• "Adelson's outstanding survey of the period examines the groundbreaking role of professional baseball, which paved the way for social mixing of blacks and whites and anticipated victories of the NAACP and the civil rights movement that would soon follow (there's also an excellent account of legislative and judicial decisions throughout the 1950s and '60s). Most importantly, Adelson documents the moving experiences of such extraordinary men as Percy Miller, who integrated the Carolina League in 1951; future big leaguers Manny Mota and Felipe Alou; future Hall of Famers Hank Aaron and Billy Williams; and visionary white owners, including Dave Burnett of the Texas League. Adelson's account of their struggles is much more than a good baseball book: it's a detailed history of how the struggle for integration and civil rights played out in the daily life of a profession that just happens to be the national pastime."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
 
• Adelson unearths at least as many unsung heroes among whites as he does villians. . . . The player recollections, printed verbatim, are refreshingly candid and direct, and Adelson convincingly argues that their pains helped create tangible progress in the battle for civil rights."
—Washington Post
 
• "Adelson preesnts a slice of recent American history that is not completely gone, and certainly not forgotten. Brushing Back Jim Crow is an aggressive attempt to shed light on minor-league baseball in the South, and the stars who would emerge to change the game—and a society."
— Philadelphia Inquirer
 

Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South
Bruce Adelson
288 pages, 5 7/8 x 8 7/8
Paper 978-0-8139-2645-2 • $14.95

New in paperback

WHILE JACKIE ROBINSON is justly famous for breaking the color line in major league baseball in 1947, other young African-American players, among them Hank Aaron, continued to struggle for acceptance on southern farm teams well into the 1960s. As Bruce Adelson writes, their presence in the South Atlantic, Carolina, and other minor leagues represented not only a quest for individual athletic achievement; simply by hitting, fielding, and signing autographs alongside their white teammates, African-American ballplayers helped to end segregation in the Jim Crow South.

In writing this book, Adelson interviewed dozens of athletes, managers, and sportswriters who witnessed this important but largely unrecognized front in the ongoing civil rights movement. When nineteen-year-old Percy Miller took the field for the Danville (Virginia) Leafs in 1951, his presence on the roster was not the result of altruism: the team's white owners saw attendance flagging and recognized the need for more African-American fans. Two years later, Hank Aaron and his two black teammates for the Milwaukee Braves' Jacksonville (Florida) farm team were regularly greeted by racial invective, even bottles and stones, on the road. And Ed Charles endured nine years of discrimination in the southern minor leagues before breaking into the majors and finally winning the World Series with the Mets in 1969.

Slowly, through the vehicle of baseball, these African Americans shattered Jim Crow restrictions and met the backlash against Brown v. Board of Education while simultaneously challenging long-held perceptions of racial inadequacy by performing on the field. Brushing Back Jim Crow weaves their firsthand accounts into a narrative that spans the long season of racism in the United States, gripping fans of history and baseball as surely as a pennantor a home run—race.


Bruce Adelson is author, with Rod Beaton, of The Minor League Baseball Book and of four children's sports books. A past commentator for NPR, he has written about baseball for the Washington Post, USA Today's Baseball Weekly, Sport Magazine, and Baseball America.

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