Voices From The Great Black Baseball Leagues

Long before the triumph of Jackie Robinson, America had a strong tradition of black baseball with its own pantheon of superstars--Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston, Smokey Joe Williams, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and many more. This was the other half of American baseball, the half that was ignored for decades. Yet these black players, on their black teams and in their black leagues, may have been playing the most exciting--and possibly the best--baseball seen in America during the sixty "blackball" years from 1887 to 1947. Certainly, in over four hundred games that have been uncovered between the black teams and barnstorming white big leaguers, the blacks won at least two out of three.
John Holway, who has done more than anyone to gain recognition for the Negro Leagues and to help their most deserving stars gain their rightful places in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, crisscrossed the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s seeking out the surviving veterans of the old Negro Leagues and putting their stories on tape; he then spent countless hours in libraries to confirm these stories. The result, in the words of nearly two dozen old-time players, and with statistics from the newspapers of the time, is one of the most important books on baseball history. Long out-of-print, this revised edition of Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues is supplemented with a new introduction, new photographs, and newly-researched statistics, to present the living history of some of the best baseball ever played.