Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues

The foremost historian of the "blackball" era spent nearly 10 years researching this acclaimed oral history, interviewing 17 outstanding players including Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, and Willie Wells. Over 80 vintage photographs.

Before Jackie Robinson crossed major league baseball's color line, there existed a parallel world of "blackball" with its own pantheon of superstars: Rube Foster, Oscar Charleston, Smokey Joe Williams, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and many others. Hundreds of elite athletes played in the Negro Leagues from 1887 through the early 1950s, and this remarkable oral history offers an inside look at some of their lives. Seventeen players and a team owner reminisce about this often-overlooked side of American baseball, recapturing the era with a vividness that no journalist could rival.
Author John Holway has achieved more than anyone else in the attempts to attain recognition for the Negro Leagues and to help their most deserving stars gain their rightful places in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Holway sought out veterans of the Negro Leagues and recorded their recollections. He then conducted extensive research to confirm the stories with statistics from newspapers of the era. The result is a living history of the great black teams, acclaimed byTheNew York Times as "the closest we can come to seeing them." This revised edition features over eighty vintage photographs and a Foreword by baseball historian Frank Ceresi.

Foreword to the Dover Edition

Preface to the 1992 Edition

Introduction: The Invisible Men

1. The Major League Nobody Knows

2. Bill Drake

3. David Malarcher

4. Crush Holloway

5. Webster McDonald

6. Newt Allen

7. Cool Papa Bell

8. Ted Page

9. Ted :Double Duty" Radcliffe

10. Bill Foster

11. Larry Brown

12. Willie Wells

13. William "Sug" Cornelius

14. Buck Leonard

15. Hilton S,mith

16. James "Joe" Greene

17. Mrs. Effa Manley

18. Tom "Pee-Wee" Butts

19. Othello Renfroe

Sunset Before Dawn

Appendix

Index