The Negro Leagues raised the bar and broke many barriers

Most kids won’t believe it if you tell them that African Americans were not welcome in major league baseball for much of its history. They’ll think you’ve gotten your facts mixed up. But, of course, you don’t. Booktalks on the not-always-so-wonderful olden days of our country’s national pastime make for an entertaining and educational session.

Kadir Nelson’s We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball (Jump at the Sun, 2008, grades 5 up) tells a powerful story and is illustrated with the author’s own amazing art. Before Jackie Robinson broke the so-called color barrier and joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, African-American baseball players were relegated to the separate Negro Leagues. The pay was lower, they had smaller teams, they played multiple games in a single day, and they often didn’t get to sleep in a bed, but rather crowded into a car or a beater of a bus. But they got to play, and that was the important thing.

Negro League teams had many firsts—including the first night game, played with artificial light. They also had perhaps America’s greatest baseball player, Satchel Paige, the subject of a terrific graphic novel, James Sturm and Rich Tommaso’s Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (Jump at the Sun, 2007, grades 5–9). Born around 1905 as Leroy Paige, the boy worked at a train depot at the age of seven. He rigged up a contraption with a pole and a rope so he could carry bags and satchels for passengers. Hence the famous nickname. Because he was African American, however, Paige wasn’t allowed to play in major league baseball until he was 42, an age when most baseball players have already retired.

He was unbelievably good. Never modest about his athletic abilities, he once said, “I could nip frosting off a cake with my fast ball.” Paige also had a great sense of humor. He sometimes pitched several games in one afternoon, and had to drive fast from one small Southern town to another in order to make them all. Once a sheriff stopped him and gave him a speeding ticket for $25. Paige handed the man $50, saying he was planning on coming back the same way and wanted to save them both some time!

Jackie Robinson was the first player to break out of the Negro Leagues and into the majors. Mike Wimmer’s superb illustrations grace Robert Burleigh’s Stealing Home: Jackie Robinson Against the Odds (S & S, 2007, all ages), a wonderfully easy book to sell. All you have to do is read Burleigh’s moving picture-book text. Skip the sidebars, which contain the meaty facts about Robinson stealing home. Simply turn the pages and watch him do it. Your listeners will be dying to read the facts themselves once you’ve put the book down.

Some of those facts include: Robinson stole home base 27 times, most famously in the 1955 World Series. How can you steal home plate and score a run when the pitcher’s pitch takes only a second and the run to home base from third base takes at least three seconds? Open this book and you’ll find out how!

Reading these books might plant some powerful what-ifs in the minds of your listeners. What if Satchel Paige had never been able to play baseball? What if Jackie Robinson was not allowed to play in the World Series? What if African Americans had been able to play sooner, what games would be played? What records would be broken?

Those “good old days” of the Negro Leagues were sometimes pretty wonderful. At the same time they could be absolutely horrible, when the athletes faced discrimination from the same fans that cheered them during the games. But the story of those Leagues will introduce your listeners to an important era—a time when sports and fair play and racial equality and being the best you can be got all swirled together and showed us how bad and good and great America can be.