Chronicles Robinson's tremendous ordeal during spring training with the minor league Montreal Royals--how he struggled on the field and off.
Chris Lamb is a professor of journalism at the Indiana University School of Journalism, Indianapolis.
"Lamb's detailed and annotated research provides an in-depth
examination of an important step in the integration of baseball, a
step that, up until now, has not received the coverage it deserves.
Of interest both to baseball fans and social
historians."—Booklist
Lamb tells what Robinson faced in 1946 in segregated Florida—six
weeks that would become a critical juncture for the national
pastime and for an American society on the threshold of a civil
rights revolution."—Dermot McEvoy, Publishers Weekly
"[A]n important contribution to American Studies."—Choice
"In his richly sourced examination of Robinson's first spring
training, Lamb puts readers on the back of a hot Greyhound bus as
it makes its way through the Jim Crow South of the mid-1940s. . . .
Throughout the book Lamb carefully documents who wrote what,
analyzing the black press, mainstream dailies, the Daily Worker, a
national newspaper for communists, and even southern newspapers.
This comprehensiveness in sources is unprecedented in examinations
of press coverage of Robinson's life or career, making it a good
investment for researchers in the field based on its footnotes
alone. The book also deserves credit for turning attention to the
black sportswriters who, as the author writes, 'faced their own
color line.'"—American Journalism
“Lamb does an excellent job of setting this pivotal episode in
baseball history in the larger context of race relations of the
South, providing a number of graphic examples of violence against
blacks in order to emphasize the dangerous world that Robinson and
Wright were entering when they arrived in Florida as new members of
the Montreal Royals, Brooklyn’s main minor league team.”—Michael
Cocchiarale, Aethlon
"Blackout is the most complete analysis of Robinson's first spring
training available as Lamb has probed the press reports to new
depths and in the process revealed another facet of the two
America's divided along racial lines. Blackout is also a volume
that is essential to any understanding of the events of sixty years
ago in Florida and their significance for baseball, for Florida,
and for America."—Richard Crepeau, Sports Literature
Association
"Blackout is well written, engaging, and analytically sound. It is
a work that belongs in all baseball libraries as well as those on
American social history."—Register of the Kentucky Historical
Society
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