Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson's First Spring Training

By Chris Lamb

Book Overview

In the spring of 1946, following the defeat of Hitler's Germany, America found itself still struggling with the subtler but no less insidious tyrannies of racism and segregation at home. In the midst of it all, Jackie Robinson, a full year away from breaking major league baseball's color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, was undergoing a harrowing dress rehearsal for integration--his first spring training as a minor league prospect with the Montreal Royals, Brooklyn's AAA team. In Blackout , Chris Lamb tells what happened during these six weeks 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. Blackout chronicles Robinson's tremendous ordeal during that crucial spring training--how he struggled on the field and off. The restaurants and hotels that welcomed his white teammates were closed to him, and in one city after another he was prohibited from taking the field. Steeping his story in its complex cultural context, Lamb describes Robinson's determination and anxiety, the reaction of the black and white communities to his appearance, and the unique and influential role of the press--mainstream reporting, the alternative black weeklies, and the Communist Daily Worker --in the integration of baseball. Told here in detail for the first time, this story brilliantly encapsulates the larger history of a man, a sport, and a nation on the verge of great and enduring change.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803229569
• ISBN13: 9780803229563
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 233 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A New and Revealing Look at a Familiar Story

An excellently researched and written book. One would think that there isn't much new to be said about Jackie Robinson, who is among the two or three most written-about men in the history of baseball, but Lamb tells a story that has previously received little attention, mainly because the mainstream news media didn't think it was worth covering. Lamb points out that black newspapers covered Robinson from the moment he began spring training with the Montreal Royals in 1946, and he uses many of those papers as his sources. In retelling the story of Branch Rickey's historic decision to sign Robinson and break baseball's color line, he refuses to treat Rickey as a lone, saintly hero; he points out that, for decades before Rickey joined the fray, black newspapers, socialists, and Communists had been agitating for the inclusion of blacks in organized baseball. Lamb shows that Lester Rodney, sportswriter for The Daily Worker, was also instrumental in the struggle to bring integration to the game. His is a name that seems to have been dropped from the record when other authors retell Robinson's story. The most powerful aspect of the book is the way Lamb portrays the gagging outrageousness of the racial prejudice and discrimination Robinson faced in the Jim Crow-era American south. The vicious, buck-naked bigotry he and other blacks encountered ought to make every white American ashamed.