Sporting Justice

Miriam Wright is an Associate Professor of History at University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She researches and teaches 20th-century Canadian history. Her recent work has focussed on race and sport in Canada, and on Chinese immigration to Newfoundland and Labrador.

“Miriam Wright’s hard-hitting analysis of Black baseball in Southern Ontario follows teams and players who contested the explicitly racialized social order of the early twentieth century. Drawing on testimony from Wilfred ‘Boomer’ Harding, Ferguson Jenkins Sr., King Terrell, and other Chatham Coloured All-Stars, this marvellous study follows their struggle for social justice on and off the field. With their 1934 Provincial Intermediate B Championship, the All-Stars rose above vicious racism to fashion a legacy of community and racial pride that continues to resonate. Brilliantly connecting baseball to memory, identity, and social meaning, Wright delivers a grand slam. This exemplary study is sport history as it should be crafted.” — Colin Howell, Department of History, Saint Mary’s University“Sporting Justice is a unique study of a Canadian community rarely explored through the lens of sport, especially from a historical perspective. The narrative takes the reader through the highs and lows of Black Ontarian baseball teams in a captivating social history that makes an important contribution to the study of memory. In that process, the author engages with the oral histories of players, families, communities for whom baseball was a major, hard-fought fulcrum of social life. This book will be pertinent to historians as well as scholars in Black Studies and Cultural Studies.” —Ornella Nzindukiyimana, Department of Human Kinetics, St. Francis Xavier University

• 1: Introduction2: Living in a Racialized World: Chatham’s East End and the Black Community in the 1920s and 1930s3: Origins: Early Black Baseball in Chatham, Buxton, and London, 1915-19274: A New Black Baseball Team in Chatham, 19335: Playing in Racialized Spaces: The 1934 Chatham City League Season6: Becoming the All-Stars: The 1934 OBAA Championship7: New Opportunities and Continued Racial Conflict in the 1935 Season8: “All we ask is a fair break”: Baseball and Sporting Justice in the Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Later Years9: After the All-Stars: Racial Integration, and the Next Generation of Black Baseball, 1940-195810: Conclusion: Baseball and Memory: Reflecting on Race, Heroes, and the All-Stars Years