Cracks in the Outfield Wall: The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas

Chris Holaday's Cracks in the Outfield Wall begins with a baseball game, that of a Springfield-area team at a 1934 high school–age Legion tournament in Gastonia, North Carolina. Six teams were set to face off. American Legion baseball was a part of grassroots play that had the potential to feed into the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, a hierarchical and white professional baseball system that set guidelines for all the member clubs across the United States and Canada. When Springfield brought Ernest Taliaferro to play in North Carolina and the other teams refused to play them, the coach had the choice to sit his Black player or return home to Massachusetts. Coach Syd Harris, in agreement with the white players, chose the latter.Holaday's book does a masterful job of showing how America's game, whether grassroots or professional play, was defined by and often adhered to the racial hierarchy of US society. In the South, especially, this was known as Jim Crow, a formal set of laws that kept white and Black people apart socially and Black Americans as second-class citizens. And yet, the fact that some American Legion teams welcomed Black players, invited them to travel, and defended their right to play demonstrated that segregation in baseball and the US was not always so black and white.Cracks in the Outfield Wall focuses on three decades of baseball in North and South Carolina, from 1934 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to argue that the “end of that segregation did not come about suddenly.” It included “steps forward and setbacks” (ix). And, as every good sport history shows, it relied on actual people “brave enough to ignore Jim Crow laws who just wanted to make a living playing the game they loved” (ix). The result is a rich history of how regional baseball in its amateur and professional forms shaped the civil rights struggle. This history also challenges a master narrative of sport and American history, as American sportswriter Dave Zirin once said, as a tale of “segregation, integration, celebration.”1Holaday's work brilliantly reveals how complex the struggle for racial integration in the Carolinas was. As organized baseball initially adhered to Jim Crow, Black teams “barnstormed,” Black Cubans attempted to “pass,” and professional baseball grappled with its own relevancy in relation to the rise of television and air conditioning in the mid–twentieth century. What makes Cracks in the Outfield Wall so compelling is that Holaday gives nuance to civil rights history through regional play as well as challenges the framework of a traditional historical monograph. He provides thirty-two short chapters, each focused on a particular aspect of this integration history. While he does move chronologically through these decades, these vignettes invite the reader into both amateur and organized play to witness how racial integration occurred, segregation was upheld, and teams and Black players persisted as part of a national struggle.Throughout this incredibly well-researched book, which relies on Black and white sportswriting across the country, fans get a glimpse of names they know, such as Jackie Robinson, whose traveling team the Jackie Robinson All-Stars played in Greensboro and Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1949, fielding greats like Larry Doby, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella. By 1953, the team included four white players, thus forcing Robinson out of the lineup for games in Birmingham, Alabama, because Black and white athletes could not share the field. While Robinson received criticism for not outright challenging Jim Crow, Holaday observes that the choice to play drew nationwide attention to segregation in the South.Cracks in the Outfield Wall is filled with names familiar to many readers and many more that are perhaps less known. This includes the story of Percy Miller Jr., a recent high school graduate who was the first ballplayer to integrate professional baseball in North Carolina in 1950. He played for the Danville Leafs, located just across the state line in Danville, Virginia, for the Class B Carolina League. The Granite Falls Rocks, a part of the Class D Western Carolina League, quietly followed suit. Even so, by 1952, “in North Carolina there was not a Black player on the roster of any of the thirty professional teams playing in five different minor leagues in the state,” demonstrating how quickly integration came and went (41). It would take repeated investment from white and Black businessmen, coaches, and players to challenge the status quo, including segregated stadium seating.This book shows how the stakes of challenging the status quo proved different for amateur and professional play. Amateur play, without the backing of the major leagues, perhaps suffered most greatly, as is shown through the story of the 1954 Canon Street All-Stars, an all-Black Little League team in South Carolina. Despite the stance from Little League Inc. against racial discrimination, white teams seceded to avoid playing in an integrated tournament, forming Dixie Youth Baseball. Holaday argues that this history may explain why many Black youth in the state, and elsewhere, still choose to play football and basketball over baseball. It is an important nod to the more recent decline of African American ballplayers in what was once all of America's game.Cracks in the Outfield Wall is thus an important addition to the rich history of American baseball because it recognizes through regional and transnational play how local baseball decisions opened the door for national civil rights and for other Black men and women to excel in all sports. Each crack tells a more complicated story about what many mistakenly believe to be a floodgate with the signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945. It is a critical regional roadmap for how to study and understand racial integration and the civil rights struggle more broadly, a reminder that the cracks let the light in.

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