Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War (University of Nebraska Press, 2022)
Describe the focus of your book.
When the 11- and 12-year-olds on the Cannon Street YMCA all-star team from Charleston, South Carolina, registered for a Little League Baseball tournament in July 1955, it put the Black team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry, and the Southern way of life. This was a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. White Southerners saw the young Black ballplayers as a threat to their way of life. White teams refused to take the field against the Cannon Street team. The Cannon Street all-stars advanced by forfeit to the state tournament and then to the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia. If the team won there, it would play in the Little League Baseball World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Little League officials, however, ruled the team ineligible because it had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field. This denied the boys their dream of playing in the World Series. Stolen Dreams chronicles how bigotry scarred the souls of these boys, who spent the next few decades suppressing their story and the decades after that telling everyone they could why it matters. This book tells their story and the story of racism in Charleston from the first slave ship to the present.
How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
I used to live in Charleston. One of my friends mentioned the story to me and thought I might be interested because I had written a number of books about sports, race, and the media. I had never written a book about the living before. What makes this story different from other stories about racism and sports is that it involves 11- and 12-year-old boys, who learned the demoralizing lesson that no matter how talented they were, they could never be good enough to achieve equality with whites, whether in baseball or in society. The book’s title is inspired by the work of poet, Langston Hughes.
What archives or research materials did you use?
I relied heavily on Newspapers.com. My trips to Charleston included the Avery Research Center, which includes archives and files of the city’s Black history; the South Carolina Reading Room at the Charleston County Library, where I had access to Charleston newspapers; and the personal papers of segregationist newspaper editor Thomas R. Waring at the Charleston Historical Society. I used countless books, of course, but also dissertations, master’s theses, and unpublished manuscripts. I went to the Little League Baseball headquarters in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where I found newspaper articles, letters, and photographs. The book’s voice comes from the scores of interviews I did with the former players. My interviews included the children of the man who prevented the Cannon Street team from taking the field with white boys.
How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
The story of the Cannon Street YMCA all-stars is relevant today because state legislatures and local school boards are prohibiting the teaching of Black history. “The past isn’t dead,” William Faulkner said. “It isn’t even past.” The story of the Cannon Street all-stars was remarkable for its time because newspapers, whether in the North or particularly in the South, rarely broached the issue of racial discrimination. But the denial of young Blacks from playing the all-American game of baseball was so egregious in the minds of some white newspaper writers and editors that they excoriated Southern bigots and Southern bigotry. The boys were only a year or two younger than Emmitt Till, whose murder had an impact on their own lives. Finally, the antagonist in this story is Thomas Waring, the segregationist editor of the Charleston News and Courier, who became one of the leading defenders of segregation in the decades after Brown v. Board of Education, lent his name and influence to the repugnant White Citizens Councils, and helped manufacture the notion of the liberal media myth to block civil rights reforms.
What advice do you have for other historians that are working on or starting projects?
If you’re interested in writing a book, ask yourself a few questions. What is it about this story that is so compelling and important that you will spend the next year or two years or eight years alone in your office researching, writing, thinking about, and kvetching about? Secondly, what is it about this story that anyone besides you and your loved ones will give a damn about? Summarize your book in no more than 100 words. This summary must include why the book is important, what the book contributes to the literature of your subject, and why you, more than anyone else, should write the book. This will help focus you. If you really believe in your book, stick with it. When you see the book for the first time, you will forget about the frustrations you encountered to write the thing and you will feel like you’ve contributed something that will outlive you. Here’s what George Orwell said about writing: “My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”