Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Race Audiobook (Free)

‘Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated town in the USA. Its unappealing record of brutality is usually widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings in Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in virtually any other city in the nation.’

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Letter from a Birmingham Prison

1963

Anybody who is acquainted with the Civil Rights movement knows that 1964 was a pivotal 12 months. And in Birmingham, about Southern Group: A True Story of Football, Civil Privileges, as well as the Deep South’s Many Compelling Pennant Competition Alabama – possibly the epicenter of racial turmoil – the Barons incredibly started their time of year with an integrated team.

Johnny ‘Blue Moon’ Odom, a talented pitcher and Tommie Reynolds, an outfielder – both young black ballplayers with dreams of using someday in the best leagues, along with Bert Campaneris, a dark-skinned shortstop from Cuba, all found out themselves in this simmering cauldron of a league town, all taking part in for Heywood Sullivan, a white former major leaguer who grew up just later on in Dothan, Alabama.

Colton traces the entire season, authoring the extraordinary relationships among these players with Sullivan, and Colton tells their story by capturing the substance of Birmingham and its own citizens in this tumultuous yr. (The infamous Bull Connor, for example, when not ordering blacks to be blasted by effective water hoses, is normally a fervent follower of the Barons and offered being a long-time broadcaster of their video games.)

By all accounts, the racial jeers and taunts that rained down upon these Birmingham players were much worse than anything that Jackie Robinson ever endured.

More than a tale about baseball, that is a true accounting of lifestyle within a different period and clearly a different place. Seventeen years after Jackie Robinson experienced broken the colour series in the major leagues, Birmingham was exploding in competition riots….and today, they were going to have their very first integrated sports group. This is a story that has under no circumstances been told.