Before Jackie Robinson

This is an excellent collection of essays depicting some lesser-known African-American athletes from the 1890's to the 1940's in the fields of horse racing, golf, baseball, aviation, track and field, basketball and tennis Some of these men and women have been heard of but most of them have disappeared from history's radar for modern readers. Jockey Isaac Murphy, golfer John Shippen, Jr., track and field stars Isadora Channels and Tidye Pickett and flyer Bessie Coleman are among those who have had more exposure than others, for example.
The essays are all well-written and places each individual in the context of their respective times. Some of them became more than a sports star, blurring the boundaries of celebrity and entertainment.
An informative book whose essays can be read out of order.

BEFORE JACKIE ROBINSON by Gerald Gems is a collection of essays about influential black athletes prior to the Jackie Robinson breaking through the racial barrier in baseball in 1947. Specifically, the essays reveal those athletes who forced change and challenged injustices due to their impossible to ignore talents, but aren't who history has most prominently remembered, like Jesse Owens, Jack Johnson and the like.
Each essay about a particular athlete is written by a different writer and each carry their own style. Some delve deep in the racial divide of the time and cover the athlete's actual performance minimally, while other essays spend most of the time on the athlete and only bring in a discussion of racial inequality when necessary. I think when we as a society look back at the segregation of the early 20th century, we have a tendency to acknowledge it was there but gloss over the hard details of what really happened. BEFORE JACKIE ROBINSON reminds us of those hardships in a way that is both informative and enlightening. I found the essays about Rube Foster, the one of the architects of Negro League baseball, and Tidye Pickett, a black track star in the 1930's, who success on the track, coupled with several other athletes, forced the US Olympic team and Olympics themselves reconsider how they deal with race in the Olympics, the most interesting.
Each essay is very well written and the reader can feel the passion of the writer has about the athlete they are chronicling. It is a hard task to create an anthology and have a similar style and texture throughout, but I think BEFORE JACKIE ROBINSON does a good job and I would recommend this book in particular to sports readers as well as historians studying early 20th century racial conditions.

Wonderful written book. It makes you think of the times when segregation was in full effect, even during baseball.

Jackie Robinson is the most celebrated athlete in American sports when one discusses the integration of African-American athletes into the mainstream of sports. However, there were many individuals who helped change the course and thinking of the black athlete in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, decades before Robinson.

Their stories and the hardships they endured are captured in this engrossing book by Gerald R. Gems. The stories are as varied as the sports that these people played as there were black pioneers in sports such as horse racing (Isaac Murphy), golf (John Shippen Jr.) and airplane flying (Bessie Coleman) as well as the more “traditional” sports such as baseball (Moses “Fleetwood” Walker) and football (Sam Ransom). The people are not limited to the playing field as others such as Rube Foster and Bob Douglas.

What sets this book apart from the pack is the meticulous research that Gems does to not only obtain information but to give proper credit to an athlete who might otherwise be never recognized for his or her accomplishment. The story of Isadore Channels and her success in tennis and basketball is one such example of this detail to attention. Gems notes that at the beginning of the chapter about Channels that the information was difficult to obtain and that there may gaps in the information. While it was proper for him to note that tidbit, just the idea that this woman whose accomplishments have been long neglected finally gets some recognition is commendable.

That is what makes this book an outstanding account of these people – interesting stories, information that is not well-known and proper credit for what these athletes contributed to both sports and society. This book should be read by any reader interested in the integration of sports, no matter which sport he or she follows.

I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing an advance review copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.