1954 : the year Willie Mays and the first generation of black superstars changed major league baseball forever

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Title:

1954 : the year Willie Mays and the first generation of black superstars changed major league baseball forever

Author:

Madden, Bill author.

ISBN:

9780306823695

Physical Description:

xiii, 290 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Personal Subject:

Mays, Willie, 1931-

Subject Term:

Baseball -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

African American baseball players -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Discrimination in sports -- United States -- History -- 20th century.

Summary:

Proof that Jackie Robinson's journey to the plate was more than a miracle, the baseball stars featured here helped pave the way for a fully integrated baseball league just as the verdict of Brown v. Board of Education legally banned segregation from American public schools. Readers discover how Hank Aaron, Larry Doby, and Ernie Mays made their mark on behalf of black Americans everywhere.

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	796.3576 MAD	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

1954--A triumphant season for black ballplayers and the country

Award-winning New York Times bestselling author Bill Madden delivers the first major book to fully examine the 1954 baseball season, drawn largely from exclusive recent interviews with the major players themselves, including Willie Mays and Larry Doby as well as New York baseball legends from that era: Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford of the Yankees, Monte Irvin of the Giants, and Carl Erskine of the Dodgers. 1954 transports readers across the baseball landscape of the time as future superstars such as Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and others entered the leagues and continued to integrate the sport. Weaving together the narrative of one of baseball's greatest seasons wit the racially charged events of that year--the same in which the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation of the races be outlawed in America's public schools-- 1954 demonstrates how our national pastime was actually ahead of the curve in terms of the acceptance of black Americans, while the nation at large continued to struggle with tolerance.

Author Notes

Bill Madden, the 2010 recipient of the Baseball Hall of Fame's J.G. Taylor Spink Award, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Steinbrenner For more than thirty years, he has covered baseball for the New York Daily News. He lives in New Jersey.

Reviews (1)

Booklist Review

Madden, veteran New York Daily News baseball writer and inductee into the writers' section of the Baseball Hall of Fame, attempts here to do the sport and readers a service beyond the lines of the diamond. He dates the true and full integration of baseball, despite Jackie Robinson's debut in 1947, to 1954, not unrelatedly the year of the Supreme Court's Brown decision. African Americans Willie Mays and Larry Doby brought their respective teams (the Giants and Indians) to the World Series that year, and Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks, among others, were beginning to etch their considerable marks on the sport. There were some laggards (notably the Yankees and Red Sox), but, Madden argues, the sport was, by 1954, ahead of much of the rest of the country in racial matters. Regrettably, he does not make the point convincingly and often loses sight of that focus, which is buried in far more conventional accounts of franchise shifts, batting races, and pennant chases, not only in the pivotal year of 1954 but also in the years preceding it. Still, the book brings together plenty of valuable information regarding the integration of baseball.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist

Introduction	p. xi
Prologue	p. 1
Chapter 1 Power to the (Other) People	p. 9
Chapter 2 Bill Veeck Leaves the Stage in the American League's Winds of Change	p. 21
Chapter 3 Waiting for Willie	p. 35
Chapter 4 Dodger Blues	p. 55
Chapter 5 Ernie and Hank	p. 69
Chapter 6 Casey's Spring of Discontent	p. 87
CHPTER 7 Leo's Midas Touch	p. 107
Chapter 8 Indian Summer	p. 127
Chapter 9 A Tree Dies (Slowly) in Brooklyn	p. 155
Chapter 10 Twilight of the Gods	p. 187
Chapter 11 Dem Wuz Some Gints	p. 209
Chapter 12 Dusty and "The Catch"	p. 229
Epilogue	p. 253
Acknowledgements	p. 263
Bibliography	p. 267
Credits	p. 269
Index	p. 271
Photos following page	p. 154

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