Southern League - Larry Colton

"Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the
United States.
Its ugly record of brutality is 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 any other city in the nation."


Martin Luther King, Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail

1963

Anybody
who is familiar with the Civil Rights movement knows that 1964 was a
pivotal year. And in Birmingham, Alabama - perhaps the epicenter of
racial conflict - the Barons amazingly started their season with an
integrated team.

Johnny "Blue Moon" Odom, a talented pitcher
and Tommie Reynolds, an outfielder - both young black ballplayers with
dreams of playing someday in the big leagues, along with Bert
Campaneris, a dark-skinned shortstop from Cuba, all found themselves in
this simmering cauldron of a minor league town, all playing for Heywood
Sullivan, a white former major leaguer who grew up just down the road in
Dothan, Alabama.

Colton traces the entire season, writing about
the extraordinary relationships among these players with Sullivan, and
Colton tells their story by capturing the essence of Birmingham and its
citizens during this tumultuous year. (The infamous Bull Connor, for
example, when not ordering blacks to be blasted by powerful water hoses,
is a fervent follower of the Barons and served as a long-time
broadcaster of their 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 story about
baseball, this is a true accounting of life in a different time and
clearly a different place. Seventeen years after Jackie Robinson had
broken the color line in the major leagues, Birmingham was exploding in
race riots....and now, they were going to have their very first
integrated sports team. This is a story that has never been told.