Invisible Ball of Dreams

Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Re-search Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research

Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brook-lyn Dodgers. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), Black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, Black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others.

Reading represen-tations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring Black cul-tural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is necessary to the pro-ject of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cul-tural history more generally.

Emily Ruth Rutter is associate dean of the Honors College and professor of English at Ball State University. She is author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, published by University Press of Mississippi, and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry. Along with Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, and darlene anita scott, she coedited Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.