Gerald R. Gems

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 show more 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.
Thank you to University of Nebraska Press, Gerald R Gems, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. show less