Here's to You Jackie Robinson: The Legend of the Prichard Mohawks

From the mid-1950s to the late-'60s, the all-black Prichard Mohawks from Mobile, Ala., played amateur baseball in the South. The team was started by local businessman Jesse Norwood to keep neighborhood teens out of trouble and quickly took on a life of its own to become a beacon of community pride and a positive example of civic responsibility. Focusing equally on the Mohawks, the history of blacks in baseball and race-relations in the 20th-century America, Formichella (Whores for Life) is equally comfortable conveying the conversational tone of yarn-spinning former ballplayers as he is dissecting the personal and cultural ramifications of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. Though the players' reminiscences become repetitious at times, Formichella's accounts of how Norwood and the team handled confrontations with racism on and off the field is both heartbreaking and inspiring. Unlike Mobile natives Henry Aaron and Willie McCovey, none of the Mohawks made it to the Majors, but Formichella focuses on their development into young men who succeeded despite overwhelming odds. While the baseball history is well-researched and equally well-dispensed, this work is more an analysis of a successful socio-political project than a sports chronicle.