Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War by Chris Lamb Robert Greene II Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War. By Chris Lamb. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. xxii, 344. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-1945-9.) The history of sport in American life has long been an important place to explore how race, sectionalism, and politics collide. While books such as Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York, 1983) and Adrian Burgos Jr.’s Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (Berkeley, 2007) showcase the interplay of sport, cultural, and political histories, Stolen Dreams: The 1955 Cannon Street All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War offers another excellent example of this approach. For Chris Lamb, the story of the Cannon Street All-Stars is a stand-in for the larger story of the civil rights struggle in South Carolina. Describing this story of young Black boys who were not allowed to compete in South Carolina’s Little League tournament due to Jim Crow segregation as “inextricably linked to postwar Charleston,” Lamb has written an important history of a Little League ball club and a narrative of Charleston’s long and vexed history of racism (p. 3). The civil rights movement’s history was partially shaped by Jackie Robinson’s 1947 desegregation of Major League Baseball. Whether one argues for a “long civil rights movement” thesis or posits that the civil rights movement as we know it began in the mid-1950s, it is clear that Robinson’s symbolism was a crucial marker for Black American activists and their white liberal allies. The story of the Cannon Street All-Stars, like the slow desegregation of the majors after Robinson’s arrival, illustrates the halting pace of desegregation across American society in the 1950s and 1960s. As Lamb points out, the Cannon Street All-Stars were denied the right to play against white teams in South Carolina just a year after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. In another historical irony, the team traveled to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to accept an invitation to watch the Little League World Series—after being denied a chance to play for it—the same week that Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. One of the strengths of Lamb’s work is his ability to tie the earlier history of Charleston as a slave port and a flashpoint during Reconstruction to the plight of the Cannon Street All-Stars. For instance, Lamb highlights the Charleston Baseball Riot of 1869. Sparked by a confrontation on a baseball diamond between Black baseball fans and Charleston police, it became both a moment when the Reconstruction-era dreams of Black Americans were confronted with the reality of powerful support for white supremacy and an example of how much baseball was intertwined with American political struggles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lamb does an exemplary job of showing how the Cannon Street All-Stars served as a nexus of both change and continuity in South Carolina’s history of racism. For example, he reminds the reader that the white teams’ refusal to play the Cannon Street All-Stars led to the creation of Dixie Youth Baseball, a segregated youth league that “didn’t become integrated” until after its founder’s death, and that continues to play tournaments today (p. 197). He also points out that the Cannon Street All-Stars became an example of how the public [End Page 382] memory of the past is actively shaped by the public. Lamb tells the story of researcher Augustus Holt, whose investigation into why Dixie Youth players (including his son) wore Confederate flags on their uniforms in the early 1990s led to his becoming a prominent voice for greater recognition of the All-Stars in Charleston. Stolen Dreams works as a history told at the intersection of sports, civil rights, and southern memory, reminding readers of how often those fields are closely woven together. Robert Greene II Claflin University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association