![Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South's Most Compelling Pennant Race by [Colton, Larry]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51SqcUKeSDL._SY346_.jpg)
Has anyone who played in a grand total of one MLB game achieved the notoriety of Larry Colton? Well, there’s Walter Alston, who became one of the game’s great managers. And you could make a case for Moonlight Graham, introduced to America in the movie, Bull Durham. But that’s about it.
Colton is the author of Southern League, a look back at the 1964 Birmingham Barons, the AA farm team of the Kansas City Athletics. Southern League also chronicles the civil rights movement as it played out in Birmingham, Alabama and in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1964.
Birmingham, Alabama, in 1964, was an American disgrace. African-Americans – as well as whites in possession of a working conscience – were still dealing with the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15, 1963, when white robed domestic terrorists, aided by 15 sticks of dynamite, killed four girls and injured 22 others.
Readers will encounter familiar and unfamiliar heroes and villains. George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, joins the narrative, as does Bull Connor, the racist Birmingham police commissioner. Charlie Finley, who built a thriving insurance business, purchased a perpetually struggling MLB franchise – the Athletics – and would soon lead the league in proposing hare-brained ideas. Haywood Sullivan, the Southern-born and -bred rookie manager of the Barons, who would achieve much greater fame and fortune in baseball..
Colton’s strength as a writer, his go-to pitch, as it were, is his ability to create believable and interesting portraits of the not-famous – his fraternity housemates in Goat Brothers, for example. In Southern League, his background stories of some of the 22 members of the Barons are the highlight of the book for this reader.
Unfortunately, material for the other half of the book appears to have been solely gleaned from the microfilm library of the Birmingham Post-Herald. As amply demonstrated in Goat Brothers, Larry Colton is not encumbered with an abundance of profound or original socio-political insights. Thus, he is well suited to the task of writing about professional baseball and the stultifying anti-intellectualism that has pervaded the sport since the dead ball era; less so to the task of chronicling the arrival of Birmingham, Alabama into the 20th century.
From Booklist
This could be the perfect storm of a baseball book. Colton, author of Counting Coup (2000), is a former professional pitcher who debuted in 1966 with the Birmingham Barons of the Southern League, this book’s subject. Two years earlier, another pitcher, eventual major-league star John “Blue Moon” Odom, received the largest bonus ever paid a black athlete when he was signed to the Barons by legendary Oakland owner Charles Finley. The 1964 Barons and, later, the young and naive Colton were caught up in the racial turmoil of the South, regional baseball only very recently integrated, and the notorious “Bombingham” of the 1960s, whose history, including the tragic church bombing that killed four children in September 1963, is chillingly summarized. He focuses on four prospects—two white, two black, including Odom—as well as the manager and the team’s owner, capably recounting their life stories and ambitions. Though his prose can be flat, and the book’s subtitle is a stretch, his story is so good it overwhelms the book’s shortcomings. One wonders why he waited so long, but Colton has now delivered the book he seemed destined to write. --Mark Levine
Review
"When I read "Counting Coup," I was staggered by Larry Colton's ability to persuade a group of high school girls to share their heart's secrets, so I am not surprised that for "Southern League" he could get a bunch of aging baseball players to remember the hopes and fears of their minor league days. The breadth of Colton's reporting here, placing the Birmingham Barons' 1964 season squarely into the context of the civil rights era, is a narrative tour de force.
-- Richard Ben Cramer
Those who say that sports do not, or should not, make us think about anything beyond the field itself have always been wrong . The summer of '64 and the stories found in Southern League demonstrate that once again.
-- Bob Costas
Larry Colton has an extraordinary gift for capturing those times when everyday, glitz and glamor-free American sports, is not merely a metaphor for our culture but becomes a mechanism for cultural change. His highest expression of that gift comes now in SOUTHERN LEAGUE in which he introduces you to players nobody has yet built statues of, but who forced sea-changes in the America in which you live.
--Keith Olbermann
Larry Colton's interweaving of the 1964 Southern League baseball season with the Civil Rights movement revisits a period in American history that many of us will not - and should not - forget. With Colton's retelling of players enduring racial insults on the field and threats and other indignities off the field, SOUTHERN LEAGUE makes for riveting, and revealing, reading.
-- Bill White
"I can't say this loud enough...this is a great book! I'd throw in an f-bomb for emphasis but that sort of thing is frowned upon in high literary circles. The explosive racial cauldron of Birmingham in the sixties, unforgettable characters, and baseball all come together in Larry Colton's memorable narrative, SOUTHERN LEAGUE. Baseball is the tie that binds, barely, but that's enough."
-- Ron Shelton
This terrific rendering is highly recommended both to baseball fans and to students of civil rights history and African-American studies.
-- Library Journal
Entertaining and painstakingly crafted, Colton's account of the Birmingham Barons is a tribute to determination and courage in the face of overwhelming adversity.
--Publisher's Weekly
The narrative of future major leaguers Johnny "Blue Moon" Odom, Tommie Reynolds, and Bert Campaneris playing on a minor-league team run by future and former Red Sox owner Haywood Sullivan in racially segregated and explosive Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s is as good a snapshot of social history as a sports book in recent years.
--The Daily Beast
An accomplished storyteller ... a tale well told.
-- Baseball Nation
SOUTHERN LEAGUE deserves to be considered one of the eye-opening books of its type and will serve as a teaching tool for those who believe that sports --- and life --- in America was always as it is today.
-- Bookreporter.com
-- Richard Ben Cramer
Those who say that sports do not, or should not, make us think about anything beyond the field itself have always been wrong . The summer of '64 and the stories found in Southern League demonstrate that once again.
-- Bob Costas
Larry Colton has an extraordinary gift for capturing those times when everyday, glitz and glamor-free American sports, is not merely a metaphor for our culture but becomes a mechanism for cultural change. His highest expression of that gift comes now in SOUTHERN LEAGUE in which he introduces you to players nobody has yet built statues of, but who forced sea-changes in the America in which you live.
--Keith Olbermann
Larry Colton's interweaving of the 1964 Southern League baseball season with the Civil Rights movement revisits a period in American history that many of us will not - and should not - forget. With Colton's retelling of players enduring racial insults on the field and threats and other indignities off the field, SOUTHERN LEAGUE makes for riveting, and revealing, reading.
-- Bill White
"I can't say this loud enough...this is a great book! I'd throw in an f-bomb for emphasis but that sort of thing is frowned upon in high literary circles. The explosive racial cauldron of Birmingham in the sixties, unforgettable characters, and baseball all come together in Larry Colton's memorable narrative, SOUTHERN LEAGUE. Baseball is the tie that binds, barely, but that's enough."
-- Ron Shelton
This terrific rendering is highly recommended both to baseball fans and to students of civil rights history and African-American studies.
-- Library Journal
Entertaining and painstakingly crafted, Colton's account of the Birmingham Barons is a tribute to determination and courage in the face of overwhelming adversity.
--Publisher's Weekly
The narrative of future major leaguers Johnny "Blue Moon" Odom, Tommie Reynolds, and Bert Campaneris playing on a minor-league team run by future and former Red Sox owner Haywood Sullivan in racially segregated and explosive Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s is as good a snapshot of social history as a sports book in recent years.
--The Daily Beast
An accomplished storyteller ... a tale well told.
-- Baseball Nation
SOUTHERN LEAGUE deserves to be considered one of the eye-opening books of its type and will serve as a teaching tool for those who believe that sports --- and life --- in America was always as it is today.
-- Bookreporter.com
