IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon's Enduring Impact on America
by Mark Whitaker
Simon & Schuster, 2025

[Publication date: May 13, 2025] 

 

Published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the first major study of Malcolm X’s influence in the sixty years since his assassination, exploring his enduring impact on culture, politics, and civil rights.

Malcolm X has become as much of an American icon as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But when he was murdered in 1965, he was still seen as a dangerous outsider. White America found him alienating, mainstream African Americans found him divisive, and even his admirers found him bravely radical. Although Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our own Black shining prince,” he never received the mainstream acceptance toward which he seemed to be striving in his final year. It is more in death than his life that Malcolm’s influence has blossomed and come to leave a deep imprint on the cultural landscape of America.

With impeccable research and original reporting, Mark Whitaker tells the story of Malcolm X’s far-reaching posthumous legacy. It stretches from founders of the Black Power Movement such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton to hip-hop pioneers such as Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur. Leaders of the Black Arts and Free Jazz movements from Amiri Baraka to Maya Angelou, August Wilson, and John Coltrane credited their political awakening to Malcolm, as did some of the most influential athletes of our time, from Muhammad Ali to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and beyond. Spike’s movie biopic and the Black Lives Matter movement reintroduced Malcolm to subsequent generations. Across the political spectrum, he has been cited as a formative influence by both Barack Obama—who venerated Malcolm’s “unadorned insistence on respect”—and Clarence Thomas, who was drawn to Malcolm’s messages of self-improvement and economic self-help.

In compelling new detail, Whitaker also retraces the long road to exoneration for two men wrongfully convicted of Malcolm’s murder, making The Afterlife of Malcolm X essential reading for anyone interested in true crime, American politics, culture, and history.


REVIEWS:


“Whitaker traces Malcolm’s influence through a fascinating array of figures from the 1970s to the present day, from boxer Muhammad Ali to Public Enemy and Spike Lee. Readers will relish this sweeping and singular work.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"Apart from providing a fascinating detective story, Whitaker documents the sometimes surprising ways in which Malcolm X remains a model of Black resistance—as, for example, an opera that “became a vehicle for making Malcolm newly relevant to the ‘Black Panther’ generation,” as well as the renewed interest in him with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. A complex, thoughtfully written book that ably lives up to its title."—Kirkus (Starred Review)

“The Afterlife of Malcolm X is a sumptuous, essential book."—Minnesota Star Tribune

"The Afterlife of Malcolm X is an expansive and inspiring portrait of a man whose fiery desire to drive action has propelled American culture forward."—Amazon Editors Best Books of May 2025

"Incisive.... Engaging....The Afterlife of Malcolm X really tells two stories....One is a work of cultural history....The other is a legal thriller."—LA Times

“Enthralling…often breathtaking.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Malcolm X still haunts and inspires this nation — in ways we often fail to understand. Now, finally, Mark Whitaker puts together the missing puzzle pieces to present a full and mesmerizing picture of the man’s life and legacy. The Afterlife of Malcolm X is an indispensable work that sheds new light on American society and of its most compelling figures.” — Jonathan Eig, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning King

“Whitaker traces the vast streaks of light left by ‘our black shining prince’ across space and time since the shock of his cruel and brutal murder at the Audubon Ballroom in New York in February 1965. The lives Malcolm X has touched, generation to generation, from Eldridge Cleaver to Amiri Baraka, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Spike Lee, Public Enemy to Black Lives Matter, make for an impressive and wide-ranging cultural history. At the same time, Whitaker reveals the stories of reporters and filmmakers who have dedicated themselves to finding justice not only for Malcolm but for those who did and did not take his life. His legacy lives on.”—Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York Times bestselling author of The Black Church

“Whitaker's deeply researched and astonishingly revelatory biography, explains Malcolm's eloquent endurance: 'he grabbed on to my frustrations and turned them into logic.' Whitaker's biography is true to its protagonist.”—David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer-prize winning author of W.E.B. Du Bois

“A fine piece of historical writing and reporting about the changing memory of Malcolm X and its impact on modern America. A must-read for anyone interested in the cultural politics of civil rights since the 1960s.”—Julian E. Zelizer, New York Times bestselling author of Myth America

“With deep insight and intellectual rigor Mark Whitaker chronicles the at times paradoxical evolution of Malcom X’s legacy in popular and political culture. A major achievement.”—Peniel Joseph, award-winning author of The Sword and the Shield


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Mark Whitaker is the former editor of Newsweek and the first African American to lead a national newsweekly. He then served as Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News and Managing Editor of CNN Worldwide. Whitaker’s memoir My Long Trip Home was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His social histories Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance and Saying it Loud: 1966—The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement were both named among the best nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post.

 

The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America

by David A. Graham

Random House,  2025

 

[Publication date:   ‎ April 22, 2025]

REVIEWS:

“Whittles [Project 2025] down to an easily manageable summation, providing a handy and necessary reference guide for concerned citizens . . . Concise and well-reasoned, Graham’s critical handbook uncovers the players and the plays orchestrating this revolutionary political movement that will impact the nation well beyond the four years of Trump’s second term.”—Booklist, starred review

“A close look at the ultra-rightist Project 2025, now playing in a capital near you . . . [Project 2025] has four chief aims: to restore the man-headed family, dismantle the ‘administrative state,’ close the border and defend the nation’s sovereignty, and ‘secure our God-given individual rights to live freely. . . .’ Essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the Trumpian maelstrom.”—Kirkus Reviews

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics and national affairs. He won the Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting for his coverage of the 2020 presidential election. Before joining The Atlantic, he reported for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street Journal, and The National.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Section I

The Ways and Means

When the public first learned about Project 2025, most of the attention focused on the specific policy ideas it laid out—plans that would upend many aspects of life in the United States, from bedrock rights to the structure of the economy. These proposals are radical and sweeping, and they deserve close attention, but without the ability to make them happen, they’re only worth the pixels they’re published in. What sets Project 2025 apart from so many campaign promises and makes it important to take seriously and comprehend is its detailed scheme for execution.

The concept of a policy blueprint for a future presidency is not novel. As the federal government has become larger and more complex, administrations of both parties have relied on outside groups to create frameworks for governing—useful information so that when a president actually takes the Oath of Office on January 20, they can spend the first hundred days of their term getting things done instead of staffing up and figuring out priorities.

The prototype for this kind of project was created prior to Ronald Reagan’s administration. The Heritage Foundation, which had launched in 1973 to marry pro-business, small-government views with cultural conservatism, published a document in 1980, also called Mandate for Leadership. Aimed at the people who would work for the next Republican president, it envisioned how he might abandon the moderate politics of the post–World War II GOP in favor of something more conservative. It worked: Mandate for Leadership was embraced by aides to President-elect Reagan and became, as The New York Times put it, “the manifesto of the Reagan revolution.” By Heritage’s count, 60 percent of its recommendations became policy within Reagan’s first year in office.

Heritage has continued to produce policy agendas, and although none has had the same impact as the first, other organizations have taken notice. In September 2000, the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century published “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” After the September 11 attacks a year later, the document’s ideas and contributors became central to the George W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror. When Barack Obama was elected, in 2008, he was still new to Washington, and the Center for American Progress helped provide staffers and ideas for his administration. “Not since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan’s transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway,” reported Time.

Heritage, meanwhile, had lost some luster. In 2012, Tea Party stalwart Jim DeMint resigned from the Senate to take over the foundation, but the Tea Party movement and DeMint’s stewardship both burned themselves out within a few years. DeMint’s successor, Kay Coles James, clashed with Trump allies, and in October 2021, Kevin Roberts was named president. Within months, he’d convened the beginnings of what would become Project 2025 and hired Paul Dans, who had worked as a personnel official in the Trump White House, to head it up. Work began in early 2022.

To ensure that Project 2025 wasn’t just a parochial project, Roberts directed Dans to look outside Heritage and gather a wide range of contributors from across the right wing, making Heritage a convener for the whole Make America Great Again movement. Hundreds of figures from conservative groups contributed to the final product, representing many different shades of Trumpism.

Heritage saw Project 2025 as a way to reclaim its Reagan-era prominence. The 922-page policy document at its center bears the same name as its forebear. “The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists,” Dans writes.

But Project 2025 diverges in essential ways from its predecessor, and not just because the policy vision is very different from Reagan’s. One big innovation was to create a sort of shadow government ready to plug into the executive branch on Day One of the new administration. This is a role that has historically been handled by presidential administrations themselves, but Project 2025 kicked off even before a president had been nominated so they’d be ready on January 20, 2025.

“We need a big-picture vision, and Donald Trump sets that forth, but we also kind of need the actual instruction manual, how to get things done,” Dans explained to Steve Bannon in 2024. This meant that Project 2025 would not only need to lay out detailed policy ideas, but also search out and train the people expected to implement them. The fourth prong of Project 2025, a playbook for the first six months of the administration, was never made public, but Vought hinted at its content in a 2024 speech: “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

The Men Behind the Curtain

The two most important figures for understanding Project 2025 are Paul Dans, who directed the project, and Russell Vought, who is listed as an author but is widely understood to be the driving intellectual force behind the project. The two men share the convictions that (in a Reagan-era dictum) personnel is policy and that the nuts and bolts of government are overlooked, but they arrived there on very different paths.

Dans holds the more traditionally elite résumé but is the outsider of the pair. He has the stout build of the lacrosse player he once was, and he carries himself with a somewhat guarded awkwardness—approaching, but not quite reaching, amiability. In interviews, he speaks with gauzy nostalgia about a happier American past. In his own telling, he’s the classic MAGA voter: a disaffected son of a liberal Catholic family who wised up to the failings of Democrats and moved right. “I come from a pure-blooded deplorable mix,” Dans said on a podcast for American Moment, a Project 2025–aligned group, in 2023. He said his parents were drawn to Washington by the idealism of the Kennedy era and met there. He grew up in the D.C. area, then enrolled at MIT, where he studied economics and earned a master’s in city planning.

Dans then attended law school at the University of Virginia, where he became involved with the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group. It was not a propitious time to lean right, even at a place like UVA, and the Federalist Society was not yet the Supreme Court–dominating juggernaut it would become in the Trump era. “It was a winter, if you will, for conservatives,” he recalled in the American Moment interview. “Clinton had come into office. This was the forty days out in the wilderness.”

So when Dans graduated, he decided not to enter government and instead worked for white-shoe law firms in New York City. His most notable work came as part of an epic battle between Chevron and the crusading lawyer Steven Donziger, who had sued the oil company over environmental damage in Ecuador. Dans was part of a team that obtained damaging footage of Donziger, filmed for a documentary, that eventually led to his disbarment.

Dans remained interested in politics. He indulged in the “birther” fantasy that Barack Obama was not born in the United States—“I had some serious academic questioning about the birthplace of a former president,” he told the American Moment hosts, with a smirk—and when Trump emerged as the most prominent proponent of birtherism, Dans became a fan. He was crushed when Trump considered but passed on a presidential bid in 2012 and was an early fan of his 2016 campaign.

After Trump’s unlikely victory, Dans hoped his elite résumé and steadfast Trump support would put him on a fast track into the administration. Instead, he found himself shut out and concluded that the problem was that he was too MAGA. “I think the question number one [on the job application] was, Have you previously served in government?” he recalled. “That would be, well, who? Everyone can do the math backwards. That’s a Bush appointee.”

Dans finally caught a break in 2018, when he met James Bacon, a college student working in the administration. Appealing to the much-younger man for help must have been humbling for Dans, well into his career, but it got him an administration job working on homelessness policy at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At HUD, he developed a healthy skepticism of career civil servants, but he had even more disdain for political appointees whom he found insufficiently committed to the cause.

“Our folks came in and they were clueless and lazy in a lot of cases,” he told the American Moment hosts. “There is obstruction [by civil servants], to be sure, but I think it’s more that the politicals kind of let themselves get led around by the nose, and that starts by not wanting to do the hard work.”

 

No Race, No Country: The Politics and Poetics of Richard Wright
by Deborah Mutnick
The University of North Carolina Press, 2025

[Publication date: May 13, 2025]

 

No Race, No Country presents a major reconsideration of the breakthrough African American author Richard Wright’s work and life. It challenges standard evaluations of his reputation as an autodidact, his late novels, his travel books, and his political commitments after he left the Communist Party USA. Deborah Mutnick engages a wide range of Wright’s work throughout his career, providing a nuanced perspective on his complicated gender politics and his serious engagement with Marx’s notions of historical materialism, alienation, and commodity fetishism. Adding to a small but growing number of studies of his ecological consciousness, it also examines both his closeness to nature, especially during his youth and late in life, and his early mapping of a racial geography of the “second nature” of the sociocultural world that overlaps with and transforms the natural world. Finally, it joins a recent surge in scholarship on Wright’s later nonfiction as a progenitor of Black radical internationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.


REVIEWS:

“In No Race, No Country, Deborah Mutnick powerfully unearths new detailed research that puts to rest the political and narrow-minded clichés that have dominated the attitudes and critical analyses of Richard Wright’s life and work for at least six decades. The success of this text emerges as no small task. Offering a painstakingly new appraisal of the life-long conjoining of Wright’s iconoclastic Marxist ideology, a serious close reading of his works in the context of his comments on those works, his struggle against racism, and the connection between his national and global political activity, this text emerges as an invaluable resource from which to trace the confluence of Wright’s personal experiences, creative ingenuity as well as his political, ideological, and global commitments. ”With the lyrical voice of an empathetic storyteller who has taken a comprehensive journey through Wright’s life, creative vision, and egalitarian dream, Deborah Mutnick offers a gift that coerces readers and scholars to view Richard Wright as an impassioned augur. After reading No Race, No Country, we have little choice except to revisit anxiously our understanding of Richard Wright’s intellectual prowess and political profundity."—Joyce Ann Joyce, author of Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy

“A tour de force in historical materialist literary criticism, Deborah Mutnick’s No Race, No Country grounds fresh and compelling readings of Richard Wright’s oeuvre in a deeply dialectical appreciation of the role played by Marxism, communism, and anti-imperialism in both his life and his creative process.”—Barbara Foley, author of Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

“One of the very best projects on Richard Wright I have ever read.”—James Smethurst, author of Behold the Land: The Black Arts Movement in the South

“Deborah Mutnick has done a masterly job of buttressing recent revisionist scholarship on Wright through her use of new archival material.”—Bill V. Mullen, author of James Baldwin: Living in Fire

“In No Race, No Country, Deborah Mutnick powerfully unearths new detailed research that puts to rest the political and narrow-minded clichés that have dominated the attitudes and critical analyses of Richard Wright’s life and work for at least six decades. The success of this text emerges as no small task. Offering a painstakingly new appraisal of the life-long conjoining of Wright’s iconoclastic Marxist ideology, a serious close reading of his works in the context of his comments on those works, his struggle against racism, and the connection between his national and global political activity, this text emerges as an invaluable resource from which to trace the confluence of Wright’s personal experiences, creative ingenuity as well as his political, ideological, and global commitments. With the lyrical voice of an empathetic storyteller who has taken a comprehensive journey through Wright’s life, creative vision, and egalitarian dream, Deborah Mutnick offers a gift that coerces readers and scholars to view Richard Wright as an impassioned augur. After reading No Race, No Country, we have little choice except to revisit anxiously our understanding of Richard Wright’s intellectual prowess and political profundity.” — Joyce A. Joyce, author of Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy

“This much-needed book makes a number of impressive contributions. It is certainly the best reading of Wright’s novel The Man Who Lived Underground and the haikus he produced late in his life. In short, I rate this as one of the very best projects on Richard Wright I have ever read.”—James Smethurst, author of Behold the Land: The Black Arts Movement in the South

“A tour de force in historical materialist literary criticism, Deborah Mutnick’s No Race, No Country grounds fresh and compelling readings of Richard Wright’s oeuvre in a deeply dialectical appreciation of the role played by Marxism, communism, and anti-imperialism in both his life and his creative process.” — Barbara Foley, author of Wrestling with the Left: The Politics of Invisible Man\

Book Description:

Restoring Richard Wright to the American literary canon


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

 

 

Deborah Mutnick is Professor of English and former Director of Writing at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University, and is the current Co-Director of LIU Brooklyn Learning Communities (LIUBLC). Chief among her current interests are the digital humanities, oral history, ethnography, public writing, and university-community partnerships that bring the resources of universities to communities and vice versa, enabling students and faculty to engage in research, writing, and creative projects in a wide range of social contexts. Related to this work, she is researching and writing about the relevance to 21st century America of the Federal Writers’ Project created in the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration.

 

Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor's Global Anticommunist Crusade
by Jeff Schuhrke

Verso, 2024

[Publication date: September 24, 2024]

 

How the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroad

Blue-Collar Empire tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO’s global anticommunist crusade—and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.

Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy. In this work, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO’s anticommunist officials, who, in a shocking betrayal, for decades expended their energies to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers’ movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. 

 

REVIEWS:

 

"In this comprehensive and consequential study, Jeff Schuhrke sheds light on the often nefarious international agenda of the AFL-CIO. During the Cold War, as Schuhrke documents, the top leaders of the U.S. labor establishment, driven by fervent and indiscriminate anti-communism, helped sabotage nascent union movements in countries across the globe. In doing so, the AFL-CIO undermined cross-border working class unity and bolstered multinational corporate power. Blue-Collar Empire thus offers much vital information and insight, both for scholars seeking to understand the rise and decline of the 20th century labor movement, and for union activists working today to build (or re-build) international networks of solidarity."
—Toni Gilpin, author of The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland

"In this highly readable and engaging book, Jeff Schuhrke explores the disastrous history of American labor's role bolstering U.S. imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere. He explains that Cold War anti-Communism was not the only key to the AFL-CIO's own "foreign policy." Equally crucial were the ideological linkages that put a liberal brand of industrial pluralism close to the heart of the modernization theory celebrated by the State Department and the CIA. Thus, in trying to transplant a North American version of "free" collective bargaining to the oligarchic regimes of Latin America, U.S. trade unions, whether funded by the CIA or not, found themselves complicit with repressive elites that could tolerate neither left wing insurgencies nor conservative enterprise-based trade unionism."
—Nelson Lichtenstein, author of A Fabulous Failure: the Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism

"For too many years, too many unions followed the State Department like sheep, supporting lethal, union-member-killing anti-communist policies abroad in the hope of keeping at least a small seat at the table. Jeff Schuhrke’s eye-opening new book, Blue-Collar Empire, is an indispensable history of this devil’s bargain, a chilling lesson why, as a new, different kind of labor movement awakens, unions must never fight for economic justice at home while denying it to those abroad."
—Greg Grandin, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the Myth

"An important contribution to how we got here and how we can move forward."

—Joe Allen, Counterpunch

"Labor journalist and historian Jeff Schuhrke’s first book, Blue-Collar Empire, dives into American labor unions’ role in Cold War-era interventions across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and their lasting impacts today."

—Isabela Escalona, Workday Magazine

"Schuhrke expertly guides the reader through the dizzying array of committees, confederations, agencies, institutes, centers and foundations set up by the AFL-CIO and the U.S. government over the decades to split (or directly suppress) militant labor movements and undermine pro-worker governments around the world. He also provides concise, and often heartbreaking, accounts of their “accomplishments” in various countries."

—Jonathan Kissam, UE News

"Blue Collar Empire is a testament of the power of union internationalism. It shows us that U.S imperialism and with that militaristic industries are not just tertiary issues for workers. Workers throughout history and across borders have longed for peace, solidarity and with that the resistance to war is central to unionism."

—Aminah Sheikh, Spring Magazine

"An invaluable contribution to the field, essential for curious novices and specialists alike.."

—Henry De Groot, Cosmonaut

"If you have ever heard the derisive term “AFL-CIA,” you will want to read Jeff Schuhrke’s new book. In Blue Collar Empire, Schuhrke, a long time labor journalist and scholar, lays out the entire disturbing history of the American labor movement’s decades of close involvement in anticommunist crusades around the world. The reality of the AFL-CIO’s ties with the Cold War, the CIA, and America’s bloody foreign policy is, I assure you, much more astounding than you might think."

—Hamilton Nolan

"There is an opening to begin to discuss and learn from the history detailed by Jeff Schuhrke in Blue Collar Empire allowing us to view anti-communism differently…as a tool of class domination which has ruled our country for the last 75 years. This book should be required reading in labor studies classes. More importantly, it should be read by all of us trying to understand developments in our labor movement during the last generation."
—Gail Lindenberg, New York Labor History Association

"Schuhrke has done a truly remarkable job simply telling us in detail about the AFL and the AFL-CIO operations around the world during these years. He has weaved together a sprawling, extremely complicated chain of events that extend around the world, and over roughly a 50 year period ... A tour de force, this book should be read by every trade unionist and people studying US global operations over these years."

—Kim Scipes, Counter Currents

"Schurhke provides us with the most comprehensive account of the insidious AFL-CIO/CIA co-operation since George Morris’s long-out-of-print classic, CIA and American Labor"

—The Morning Star 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to In These Times and Jacobin, and his scholarship has been published in Diplomatic History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History. 

 

 

PLAY HARDER: The Triumph of Black Baseball in America
by Gerald Early and National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
Ten Speed Press, 2025

[Publication date: April 29, 2025]

 

An authoritative exploration of how Black Americans have shaped baseball from its emergence after the Civil War to the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier, up to today’s game—by award-winning author Gerald Early in collaboration with the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

No sport has been more associated with America’s sense of itself, with its identity, than baseball. No sport has been so inextricably bound with America’s traditions—with its notions of democracy and fair play—than baseball. And no professional sport in America has been as dramatically connected to social change as Major League Baseball when it became racially integrated the moment Jackie Robinson took the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

Play Harder comes at a time when the history of Black baseball has become especially relevant—following MLB's recent recognition of the Negro Leagues as major leagues and the effort to incorporate statistics from the Negro Leagues into those for all players. Before Robinson, as Play Harder shows, Black athletes played baseball as far back as the 1800s even before the establishment of the Negro Leagues. But once founded in 1920, the Negro Leagues gave Black Americans an inroad to baseball that would be enduring and profound. The leagues were an instrument of community building during a time when discrimination separated Black people from all white enterprises, including baseball, and they paved the way for racial integration that Black players hoped would come.

Play Harder showcases the Black stars of the game—those from baseball’s early years such as Moses Fleetwood Walker and Rube Foster; Negro Leagues stars like Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell; Jackie Robinson and those who crossed the color line after him, like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, followed by Frank Robinson and Curt Flood; and the stars who ushered in today’s game, such as Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Barry Bonds, and Ken Griffey, Jr. Playing out against the cultural and political events of 150 years, the story bears witness to the richness of this country's diversity while remaining clear-eyed about the racial injustice endured by Black Americans. In the end, Play Harder celebrates the triumph of some of baseball’s greatest players and their remarkable contributions to the game we know and love today.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis. He specializes in writing about African American literature and culture, sports, jazz, and the cultural history of the United States. He won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction for The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture. His latest book, written in collaboration with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is Play Harder: The Triumph of Black Baseball in America. He is also the editor of the Sammy Davis Jr. Reader and the Muhammad Ali Reader. He is also the editor of the Common Reader, the online journal of Washington University.