Borderless: Black Baseball and Its History Lessons for the 21st Century

A cultural history of how Black baseball teams paved the way for agency, recognition, and societal change. We know a great amount about how baseball has changed history. Jackie Robinson's rise advanced civil rights in America. The Chatham Coloured All-Stars changed perceptions of Black life in Canada. But did you know organized baseball barnstormed through Saskatchewan, pre-dated Black hockey in the Maritimes, and helped found cities across the country? Black baseball is an ongoing story of the movement of Black bodies across North America, facing systemic and deliberate racism ― existing in the same spaces, in some cases, as the Ku Klux Klan ― in order to just pursue a better life, in baseball and otherwise. How much do we know, and can we know, about these stories? How do we serve our collective memory? How do we learn about these stories to equip ourselves for the next problem or crisis? This is a story of baseball that belongs on two sides of a border. Borderless draws those lessons and, hopefully, helps us to hope for better days ahead.