The Black Fives is a groundbreaking, timely history of the largely unknown early days of Black basketball, bringing to life the trailblazing players, teams, and impresarios who pioneered the sport.“For a game that has meant so much to the world, Claude Johnson somehow presents a definitive account for a part of basketball’s history that for so long was kept away from us. Claude is a superhero storyteller, and this ...

Formed in 1904, the Alpha Physical Culture Club of Harlem was America's first African American athletic club. Conrad Norman, its Jamaican-born founder, hoped to address rampant lung disease among blacks living in New York City's overcrowded tenements by providing proper exercise facilities they could use without bias. The club's basketball team, the Alpha Big Five, became nationally famous during the 1910s while sticking faithfully to the strictest amateur ideals. But the times were changi...

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way."Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful." --The Washington PostNo announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant...

A groundbreaking history of Black basketballAfrican Americans were making moves in basketball generations before the rise of the NBA. Their pioneering efforts helped popularize the sport in big cities and small towns alike and shaped the game we know and love today. From theinvention of the game in 1891 to the racial integration of all-White professional leagues in the 1950s, dozens of teams—then often called “fives”—of African American players were founded and flourished. T...

**Nominated for the 2019 Toronto Heritage Book AwardWe may never see a playoff series like it again.**Before Gary Bettman, and the lockouts. Before all the NHL's old barns were torn down to make way for bigger, glitzier rinks. Before expansion and parity across the league, just about anything could happen on the ice. And it often did. It was an era when huge personalities dominated the sport; and willpower was often enough to win games. And in the spring of 1993, some of th...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—EbonyFrom Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still fin...

NAACP Image Award Finalist: "Boyd's riveting new history…turns an oft-caricatured community into a world of actual, struggling human beings."—Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and MeA Michigan Notable Books HonoreeIn this book, the author of Baldwin's Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit—in "a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores...

Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again.Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Forget Alexander Joy Cartwright and the New York Knickerbockers. Instead, meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and Louis Fenn Wadsworth, each of whom has a stronger claim to baseball paternity than Doubleday or Cartwright.But did baseball even have a father—or did it just evolve from other bat-and-ball games? John Thorn, baseball’s preeminent historian, examines th...

Early in the twentieth century, the black community in Tulsa- the "Greenwood District"- became a nationally renowned entrepreneurial center. Frequently referred to as "The Black Wall Street of America," the Greenwood District attracted pioneers from all over America who sought new opportunities and fresh challenges. Legal segregation forced blacks to do business among themselves. The Greenwood district prospered as dollars circulated within the black community. But fear and jealousy swelle...

The untold story of baseball's nineteenth-century origins: "a delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat" (Paul Dickson, The Wall Street Journal).You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn't. Perhaps you've read that baseball's color line wa...

From the bestselling author of The Afterlife of Malcolm X comes a brilliant, lively account of the Black Renaissance that burst forth in Pittsburgh from the 1920s through the 1950s—“Smoketown will appeal to anybody interested in black history and anybody who loves a good story…terrific, eminently readable…fascinating” (The Washington Post).Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about noble, but doom...

Fifty-nine in '84 is award–winning journalist Edward Achorn's riveting history of late nineteenth century baseball and the era's most legendary pitcher.In 1884, Providence Grays pitcher Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn won an astounding fifty-nine games—more than anyone in major-league history ever had before, or has since. He then went on to win all three games of baseball's first World Series.Fifty-nine in '84 tells the dramatic story not onl...