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The Kings of Casino Park: Black Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932

Amazon.com Price:  $28.99 (as of 02/05/2019 13:38 PST- Details)

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Description

In the 1930s, Monroe, Louisiana, was once a town of twenty-six thousand in the northeastern corner of the state, an area described by the New Orleans Item as the “lynch law center of Louisiana.” race relations were bad, and the Depression was once pitiless for most, especially for the working class—a great many of whom had no work at all or seasonal work at best. Yet for a couple of years in the early 1930s, this unlikely spot was once home to the Monarchs, a national-caliber Negro League baseball team. Crowds of black and white fans eagerly filled their segregated grandstand seats to see the players who would change into the only World Series team Louisiana would ever generate, and the first from the American South.
 
By 1932, the team had as good a claim to the national baseball championship of black The us as some other. Partisans claim, with merit, that league officials awarded the National Championship to the Chicago American Giants in flagrant violation of the league’s own rules: times were hard and more people would pay to see a Chicago team than an outfit from the Louisiana back country. Black newspapers in the South rallied to beef up Monroe’s cause, railing against the league and the bias of black newspapers in the North, but the decision, unfair though it is going to have been, was once also the only financially feasible option for the league’s besieged leadership, who were struggling to care for a black baseball league in the middle of the Great Depression.
 
Aiello addresses long-held misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the Monarchs’ 1932 season. He tells the almost-unknown story of the team—its time, its fortunes, its place of origin—and positions black baseball in the context of American racial discrimination. He illuminates the culture-changing power of a baseball team and the importance of sport in cultural and social history.

 

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