African American Sports History in Frazier Slow Robinson’s Negro Leagues Memoir, 1999

Frazier “Slow” Robinson

First Edition

Robinson, Frazier “Slow,” with Paul Bauer. Catching Dreams: My Life in the Negro Baseball Leagues, 1999, preserves a catcher’s firsthand account of professional Black baseball across the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. Robinson recounts the athletic labor, racial discrimination, extensive travel, unstable rosters, barnstorming schedules, friendships, and communal life that sustained Black baseball while organized white professional leagues excluded African American players. His perspective from behind the plate gives particular immediacy to his work with pitchers including Satchel Paige and Leon Day, while his comparatively workmanlike career broadens the historical record beyond the Negro Leagues’ most celebrated stars. A foreword by John “Buck” O’Neil and an introduction by Gerald Early place Robinson’s testimony within African American culture and United States history, making the memoir significant for research into Jim Crow, Black athletic institutions, labor, migration, and historical memory.

Robinson, Frazier “Slow,” with Paul Bauer. Catching Dreams: My Life in the Negro Baseball Leagues. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999. First edition. The memoir follows Robinson from early industrial and independent teams through barnstorming tours and Negro Leagues competition, including his association with the Kansas City Monarchs, New York Cubans, and other Black clubs, before the conclusion of his playing career in Canada. He describes games against local and traveling opponents, the movement of players between teams, encounters with Black entertainers and public figures, and the practical difficulties of lodging and transportation in a racially divided nation. Robinson caught Paige during a 1939 barnstorming tour extending from New Orleans to Walla Walla and later played alongside athletes whose careers preceded or overlapped the gradual integration of organized baseball. One volume. 215 pages. Illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout. Red cloth stamped in silver, in original photographic dust jacket. Octavo.

Published two years after Robinson’s death, Catching Dreams contributes to the recovery of Black baseball history through the testimony of a player whose career encompassed both the Negro Leagues’ independent culture and the changes brought by integration. Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Brooklyn Dodgers opened Major League Baseball to Black players but also contributed to declining attendance and financial instability among established Black clubs, making recollections by Negro Leagues veterans particularly important for understanding institutions that integration did not simply preserve. Fine, with clean pages and a tight binding; near fine dust jacket with minimal edge wear. Ex-library stamp of Rowan Public Library, North Carolina, on the title page; otherwise unmarked. A substantial firsthand narrative of segregated professional baseball, preserving the daily experiences and collective culture of the players who sustained the Negro Leagues.

Item #21975

Price: $75.00