Join us for a VIRTUAL book talk with Ted Reinstein on Thursday, February 10, at 7:00PM!  The author will be discussing his latest book, Before Brooklyn: The Unsung Heroes Who Helped Break Baseball's Color Barrier.

In April of 1945, exactly two years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, liberal Boston City Councilman Izzy Muchnick persuaded the Red Sox to try out three black players in return for a favorable vote to allow the team to play on Sundays. The Red Sox got the councilman’s much-needed vote, but the tryout was a sham; the three players would get no closer to the major leagues. It was a lost battle in a war that was ultimately won by Robinson in 1947. This book tells the story of the little-known heroes who fought segregation in baseball, from communist newspaper reporters to the Pullman car porters who saw to it that black newspapers espousing integration in professional sports reached the homes of blacks throughout the country. It also reminds us that the first black player in professional baseball was not Jackie Robinson but Moses Fleetwood Walker in 1884, and that for a time integrated teams were not that unusual. And then, as segregation throughout the country hardened, the exclusion of blacks in baseball quietly became the norm, and the battle for integration began anew.

Ted Reinstein is best known in New England as a journalist and reporter for Chronicle, Boston’s celebrated (and America’s longest-running, locally-produced) TV news-magazine. In 2002, he was part of the Chronicle team honored with a prestigious National DuPont-Columbia Broadcast Journalism Award for their coverage of Boston’s controversial Big Dig project, the nation’s largest-ever public works project. While he also appears in the studio at the anchor desk or delivering an opinion commentary, it’s out in the field where viewers are most familiar seeing Ted. From every corner of New England, he’s found the offbeat, the unique, the moving, and the just plain memorable, all while telling the enduringly colorful stories of the region’s people and places.