Sporting Justice

Thirteen years before Jackie Robinson smashed Major League Baseball’s colour bar, a team of Black players in southwestern Ontario became champions in another league that refused to see them as equals. The story of the Chatham Coloured All-Stars has inspired two books by members of a group that has spent almost a decade working to spotlight the team.

In Sporting Justice, Miriam Wright, an associate professor of history at the University of Windsor, explores more than three decades of Black baseball, including the All-Stars’ 1934 Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship, the first by a Black team. And in 1934, Heidi Jacobs, a librarian at the same university and a writer of fiction and non-fiction, recounts the championship season month by month.

Their initial project was a website titled Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding and the Chatham Coloured All-Stars (1932–1939). The two books draw heavily on oral histories as well as scrapbooks that were carefully preserved by the mother and daughter-in-law of one of the team’s players.

Crowds loved the All-Stars’ fast, entertaining play. But that didn’t mean they wanted the Black players eating in their restaurants or working in their offices, even though a few white business owners helped to pay for travel and matching uniforms.

On the road, the All-Stars faced racial slurs from fans and unfair treatment from umpires. During the 1934 finals, which they ultimately won against a team from Penetanguishene, Ontario, players were told that there was no room for them at the motel in Penetanguishene where they’d planned to stay. They found lodging in nearby Midland, but in later interviews players revealed both the pain of being turned away and their disbelief that the rooms had suddenly all been filled.

The books are unflinching in their portrayals of the casual, omnipresent racism the players and their Black fans often endured, stories that complicate the view of Canada as a promised land of equality for all. As Wilfred Harding’s daughter-in-law Pat Harding says in Jacobs’ book, “As long as they were Stars, they were members of the community. When they stopped playing, they were just ‘coloured boys.’”

Both books feature black-and-white photos of the players wearing suits, baseball gear, and military uniforms. Gifted players like Harding, Earl “Flat” Chase, Donise Washington, and Ferguson Jenkins Sr. (the father of Canada’s first inductee to the U.S. Baseball Hall of Fame, pitcher Fergie Jenkins Jr.) deserve at least two books to ensure that their stories — including both the triumph and the ugliness — become familiar to all Canadians.