‘Birmingham is just about the most thoroughly segregated city in the USA. Its ugly record of brutality is normally well known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been even more unsolved bombings in Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in virtually any other town in the nation.’

Martin Luther Ruler, Jr.

Notice from a Birmingham Jail

1963

Anybody who is familiar with the Civil Rights movement knows that 1964 was a pivotal season. And in Birmingham, about Southern Group: A True Story of Football, Civil Privileges, as well as the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Competition Alabama – possibly the epicenter of racial issue – the Barons amazingly started their season with an integrated team.

Johnny ‘Blue Moon’ Odom, a talented pitcher and Tommie Reynolds, an outfielder – both little dark ballplayers with dreams of using someday in the best leagues, along with Bert Campaneris, a dark-skinned shortstop from Cuba, all found out themselves in this simmering cauldron of a league town, all using for Heywood Sullivan, a white former major leaguer who grew up just later on in Dothan, Alabama.

Colton traces the entire season, authoring the extraordinary interactions among these players with Sullivan, and Colton tells their tale by capturing the essence of Birmingham and its own citizens in this tumultuous 12 months. (The infamous Bull Connor, for example, when not ordering blacks to become blasted by effective water hoses, is definitely a fervent follower of the Barons and served as a long-time broadcaster of their games.)

By all accounts, the racial jeers and taunts that rained down upon these Birmingham players were very much worse than anything that Jackie Robinson ever endured.

Greater than a story about baseball, this is a true accounting of lifestyle within a different period and clearly a different place. Seventeen years after Jackie Robinson acquired broken the colour line in the major leagues, Birmingham was exploding in race riots….and now, they were going to have their very first integrated sports team. This is a story that has hardly ever been told.