© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Illustrated Book Chronicles Negro League Pioneers

The vivid, detailed and realistic pictures in a new book for children transport readers to the past and the world of baseball's Negro Leagues.

Award-winning artist Kadir Nelson wrote and illustrated the book, We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, which is his first as an author.

The project took Nelson nearly eight years to complete.

"It started off as a few paintings and then it grew into more than 40 paintings," Nelson tells Michele Norris.

Each painting required a tremendous amount of research. Nelson read a number of books about the Negro Leagues and interviewed former players, including Walt McCoy, who lives in San Diego, as does Nelson.

"It helps a lot to hear the history directly from someone who lived it, rather than reading it in a textbook," Nelson says.

"I felt that if I [wrote the book] in that way — like a grandfather telling his story to his grandchildren — it would make the history all the more real," he says.

Nelson describes how the men and women who played in the Negro Leagues — faced with discrimination and a ban against their playing in the Major Leagues — created their own "grand stage" to showcase their talents.

It was characterized by rough-and-tumble play; Nelson notes that Negro League players threw pitches that were banned in the Major Leagues and, as a result, learned how to hit anything.

"By the time integration came, when Jackie Robinson crossed the color barrier in 1947, African-American ballplayers were prepared to hit anything and to play at that high level of play," Nelson says.

The title of the book comes from a quote from the founder of the Negro Leagues, Rube Foster: "We are the ship, all else the sea."

Nelson says it was a "declaration of independence" of the Negro Leagues from the Major Leagues — and a fitting title for his book.

"This story is presented in the first-person plural. We played baseball. This is how we lived, and this is what we did to enable African Americans and people of color to follow in our footsteps."

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.