Play Harder

“Play Harder offers a vital and gripping tale about the national pastime and the Black experience. The book chronicles the nearly 160-year journey of Black baseball in America: from its beginnings as a means for newly freed enslaved people to find purpose and an expression of prowess after the Civil War, to its breaking down the barriers of Jim Crow with the emergence of [Jackie] Robinson, to the subsequent triumph of heroes like Willie Mays and Henry Aaron… . Play Harder can’t tell the whole story, but it tells one that needs to be shared, not silenced. The story of Black baseball must be understood within the context of the Black struggle for freedom and equality in America, in the same way that the centuries-old Black struggle is an inescapable part of American history writ large.”—Michael Lee, The Washington Post

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis. An award-winning essayist and culture critic, Early has published extensively, winning a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been a consultant on the Ken Burns documentaries Baseball, Jazz, The Tenth Inning, Unforgivable Blackness, The War, The Roosevelts, and Jackie Robinson. In 2013, President Obama appointed Early to a five-year term at the National Council on the Humanities.