Note: Thank you to NetGalley, University of Nebraska Press, and Mitchell Nathanson for the advanced reader copy of the book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

Whenever I heard talk of baseball’s pension plan, I always wondered why the multi-millionaire headline-grabbing players need a pension. They don’t. Those who do need a pension are the ones who don’t make it to the big leagues or do spend a small amount of time in “the Show,” but have given a good portion of their young lives to the game of baseball. Many of the men in this book deserve that as well.

When Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, that didn’t make racial prejudice go away. It didn’t even level the playing field for black athletes. In Under Jackie’s Shadow, author Mitchell Nathanson interviews black minor league baseball players of the 1950s through 1970s about their experiences playing in the minor leagues. For many of them, especially those that played in the south, there was a great disparity as to how they were treated versus their white counterparts.

Several of the interviewees came from sheltered backgrounds where they didn’t experience as much racism as others had. It was a shock to them to go to Florida and suddenly hear the word “ni–er” tossed at them and learn that restaurants wouldn’t serve them. Florida does seem to be the biggest problem in that regard. Between spring training and the minor leagues there, many of the players detail the segregation and outright hostility they faced there.

However, it was baseball itself that held these players back. Many of the organizations would sign these young black athletes and then hold them back from advancing through the system to the Major Leagues. Some of the statistics they had are amazing, yet they were passed over again and again in favor of white players whose statistics were less than stellar. In some cases, the managers were outright hostile to them. In others, it seems to be throughout a particular organization.

For many, it left a bad taste in their mouths and they turned away from baseball completely. It’s a hard thing to digest when something you love doing, like playing professional baseball, punishes you for the color of your skin.

The interviews Nathanson had are transcribed here for readers to learn from. They are pretty startling in a way and really drive home what conditions were like in the Jim Crow South, and the country as a whole through the lens of baseball. Even as the Civil Rights movement is going on, there is still bias in the treatment of these men, no matter what their skill level. Some of them spend eight years or more in the minor leagues with nothing to show for it. Shouldn’t they be entitled to pensions of some kind to help them start a new career? Especially after many times, they were plucked out of college, unable to finish their degree. In one case, a former player details how a team worked around a white player’s schedule who wanted to complete his college education but refused to do the same for him.

Under Jackie’s Shadow is presented very well as a witness to the racism in our country as well as baseball. There was no magic wand once Jackie Robinson began to play that made it all better, and you might better understand the concept of institutionalized racism and why affirmative action has been needed to level the playing field.