A Long Way From Home: The Untold Story of Baseball's Desegregation

FAIN: TD-50540-13

Center for Independent Documentary, Inc. (Newton, MA 02458-1341)
Gaspar Gonzalez (Project Director: August 2012 to July 2016)

Development of a two-hour documentary film on the history of pioneering African American baseball players who followed Jackie Robinson and integrated both minor and major league baseball.

"A Long Way From Home" will chronicle the struggles of the pioneering African-American ballplayers who followed Jackie Robinson into white professional baseball, paying particular attention to their experiences in minor-league communities where Jim Crow remained a fact of life well into the 1960s. Indeed, nearly two decades after Robinson's historic debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, there were still professional minor league teams that had never employed a black (or black Latino) player. That historical fact has remained largely obscured by the myth of the integrationist "moment" of Robinson taking the field in Brooklyn. As "A Long Way From Home" will show, the progress of baseball's desegregation was more tortured and more contested--and the actions of those who followed in Robinson's footsteps, more heroic --than is generally known.