Stolen Dreams by Dr. Chris Lamb is the story of how a seemingly mild act of protest became part of a much bigger struggle for racial equality during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. The Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars was South Carolina’s first black Little League team, its charter approved in 1953. To the young boys in the league it meant they could play on a real field, with real uniforms and equipment. But it meant more than that to the team’s founder, Robert Morrison. He dreamed that the team could become a vehicle for change–if youth baseball could be integrated, so could other institutions.

When the 11- and 12-year-olds registered for a tournament in July 1955, it became clear just how hard that change might come. White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street team. Segregationists denied the boys their dream of playing in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The Cannon Street all-stars spent decades trying to forget that day. It would not be clear to them until they were middle-aged men that they were part of something much larger.

Although the core of this book is about that team and the discovery of their heartbreaking story, the book also offers a broader examination of how the Civil Rights Movement began in South Carolina, about the centuries of bigotry in the South and how it shaped the city of Charleston and its people, from its horrific roots in the 1600s to the murders at Mother Emanuel AME Church in 2015.

Praise for Stolen Dreams:

“…meticulously documents an important moment, and team, that few people will know but should. It’s about the collision of racism and baseball, years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and shows just how far Blacks had left to go to be accepted in America’s pastime. Lamb writes this story with affection, grace, and skill.”—Mike Freeman, editor of race and inequality at USA Today
 

“Chris Lamb takes a forgotten baseball tournament and a forgotten moment in the civil rights struggle and spins them into an unforgettable story, proving, as Martin Luther King Jr. might have said, that the long arc of a batted ball bends toward justice. With impressive research and sharp insight, Lamb illustrates once again the important role baseball plays in understanding and shaping American culture.”—Jonathan Eig, best-selling author of Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season
 

“Sports is a brilliant and bracing window for understanding Jim Crow segregation in the South. With this book, Chris Lamb uncovers a narrative in this history that few readers will know: a history of racism, injustice, baseball, and the kids crushed by the hatreds of adults. I can’t recommend this book enough. It speaks to the past brilliantly, but it also speaks to our troubled present. A necessary and important read.”—Dave Zirin, author of The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World

“Lamb has presented Little League Baseball as a microcosm of Jim Crowism with so many history lessons of shame, sadness, and racial injustices propagated by the white majority. Lamb fires cannon shots with explosive narratives about Octavius Catto, Judge J. Waties Waring, Isaac Woodard, Robert Morrison, Robert Small, Frazier B. Baker, and others. This narrative is one of the most comprehensive examinations of the Lost Cause obsession for control in America.”—Larry Lester, Negro League Baseball historian and author
 

“Chris Lamb’s thorough and eloquent account embodies the best tradition of civil rights scholarship, exposing America’s long history of racism, particularly in Charleston, a city built literally on the backs of enslaved people. Redemptive at its core, Stolen Dreams reminds us of all of the importance of telling the stories of African Americans that have so often been erased, forgotten, or neglected.”—Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina poet laureate, 2003–20