A book that takes a closer look at the Chatham baseball team that broke a colour barrier years before Jackie Robinson is now available to the public.
"1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars' Barrier-Breaking Year" was written by Heidi LM Jacobs, a librarian at the University of Windsor. The book looks at the 1934 edition of the team, which was the first Black team to win a title in the Ontario Baseball Association.
Jacobs said the project fell into her lap when she and her colleagues were approached by Pat Harding in 2015 with a scrapbook about the team and her father-in-law, Boomer Harding.
"We were approached to help make her a website, so my colleagues and I at the University of Windsor worked together and created a website. Then as we started getting into the research it was such a fantastic story, and I kept going," said Jacobs.
When Jacobs first started working on the project, she thought it would only take six months.
"The story is so exciting and so rich," said Jacobs. "There's some family scrapbooks that I was able to see that really helps illustrate it, and lots of newspaper coverage from the 1930's, and so it was a real exciting journey to embark upon."
Jacobs is a baseball fan who is also interested in local history, so she was surprised that she had never heard about the team before.
"There's so many things that actually did surprise me. The depth of coverage, the way race was discussed and not discussed," said Jacobs. "There was just an awful lot, and I think it's a very timely story."
A book launch event is taking place Wednesday at Sons of Kent Brewing in Chatham at 7 p.m.
There will be a reading, book signing, and a panel with Jacobs, filmmaker LeSean Harris, and descendants of All-Star players, Blake Harding and Donald Tabron. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Deirdre McCorkindale from the University of Guelph, who is originally from Chatham.