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Jeffrey Powers-Beck. The American Indian Integration of Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 269 pp. Cloth, $34.95.
The first baseball players of the twentieth century to hear "nigger" from the stands of Major League stadiums were not African-Americans but American Indians, according to Jeffrey Powers-Beck's monumental book, The American Indian Integration of Baseball. They also heard "back to the reservation," "dumb injun," "redskin," "war hoops," and other similar derogatory comments.
A non-Indian, the author is a professor of English and assistant dean of graduate studies at East Tennessee State University. The foreword to the book is written by Joseph B. Oxendine, a Lumbee Indian and the retired chancellor of North Carolina's Pembroke State University. Oxendine notes that most observers believe that the entry of Jackie Robinson into Major League baseball in 1947 marked the beginning of integration and racial issues in baseball. He further comments that anti-Indian behavior was...