The Canadian Historical Association has awarded history professor Miriam Wright the Clio Prize for best book in Ontario history for Sporting Justice: the Chatham Coloured All-Stars and Black Baseball in Southwestern Ontario, 1915-1958, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2023. The awards were presented on June 18.
When local sports were largely racially segregated, the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, a Black baseball team from 1930s Chatham, were the first Black team to win a provincial championship in the primarily white Ontario Baseball Amateur Association.
Dr. Wright began working on the history of this team in 2015, after meeting Pat Harding, daughter-in-law of one of the Chatham Coloured All-Stars players. Harding wondered if the University could help create a website to share the story. The website, “Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred ‘Boomer’ Harding and the Chatham Coloured All-Stars,” launched in 2017, involved Wright, Heidi Jacobs and Dave Johnston of Leddy Library, the Harding family, the Chatham Sports Hall of Fame, and the Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society and Black Mecca Museum.
While the website focused on the All-Stars’ 1934 championship season, Sporting Justice is a broader, intergenerational study of Black baseball in southwestern Ontario both before and after the All-Stars played. Situating the teams in the racist and classist context of early 20th-century Canada, the book also reflects on the relationship between sport and the wider movement for social justice happening in Black communities of the period.
Oral history is a central feature of the book. Wright drew on earlier oral history and newspaper interviews given by former All-Stars players, as well as others conducted with family members of the team for the 2017 website.
As Wright noted, “How the players and their families remembered the story, how they gave it meaning, and why they wanted to share it is very important.”
The Canadian Historical Association awards Clio Prizes for the best books in regional history, presenting separate prizes for the Atlantic region, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, B.C., and the north.