Representing the Integration of Baseball to a New Generation

In this essay, I examine two recent books for children that narrate the integration of major league baseball—Sharon Robinson’s Promises to Keep and Kadir Nelson’s We Are the Ship—in order to analyze the different models of social activism offered to readers in these presentations of a key episode from the civil rights movement. I investigate Robinson’s and Nelson’s divergent narrative and visual strategies for depicting black male anger and the economic consequences of desegregation in order to determine how these texts attempt to shape the ways in which future citizens envisage the continuing need for action toward racial equality.