New Books In Biography

The integration of baseball is most often cast in terms of black and white, but biographer Adrian Burgos, Jr.— a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign– is out to change that. In his new biography, entitled Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball (Hill and Wang, 2011), Burgos explores the nuances of baseball’s color line through the story of the Negro League owner, Alex Pompez. The son of a Cuban father and a “mulatto” mother, Pompez, a black Latino, was an influential force in the integration of Negro League baseball and, by extension, the Major Leagues. Importing talent from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico and the Dominican Republic for his Cuban Stars, he assembled the most racially diverse team within the Negro League. An outrageously successful entrepreneur, Pompez overcame the two primary problems facing Negro League owners: a lack of capital and a lack of stadiums. Using the money earned through his Harlem numbers racket, Pompez both financed the Cu