PRETEND THE BALL IS NAMED JIM CROW : the story of josh gibson

Joshua "Josh" Gibson (1911–1947) is a baseball legend—one of the greatest power hitters in the Negro Leagues, and in all of baseball history. At the height of his career, this trailblazing athlete suffered grueling physical ailments, lost his young wife who died giving birth to their twins, and endured years of Jim Crow–era segregation and discrimination—all the while breaking records on the ball field. Dorian Hairston's debut poetry collection explores the Black American experience through the lens of Gibson's life and seventeen-year baseball career, which culminated in his posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Hairston brilliantly reconstructs the personas of Gibson and others in his orbit whose encounters with white supremacy interweave with the inevitability of losing loved ones. By alternating between the perspectives of Gibson, members of his family, and contemporary Black baseball players, Hairston captures the complexity and the pain of living under the oppressive weight of grief and racial discrimination. Emotive, prescient, and absorbing, these powerful poems address social change, culture, family, race, death, and oppression—while honoring and giving voice to Gibson and a voiceless generation of African Americans. In the summer of 1960, director C. Douglas Ramey took his Carriage House Players theater company down the street from their Old Louisville venue to Central Park, where the actors performed scenes from the Shakespeare classic Much Ado about Nothing . Buoyed by the enthusiastic audience response, Ramey's company returned to the park the next year for the first full season of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. More than sixty years later, Kentucky Shakespeare is now the oldest free, non-ticketed Shakespeare in the Park festival in the country. To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the festival, in spring 2020 Kentucky Shakespeare cooperated with students in the University of Louisville's Department of History to record twenty entertaining and enlightening oral interviews with longtime members of the company. In Under the Greenwood Tree , author Tracy K'Meyer captures the history of Kentucky Shakespeare in a series of carefully selected and edited transcripts of these interviews. In these pages, past and present cast and crew share their memories of the company's history, performances in the park, and the positive impact of its many outreach programs, from its inception in the 1960s, to its slump in the early 2000s, and on to its recent renaissance. An illuminating record of the collaborative artistry that brings Shakespeare's works to life, Under the Greenwood Tree offers readers a peek behind the curtain at the group's steadfast stewardship of the most important literature in the English language.