On May 1, 1951, Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso took the field for the Chicago White Sox and broke the color line for Chicago major league baseball. Ernie Banks integrated the Chicago Cubs two years later. The future Hall of Famers began their Chicago baseball careers against the backdrop of a 1951 race riot in suburban Cicero, where a white mob abetted by local police attacked a building that had rented to Black tenants.

Don Zminda’s account looks at these interconnected events alongside the little-known chronicle of Chicago’s slow track to integrating major league baseball. By the early 1950s, the Cubs and White Sox organizations had become rich in Black and Afro-Latino stars and talented prospects. Unlike Miñoso and Banks, however, most of these minor leaguers never advanced to the majors or, if they did, it was for little more than a cup of coffee. Zminda also profiles these players, from Charles Pope, the Cubs’ first Black signee, to larger-than-life fireballer Blood Burns.

Essential and dramatic, Justice Batted Last uses the lives and careers of two Chicago legends to tell a story of integration on and off the diamond.

"The writer," according to Emerson, "believes all that can be thought can be written...In his eyes a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported." And what writer worth his name, E. L. Doctorow asks, will not seriously, however furtively, take on the universe? Human consciousness, personal history, American literature, religion, and politics--these are the far-flung coordinates of the universe that Doctorow reports here, a universe that uniquely and brilliantly reflects our contemporary scene.