A Chatham-Kent sports writer’s new book looks at the relationship between race and sport through experiences of local athletes, and he says the most familiar stories are just the tip of the iceberg.
Ian Kennedy’s On Account of Darkness: Shining a Light on Race and Sport is set to be released May 30. The book includes stories about the Chatham Colored All-Stars and baseball hall-of-famer Fergie Jenkins, but Kennedy said there have been many Black, Indigenous and Japanese-Canadian athletes from the area who have made an impact on sport.
“As I local sports lover, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard about some of the people that were involved in the book, and some of the struggles they had gone through to become successful athletes,” he said.
Other athletes featured in the book include professional fisher Bob Izumi, baseball players Herb and Mel Wakabayashi and hockey player Gerry Binga.
Kennedy writes for The Hockey News and Yahoo Sports and has been published in The Globe and Mail. He also founded the Chatham-Kent Sports Network website in 2011.
Before the book came to be, Kennedy had written articles about some of the individuals featured in the book. He said at the start of the pandemic he wanted to “dive deeper” into the stories he knew a little about.
“I was looking at doing a little more research into some of the stories that might not have been told in the past,” he said. “I’ve also always been interested in social justice and fighting against some of the things that are going on in the culture of sports today.”
Kennedy’s research included visits to the Black Mecca Museum and Walpole Island, as well as working with historians at former residential schools and Japanese-Canadian museums and cultural centres.
However, he said the “biggest part” was meeting and interviewing descendants and others – such as friends and coaches – who are connected to the people featured in the book. This means the book mostly focuses on people from the 1950s onwards.
“That’s really where there are still living people to talk about the stories, which was the whole idea of this,” Kennedy said. “I didn’t want to become a storyteller. I wanted to become a story preservationist because they are not my stories to tell, but so many were disappearing, or I hadn’t heard about.”
Kennedy said most chapters can stand on their own, but the issue of systemic barriers – from colonization to slavery to Japanese internment camps – these athletes faced runs through the whole book.
“We go through how sport was used at residential schools,” he said. “Something like hockey was not just a game that was played at those residential schools, it was a game that was played there as a tool of assimilation to make Indigenous youth – quote-unquote – ‘feel’ more Canadian.”
The title of the book comes from an umpire’s decision at what was supposed to be the deciding game for the Chatham Colored All-Stars at the Ontario Baseball Association championship in 1934.
The score was tied in the 11th inning of the third game and the umpire called it because of darkness, even though there was still enough light to play more innings. The team won the championship anyway after the next game.
Kennedy will be appearing at Turns & Tales in downtown Chatham on May 28 for a signing and reading; at Sons of Kent on June 4 for the book launch and signing; and at Buxton Museum on June 11.
On Account of Darkness will be available at book stores in Canada and the US, as well as online sellers. It can be pre-ordered through the publisher at www.tidewaterpress.ca/on-account-of-darkness.