Waiting For Pumpsie
Illustrated by London Ladd
(Charlesbridge Publishing, 2017)
Bernard is a young baseball fan living in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston. Bernard is "crazy, crazy, crazy about the Red Sox" and he longs for the day when someone with dark skin like his is wearing a crisp, white uniform at Fenway Park ("the most beautiful place in the world").
As the 1959 season begins, Jackie Robinson has been retired from baseball for two years and the Red Sox still do not have a black player on their roster.
(In looking online for information about Green, I learned – to my astonishment – that the Boston Bruins integrated before the Red Sox.