I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America
Date and Time
Speakers: Imani Perry and Rowan Ricardo Philips
About the Event
Drawing on years of archival research and written with narrative power, intellectual depth, and literary grace, I Just Want Them to Remember Me recovers forgotten lives, reexamines celebrated ones, and restores Black baseball to its rightful place at the center of the American story. This singular book illuminates a tradition whose influence extends far beyond the diamond. It stands as an ode to the talent and determination that shaped both the game and the nation.
About the Speakers
Imani Perry is Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She received the National Book Award for Nonfiction for her critically acclaimed 2022 book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Her writing and scholarship primarily focus on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained.
She is the author of eight books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which received the Pen Bograd-Weld Award for Biography, the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, and the Shilts-Grahn Award for nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle, among other honors. Her book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem won the 2019 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Award for the best book in American Studies, the Hurston Wright Award for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a poet, essayist, critic, and translator. He is the author of four collections of poetry: The Ground, Heaven, Living Weapon, and Silver. Heaven and Silverwere both longlisted for the National Book Award, and Heaven was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His fifth collection, The Milky Way, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His next book, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, traces Black baseball from the free Black communities of the nineteenth century to Hank Aaron’s 715th home run in 1974. It will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 1, 2027. He served as a curatorial consultant for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s exhibition Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball and gave the keynote address at its opening.
His other books include The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing; the essay collection When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness; and a translation from the Catalan of Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. His poetry, essays, and sportswriting have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review, and his basketball writing is collected in the Library of America’s Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game. His honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Presidential Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University, where he has taught since 2002. He is also the poetry editor of The New Republic and the editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. He lives in New York and Barcelona.
About the Series: Sports & Us
The recent World Cup gave us a vivid reminder that sports are engines of national and regional pride, political maneuvering, human drama, ardent engagement, and economic consequence. Events in the Sports & Us series will explore the many dimensions of athletic competition and how they have contributed to the making of our world.