I'm calling on behalf of Senator Kennedy.

That's what the guy had said, and if Mudcat Grant were white, he may have trusted him. But for black ballplayers like Grant, prank calls were commonplace — and in some cases dangerous. They came at all hours, in all forms, and were often accompanied by death threats. This one had come by way of a ringing telephone in Grant's room at the Sheraton Cadillac in Detroit, the majestic hotel in which the twenty-five-year-old pitcher was staying with the rest of the Cleveland Indians.

The caller was still talking. "Mr. Kennedy would like to have breakfast with you."

"I'm sorry," Grant said and quickly hung up.

The phone rang again. And again. And again.

Grant ignored it each time, and went back to reading the morning paper. It was Labor Day 1960 and barely eight o'clock. He was scheduled to pitch the first game of a doubleheader against Detroit in a few hours. The game was meaningless — the Tigers and the Indians were both out of contention — but it mattered to Grant. One more win and he'd match his career high of ten, which he'd posted each of the previous two seasons.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Grant got up off the bed and looked through the peephole. Standing in the hallway were two white men wearing identical suits and deadpan expressions — and flashing ID cards. They looked official enough, so Grant let them in.

"Mr. Kennedy is a big fan of yours," they said, explaining that they worked for the Massachusetts senator. "He'd like you to join him for breakfast in the hotel."

Hard as it was to believe, the phone calls had been legit. Grant got dressed and, within minutes, was sitting in the hotel dining room sharing eggs and coffee with the man who'd won the Democratic nomination for president six weeks earlier. John F. Kennedy told Grant how much he admired the black ballplayers that had been pioneering integration in the Majors; he went on to say that he'd followed the career of Grant's former roommate, Larry Doby, who'd broken the color line in the American League three months after Jackie Robinson had done the same with the Dodgers in the National League.

Sitting across from each other, Kennedy and Grant made for an odd couple: one an Irish-Catholic politician, born into money and prestige, his skin tanned, his collar starched, his thick, nasal Boston accent unmistakable; the other a brown-skinned southerner, the grandson of a slave raised in the blinding hatred of Jim Crow. (Racism had followed Mudcat into the minors, which is where he got his nickname. Some white teammates, upon seeing James Timothy Grant for the first time, said he had the face of a Mississippi mudcat — and the derisive moniker had stuck.)

"You're from Locawoochee, Florida?" Kennedy asked.

"Lacoochee," Grant said, correcting the senator's pronunciation of his birthplace, surprised the man knew so much about him.

Grant explained that it was in Lacoochee's black quarters, fifty miles northeast of Tampa, that his mother, Viola, had raised him and his six siblings. He could barely remember his father and namesake James, who'd been a log cutter at the local mill; the elder James had fallen ill on the job and died of pneumonia when Grant was a young boy.

The town Grant described to Kennedy was the Lacoochee of the late '40s and '50s, the one whose mill shut down once the area had run out of cypress trees, the one that had gone into an economic tailspin shortly thereafter.

Grant told Kennedy, too, how his elementary school teacher had introduced him to a wide range of music, and how his mother, who'd worked as a maid and directed the choir at Mount Moriah Baptist Church, had taught him to sing. But he didn't sugarcoat his story: He was raised in the Deep South, where, for blacks, opportunities had been practically nonexistent. He told the senator about the tumbledown row house that had served as his elementary school, about the school's secondhand books, about the books' torn and missing pages.

Still today, Grant has vivid memories of the indignities he'd suffered as a kid in Lacoochee. These are Mudcat's words, from Bill Staples and Rich Herschlag's Before the Glory:

The very minute you walked out of your house, there were incidents that were out of line. As a black person, you had water fountains you couldn't drink from. There were restaurants you couldn't go into. You had to always watch where you were and know what you were going to do, because there was something that was going to happen to you every day. You knew of lynchings. You would hear it in the night, and if you didn't, word came through the next town that somebody was hanged or somebody was castrated. There used to be a law called "reckless eyeballing." If they saw you looking at a white lady, you could be charged with "reckless eyeballing." Sometimes, whites would get drunk, go riding through town, and fire guns into your house. That was done to my family. I remember my mother putting me down by the fireplace to keep the bullets from hitting me. That was called "nigger-shooting time."

Kennedy listened intently for nearly an hour, and when the two finished eating, he thanked Grant for his time and reassured him that he was working with Congress to end segregation.

Soon after their meeting, Kennedy stood on a makeshift podium in Detroit's Cadillac Square and addressed sixty thousand enthusiastic supporters. His pro-labor speech praised collective bargaining, called for an increase in the minimum wage, and, echoing his conversation with his new friend Mudcat Grant, called upon America to put an end to bigotry: "I take my case to you because I know you agree with me that racial discrimination must be eliminated everywhere in our society; in jobs, in housing, in voting, in lunch counters, and in schools."

That same day, Mudcat Grant toed the rubber on the mound at Briggs Stadium. He pitched seven innings, striking out ten, but lost the game, 4–3.

Still, the day put a checkmark in a win column that no baseball fan could see. Grant had just met the man who might become president, and he seemed to care genuinely about the plight of blacks in Lacoochee and the rest of the country.

By 1960, the world was changing. Blacks were speaking out, mobilizing; they were demanding equality, forcing America to confront its bigotry, to wake up from the slumber it had been in.

One such voice belonged to Jackie Robinson.

Known in various circles as a pariah, a sacrificial lamb, and a national icon since breaking baseball's color line, Robinson had retired from the Brooklyn Dodgers after the 1956 season and had become a familiar face at civil rights protests.

Unlike Mudcat Grant, Robinson had little regard for John Kennedy. Rather, he was a loyal supporter of the Republican nominee, Vice President Richard Nixon. He wasn't alone. Black voters had long backed the GOP; it was the party of Lincoln, the party of emancipation. Conversely, it was Democrats who during Reconstruction had formed the Ku Klux Klan, the organization bent on restoring white supremacy. And while the advent of the '60s saw an evolving ideology in both parties, blacks were still an important voting bloc. As late as 1956, black Americans helped get Dwight D. Eisenhower reelected, with 39 percent of their vote.

"I wanted to be fair about things,...