Almost 5 stars. My only quibble is with the structure, which can be hard to follow.

This book places the two team championships in their historical contexts. It fills in both national and local African American and civil rights history.

I’ve lived in the Columbus area for almost forty years and was astonished to realize how white (and therefore incomplete) my grasp of Columbus history is.

The team stories are compelling and the national events (Jackie Robinson, Emmett Till, Martin Luther King Jr., Nixon’s southern strategy and racism, and more) are connected to the team’s stories so that they’re equally compelling. Local history (particularly the lawsuit that resulted in desegregation of Columbus Schools and stories of lynchings and other racial violence and in Ohio) is eye-opening. Woody Hayes comes off as quite progressive; the rest of Ohio State, not so much.