Author Tom Stanton will discuss his New York Times bestseller Terror in the City of Champions. Named as a 2017 Notable Book by the Library of Michigan, Terror… tells a true story of murder, baseball, and the nefarious Black Legion secret society that flourished in mid-1930s Detroit. The book opens with the arrival of Mickey Cochrane, a fiery baseball star who rouses the Great Depression’s hardest-hit city by leading the Tigers to the 1934 pennant. A year later he guides the team to its first championship. Within seven months the Lions and Red Wings follow —all while Joe Louis chases boxing’s heavyweight crown. Amidst such unrivaled sports glory, the Klan-like Black Legion is executing a wicked plan of terror, murdering enemies, bombing meeting places, flogging associates, and contemplating armed rebellion. Among its tens of thousands of members are politicians and prominent citizens. Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss has called Terror in the City of Champions a “captivating slice of American history.” Columnist George F. Will has praised it as well, and in a starred review Kirkus commended it as “first-rate reporting and a seminar in how to employ context in investigative and historical journalism.”
Tom Stanton is author of several books of nonfiction, including the critically acclaimed Tiger Stadium memoir The Final Season and the Quill Award finalist Ty and The Babe. A professor of journalism at the University of Detroit Mercy, he is a former Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. He lives in New Baltimore, Michigan.
Join us Saturday May 20th, to learn more about some of Detroit’s least known, and most sinister, history. Doors open at 7pm. The program begins at 8pm.
Northwestern Unitarian Universalist Church
23925 Northwestern Hwy, Southfield, MI 48075