WILLIE O'REE

Details the career of professional hockey player Willie O’Ree, who broke the color barrier as the National Hockey League’s first black player.

Raised in New Brunswick in one of only two black families in town, O’Ree always loved skating and hockey. He participated in numerous sports and at first played professional baseball before eventually being recruited to play ice hockey for the Boston Bruins. Despite an injury on the ice that left him blind in one eye, O’Ree had a successful career. In the U.S., he experienced racism to a greater degree than in Canada. In retirement, O’Ree was able to have a broad impact when he was appointed director of the NHL’s Diversity Task Force in the 1990s. This short, accessible biography gives readers a view of what it must have felt like to grow up in O’Ree’s shoes. An interesting early chapter includes a history of black Canadians’ relationship to the sport. Mortillaro’s writing is appropriately fast-paced and engaging. Unfortunately, the language employed about race centers whiteness and risks leaving young readers of color on the outside looking in, for example the repeated use of the N-word and “slaves” rather than “enslaved people” as well as a description of segregation-era race relations that appears to put black people’s mistrust of whites on an equal footing with white racism.

Fascinating history too carefully written for its radical subject.