I’m from Chatham, a mid-size city in southern Ontario that has many claims to fame. The most important one, in my opinion, is that Chatham is the birthplace of the first Canadian to be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Fergie Jenkins was a hero to many kids in my hometown. When he would return home in the winter, it was easy to get Fergie’s autograph and to this day, I still have an 8x10 signed photo from his time with the Chicago Cubs.

What I didn’t learn until years later was that Fergie’s father was part of a trailblazing baseball team – the Chatham All-Stars. In 1934, a dozen years before Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in professional baseball, the All-Stars became the first Black team to win an amateur Ontario Baseball Association title.

So many ground-breaking Canadian Black athletes have been forgotten over the years. Luckily, Nicole Forrester, an Olympian and an assistant professor in the Sport Media program at Ryerson University, has written a wonderful article about many of those forgotten athletes. She tells us about John (Army) Howard, the first Black athlete to compete for Canada at the Olympics, and about Howard’s grandson, Harry Jerome, one of the world’s best sprinters in the 1960s. “The achievements of Black Canadians are not something of importance for only the Black community, but are significant for all Canadians,” she writes.

For your weekend reading pleasure, I’ve assembled a number of stories from around The Conversation network that commemorate Black History Month.

In most places in Canada (including our newsroom) this is a long weekend, so we’ll be back in your Inbox on Tuesday.