Mookie Betts and Stephen Curry are producing the film about the 1955 Charleston team barred from Little League World Series play.
Reggie Rock Bythewood is developing Cannon Street All-Stars, a feature based on the true story of South Carolina’s first all-Black Little League team, through Undisputed Cinema, the production company he runs with wife Gina Prince-Bythewood. Dodgers star Mookie Betts and Warriors star Stephen Curry are both attached as producers.
The film centers on events from the summer of 1955. Eight years after Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball, Little League play across the South remained segregated. That year, the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars, a team of 11- and 12-year-olds from Charleston, registered for the state tournament. Every other team in South Carolina’s Little League refused to take the field against them. Rather than integrate, those 61 other leagues broke away from Little League Baseball entirely, eventually forming what became Dixie Youth Baseball.
Because their opponents forfeited across the board, Cannon Street won the state tournament by default. But Little League officials ruled the boys ineligible for regional play in Georgia, on the grounds that they hadn’t technically won a game on the field, and barred them from competing. Instead, they were invited to attend the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, as guests, allowed to watch but never to play. During a practice session there, the crowd broke into a spontaneous chant of “Let them play.” The boys never got the chance.
Bythewood will write, direct, and produce the film, sharing story credit with Christopher Lee Bythewood. The project has the support of the Jackie Robinson Foundation.
The timing follows renewed attention on the team’s story. Its surviving members were honored at last year’s Little League World Series, an occasion Bythewood referenced directly. “Last year they were honored at the Little League World Series,” he said. “Now it is time to honor them on film.” Little League International CEO Patrick Wilson credited the organization’s present-day existence to what the Cannon Street players endured: “We are here today, the program that we are, because of what they did.”
Alongside Undisputed Cinema, the film is being produced by Debra Martin Chase and E. Monique Floyd. Betts produces through OMG Entertainment with Cam Lewis and Omar Bradford, while Curry produces through Unanimous Media with Sharla Sumpter Bridgett.