By ANDY GRAY

Staff writer

Warren native David Lee Morgan Jr. is educating young readers on “Black Trailblazers in Sports.”

Morgan is the author of a series of books released earlier this month targeted to children ages 8 to 13. They focus on the lives and careers of baseball’s Jackie Robinson, basketball’s Bill Russell and Cheryl Miller, tennis’ Arthur Ashe and sisters Venus and Serena Williams, track’s Jesse Owens and Wilma Rudolph and football’s Doug Williams.

Morgan — a former reporter for the Tribune Chronicle, Vindicator and Akron Beacon Journal and a Youngstown State University graduate and former teacher there — is no stranger to book publishing. He is the author of six books, including the first biography of LeBron James (“LeBron James: The Rise of a Star’) and a book on Canton native and Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee Marion Motley, one of four players who broke the NFL’s color barrier in 1946.

Unlike those books, “Black Trailblazers” wasn’t Morgan’s idea.

“The publisher who did my Marion Motley book (Minnesota-based North Star Editions), right before I was finished with that manuscript, they said they were looking to do a children’s book series called ‘Black Trailblazers in Sports.’ Would you be interested? Absolutely, yeah,” Morgan said.

Each book follows the same format.

“The first chapter is always, what was their defining moment, their career,” he said. “The second chapter is always where were they from, where were they born, all that. The third chapter is what was their professional career like, what was the success of it. And the fourth chapter is always their legacy, like Jackie Robinson was all about civil rights.”

Emphasizing the educational component, each book ($31.35 hardback, $9.95 paperback) also includes an “At-a-Glance Map,” a reading comprehension quiz, a glossary and additional resources.

These days Morgan is a teacher, but he teaches English to high school seniors, not grade-school children. He described adapting his writing style to that age range as one of the biggest challenges of his career.

“You can’t write like you’re writing to an adult audience,” he said. “You have to understand the reading level of children — the cadence, the rhythm, word choice, word usage, sentence structure, all of that, because it’s gotta be really short sentences. But your book has to tell a story. It has to have a beginning, middle and end, and you’re trying to do all of that in four chapters.

“As somebody who writes adult books, you have all of this information, you have all of this research. OK, but then how do you write it in a simple way to where it’s for fourth graders? That was tough, that was hard.”

Morgan found himself learning some things about these famous athletes as he did his research. Jesse Owens’ full name is James Cleveland Owens, and his family called him JC. One of his teachers misheard him when he introduced himself as JC and started calling him Jesse. The name stuck.

Other facts weren’t so cute.

After Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics, “There was a ticker-tape parade for him in New York City,” Morgan said. “They put him up at the Waldorf Astoria, but he couldn’t go through the front door. He had to go around back, through the freight elevator. They’re giving him a ticker-tape parade, but he couldn’t have dinner there. That spoke a lot to where the United States still was, even after him winning four gold medals.”

Unable to find quality work after the Olympics, Owens was reduced to things like running races against horses at fairs, Morgan said. There’s a photo of one of those races in the book.

Many of the athletes profiled were trailblazers not only in athletics, but in the way they devoted their lives to calling attention to those issues.

“They used their platforms to bring to light the inequalities and things that were happening to people of color and that they experienced,” Morgan said. “It was kind of cool that this group of athletes seemed to have a sense of obligation to do something more after their playing days were over.”

The feedback from teachers, librarians, parents and children has been encouraging since the release of the books, which are available from all major online retailers. Morgan’s teaching career keeps him from being able to schedule school visits to promote the books, but he is working on using boys clubs and afterschool programs to get the word out as well as doing book signings at retail outlets.

And with golf, gymnastics, auto racing among the sports not covered in the first eight books, the potential is there for the series to continue if the demand exists.

“You can’t just say there’s only eight Black trailblazers,” he said.

Have an interesting story? Contact Andy Gray by email at agray@tribtoday.com.