In the new Amazon TV series A League of Their Own, Maxine “Max” Chapman (Chanté Adams), a talented pitcher with a wicked fastball, shows up in Chicago at the tryouts for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in its 1943 inaugural season. The players are impressed when she throws the ball from the outfield into the stands behind home plate, but one of the coaches tells her, “We’re not going to have colored girls playing with our girls.”

That happened to the teenage Mamie “Peanut” Johnson at an AAGPBL tryout in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1952. The AAGPBL, which lasted from 1943 to 1954, never had a black player, even after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. (A few light-skinned Latinas who “passed” as white were permitted to play, as depicted in the Amazon series).

Prohibited from playing in the AAGPBL, three African American women — Johnson, Toni Stone, and Connie Morgan — played in the otherwise all-male Negro Leagues. In the TV series, the character of Chapman is an amalgam of these three female trailblazers.