By Michael Kaufman

Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime but one day there will be a plaque on display in the Baseball Hall of Fame in honor of Lester Rodney. Rodney, who died last week at the age of 98, was a sportswriter for the Daily Worker from 1936 to 1958. He played a significant role in breaking the color line in American sports, but, as Dave Zirin aptly noted in a recent column in the Huffington Post, instead of getting the recognition he deserved, “he was largely erased from the books.” Rodney’s writing “is still bracing and ahead of its time,” wrote Zirin.

It was Rodney’s association with the Worker, the Communist Party newspaper that led to his being shunted aside during the McCarthy Era and Cold War period. That has changed in recent years as historians and some of the better modern-day sportswriters (especially Zirin) have taken a closer look at the events leading up to the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

But there is still a long way to go, in part because of the way we Americans have been conditioned to view historic events. Thus, Richard Nixon now gets credit for the Title IX legislation of 1972 that requires gender equity for boys and girls in every educational program that receives federal funding. Nixon, as president, merely signed off on the bill. But that legislation was made possible by people like the little girl in Staten Island who decided she wanted to play Little League baseball and would not take “no” for an answer…. by Bernice Gera, who fought for a chance to become a professional baseball umpire…. by Kathy Switzer, who registered as “K.V. Switzer” to run in the Boston Marathon in 1967 and finished despite an attempt by race official Jock Semple to rip off her numbers and eject her from the event…. and by countless other courageous girls and women.

Title IX did not happen in a vacuum and neither did Branch Rickey’s signing of Robinson. The latter was to have been the subject of my thesis for a graduate course in sociology in 1973. I wrote to Rodney, who was then working as editor of the religion section of a newspaper in California. Like Zirin, as a young sportswriter I found inspiration in Rodney’s old columns and the campaign he and his colleagues launched in the pages of the Worker beginning in 1936 to end what they called “The Crime of the Big Leagues,” namely the systematic exclusion of black players from major-league baseball.

In the years that followed, their articles led to petitions, demonstrations at Ebbets Field and other major-league ballparks, even passage of a resolution by the New York City Council, calling for an end to racial discrimination in baseball. By the time Rickey signed Robinson there was a groundswell of popular support for the move.

“There is so much more than the dates, interviews, statements,” Rodney wrote in his gracious reply. “Those are the bones. The ATMOSPHERE when we started digging into it would seem like a million light years from today to younger folks.” He recalled a 1937 conversation with Burleigh Grimes, then manager of the Dodgers, who had confided his belief that a number of Negro League players had major-league talent. But when Rodney asked if he could quote him, Grimes unhappily replied, “Don’t you know I can’t talk about them? Don’t you know it can NEVER happen, living and traveling together, showers, clubhouse…let’s talk about something else.”

Rodney recounted the unique cooperation between the Worker and the weekly newspapers that served the black community, and the way “none of the other papers — not the liberal Post, Times, whatever, ever touched the subject.” Years later, they would write disparagingly, as Dick Young of the Daily News did in his 1951 book, Roy Campanella, with comments like, “Roy found himself accosted by a man who introduced himself as a reporter from the Daily Worker, communistic organ…” 

“Of course,” wrote Rodney,” both I and Nat Low knew Roy long and well before that.” Low was the Worker’s expert on the Negro Leagues and Rodney credited him for playing “a vital role in the climactic years during World War II” when Rodney was serving in the army.

Soon after receiving Rodney’s letter I had an opportunity to interview Campanella. He smiled warmly at the mention of Low’s name. “How is Nat?” he asked. When I told him that Low had been dead for years he shook his head sadly.

 Since 1962, the Baseball Writers Association of America, which elects players to the Hall of Fame, has conducted a separate ballot to honor a writer with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award. Spink, the driving force of The Sporting News, known during his lifetime as the “Baseball Bible,” was its first recipient. Other recipients include the likes of Ring Lardner, Damon Runyan, Grantland Rice, John T. Carmichael, Red Smith and Shirley Povich. (There are a couple of turkeys in there, too, but we won’t talk about that now.)  

The 1993 Spink Award recipient was Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly newspaper that has served the black community in Pittsburgh since 1910. Smith was honored posthumously in large part for his role in the fight against the color bar, particularly for a series of articles he wrote in 1939, which included an outpouring of anti-segregation statements by white major-league players. The Worker was the only daily newspaper in the country to run the series and Smith wrote to Rodney: “I take this opportunity to congratulate you and the Daily Worker for the way you have joined with us on the current series concerning Negro players in the major leagues, as well as all your past great efforts in this respect.”

It is only a matter of time before Lester Rodney (and perhaps Nat Low as well) will be similarly honored.

Michael can be reached at Michael@zestoforange.com.

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