LESTER RODNEY, WHO WAS BORN IN 1911 (“A YEAR BEFORE the Titanic went down”) grew up in predominantly Jewish Bensonhurst and was a product of the Depression. His Jewish parents had not been immigrants. Both were born in New York City, his father in 1867, his mother in 1882. His father, who was in the garment industry, had been very successful through the boom of the 1920s. He owned a home, and like many high-rollers at the time, he had seen other men growing rich by investing heavily in the stock market, and he himself had taken a plunge, borrowing more and more to buy stocks as they spiraled up and up, until that disastrous October Tuesday in 1929 when the market suddenly crashed, leaving rich men broke and strong men broken. Unfettered capitalism had taken its toll, and for thinking men like Lester Rodney and millions of other disillusioned Americans, the crash and subsequent depression prompted them to question whether some other economic system might be better for the Average Working Man than the capitalist system that had failed them so badly.
While attending New York University, Rodney began reading the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. He saw that the Communists had interests that jibed with his own, especially when it came to civil rights. Rodney was born with the baseball gene, and he could not understand why blacks were barred from playing major league baseball. He figured if he could become the paper’s sports editor, he could further the two causes he felt so strongly about. Before he was finished, Lester Rodney became one of the major moving forces behind the campaign to bring blacks to the major leagues.
Lester Rodney, 1918, is the kid with the Buster Brown hair on the left. Courtesy of Lester Rodney
LESTER RODNEY “I grew up in Bensonhurst, a majority Jewish, with quite a few Italians, and a mix of German-Irish and Germans. There were no African-Americans, no blacks in our community. A Negro was an abstraction to me. I would sing mindlessly with the other kids the ditties, ‘Oh, you dirty little nigger, does your mother know you’re going out with her?’ I think back. Did I say that? But it really had no meaning to us. It was an abstraction.
“The neighborhood was pretty much peaceful. At Halloween a bunch of Irish kids would fill their socks with chalk and come around, and we’d scuffle with them, but that was kids’ stuff. It was a different time. We didn’t have Little League. We had empty lots, and we cleared them of glass and rocks and created diamonds and played baseball. We played stickball in the streets.
“This was long before television. In fact, I remember when radio began. We got a big Atwater Kent box. My mother heard the music and threw open a window and put her head out one night and looked up and said, ‘You mean somewhere there’s a band playing this music? And it comes through the air, not on wires? It comes through our windows?’ The wonderment of this was an amazing thing.
“Of course, the thing about Brooklyn and sports was that everyone was a baseball fan. And most everyone was a Dodgers fan. It was far more truly a national pastime than now. There was no pro football league, no pro basketball league. It was unthinkable that people weren’t Dodgers fans.
“In 1920, when I was nine years old, I skipped school early one October morning, got on my bicycle, and pedaled thirteen miles from Bensonhurst to Ebbets Field. The right center field exit gate on Bedford Avenue didn’t quite reach the sidewalk. There were a few inches of space and room for six kids lying flat on their stomachs on the sidewalk there to peer underneath and watch the game—what we saw was the centerfielder, the second baseman, the pitcher, the catcher, and the umpire. I saw the first game of the 1920 World Series, Brooklyn against Cleveland. Stanley Covelesky, the spitball pitcher, started that day. He won three games for Cleveland. That was the series in which Bill Wambsganns made a triple play unassisted, and Elmer Smith hit a grand slam. It was a year after the Black Sox scandal, which I can’t say lessened my enthusiasm for the game or my feelings about the Dodgers. I would say that was true of all the kids on the block.
Both blacks and whites lined up outside Ebbets Field to get in to see the 1920 World Series. Library of Congress
“In the 1920s we had a first baseman named Jacques Fornier. He was our cleanup hitter, though Zack Wheat was my favorite player. I’d go to the bleachers for 50¢, and before the game Zack Wheat would lean up against the barrier and chat with the kids in the bleachers. We’d say, ‘How many hits today, Zack?’ And he’d hold up two or three fingers. Wheat and Fornier batted third and fourth, and I remember one game with Philadelphia. Clarence Mitchell, a left-handed spitball pitcher, was leading 1-0 in the bottom of the ninth, two out, and Wheat singled, and Fornier hit one over the wall into Bedford Avenue to win it. That’s the kind of game I remember.
“The Dodger manager was Wilbert Robinson, Uncle Robbie, a fat, jovial-looking guy. From reading the sports pages I knew he had been the pitching coach for New York Giants’ manager John McGraw. I read the sports pages. Teachers today ask, “How do you get kids to read?” The first things we read were the box scores and the stories of the baseball games. That’s one way that many kids became interested in mastering reading. They say anything can start you reading, but for us it was baseball. It also introduced us to drama, the drama of the game and the tensions and great empty disappointments and how to cope with that. Baseball was so important a part of our young lives.
Lester Rodney’s father.
Courtesy of Lester Rodney
“We played all kinds of games in the streets, and I also played baseball on a sandlot that we made into a makeshift field. After high school I played more organized sandlot ball. I was nineteen and twenty, and we had a team, the 83rd Street Dodgers, which was managed by a former minor league player, Bill Renner. I played shortstop. We played against neighborhood teams, a team from Borough Park, for instance. We played on Sundays, and people would gather, and we’d pass the hat, and they’d put in loose change or dollar bills, and we’d use the money to buy balls and bats. It was a culture of baseball you don’t find today.
“My father was a silk salesman, and the Depression finished him, as it did many men at that time. We lost everything with the stock market crash, his job, our home. We had stocks on margin, and our home was mortgaged. Although we had a solid middle-class existence, it was just quickly wiped away. They had no idea of the social background of the Depression. All they knew was that the man is supposed to support his family, and they had failed their families. It just destroyed so many men, knocked their lives apart. My father was hit particularly hard. He had a stroke. And he was a Republican, by the way. I remember when Roosevelt was elected in 1932, the first year I voted, I didn’t vote for him. He was a rich, aristocratic governor of New York. He developed later. In 1932 I voted for Hoover.
“I had gone to New Utrecht High School, where I earned a track scholarship to Syracuse. I ran the 880, the half-mile, the two-mile relay, and occasionally the mile. New Utrecht had the best track team in the city the four years I was there. I was a good long-distance runner, and after graduating in June of 1929 I was going to go to Syracuse, and then came the crash in October, so instead I went to NYU at night. I worked traditional Depression jobs. I was a stock clerk. I was a chauffeur for a rich family for a while. I drove two young girls to school and drove their parents around in a big Cadillac. I would take them to the Catskill Mountains to summer resorts. That was my first taste of Catskill Mountains luxury.
Lester Rodney’s mother.
Courtesy of Lester Rodney
“I didn’t have any class consciousness at the time. I was twenty. In fact, if I would pass a Communist Party rally on a street corner, I would say to myself, Comes the revolution, ha ha ha. Not vindictively. But once I started going to NYU, everybody there was part of the hubbub of ‘ists.’ You were either a communist, a socialist, a Trotskyite, or else you were pretty brain-dead. If you were on a college campus at that time and weren’t questioning the workings of capitalism, you were pretty dull.
“The Wall Street crash would be a huge scandal today, like the Enron scandal, whose stock doubled and tripled through manipulation. What it was was unregulated capitalism, and it took Roosevelt to restore some order in the capitalist system.
“At NYU I joined the Young Communist League, because I thought the Russians had paved a new path. We were Americans who believed that socialism was a far more equitable way for our country to go, and Russia was the first country in the world to proclaim itself socialist. We rooted for them to show the world it worked. And in that process we put on self-inflicted blinders. We refused to see what was jammed in our face by Stalin, but that’s all history.
“At NYU people in my class would ask me, ‘Have you ever read the Daily Worker?’ ‘No, what’s that?’ When I got a hold of the paper, I found it was a stridently written paper that rubbed me the wrong way in some instances, but they had a weekly sports section. It talked about sports, but it had a down-the-nose attitude toward sports. By that time I had become more radicalized than I had realized, so I wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Worker. I didn’t even know his name. I wrote, ‘Editor, Daily Worker.’ I said, ‘I’ve been reading your paper,’ and I made suggestions. I said, ‘You seem to have a standoffish feeling about sports,’ which was part of the ideology, that sport dulls the worker, engages his interest, and lessens his class instincts. I suggested to him that young workers were people who loved sports, that they played ball in the streets, played ball in high school, and they were trade unionists, and he should appeal to people like that by covering sports, and covering it as though he liked it. I said, ‘And you can still point out what’s wrong with sports while you are doing it. There is no contradiction.’
“What was wrong with sports, with baseball, at the time was it was lily-white.”
After President Rutherford B. Hayes took office in 1877, segregation became so prevalent throughout the entire country that black baseball players were no longer allowed to play on the same team with whites. In 1883, Fleet Walker, an excellent catcher for Toledo in the major league American Association, was ordered off the field by Cap Anson, the captain of the Chicago White Stockings, before an exhibition game. The Toledo manager confronted Anson, and told him that the White Stockings would forfeit their portion of the gate receipts if he had to take Walker off the field. The color green apparently being more important than the color black, Anson relented. But within the next five years, Anson’s actions would cause the major and minor leagues to institute a complete ban on black players, effectively keeping blacks off major and minor league fields for another sixty years.
LESTER RODNEY “I was called in by the editor, and he said, ‘How would you like to do a little writing for the Sunday sports page?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I wrote articles about baseball. I talked about the love of the game and the beauty of a perfectly executed double play, and the camaraderie of the players. My column led to a poll of the readers as to whether they wanted a daily sports section, and to the surprise of some people and to the hostility of some of the party people, the vote was six to one in favor of starting a daily sports section. So I became the founding sports editor of the Daily Worker in September of 1936. My first big headline came during the 1936 World Series between the Yankees and the Giants. GIANT POWER THREATENS YANKS. I wrote it that way because someone kidded me by saying, ‘If New York was playing Cincinnati, would you have said, YANKEE POWER THREATENS REDS?’
“To get accreditation to cover the games I had to prove I was actually covering baseball, and after a time I got my accreditation, and when I retired in 1957, I was voted an honorary lifetime membership in the Baseball Writers’ Association. Which is usual, but not automatic. So I can get into any press box in the country now.
“One of the very first things I did was attend and cover the Negro League games. The Negro Leagues were not covered in the mainstream press, except perhaps a notice that the Kansas City Monarchs were playing the Baltimore Elite Giants at 3 P.M., but nothing about the fact that none of these players could play in the big leagues or even in the minor leagues of what was called Our National Pastime. If you go back to the great newspapers of our time in the mid-’30s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, you would find no editorials saying, ‘What’s going on here? This is America.’
“So I had a scoop. I had the story all to myself. One of the first points to make was that there were black players qualified to play in the big leagues. And who were they? I began running articles about Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson and others. I saw Josh Gibson play maybe twenty times, and I think he was the greatest catcher ever to put on a uniform. I agree with those who say Johnny Bench was the definitive big-league catcher, but Josh was at least as good as Bench defensively and maybe a little quicker popping out for a dribbler in front of the plate. Josh was catlike. Pitchers loved pitching to him, like he was in a rocking chair. At bat he was nothing less than a right-handed Babe Ruth. There can never be accurate records of all his home runs. They didn’t keep statistics like the big leagues did and do. But back then I would go to ballparks, and people would say to me, ‘He hit one into the third deck of Yankee Stadium, and it almost went out of the ballpark.’ Josh was just remarkable. When I speak to a young audience, it’s so hard to make them believe that halfway through the twentieth century, in the land of the free, a ball player who was qualified—or over-qualified—couldn’t play because of the color of his skin. My granddaughter (a big Giants fan) lives in Santa Rosa. Imagine everybody knows how good Barry Bonds is, just like everyone knew how good Josh Gibson was, and yet he couldn’t play?
“In 1937, my second year, I interviewed Burleigh Grimes, the manager of the Dodgers. I was on the field before the game, browsing around, and he knew me, and I said, ‘Burleigh, how are things going?’ He was sixth in an eight-team league. He didn’t have much of a team. He said, ‘I don’t have to tell you, I need some pitching and some hitting.’
A page from the Daily Worker in 1939. Lester Rodney is interviewing Yankee third baseman Red Rolfe. Courtesy of Lester Rodney
“I said, ‘How would you like to put a Dodger uniform on Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson?’ You’d have thought I had hit him over the head with a two-by-four.
“He said, ‘Don’t talk about that. You know better than that. That can never happen.’
“‘Why not, Burleigh?’ I said.
“‘The trains; the hotels. It just won’t happen.’
“‘But do you know how good they are?’ I asked.
“‘Of course I do.’
“All baseball people knew.
“‘Can I put that in my paper?’ I asked him. ‘Just a headline, I KNOW HOW GOOD THEY ARE AND THEY OUGHT TO BE IN THE BIG LEAGUES: GRIMES.
“‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to stick my neck out.’
“But a couple of years later Leo Durocher was the manager of the Dodgers, and he was a different kind of cat, confident. In 1939 he had a pennant-contending team evolving, and he said, ‘Hell, yes, I’d sign them in a minute if I got the okay from the big boys.’ I printed it, and the institution in the person of Judge Landis dropped down on him. Yeah, Landis clamped down on him. But still the word got out, as part of this developing campaign.
“We saw that Judge Landis was probably the biggest roadblock to bringing blacks to the major leagues. He was a stone racist. Back then it was not that unusual even for a federal judge to be a racist, especially a Southerner.
“We called him on it. We said, ‘It’s up to you, Judge Landis.’ He never responded to any of our questions. He would say, ‘Go talk to the baseball owners. They don’t want them. The ballplayers will never stand for it. Just forget it.’
“So one of the first things we tried to do was shoot down the notion that white players wouldn’t stand for it. To prove that wrong, I collaborated with Wendell Smith, the sports editor of the Pittsburgh Defender, a black weekly. I would run his stories in my paper, and he would run my stories in his. The key year was 1939. After our campaign got under way, Smith really got into it, and he was a key factor. He was the guy who got Bill McKecknie, the manager of the Reds, to say, ‘I know about twenty players in the Negro League who belong in the big leagues, and I’d like to have them on my team.’ Bucky Walters and Johnny Vander Meer both said, ‘I have no problem with black players wanting to play.’
“Every year I would send out telegrams to every big league owner, respectfully asking, ‘Would you be in favor of accepting qualified Negro players?’ And in 1939 William Benswanger, the owner of the Pirates, was the very first one to answer positively. He wrote, ‘I see no reason why Negroes, just as they do in music and other things, shouldn’t participate.’ And Benswanger agreed to a trial of three Negro players, including a young Roy Campanella.
“The trial never took place. I’m sure pressure was put on Benswanger, but I have no hard evidence of that. But he gracefully backed out of it. But still, his agreeing to do it made a big splash. Wendell Smith and I both wrote it and played it up very big. It’s an interesting ‘What if?’ Suppose Benswanger had been as bold as Branch Rickey and said, ‘I’ll take Campanella, and I’ll take Satchel Paige, and I’ll take Josh Gibson. Pittsburgh, the very center of Negro League ball with the Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, would have been the place, not Brooklyn. By Wendell Smith’s estimation, six players on the Crawfords were possible major league all-stars. Pittsburgh could have won the next ten pennants, and Brooklyn wouldn’t have.
“An important editor on the Daily Worker was a black man by the name of Benjamin Davis, who subsequently would be elected as the first Communist city councilman in New York. Ben was the editor of Negro affairs, as they called it. He had strong opinions, and he influenced the direction of the paper in many ways. Ben had been the attorney for Angelo Herndon, one of the more publicized civil rights cases in the 1930s. He was legally active too and a great guy.
One morning I was going to work, made the turn from University Place onto East 12th Street, walking toward the Building, as we called it, and Big Ben comes up behind me and gives me a big clap on the shoulder and throws his arm around me and says, ‘Well, Lester, here it is in black and white.’ That’s the kind of guy he was, lighthearted about things like that, when some people weren’t.
“Ben reinforced the campaign to end discrimination in baseball, actually mapping out the petition drive. He set up the picket lines at ball parks—we picketed at Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium, and the Polo Grounds, but he made it clear that we were to make sure people understood we were not stopping them from going into the park. In the thirties, especially, that’s what a picket line meant. But Ben, who was very sensitive about that point, said, ‘Some people are not used to seeing blacks and whites together, let alone on a picket line. They may think it’s just an angry attempt to keep people from attending the ball games.’ So on the picket line, we would chant, ‘Enjoy the game. Sign here to make the game democratic, a real American game.’ This was his sensitive contribution.
“The picketing spread to other cities as well, like Cleveland and Detroit. At that time a Communist was actually running the United Auto Workers. It was just before Walter Reuther, who was a Socialist. Why? It was a result of who did all the organizing, the hard work on the ground. John L. Lewis admitted, kind of ruefully, that they needed the Communists in the rough situations. Ford sent goon squads to beat us up.
“I can remember in 1939 seeing Joe Louis fight Bob Pessner in Briggs Stadium in Detroit, and there was a big contingent of auto workers who had worked with Joe on the assembly line not too many years before that. They were mostly, but not all, black, and they were holding up signs saying, JOE WORKED WITH US.
“I met Joe Louis’s mother then, and when another sportswriter, Lester Bromberg, who covered boxing for the World Telegram, a Scripps-Howard newspaper, heard I was going to see her, he asked if he could come along.
“He came, and he was fascinated. The other Lester asked her questions, but not a word appeared in his newspaper. I had a really good talk with her, and I ran a big story about what she thought about the cartoons showing Joe as a lazy beast and being a ‘natural’ fighter. She said, ‘There was nothing natural. He used to come home from work at the auto plant and go to the fight club and train, and he could hardly keep his eyes open.’ She particularly resented the characterization of her son as being some kind of animal.”
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and Rodney was drafted in May of 1942.
Lester Rodney in uniform during World War II. Courtesy of Lester Rodney
LESTER RODNEY “After Bataan and Corrigedor, they crash-trained a bunch of us who had no medical training to be med techs. I had six months of intensive training without the niceties of bed-folding. You can learn an awful lot. We helped the doctors. We’d land, set up a field hospital, and treat the casualties. I was in the Pacific thirty-two months. I saw a lot. We patched up the wounded during the Sullivan Islands and most of the Philippines campaigns.
“When I was in the army, it would become known I was a Communist—a new CO would come in, and I discovered that the magic word ‘sportswriter’ inevitably trumped the word ‘Communist.’ He’d ask me, ‘You mean you actually talked to Joe DiMaggio? Tell me about him.’ A white Southern guy would say, ‘I’m from Fulton County in Alabama; that’s where Joe Louis’s family came from.’
“During the war blacks were discriminated against, but as a medic I could do what I could. I remember one stormy, rainy night on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. I was in charge of the ward. There was segregation, but segregation would break down in real-life situations. A white kid, bleeding from the shoulder, walking wounded, came in. I said, ‘You take the bed next to that man.’ ‘That man’ was black. The kid stiffened, and I looked at his dog tag, and it said BILOXI, and I was in a position to say to him, ‘Listen, soldier, this isn’t Biloxi, this is the United States of America army, and you take that bed right now or stand right there and bleed to death. You won’t be treated.’ He lay down. There was no great conversation, but I’m sure he learned a little something about his fellow humanity.
“When we got out, we were given the option of being sent to a medical school. They would factor in what we had learned and give us a crash course, and we could emerge as doctors, and the catch was we would have to spend at least three years in the army. Some of the guys I soldiered with did that. I was tempted, but I was a Communist, and I had strong feelings about going back to the Daily Worker. I also wanted to see the culmination of this campaign to integrate baseball.
“I came out of the army in December of 1945, and I took a little leave for R&R. We all did before we went back to work.
“I didn’t begin to write sports immediately. I was too overwhelmed by the war. I began writing general articles, but by opening day of 1947, I was back as sports editor.
“In 1946 Branch Rickey of the Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract. He played for Montreal. The time was right for baseball to integrate. It was a short time after the war in which blacks bled and died the same as whites, which gave it the final impetus. Eleanor Roosevelt even spoke out. Not Franklin, Eleanor. Then there had been two big shipyards in Brooklyn, the Todd Shipyard and the other big one, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where at first there was enforced integration. It was war production. They were churning out the liberty boats. You learned to sit next to a black. And Brooklyn had its fair share of New Deal radicals, more than its fair share. And it had a strong African-American population.
“Rickey was arrogant, self-promoting, and smarter than the other magnates, and he decided to take credit for what he saw would become inevitable. Sort of like Nixon going to China or Reagan and the fall of the East Berlin wall. But looking back, I give him high marks. I didn’t at the time. You have to consider what his motivations were in the climate of the time. I have to admit from my vantage point today I would not be too harsh on Branch Rickey.
“The other man, one who has not been fully recognized for the role he played, was Bill Veeck, who owned the Cleveland Indians at the time. Rickey had brought in Jackie, and the other owners were hoping to seal it off with Brooklyn, and then it would die out. I heard verbal, anecdotal testimony where the owners said, ‘We’ll live with Robinson in Brooklyn and hold the line.’
“Seven weeks later Veeck brought in Larry Doby, so what he did was open up the American League at a time when the baseball establishment apparently thought they could hold the line. I heard stories, and I couldn’t run them because I couldn’t prove it, but I heard the stories, and what Veeck did was underrated, because he integrated the American League, and it helped break things wider open. He defied them. He really defied the establishment. He was that kind of guy. When I went to Cleveland in 1948 to cover the World Series against the Boston Braves, I went to Municipal Stadium, a big, rambling place, and Veeck said, ‘Lester, I want to show you something.’ He had established a babysitting service so women could drop their kids off when they wanted to see a game. He said, ‘Of course, I want the money from Cleveland housewives who know they can come and get professional help for their kids. But this is what I wanted to show you particularly,’ and he pointed, and there in that room were kids, both black and white, playing together. That’s the kind of guy he was. He was a real mensch.
“After the country was integrated, one thing I noticed, some whites, especially northern whites, didn’t know how to act with black guys. The same thing in baseball. Paul Richards, who was from Waxahachie, Texas, was a good catcher. He was managing the Chicago White Sox, and in the dressing room one day he pointed something out: ‘You know, Les,’ he said, ‘we Southerners, once we get rid of the poison, are much more natural and at ease with the black guys than the Northerners.’ It was a very interesting observation. And there was truth to that. Black and white kids in the South often grew up playing together until they were seven or eight. They lived close to each other and didn’t know any better. It’s like the song in South Pacific says, ‘You have to be carefully taught when you’re seven or eight to hate.’ But Paul Richards, a Texan, made that observation, and I never would have had the wit to pose it that way—or even think it.
“I look back at 1947, when Jackie came in. People ask me, ‘Was there a celebratory feeling? Did people have a sense of history when they went to the ballgame?’ Not at the beginning. On that first day, April 15, a cloudy afternoon, there was no sign of a close, intimate relationship between Jackie and his teammates. You know Dixie Walker initiated a petition against Jackie. Bobby Bragan and Carl Furillo signed it, and so did a couple of others. The celebratory feeling only developed as Jackie became part of the team and things happened. Carl Furillo was the most dramatic example of Jackie’s effect on people.
“Carl, who was a guy from a working-class family in Pennsylvania, at first said, ‘I ain’t gonna play with no niggers.’ Six weeks later I came down to the field early to browse around before the game. Before taking infield, two players were warming up their arms along the sidelines before they threw hard, and here were number 6 and number 42 tossing back and forth. Furillo and Robinson. This was the guy who had said, ‘I ain’t playing with no niggers.’ What happened? The abstraction wore off. Jackie was no longer ‘The Negro.’ He was a ballplayer and a better ballplayer than him, and that’s all he knew. Furillo was a baseball person, and how do you measure superiority and inferiority with these guys? Can he play ball as well as me, or no? To complete the story, I’ll leapfrog ahead to 1955, when the Dodgers beat the damn Yankees for the first time in the World Series. They had a big party at the old Bossert Hotel for the ballplayers and their wives and the baseball people and the writers. The borough was seething. There were tens of thousands of people outside. They put up wooden horses to hold back the crowd. The cars came with the ballplayers, and the ballplayers went inside—it was just a madhouse. I was in there when Jackie and Rachel arrived, and Carl Furillo jumped out of his chair and rushed over and hugged Jackie, and they were cheek-to-cheek, swaying, saying, ‘We did it. We did it.’ You tell that to kids today, and they say, ‘Big deal. They do that in the NBA.’ But back then it was really something.
“The kids today can’t imagine what Jackie Robinson went through. Here’s a guy who was a tough, scrappy, militant athlete at Pasadena City College and UCLA. Did you know he was a four-sport athlete? Did you know he averaged eleven yards a carry in his second year of football? White players who are set on playing big league baseball do not play football in college. There are very few exceptions. I remember Jackie Jensen. You don’t want to bang your shoulders in scrimmages. Incidentally, the only part of Jackie’s all-around game that was ordinary was his throwing arm. That’s why they changed him from shortstop to second base. He made the throws when he had to. But you have to think those years of pounding playing college football might have had something to do with it.
“I’ve seen grainy films of his playing at UCLA. God, he looked just like Gale Sayers. He’d reversed his field, had blazing speed, incredible, plus in basketball he was the leading scorer in the Pac Eight for the two years he played. And he was the national champion in the running broad jump.
“The San Francisco Chronicle had a series of articles on the greatest all-around athlete of all time, and they never mentioned Jackie Robinson. Here was a guy who was good in four sports, and he came up to the big leagues at age twenty-eight. Babe Ruth came up at nineteen, Ted Williams at twenty, Mickey Mantle at nineteen, and Willie Mays at nineteen. Eight ripe years, and for him to do what he did and not consider him as the greatest all-around athlete? And he was a great tennis player. I saw him play a few times.
“Jackie was a guy who had been court-martialed at Fort Hood in Texas for refusing to go to the back of the bus that circled the fort. That’s the kind of guy he was. Now he’s asked by Rickey to suppress his very being. No matter what is said to him, he was not to fight back or even to glare back.
“I say to kids, ‘Imagine Tiger Woods walking down the fairway with the other golfers, and along the way people are screaming vile things at him, and screaming to the white golfers, “How about Tiger and your wife tonight?” ’ Unspeakable stuff that Jackie went through. And they come to the putting green and someone throws a black cat in front of Tiger Woods, and that happened to Jackie in Philadelphia with Ben Chapman standing and laughing in front of his dugout. As for the physical part, Jackie was hit by pitched balls at least three times as much as the next player in the National League.
“To suppress his own nature and to play the way he did—he was the first Rookie of the Year and they won the pennant—that has to be the most amazing and courageous feat in the history of American sports. I don’t like ringing statements like that, but that absolutely has to be a fact. There never was any feat like that, and nothing even close. People ask me, ‘What are the parallel things in sports today?’ I say, ‘There is nothing as blatant as that.’
“People don’t remember, but it was incredible how short a time it took for Jackie to win everyone over. When he first came to Brooklyn, there was a little race-baiting in Brooklyn, but it was more hushed up. But on opening day with the cool reception—not an unfriendly reception—here he comes out, wearing that unfamiliar first baseman’s glove, and I remember this thirteen-year-old white kid in the stands beneath me, and he piped out, ‘Let’s go, Jackie.’ It was the first encouraging sign I saw. Before long, if somebody stood up and said, ‘You lousy nigger,’ he would have been isolated. Quickly Jackie was a recognized star. Especially in Brooklyn, where people would not have stood for that.
“Jackie and I got along. He was very proper and professional with me. I always had the feeling that Branch Rickey did not want him to fraternize too much with me, and Rachel, too, was afraid of having him linked with the Communist press. But I did get stories from him, chatted with him on the field about the game. I was much chummier with Roy Campanella. He didn’t have restrictions placed on him like Jackie did. Campy didn’t care.
“The impact of the Jackie Robinson Brooklyn Dodgers was amazing. Early in 1949, they broke camp in Florida, and as was the custom then, they would stop at minor league cities. Atlanta was one of them. This was going to be the first interracial game in the state of Georgia. The Dodgers had Campanella and Don Newcombe as well as Jackie. The Grand Kliegel of the Ku Klux Klan said, ‘This game must never take place.’ So there was an air of tension that night.
“Blacks poured in, not only from Atlanta, but from the suburbs and farms. The Atlanta Crackers, like all minor league ballparks in the South, had small, segregated stands, which quickly filled up, and the ballclub had to make a quick decision. Whether it was their sense of history or the sight of all these people waving green money we’ll never know. What they did was put a rope around the outfield, foreshortening the field. There was also a crevassed right field wall where blacks climbed up. It was a sea of blacks out there when the Dodgers first emerged.
“A roar erupted from the black fans, and the second thing that happened was the booing and hissing from the white stands. And then a third thing happened: like in a movie, white men and women began standing up singly, hesitant at first, to differentiate themselves from the booers. Hundreds stood. Who were these people standing? They were people, men and women, weaned in the South on baseball at one of their mothers’ breasts and sportsmanship on the other, and so for whatever reason, they wanted to differentiate themselves. It was total bedlam. The roaring and greeting and booing and hissing and then white people standing up. How do you miss the social impact of something like that? The Klan said, ‘Never in Mobile. Never in Shreveport. Never in New Orleans.’ And this happened in every one of those cities. That was the impact of the Dodgers.
“And nobody in the mainstream press wrote about it. People ask me, ‘Do you mean all the sportswriters were racist?’ Of course not. But that was the policy of the papers. If a sportswriter came in with a story about race, he’d get a quizzical look and a friendly pat. ‘You know we don’t fuss about this stuff.’
“If you go back to the great newspapers of our time in the mid-’30s, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, you would find not a single editorial asking, ‘This is America. What’s going on here?’ You’d find nothing about the fact that none of these great black players were allowed to play in the major leagues.
“I’ve never seen the electricity in any sports anywhere since that crowd in 1949 at Ebbets Field. I’d look down from the press box, and here was this raucous, thoroughly integrated crowd, good-natured, and what added to that was the fact that six main position players—Campanella, Hodges, Reese, Furillo, Robinson, and Snider—stayed with the team throughout the whole Jackie Robinson decade. It would be unthinkable today in the age of free agency. It was unthinkable then. Not only that, but they all identified with Brooklyn. Some of them lived there. They made their summer homes in Brooklyn. People in Bay Ridge still talk about where Pee Wee Reese lived.”
Lester Rodney, the sports editor of the Daily Worker, was the one reporter to ask the question: Why can’t a black man play major league baseball? In his columns over and over he browbeat America and baseball into doing what was just, right, and fair.
Lester Rodney today. Courtesy of Lester Rodney
LESTER RODNEY “I was in a union position. By the way, the Daily Worker at the time had an impact well beyond its circulation, because of the nascent trade union movement. In his book, John L. Lewis reluctantly admitted that the Communists played a leading role. There were Communists in large unions like the United Automobile Workers and the Transport Workers Union. Young trade unionists and all the union leaders read the Daily Worker. And on May Day, May 1, we held an annual parade, and during our peak years in the 1930s half a million people paraded down Fifth Avenue. These were the years when Russia was still our ally, before the Great Opprobrium. I meet lots of people who say to me, ‘I wasn’t a Communist, but I was sympathetic.’ These were the famed ‘fellow travelers,’ people who for whatever reason just didn’t like party discipline, but they were with us, and many were in the trade unions. During these May Day parades we’d have teams in baseball uniforms from the big unions carrying signs that read, END JIM CROW IN BASEBALL. The Daily Worker had an impact far and wide.
“After McCarthy came in, they tried to say the Communists wanted to overthrow the American government, but that was nonsense. We wanted socialism. We wanted social justice. We didn’t want to overthrow the government. There were fifteen thousand Communists on the record who served in the armed forces in the war, and many of them won outstanding commendations.
“When Joe McCarthy started his campaign and HUAC had its witch hunt, no one ever bothered me. Being a sportswriter, out in the open, shielded me from some of this, plus the main thing for HUAC and McCarthy was to unearth Communists in the professions and in Hollywood and government. You don’t unearth someone who’s working for the Daily Worker. So I escaped all of that.”
Lester Rodney retired in 1957, the same year the Dodgers fled for Los Angeles. By then, largely because of the Joe McCarthy witch hunt, membership in the Communist Party had fallen to under ten thousand, and the paper folded. Lester Rodney’s impact on the game of baseball and civil rights, however, should never be forgotten.