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A Communist in the Press Box
By Irwin Silber

In September 1936, a Brooklyn-born sports enthusiast by the name of Lester Rodney, then 25 years old, was hired by the Daily Worker—the newspaper of the U.S. Communist Party—to be its sports editor. This was a little-noted but nevertheless remarkable event on several counts.
Most people will be surprised to learn that a Communist newspaper would even have a sports section, let alone a sports editor. To the average American, the very idea probably sounds like an oxymoron. It also seemed that way to many a stalwart reader of the Daily Worker, for whom the event was little short of an ideological revolution. They were more used to comments like this one by a prominent Communist Party leader: “When hundreds of sports writers rivet the attention of millions of workers upon baseball rather than upon unemployment, wage cuts and wars, then we can say they are serving the interests of the ruling class.”
The Daily Worker launched its sports section at a time when the Communist Party was making a concerted effort to broaden its influence and break with the rigid dogma and narrow sectarianism of earlier years.
Nevertheless, it was not a simple turnaround. For a paper which had historically viewed popular culture and sports as not only frivolous but ideologically corrupt, there was plenty of resistance to “wasting valuable space” on a daily sports section which would take up one whole page in an eight-page newspaper.
But what Rodney did with that “valuable space” helped the Daily Worker win thousands of new, young working class readers and thoroughly silenced the dubious.
For one thing, his knowledge and love of sports was an eye-opener—not only to the paper’s readers, but to the sports community as well. After a year in which his sports coverage was closely monitored by the Baseball Writers of America, he was granted membership in that organization and given the right to a seat in its much sought-after press box.
A more blunt endorsement came a few years later from Brooklyn Dodger manager Leo Durocher, who in the midst of a discussion about baseball strategy with Rodney turned to him and said, “You know, for a fucking Communist, you sure know your baseball.” Lester told me this story sixty years later when I was interviewing him for Press Box Red, the book I wrote about him, and then added: “So, as I told my children, now if anybody asks me what kind of Communist I was, I can tell them.”
From the very beginning, a decade before Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers, Rodney also used his space in the Daily Worker to launch and direct the Daily Worker’s unique and still largely unknown campaign to break baseball’s longstanding color line. It was a time when there existed what the Sporting News called a “tacit understanding that a player of Ethiopian descent is ineligible” to play for any team under the jurisdiction of organized baseball.
It was a cause the Daily Worker had almost to itself, the only exceptions being occasional comments on the ban by such Black newspapers as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Amsterdam News. But for the vast majority of mainstream news sources, including all the major newspapers of the time, the subject was taboo.
The Daily Worker’s campaign began with a house ad (August 13, 1936), followed by an extended three-part series calling the ban “The Crime of the Big Leagues” and a “carefully laid conspiracy” by the “most sacred figures in baseball officialdom.” At the same time, Rodney arranged an interview with National League President Ford Frick in which Frick was directly challenged on the issue. After trying to dodge the question, Frick finally declared that there was “nothing in the National League constitution to bar players because of color,” adding, “I do not recall one instance where baseball [has] allowed either race, creed or color to enter into the question of selection of the players.”
Despite Frick’s faulty recollection, which no sportswriter took seriously, the Daily Worker’s subsequent report on the interview was a landmark. Never before had the issue of baseball’s racial barrier been brought out into the open so forcefully. Even so, no major daily newspaper considered Frick’s statement newsworthy.
For the next ten years, the Daily Worker sounded an unceasing drumbeat on the theme. It tackled head-on the owners’ main excuse for the absence of Blacks on their teams—that there were none qualified.
In response, Rodney talked to players and managers: “Satchel Paige is a better pitcher than I am, ever was, or ever will be.” (Dizzy Dean.) “Josh Gibson is as great a catcher as I ever saw.” (Carl Hubbell.) “I know at least 20 Negro playuers good enough to play in the big leagues.” (Bill McKechnie, manager of the Cincinnati Reds.) “Satchel Paige is the greatest pitcher I ever batted against.” (Joe Dimaggio, who faced Paige in post-season exhibition games.) “If we were given permission [to sign Black players], there’d be a mad scramble between managers to sign them up.” (Gabby Hartnett, manager Chicago Cubs.)
At Rodney’s urging, members of the Young Communist League circulated petitions at major league ball-parks calling on Landis to use his office to break the color barrier. More than a million signatures were put on Landis’ desk. Rodney and Associate Editor Nat Low brought Black players to big league training camps for try-outs. In 1940, long before Branch Rickey began his “search” for a Black player to sign for the Dodgers, the Daily Worker was touting Jackie Rtobinson as a “player of big league caliber.”
Meanwhile, the Daily Worker was turning up the heat on Judge Landis. Article after article—many transformed into leaflets for distribuition at major league ballparks—challenged baseball’s High Commissioner to respond to the growing demands for action.
Small wonder then that Arnold Rampersad, author of the Jackie Robinson biography, wrote in 1997: “In the campaign to end Jim Crow in baseball, the most vigorous efforts came from the Communist Press. . . . notably from Lester Rodney.”
Rodney was sitting in the Press Box at Ebbets Field in 1947 when the announcement came that Jackie Robinson had been brought up to the Dodgers from Montreal. Rodney recalls the moment. “Wow! It’s like a scene from a movie. All the writers jump for their phones. And three writers—Dick Young of 0the Daily News, Jim Becker of the Associated Press, and one other guy, I forget who—come over to me and say, “Well, you guys can take a lot of credit for this.”
To be sure, Branch Rickey gets and deserves credit for actually signing Robinson. But the climate generated by the decade-long campaign by Lester Rodney and the Daily Worker played no small role in making it all possible.

Irwin Silber was the editor of Sing Out! for its first 17 years and writer for and Executive Director of The (NY) Guardian for 11 years.