* Lest we forget: Lester Rodney

December 24, 2009

One more legend I missed an opportunity to interview.

Rodney, who died at the age of 98, was the sports editor of the communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. He was also a champion in the battle to have Major League Baseball admit African Americans to its ranks. So in a sense, he was probably doubly hated by many good Americans. Add to that the fact that he was a Jew, and you hit the trifecta.

From Richard Goldstein’s obituary in today’s NY Times:

Running a six-day-a-week Daily Worker sports section that he introduced in 1936, more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier, Mr. Rodney pressured the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and the major league club owners to end baseball’s racial barrier.

His columns cited the exploits of stars of the Negro leagues like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, and he quoted major league players and managers praising the talents of black players to buttress his argument that they offered a vast talent pool. He publicized Communist-led petition drives aimed at ending the majors’ exclusion of blacks.

“Negro soldiers and sailors are among those beloved heroes of the American people who have already died for the preservation of this country and everything this country stands for — yes, including the great game of baseball,” Mr. Rodney wrote in an open letter to Landis published in The Daily Worker in May 1942. “You, the self-proclaimed ‘Czar’ of baseball, are the man responsible for keeping Jim Crow in our National Pastime. You are the one refusing to say the word which would do more to justify baseball’s existence in this year of war than any other single thing.”

In recounting the mounting pressures baseball faced to end its color barrier, Arnold Rampersad wrote in his 1997 biography “Jackie Robinson” that “the most vigorous efforts came from the Communist press.”

In 2003, Temple University press published Press Box Red, a biography about Rodney written by Irwin Silber. (You can read an excerpt via the link.)

UPDATE: A piece on Rodney from the Arizona Republic.

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