How the Daily Worker fought segregation in baseball

THIS Saturday, the New York Mets play the Chicago White Sox in the Civil Rights match that marks the end of baseball's Spring Training.

While marking the struggle against racism is a reason for celebration, we won't be told its full story, as history is not always written by the victors but by those who wield authority and power.

The blending of politics and sport is as old as the two pastimes have existed. It is played out in many forms and one of the most famous is that of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play baseball in the major leagues.

Signing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Robinson became an important forerunner for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The integration of baseball didn't start, though, with Brooklyn's interest in Robinson in 1945, but with a campaign that began as early as 1936 in which the communist Daily Worker, today known in the US as the People's Weekly World, played a leading role. This is one of baseball's, as it is for the US itself, neglected histories.

The campaign for the integration of baseball marked a combining of the political and the sporting in a new direction for the Worker.

In July 1935, under the directives of the Third International, Communist Parties were encouraged to join "popular fronts" with other leftist groups.

Part of this new direction involved an emphasis on culture and respective national traditions. In the US, this meant communism being recasted, in the words of party leader Earl Browder, as "20th century Americanism."

The Daily Worker had to become not just an organ that addressed the party faithful but one that would appeal to a broader audience.

One of the ways employed to court a working-class audience was the coverage of sports.

Lester Rodney became the sports editor and used the back pages to promote coverage of both features and results of the main sports alongside a critique of the unjust society in which sports were played.

Rodney's initial crusade to desegregate baseball in 1936 was a lonely one. Few were aware of the existence of black teams and most people in the US accepted segregation as the natural order of things. Baseball's colour line, along with the black-only Negro Leagues, was largely ignored by the mainstream press.

This didn't prevent the Worker from petitioning followers and fans and eventually amassing over a million names protesting over blacks' exclusion from the sport. By 1938, banners demanding the end to Jim Crow in baseball were being carried at the Communist Party's annual May Day parade in New York.

The New York Trade Union Athletic Association threw its weight into the campaign. With 30 affiliates from unions in the New York area, its role of providing sports for union members took on a political nature.

When a young Joe DiMaggio was asked who was the best pitcher he ever faced, he replied: "Satchel Paige." The now hall-of-famer Paige would have to wait until he was 42 before pitching for the Cleveland Indians in the major leagues.

In 1937, Paige challenged the winners of the World Series to play an all-star Negro team in a one-off at Yankee Stadium.

The Daily Worker was the only paper to carry the story which certainly won it credibility and support in Harlem.

While the offer was never taken up, Rodney asserts that it may have had something to do with Ben Davis - a prominent black communist - being elected to the New York City Council.

Following the war, a racist stance became increasingly difficult.

Two members of the Communist Party had been elected to the New York City Council and the leftist American Labour Party was winning support.

The "sports-minded voter" was appealed to in a New York pamphlet that depicted a black soldier killed in action, with the message, "Good enough to die for his country, but not good enough for organised baseball."

The Ives-Quinn Anti-Discrimination Act outlawed discrimination in employment because of race, creed or colour. Though baseball was not mentioned specifically and the law only applied to New York, it allowed the three New York teams to break the colour line.

The new baseball commissioner Happy Chandler declared: "I believe Negroes should have a chance like everybody else."

Finally, in 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers made Jackie Robinson the first African-American to be picked for a major league team. On signing, Robinson was sent to play in Montreal for Brooklyn's farm team.

His coach Clay Hopper enquired: "Do you really think a nigger is a human being?" Robinson would lead the minor league in a telling statistic - most times hit by a pitcher.

In 1947, Robinson took his place in the Brooklyn Dodgers line-up. Rodney was proud that the Daily Worker alone had touted him for the major leagues as early as 1939 when he was still in high school. A veteran baseball writer had said to him: "You guys can take a bow," when Robinson's name was announced in his first game with the Dodgers.

Robinson's elevation allowed other African-American players to enter the major leagues, though racist attitudes were still the norm. Segregation laws, though, came under pressure once baseball broke the colour ban.

The catcher Roy Campanella argued that baseball was the most important factor in the Supreme Court's 1954 decision ruling school segregation unconstitutional.

When Martin Luther King first met starting-pitcher Don Newcombe, he said: "You'll never know what Jackie and you and Roy did to make it possible for me to do my work."

So, why is there so little reference to Rodney, the Communist Party and the Worker in the traditional history of baseball?

It is unsurprising considering the anti-red scare following the second world war.

The integration of baseball unfolded primarily as a story of the Dodgers' general manager Branch Rickey and Robinson's individual initiative and courage.

It obviously suited American business interests to show that it was one of them who advocated integration rather than leftist political pressure. In reality, most of the owners had opposed desegregation, arguing that the players would be against it and that black fans would flood the stands and drive white supporters away.

Anyway, what could a relatively small political organisation and its daily newspaper do? The same as it does today and that is to ensure that the issues are being raised. Petitions and protests brought the attention of white fans to black baseball. Getting white managers and players on the record in favour of ending the ban was another tactic that slowly chipped away at the racist logic.

Recent academic texts have more accurately portrayed the role played by the Daily Worker. Jules Tygiel's Baseball's Great Experiment asserted that the Communist Party, and particularly the Daily Worker, had "played a major role in elevating the issues of baseball's racial policies to the level of public consciousness."

In his 1997 biography of Jackie Robinson, Arnold Rampersad argued that, in the campaign to end the colour bar in baseball, "the most vigorous efforts came from the Communist press."

Finally, in his introduction to Press Box, Red Tygiel wrote of "the never-ending battle for a more just society can be effectively waged from even the most unexpected vantage points."

In this tradition, the Morning Star continues Rodney's use of the back pages to both record results and highlight the inequities of an unjust world.