The Big Interview: Lester 'red' Rodney

In 1945 George Orwell wrote in the Tribune: 'Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived. That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.'

It is a conventional view from anyone on the left, recoiling from sport's ravening commercialisation and emphasis on winning at the cost of all else. And yet. Ten years previously in New York, Lester Rodney was attempting to convince The Daily Worker in the United States that they should have a sports page. The Daily Worker did cover sport. There would be match reports from the Workers Table Tennis Meet or the Eastern District Wrestling Meet and the occasional rant about sport being the opiate of the masses, but little else. Rodney reasoned that the best way to court the working classes was to cover the sport they enjoyed.

He was met with opposition from senior writers at the paper. Betty Gannet argued: 'It's kid stuff. Does it make sense for a hard-pressed radical paper to give one-eighth of its space to games?', while Simon Gerson, refusing to accept 'the democracy of the gymnasium' asked: 'Do you honestly believe that you and I are the "equals" of JP Morgan once we all put on gym shorts?'

But the editor, Clarence Hathaway, according to Rodney 'a hard-drinking guy from Minnesota who once broke a chair over some socialist's head in Madison Square Garden', went with Rodney and, after a poll in which six out of seven readers opted for a daily sports section, he made Rodney its editor, a position he held until the paper closed in 1958.

He was alone among the mainstream press in addressing the main baseball issue of the day. 'It's hard to tell young people today that midway through the 20th century in the so-called Land of the Free players who were qualified, or indeed overqualified, to play in the big leagues could not play because of the pigmentation of their skin,' says the 94-year-old Rodney, speaking from his condo in Walnut Creek, California. Extraordinary as it may seem, America's segregation legalisation, commonly known as the Jim Crow laws, prevented many talented black players from performing in the major leagues.

Lester 'Red' Rodney had studied at New York University. 'If you were on campus in New York and not some kind of "ist", you were brain dead,' but he joined the Communist Party only after he had joined the paper.

The timidity of his competitors - neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post would print a word on the subject - allowed Rodney an open field. 'I remember a young Joe Di Maggio in the dressing room at the Yankee Stadium,' he says, 'and someone asked him who was the best pitcher he had faced and young Joe says Satchel Paige. And there was not a word about it in other papers. These writers weren't racist, but their papers wouldn't handle that stuff. It's unbelievable that journalism was so debased. And I had an exclusive. I didn't want it to be a Daily Worker exclusive, I wanted to end the darn ban.

'Paige was arguably one of the three greatest pitchers that the US has developed and he finally came in as a 42-year-old rookie in 1948. They used to call him a big frog in a small puddle and say he didn't want to play in the major leagues. But I shot that down when I interviewed him in 1937 and he said, "A great violinist doesn't want to stay in Podunk, Kansas, he wants to play Carnegie Hall. I want to prove how good I am." That ended the caricature notion that black players wanted to play on their own.'

Such notions were routinely peddled in the regular press, but Rodney did have allies. 'People would say to me, "Here's something I can't get into my paper but would darn well like to see in print." We had an influence far greater than our circulation.' In particular he teamed up with Wendell Smith at the Pittsburgh Courier (the largest circulation black paper). 'He would give me his interviews and I would give him mine.'

The Daily Worker initiated a petition to end segregation in baseball, which would eventually attract a million and a half signatures. They were helped by the fact that many Communists held senior positions in the large trade unions. 'That gave us an immediate entry,' says Rodney. 'There would be half-a-million people on the New York May Day parade and many of them would be holding up signs saying "End Jim Crow in Baseball".'

Rodney was also relentless in his harrying of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis - 'What we call a stone-cold racist' - the man who had become the first commissioner of baseball, since being called into deal with the fallout from the fixed World Series in 1919. 'Time for Stalling is Over, Judge Landis'; 'Can You Talk, Judge Landis?; 'Can you read, Judge Landis?' were among the headlines in The Daily Worker

'It was ridiculous that the Communist Party had to be the one to voice this kind of thing,' he says. 'Eleanor Roosevelt finally spoke out as war broke out about asking black guys to go and die for their country when they can't even play the national game in their own country. Franklin never said a word, but Eleanor was always far in advance of him.'

The breakthrough came in the aftermath of the Second World War when the Brooklyn Dodgers chairman, Branch Rickey, signed Jackie Robinson. 'He was a deeply religious man,' says Rodney. 'We called him Branch "the non-alcoholic" Rickey. He was bolder and smarter than the others and realised it was becoming inevitable. So he decided to take credit for something that was inevitable, like Nixon going to China.

'When Robinson became the first black player in the major leagues [in 1947], he was 28. He had to say to Rickey that he would subordinate his personhood and take all kinds of vicious taunts on the chin . This was a man who had been court-martialled for refusing to go to the back of a military bus. To imagine some of the abuse he received, look at Tiger Woods today and imagine him walking down the fairway and the spectators screaming dirty things about his sisters and when he reaches the green someone throws out a dead, black cat at his feet. That happened for the first time in Philadelphia and the manager of the Phillies stood in front of his dugout laughing.

'Why didn't this proud man say to hell with this? Because he was a fiercely intelligent man who knew exactly the role he was playing and what it meant for the black people who would follow him. Jackie was 28 years old and he was still rookie of the year and led his team to the pennant. That was probably the most courageous feat in the history of US sport and still hasn't been fully recognised.'

Even some of Robinson's team-mates weren't supportive. 'In 1947 Carl Furillo said, "I ain't going to play with no niggers." Yet in 1955, when the Dodgers finally beat the darned Yankees, there was a big party and when Jackie appeared Furillo leaped from his chair and hugged him. Back then that was a big deal.

'Pee Wee Reese was a shortstop from Louisville, Kentucky and freely admitted that he had very mixed feelings about having Jackie on the team - he was a creature of his time. Yet it was he who said, in a Kentucky drawl you could have laid, "Democracy means everyone should be treated the same, yet Jackie is the only coloured guy in the league and he's getting special hell for it. Maybe we ought to do something to make it more equal."

'Pee Wee had struggled through to this 35 years before the concept of affirmative action. In Cincinatti once there was a group of men shouting vile things at Jackie and no one was stopping them. And Pee Wee dropped his glove, walked across the diamond, and draped his arm around Jackie Robinson. That was a tremendous big deal at the time.'

Perhaps the biggest deal was when the Dodgers went on the road for the first time with Robinson on the roster. 'I saw the impact the Dodgers made when they went into different cities with a desegregated team. In St Louis, this white guy, not with venom, says to a black man, "Hey, you're from St Louis. Why aren't you cheering for St Louis?" And he put up his hand and said, "You see this colour. You don't see that on any St Louis players. You want me to cheer for St Louis against a desegregated team. Hey, wise up. Wise up."

'I remember a night game in Atlanta, Georgia. It was the first inter-racial game to be held in the South. And the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan said the game must not take place. The small, regulated stands for blacks were quickly filled. And the owners had to make a quick decision and whether they were motivated by a sense of history or couldn't stand the thought of losing money, I don't know, but they let blacks into other areas. When the Dodgers came out the first thing that happened was a roar of welcome from the black stands. The second thing that happened was booing and hissing from the white stands. Then a third thing happened, some of the white guys started clapping.

'Now there were not many closet white liberals in Georgia. But they had been weaned on sport and sportsmanship as much as they had been weaned on racism and they were hosts, which is very important in the South. And they thought there was something wrong with booing Big Leaguers. There was bedlam.

'People used to say 'Never in Shreveport', 'Never in Mobile', 'Never in Biloxi', but the Atlanta scene happened everywhere where black and white took the field that year. It was unthinkable in the South, and it was the beginning of the transformation in America.'

A year after the Brooklyn Dodgers beat the darned Yankees the Supreme Court ruled against desegregation in schools.

'I was at the ballpark in 1956 speaking to Roy Campanella [one of the first players to follow in Robinson's footsteps], who was much more voluble than Jackie Robinson, when the Brown v Board of Education ruling was announced. I asked him if baseball had anything to do with it and he replied, 'Without the Brooklyn Dodgers you don't have Brown v Board of Education." I gave him the quizzical look and he said, "All I know was that we were the first ones on the trains, we were the first ones down south not to go around the back of the restaurant, first ones in the hotels. We were like the teachers of the whole thing."

'It's a very persuasive argument and not to be ignored. Baseball was the opening wedge - what that says about the US I don't know.'

Rodney did not just cover baseball. He is the last man to have covered the second Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight who is 'still perpendicular. First of all the Jewish organisations decided to boycott the fight as they didn't want to contribute money for Max Schmeling to take back to Germany. And Hitler wired Schmeling a message, "I am confident you will defeat the ubermensch". The fight was in Yankee Stadium, with the ring pitched at second base. The place was in uproar. Two hundred Germans came marching in and sat at ringside. All the elements of the rise of Nazism were in that fight.'

After it was over in the first round there were celebrations in Harlem and riots across the South. 'The next morning a black guy was being led to Death Row and he cried out, "Save me, Joe Louis!"'

Rodney left the Communist Party in 1958. 'Stalin murdered the socialist dream. We left the Communist Party for the same reason that we joined it.' The Daily Worker closed in the same year. 'I'm in contact with many of the exes, as we call ourselves, and 95 per cent of them are still progressive people working for good causes. Many of us think this regime [the Bush administration] is trying to totally dismantle the New Deal by starving government so there is no money available for social welfare. I tell my friends who are totally demoralised that this country, with all its faults, has a tradition of finally coming to terms with reality. As the old trade union leaders used to say, "Don't mourn, organise."'

Rodney continues to organise for the Democratic Party and last month he was inducted into the Shrine of the Eternals by the Baseball Reliquary, aka the alternative Hall of Fame. 'We honor nonconformists in a game where conformity takes precedence,' read the citation. Seventy years on, Rodney has received due recognition. Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports by Irwin Silber is available at amazon.com.