Most of you probably never heard of Lester Rodney. And for good reason. His claim to fame was being the sports editor for The Daily Worker, the newspaper of American Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1950s. I read scores of back issues of the Daily Worker for a class I took in college. It was a fairly awful newspaper before you even get to the politics of it all, but Rodney stood out. At least to me. The reason: he was beating the drum -- loudly and unrelentingly -- for the integration of baseball long before anyone had heard of Jackie Robinson.
Rodney died last week. An obituary ran in the New York Times. Today the Boston Globe has a more in-depth profile of his pro-integration writings, and it’s definitely worth a read. Though I am a Marxist, I’m no communist. Indeed, I’m not a member of any party, really, because I don’t believe any one party has a monopoly on wisdom. But Rodney and the Daily Worker definitely had the subject of baseball’s color barrier right. And first. And he and it should be remembered for that.
Good goin’, comrade. Rest in peace.
