Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball

by Chris Lamb

The campaign to desegregate baseball was one of the most important civil rights stories of the 1930s and 1940s. But most of white America knew nothing about this story because mainstream newspapers said little about the color line and still less about the efforts to end it. Even today, as far as most Americans know, the integration of baseball revolved around Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ organization in 1945. This book shows how Rickey’s move, critical as it may have been, came after more than a decade of work by Black and left-leaning journalists to desegregate the game.
Drawing on hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews with journalists, Chris Lamb reveals how differently Black and white newspapers, and Black and white America, viewed racial equality. Between 1933 and 1945, Black newspapers and the communist Daily Worker published hundreds of articles and editorials calling for an end to baseball’s color line, while white mainstream sportswriters perpetuated the color line by participating in what their Black counterparts called a “conspiracy of silence.” The alternative presses’ efforts to end baseball’s color line, chronicled for the first time in Conspiracy of Silence , constitute one of the great untold stories of baseball—and the civil rights movement.
 

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Journalism, History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2012

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book explores how the mainstream media, mostly in newspapers, of the first half of the 20th century, and their complicity in questioning the segregation of professional baseball. Secondly, it looks to how the Black Press and the Communist Press worked diligently for over a decade prior to Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier, breaking down the myth of Branch Rickey suddenly embracing anti-racism after decades of silence. Lamb argues that the relentless journalism of the Black Press in writers like Wendell Smith, which always kept the issue alive for black readers, coupled with white radicals of the Daily Worker who challenged the white press, slowly pushed the mainstream culture so that eventually liberal politicians and opinion makers embraced the cause of ending segregation in the most popular sport of the United States. This pushed the very conservative, very anti-communist Major League Baseball owners to eventually crack and begin signing black ballplayers beginning with Robinson. Being extremely anti-communist meant that MLB took great pains to totally erase the pressure campaign's history in shifting opinion. Meanwhile, during this time period, the mainstream white newspaper writers almost totally ignored both the color barrier with very little commentary on why no black players were in the Major Leagues, to the point where the silence has to be understood as totally intention whether by conservative and often racist writers, to editors who would not let even writers who wanted to explore the issue. In fact, tidbits were often leaked to white Communist writers, whose Daily Worker readership far outstripped its circulation as a mainstay of workplace factory reading before the Red Scare destroyed the influence of the Communists.

Lamb's book is invaluable to understanding how both the silence of the white mainstream media was deafening, and how long the campaign of the sometimes allies and sometimes rival Black Press and white communist press was before it succeeded in making it possible for Branch Rickey to sign Jackie Robinson. It fits well with Lester Rodney's biography of Press Box Red and Rob Ruck's Raceball in both understanding how the labor dynamics of desegregation played out and how the history was totally changed to fit into the anti-radical individualistic narrative of Branch Rickey single handedly ending segregation in baseball.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meticulously documented story of how the media helped -- and hindered -- the desegregation of Major League baseball. A terrific read for baseball and media buffs.