David M. Shribman
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — The ball clubs have departed their springtime nests, pennant hopes are flowering like daffodils, the ancient game is springing to life again. For even the lowliest teams — maybe including your favorite — the future seems improbably bright at this juncture of the season.
But for all the future hopes, it’s the richness of baseball’s past that sets it apart in American cultural life. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), the 18th-century philosopher and legislator often considered the lodestar of conservatism, inadvertently expressed the essence of baseball when, in his most influential work, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” he wrote in 1790 of society as a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”
So it is appropriate at the beginning of the baseball season to linger for a moment and salute the people of the past who shaped the sport of today. One of them is being inducted into the National Sports Media Association Hall of Fame this summer for his efforts to assure that Black ballplayers don’t eternally sit in the on-deck circle.
He is Wendell Smith, and as much as Branch Rickey is credited for integrating baseball by signing Jackie Robinson, it’s arguable that Smith, who died in 1972, deserves just as much, perhaps more, credit. It was he who, as a writer for The Pittsburgh Courier, likely the greatest Black newspaper in American history, campaigned for baseball integration, prevailed upon Rickey and, it’s not too much to say, ushered Robinson into the Brooklyn Dodgers.
“Smith’s prior 10 years of efforts in print and behind the scenes to bring down baseball’s color barrier have been largely overshadowed in the public’s consciousness by Rickey’s bold stroke and Robinson’s uncommon bravery,” Brian Carroll, a Black baseball expert and chair of the communication department at Georgia’s Berry College wrote in an article in the Negro Leagues journal Black Ball. Carroll noted that Smith and another Black writer, Sam Lacy, “did not reflexively accept segregation and with it the implicit subordination of Blacks.”
Smith did more than report on the status of Black people in baseball. He worked to change the game, and Black sportswriters who followed him insisted on keeping his story alive. One of them was Larry Whiteside, who in the early 1970s was the only Black writer regularly covering major-league baseball games and became the first Black person to win the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, which fans know is the Baseball Writers Association of America’s highest award.
So when Dan Shaughnessy, today a top Boston Globe sports columnist, joined the big-league baseball beat at age 23, his Globe colleague Whiteside, who died in 2007, made sure the rookie in the press box knew the importance of Wendell Smith. “All these years later,” said Shaughnessy, who is being inducted into the sports-media hall of fame at the same time as Smith, “to be honored in the same Hall of Fame, on the same weekend, with Smith — a true pioneer and giant of our craft — is beyond humbling.”
Smith could move with subtlety — that marked many of his interchanges with Rickey — but at the typewriter he spoke with clarity and passion. He called the ban on Black players baseball’s “closed door policy” and described it as “a great American tragedy … a blot on the Statue of Liberty, the American flag, the Constitution.”
He knew one thing that the mandarins of baseball management didn’t know: that white players wanted Black players in big-league uniforms. He learned this through a relentless series of interviews with the leading players of the 1940s. “Smith refused to grant players neutrality and instead extracted, molded and publicized white opinion,” Ursula McTaggart wrote in the journal American Studies.
“Would I use him?” Dodgers manager Leo Durocher told Smith about Jackie Robinson. “Hell, yes. I’d sleep with him and watch him like a mother watches her newborn baby.”
Once the breakthrough was transformed from hope to reality, Smith also counseled Robinson. “All you have to do is keep a cool head, play the kind of ball you are capable of playing, and don’t worry about anything,” he wrote Robinson. “As you know, Rickey is no dummy. He is a very methodical man and will see to it that you are treated right. All you have to do is take care of Jackie Robinson on the playing field, and he will do the rest.”
The Robinson story is one of perseverance and ability, but it is also one thing more, fading from American culture but deserving to be celebrated today: It is a newspaper story. Smith insisted that it be so.
“Now, Rickey, I want you to feel as though the publishers of The Pittsburgh Courier and I are a distinct part of this undertaking,” he wrote the Dodgers leader. “We do not want you to take all of the responsibility with regards to help to strengthen these boys spiritually and morally for the part they are to play in this great adventure.”
In his role, Smith was both protester and pioneer. “It was not apparent at that moment,” Morgan State University professor Wayne Dawkins wrote in a new dual biography of Lacy and Smith, “but Wendell Smith was drafting the blueprint for the 1950s to 1960s civil rights media strategy.”
The Courier had a circulation of 347,000 in the year Robinson joined the majors. That is a third more than the print circulation of The New York Times today and would make it the second-largest print newspaper in the country, behind only The Wall Street Journal. But the Courier’s historical significance goes beyond baseball. Its fabled “Double-V” campaign, calling for victory in World War II abroad and in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans at home, was an important element of what became known as the civil-rights movement.
“I am really proud of the history the Courier and Wendell Smith made,” said Rod Doss, the current publisher of the newspaper. “It is especially important for us now to remember the great contributions of African Americans in the current climate, dominated by those who would not mind if those contributions disappeared. Now more than ever, it is essential to recall the contributions that Wendell and Jackie made, and the achievements that followed.”
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
