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

Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball
ISBN-10
0803240201
ISBN-13
9780803240209
Series
Conspiracy of Silence
Category
Sports & Recreation
Pages
416
Language
English
Published
2012-04-01
Publisher
U of Nebraska Press
Author
Chris Lamb

Description

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 less about the efforts to end it. Even today, as far as most Americans know, the integration of baseball revolved around Branch RickeyOCOs signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn DodgersOCO organization in 1945. This book shows how RickeyOCOs move, critical as it may well 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. He shows how white mainstream sportswriters perpetuated the color line by participating in what their black counterparts called a OC conspiracy of silence.OCO Between 1933 and 1945, black newspapers and the Communist" Daily Worker" published hundreds of articles and editorials calling for an end to baseballOCOs color line. The efforts of the alternative presses to end baseballOCOs color line, chronicled for the first time in "Conspiracy of Silence," constitute one of baseballOCOsOCoand the civil rights movementOCOsOCogreat untold stories.

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