Conspiracy of Silence

by Lamb, Chris

• ISBN13: 9780803210769
• ISBN10: 0803210760
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

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 Rickey's signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization in 1945. This book shows how Rickey's 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 "conspiracy of silence." Between 1933 and 1945, black newspapers and the Communist Daily Workerpublished hundreds of articles and editorials calling for an end to baseball's color line. The efforts of the alternative presses to end baseball's color line, chronicled for the first time in Conspiracy of Silence, constitute one of baseball'sand the civil rights movement'sgreat untold stories.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
White Sportswriters and Minstrel Shows	p. 3
The Color Line is Drawn	p. 29
Invisible Men	p. 57
"Agitators" and "Social-Minded Drum Beaters": Written with Kelly Rusinack	p. 85
"L'affaire Jake Powell"	p. 109
Major League Managers and Ballplayers Call for End of Color Line	p. 133
The Double V Campaign	p. 159
"The Great White Father" Speaks	p. 187
Black Editors Make their Case for Desegregation	p. 217
"Get Those Niggers Off the Field"	p. 249
Robinson Becomes the Chosen One	p. 283
"I Never Want to Take Another Trip Like this One"	p. 307
Notes	p. 335
Bibliography	p. 363
Index	p. 375
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