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

Chris Lamb. Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 397 pp. Cloth, $39.95. In this well-researched book, Chris Lamb insists that Major League Baseball not have maintained the color line as long as it did without the aid and comfort of the country's white mainstream (14). In fact, only a handful of white sportswriters ever wrote about baseball's longstanding prohibition against integrated play, and fewer still actively campaigned against it. As a result, black sportswriters had to wage the battle against Jim Crow practically alone. In Lamb's estimation, understanding the role of black sportswriters--and their handful of white allies--in the collapse of the color barrier enriches our appreciation of the long campaign to desegregate the sport. Lamb cautions, however, that the importance of their efforts is not limited to history alone; they are of the larger narrative of the campaign for racial equality in the years preceding and immediately following World War (17). Lamb begins by recounting a 1933 speech by former sportswriter Heywood Broun of the New York World-Telegram at the annual New York Baseball Writers' Association dinner, an all-white affair. In his address, Broun became the first person ever to speak out against segregated at the gathering. The journalists in attendance apparently listened politely, but later nearly all of them failed to mention Broun's remarks in their columns, revealing, at the very least, their tacit support of baseball's racial status quo. The lone exception, Jimmy Powers, wrote an article in support of Broun's statements in the New York Daily News. Powers's piece included the results of a survey he had taken among several executives and ballplayers asking whether they objected to the presence of blacks in the major leagues. Powers found that most of them did not, prompting him to call on to follow the lead of other sports and initiate integrated play. Over the next decade, Powers continued to criticize the color line, and a handful of other white journalists--including Shirley Povich and Westbrook Pegler--joined him from time to time, but, overall, the conspiracy of silence among white mainstream sports reporters held strong. Black journalists themselves said little about baseball's color barrier until the 1930s. Prior to that time, they committed their energies toward building up black rather than desegregating white baseball (74). According to Lamb, taking a stance against the sport's color line rarely crossed the mind of black sportswriters of this era because racial separation was so deeply entrenched that it seemed to be an unalterable fact of life. Moreover, many African American sportswriters were part of the black establishment during this period and therefore felt duty bound to help black grow. Finally, black executives, like their white counterparts, expected black sportswriters to preserve black baseball. By the early 1930s, however, the cozy relationship between black sportswriters and executive had ended (75) and black journalists had begun to question the color line. New York Yankees outfielder Jake Powell's use of a racial slur during a 1938 radio interview and the outbreak of World War II in Europe, which led many to question how the US government could denounce Hitler's bigoted Nazi regime while tolerating racial injustice at home, motivated black sportswriters to launch an all-out assault against baseball's color barrier. …

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