Reporting the Pacific Northwest: An Annotated Bibliography of Journalism History in Oregon and Washington

Lamb, Chris. Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson's First Spring Training. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 226 pp. $24.95. Roger Kahn, in his best-selling book, The Boys of Summer, recalled what it was like in 1947 to see Jackie Robinson, baseball's first black in the modern major leagues. For a long time he shocked people seeing him for the first time simply by the fact of his color: uncompromising ebony, he wrote. . . Without realizing it, one had become conditioned. The grass was green, the dirt was brown and the ball players were white. Suddenly in Ebbets Field, under a white home uniform, two muscled arms extended like black hawsers. Black. Like the arms of a janitor. The new color jolted the consciousness, in a profound and not quite definable way. Kahn's recollection comes to life in Blackout, a book by Chris Lamb, an associate professor of media studies at the College of Charleston. Unlike most writers, who have focused on Robinson's first year in the major leagues, he steps back to 1946 and the six weeks of spring training in Florida, when he was struggling to make the Montreal Royals, a AAA minor league team of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The book closely examines that spring's newspaper coverage of Robinson, both in the black and the white press, and puts the story in historical context against a backdrop of rigid Southern segregation and continued racial violence around the United States, such as the lynching of blacks. A thread running throughout the book is Robinson's importance to blacks in their on-going struggle for equal rights. Quite simply, he was propelling an entire race forward with his spikes, his bat, and his glove. A black man, who lived across the street from one of the spring training fields in Florida, recalled literally praying for Robinson to do well: I would say, 'Please, God, let him show the whites what we can do and that we can excel like they can.' On the day of Robinson's first spring training game, blacks in Daytona Beach heard sermons about him, and then they paraded by the hundreds to the ball park in their Sunday clothes. As Lamb notes, Mothers and fathers held the hands of small children, others clutched the arms of the frail, and young boys hurried excitedly ahead of their families. Among those capturing such scenes vividly, sometimes almost breathlessly and clearly with passion because they realized what was at stake for blacks, were two of the black press' top sportswriters who would later be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier and Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American. …

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