Here's What A White Ally Looks Like Mickey Z.

Photo credit: Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

June 11, 2020

In 1937, baseball was a segregated, primarily Eastern sport… but in the off-season, major leaguers often competed against Negro League teams in California. Against that backdrop, second-year phenom Joe DiMaggio was asked to name the toughest pitcher he had ever faced.

Without hesitation, the Yankee Clipper told a group of reporters: “Satchel Paige.”

Predictably, Joe D.’s honest appraisal went unmentioned in the next day’s newspapers... with one exception. Lester Rodney not only reported DiMaggio’s comment, but he also made it a huge headline in the sports pages of the Daily Worker -- the newspaper of the U.S. Communist Party. “[DiMaggio] knew Paige was black and that blacks were banned when he said that,” Rodney explained. “We had a huge headline the next day. The other papers never reported it.”

***

The Brooklyn-born Lester Rodney waged a relentless and effective campaign to publicly excoriate and humiliate baseball’s commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. “A blatant racist,” Rodney called Landis.

“The baseball owners of that period couldn’t have picked a more appropriate man to represent their policies," Rodney said. "He simply kept denying that there was a color barrier. I would write stories with headlines like ‘Can You Read, Judge Landis?’ and ‘Can You Hear, Judge Landis?’ I know we got to him. The Daily Worker didn’t have a big circulation, but we got noticed, and what we wrote was read by people in baseball and by other journalists.”

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https://worldnewstrust.com/here-s-what-a-white-ally-looks-like-mickey-z