19 Facts About Lester Rodney

Lester Rodney was an American journalist who helped break down the color barrier in baseball as sports writer for the Daily Worker.

The Rodneys moved from the Bronx to Brooklyn when Lester was 6, where his lifelong love of the Dodgers developed.

Lester Rodney's father lost his business, and then the family home, in the 1929 stock market crash that began the Great Depression, an era in which communism and other radical social philosophies captured the attention of the intelligentsia.

Lester Rodney earned a partial track scholarship to Syracuse University, but his family could not afford the other half of his tuition so he did not complete his formal education.

In 1936,25-year-old Lester Rodney parlayed a background in high-school sportswriting into a job with the Daily Worker and its Sunday edition, the Sunday Worker, the party organ of the Communist Party USA, or CPUSA.

Lester Rodney's style was to combine sports journalism with a sense of social justice, to champion social issues through sports.

Lester Rodney was given wide discretion in his sportswriting, permitted to criticize baseball, America, and Hitler in order to prove the fact that African American ballplayers were the equals of white major leaguers.

However, after Lester Rodney wrote a letter to the editor of the paper, Clarence Hathaway, explaining that he believed the sports column needed to write about why USworkers found sports meaningful to their cause, he was amazed when he was offered the job as editor of the sports page, not knowing that the ComIntern had recently decided that a focus on the social and cultural issues in American sports could help garner support to the burgeoning Communist movement in the United States.

Lester Rodney started to write about sports in a way that was not seen in other newspapers at the time, focusing more on the importance of their social impact than on box scores.

Lester Rodney did investigative reporting on the relationship of race, culture, and sports.

Lester Rodney highlighted the careers of good Negro League baseball players, bragging up their background and history.

Lester Rodney was a key factor in the start of the Worker's campaign to integrate baseball in the 1930s.

Lester Rodney was always looking for more evidence that baseball should be interracial, and asked white players how they felt about integration.

Lester Rodney served in the South Pacific in World War II, and it was during his service that Branch Rickey announced the signing of Los Angeles native and war veteran Jackie Robinson to a minor league contract.

Lester Rodney was one of the few white sportswriters of his time to devote a great deal of space and praise to black athletes.

Lester Rodney stayed with the Daily Worker until the mid-1950s, keeping on top of racial issues in sports.

Lester Rodney continued to work as a journalist, most notably as the Religion editor of the Long-Beach Press Telegram.

Lester Rodney was inducted into the Baseball Reliquary's Shrine of the Eternals in 2005.

Lester Rodney celebrated his 96th birthday on April 17,2007 in Walnut Creek, California with his partner, Mary Reynolds Harvey.