Press Box Red: The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports. - book review

Black Issues in Higher Education, April 10, 2003

By Irwin Silber, forward by Jules Tygiel Temple University Press, 2003 248 pp. $59.95 cloth, ISBN 1-56639-974-2, $19.95 paper, ISBN 1-56639-973-4

Long before Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a Brooklyn Dodger contract in 1945, the first sports editor of the Communist Daily Worker launched a campaign to break baseball's color line. Lester Rodney's story has remained relatively unknown since then, but in Press Box Red, Silber recounts this 11-year period as a highlight in Rodney's sports journalism career.

The book features a collection of first-hand accounts of Rodney's challenges to front-office professional and collegiate sports personalities such as Rickey, Larry McPhail, Bill Veeck, Leo Durocher, Casey Stengel, Nat Holman and Clair Bee. It also includes frank and frequently humorous encounters with various athletes, including Robinson, Roy Campanella, Joe DiMaggio, Satchel Paige, Peewee Reese and Joe Louis.