A Media Pioneer: Sam Lacy Helped Jackie Robinson Break the Color Line

With seventy-some years of newspaper experience, Sam Lacy knew the ins and outs of quality journalism and yet he may have broken the cardinal rule of journalism on a daily basis.

 Cover the story, don’t be the story.

Forgive Lacy though, he knew full well what he was doing.

Born in Washington, D.C., Lacy grew up just a few blocks from Griffith Stadium and routinely ran errands for the Washington Senators, an all-white professional baseball team in the American League.  As a child he sold peanuts as a vendor in the Jim Crow section of the ballpark.

As a teenager Lacy played semipro baseball in a local league against other African-Americans and eventually came to the conclusion that there was no difference in quality of play between white and black ballplayers.  To him, segregation at any level didn’t make sense.

“I had seen the teams come into play [the Senators],” Lacy said shortly before his death in 2003.  “Having seen these guys, I got to thinking that some of these ballplayers, watching them play, are no better than the guys that play in the Negro Leagues.  It just didn’t seem proper or right.”

Lacy began his journalism career as a part-time writer at the Washington Tribune while still attending Howard University.  He joined the paper full-time upon graduation and moved into the sports department, where he quickly made a name for himself as an advocate for equality in sports.

After writing several columns that challenged the racial climate of the nation, including an article on an African-American football player from Syracuse University, Lacy turned his focus to equality on the baseball diamond.

“Baseball would accept anybody,” Lacy said.  “Ex-convicts, anybody … I gave a lot of explanations about people who could be more undesirable than black guys.”

Clark Griffith, the owner of the Washington Senators, was one of the people Lacy contacted about integration.

“I used that old cliché about Washington being first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League, and that he could remedy that [with integration],” Lacy told Sam Donnellon of the Philadelphia Daily News.  “But he told me that the climate wasn’t right.”

Lacy moved from the Tribune to the Chicago Defender in 1940 and on several occasions sought a meeting with baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to discuss the integration of Major League Baseball.  Landis never replied.

Lacy had gained the support of dozens of black sportswriters and even several prominent white journalists, including Shirley Povich, a famed sports columnist from the Washington Post.

Several of Lacy’s columns promoting integration in baseball were picked up by wire services and syndicated throughout in newspapers throughout the country.

Lacy left the Defender and joined the Afro-American in Baltimore a few years later and continued his pursuit of desegregating.  He petitioned to the Major League owners that an integration committee be formed and that black ballplayers be given a chance to compete.

Such a committee was formed in 1944 and Lacy was joined by Branch Rickey of the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers and Larry MacPhail of the New York Yankees.

MacPhail never attended a single meeting so Rickey and Lacy discussed the matter and were in agreement that Jackie Robinson was the perfect fit to break the color barrier.

Major League Baseball introduced Happy Chandler as commissioner in April of 1945 and six months later Robinson signed a contract with Rickey to play for Brooklyn’s Triple A club in Montreal.

Wendell Smith, another noted black sportswriter with a post at the Pittsburgh Courier, worked alongside Lacy to ensure Robinson’s early success.

Smith worked with the Dodgers in finding suitable housing for Robinson in Spring Training and when the club traveled.

Documents from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s archives indicate that the Courier was willing to incur the Smith’s traveling expenses in conjunction with the assistance of Robinson because the paper wanted to “render the cause of Democracy.”

Smith followed Robinson when he played with Montreal in the International League in 1947.  A year later he authored Robinson’s autobiography, Jackie Robinson, My Own Story.

The Afro-American allowed Lacy to cover Robinson for the next three years and the black press agreed that he was the perfect fit to integrate Major League Baseball, having served in the military and an attendee of UCLA.

Though the black press and community were in support of Robinson, racially motivated insults were routine as was unfair treatment.  

From a media standpoint, Lacy was forced to cover several Dodgers games from the dugout because he was not allowed to sit in the press box with white reporters.  In 1952 he was denied entry into Yankee Stadium to cover a World Series game, though he had the proper credentials to do so.

“It would have been a selfish thing for me to be concerned about myself and how I was treated,” Lacy said in an interview.  

Lacy never reported on his own trials and tribulations.

Lacy continued covering baseball for the Afro-American until his death in May of 2003.  He was inducted into the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1998.

(Patrick Gordon is a freelance editor / sportswriter based in Philadelphia.  He currently manages the Philadelphia Baseball Review.)