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Today's
Stories
April 3 / 5, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Anti-Depressants
a Problem? We're Shocked
Jeffrey St. Clair
How Neil Bush Succeeded in Business
Without Really Trying
April 2, 2004
Dave Lindorff
Barbaric
Relativism: the Press and Fallujah
Kurt Nimmo
Wherever
Bush Goes, Osama is Bound to Follow
Emma Miller
The
Role of the West in the Rwandan Genocide
Dr. Susan Block
Same
Sex Marriages: Just Say "No" to Prohibition
Norman Solomon
Media Strategy Memo for George & Dick
Sacha Guney
The Meaning of the Elections in Turkey
Christopher Brauchli
The
Disturbing Case of Cpt. Yee
Website of the Day
Mercenaries, Inc.
April 1, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Dying in Vain in Iraq
Harry Browne
No Smoke, Plenty of Fire: Ireland's Pubs Go Smokefree
Chris Floyd
Towel Boy: Bush Hits Workers with Chemical Weapons
Nicole Colson
Inside America's Concentration Camp: Tortured at Guantanamo
Charles Arthur
Haiti's Army Cracks Down on Workers
Laura Flanders
Elaine
Chao: a First Daughter for the First Son
March 31, 2004
M. Junaid Alam
Israel:
Suicide Nation?
John L. Hess
Condi
Under Oath: But What About the NYTs Reporters?
Fernando Suarez del Solar
A Year
Since My Son's Death in Iraq
Sofia Perez
Spain's
U-Turn on Iraq is Real Democracy in Action
David Vest
Stick 'Em Up: Put Cheney and Bush Under Oath
Tanya Reinhart
As in Tiannamen Square: Justice and the Yassin Assassination
Mike Whitney
Time to Dump the Pledge
Donald Kaul
Martha Stewart's Lesson: Never Talk to the FBI
Milt Bearden
Mired in the Tracks of Alexander the Great
Marjorie Cohn
The Illegal
Coup in Haiti: How the Kidnapping of Aristide Violated US and
International Law
Website of the Day
New Pentagon Papers Dropped at DC Starbucks
March 30, 2004
William S. Lind
An Occurrence
in Pakistan: the Battle That Wasn't
Ron Jacobs
Assassinations, Hate Mail &
Justice
Mickey Z.
Tommy Boy Friedman Does "Imagine"
Neve Gordon
Strategic Motives of the Yassin Assassination
Mark Scaramella
The Founding Scam: Insider Trading is the American Way
John Chuckman
The Countessa of Empire: Condi
Rice's Idea of Democracy
Greg Moses
Live from Pasadena: Silhouettes of New Order
Rai O'Brien
What Kind of Democracy to Expect if the Opposition Takes Power
in Venezuela
Bill Christison
The
9/11 Commission: Dangerous Harbinger for the Future
Website of the Day
Ghost Town: Riding Through Chernobyl
March 29, 2004
John Maxwell
Crisis
in the Caribbean: a Miasma Foretold
J. Michael Springmann
Email
Spying & Attorney Client Privilege
Robert Fisk / Severin
Carrell
Coalition
of the Mercenaries
The Black Commentator
Haiti's Troika of Terror
Doug Giebel
Candide in the Wilderness:
How Bush Policy Was Made
David Krieger
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Bargain
Mike Whitney
Rejecting the Language of Terrorism
Richard Oxman
The Pitts: a 9/11 Burrow of an American
Family
Kim Scipes
The AFL-CIO in Venezuela: Deja Vu All Over Again
Michael Donnelly
End Game for Northwest Forests
Norman Solomon
The Media Politics of 9/11
Kathy Kelly
Last Lines Before Vanishing
Website of the Day
Swans: Can Money Buy Everything?
March 27 / 28, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Empire of the Locusts
Gary Leupp
The Yassin Assassination: Prelude to an Attack on Syria
William A. Cook
The Yassin Assassination: a Monstrous Insanity Blessed by the
US
Faheem Hussain
Some Thoughts on Waziristan: Once and Always a Colonial Army
Elaine Cassel
Is Playing Paintball Terrorism?
Larry Birns / Jessica
Leight
Disturbing Signals: Kerry and Latin America
John Ross
Bush Tells the World: "Drop Dead"
John Eskow
A Memo to Karl Rove from the Hollywood Caucus
Alan Maass
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Dave Lindorff
Spineless of US Journalists
Joe Bageant
Howling in the Belly of the Confederacy
Dave Zirin
Reasonable Doubt: Why Barry Bonds is Not on Steroids
Craig Waggoner
Who Would Mel's Jesus Nuke?
The Kerry Quandry
Joel Wendland
Marxists
for Kerry
Josh Frank
Scary,
Scary John Kerry
Matt Vidal
Spoilers, Electability and the Poverty of American Democracy
Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Hamod, Guthrie, Davies and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Say a Little Prayer
March 26, 2004
Christopher Brauchli
There's
a Chill Over the Country
Robert Fisk
The Man Who Knew Too Much: the Ordeal
of Mordechai Vanunu
Joe DeRaymond
Democracy in El Salvador? Think Again
Mike Whitney
Lessons on Apartheid from Ariel Sharon
Mickey Z.
Somalia and Iraq: Looking Back and Ahead
Chris Floyd
The Pentagon Archipelago
CounterPunch Photo Wire
Cheney's Close Shave?
John Breneman
Bush's Comic Bomb
Website of the Day
Dick
is a Killer
March 25, 2004
Lee Sustar
Who
is to Blame for Lost Jobs?
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Offshore Banking Centers
Roger Burbach
Lula vs. the IMF: Brazil Begins
to Throw Off the Austerity Planners
Jimmer Endres
Elections Without Politics: The Military Budget Is Not an "Issue"
Larry Tuttle
Acting in Your Name: Identity Theft and Public Interest Groups
Toni Solo
Misreporting Venezuela
Dan Bacher
A Memorial Wall for Iraq War's Dead and Wounded
Saul Landau
Is
Venezuela Next?
Website of the Day
The Spiral Railway
March 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
General
Musharraf's IOU
Richard Oxman
Shakespeare
for Kerry
William Lind
The Beginning
of Phase Three: 4G Warfare Hits Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul
Iraq One Year Later
Michael Dempsey
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
Alan Farago
The Bad Math of Mercury: Bush's War on the Unborn
Benjamin Dangl
and April Howard
Media
in Cuba
John L. Hess
No Lie Left Behind: Judy Miller Does Dick Clarke
Greg Weiher
Two Cheers for Dems: "We're Not as Bad as George"
Eva Golinger
An Open Letter to John Kerry on Venezuela
Grayson Childs
Where's Cynthia McKinney?
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
Website of the Day
The Bushiad and the Idiossey
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
April 3 / 5, 2004
Lester Speaks
An
Interview with "Red" Rodney
By DAVE ZIRIN
93 year-old Lester "Red" Rodney
was one of the most courageous and principled sports writers
of his day. As the Sports Editor for the U.S. Communist Party's
newspaper, The Daily Worker, from 1936-1958, he launched the
fight to integrate baseball in the 1930s. He was also the first
writer to scout a young second baseman named Jackie Robinson
and covered the famed 1938 Joe Louis/Max Schmeling bouts.
Yet because of his background as a political
radical, Rodney has remained a buried figure on the sports landscape
even though, like thousands of others, he left the Party in 1958
when the extent of the crimes of Josef Stalin were revealed.
His story is now being told in the newly published book Press
Box Red by Irwin Silber (Temple University Press.). Still
a self-proclaimed radical after all these years, Rodney speaks
with Dave Zirin about those days.
DZ: Were you an athlete as a teenager?
LR: I went to high school in Bensonhurst
back when they had the dominant track team in New York City.
They never lost a meet in four years. I ran in the middle distance
relays that won the championship in the city. I also played a
little basketball. I wasn't too great, but I made the squad.
I got a partial track scholarship to Syracuse but the Depression
had just hit, and knocked my whole family out. We lost our home,
everything. I had to go back to work. I graduated high school
in '29, right into the mouth of the crash.
DZ: What was your first contact with
the Communist Party?
LR: I went to NYU at night and I had
to work during the day. People who weren't around during the
1930s, can't fully grasp what it was like politically. In New
York if you were on a college campus and you weren't some kind
of radical, Communist, socialist, or Trotskyist, you were considered
brain-dead, and you probably were! That's what all conversation
was about during the Depression. One day, on the way to class,
I met someone selling a paper, the Daily Worker. This person
said, "Read this paper and see what you think." I immediately
connected with the tone of it, and I was ready to question capitalism
at that time. But what caught my eye was that they also had a
weekly column on sports.
DZ: What were your thoughts on the
sports section?
LR: I absolutely cringed when I read
that sports page. It reflected a lot of sectarianism. They commented
mostly negatively on everything. It was quite patronizing, calling
sports "the opium of the masses" and all that. That's
partially true too, of course. Someone whose whole life is conjoined
with following sports doesn't follow what's going on in the country.
But at this time the party was beginning to change its demographic
makeup as well. The ones who were pouring into the party were
young people, born here in the states, and there were many trade
unionists that played ball and were interested in sports. Ten
years earlier, the party was probably 75% foreign born and they
brought the prejudice of European immigrants about sports, seeing
it as "grown people, wasting their time on children's games."
They couldn't understand its appeal. When I met my wife's father
for the first time, he said, "What do you do?" I said,
"I write sports." He laughed uneasily and asked "but
what do you really do?" He couldn't grasp that his daughter
was marrying someone who just wrote about games.
Anyway, my feelings about the Daily Worker
paper peaked enough that I sent a letter to them just mildly
suggesting that, yes, they ought to speak about what's wrong
with sports and so on, but realize that sports are also something
that are meaningful to American workers and for good reasons.
I didn't make some big argument that a collective effort of a
team, the coming together, and finding satisfaction in getting
the job well done, is some kind of revolutionary act. I didn't
go into all that but I did say that the paper ought to relax
and cover sports and respect people who are interested in sports.
They called me in and I was hired to head it up - even though
at that point I hadn't even joined the Party.
DZ: How widespread were the objections
to a popular sports section on the Daily Worker staff?
LR: It was really a generational thing.
There was one person who said, "This is ridiculous. We have
a socialist paper that barely has enough money to put out eight
pages, and here we're going to devote one eighth of that paper
to games?" But the editor, Clarence Hathaway, he was from
Minnesota. He said, let's check with the readers. And they actually
had a poll. They asked their readers to vote on whether the Daily
Worker should have a daily sports section that covers big league
baseball and college sports and so on in addition to trade union
activities and people overwhelmingly voted that they wanted it.
DZ: What made you think that you could
reach people politically through sports?
LR: I didn't have a full realization
of what the meaning of sports could be. Looking back, when you
look at the meaning of Joe Louis and what he meant when he knocked
out [German boxer and Nazi party favorite] Max Schmeling in that
second fight and it's just incredible. Abner Barry was a black
columnist of the day and he was assigned to Harlem during the
second fight. He told how during the preparation for that fight
and the fight itself, the streets were eerily deserted like a
scene from after the atom bomb drops in a movie. The minute the
fight was over people were teeming with people and young kids
were laughing and giving the mock Hitler salute. And this was
happening in every city in the country including Southern cities.
In Knoxville [Tennessee] Blacks poured out into the streets and
fought with the police who tried to keep them from marching.
So you say there's no social meaning to Joe Louis? There was
a young Black man being led to death row and he cried out "Save
me Joe Louis!" It sounds corny and hokey, but it's true.
DZ: The Communist Party is known to
have organized radio listenings around the Louis-Schmeling. Where
did you hear the fight?
LR: I didn't hear it. I worked it. I
was there! I was in the press row. In fact, you know the PBS
program "American Experience?" They contacted me and
said they had been scouring the country for sports writers who
covered that fight. And I'm the only one who covered that fight
who's still perpendicular. So they came up to my house with a
big camera crew and put me on tape, and it will be on later this
year. I saw first hand how meaningful Louis was. You can almost
say in a sense that Joe Louis may have been just as important
as Jackie Robinson, just on a different level; one of the differences
being that Joe Louis was uneducated and not articulate, and at
that time he was asked and he agreed to not make waves. That's
hard for people to understand today. Here's a person in the thirties,
and this is years before the Civil Rights movement.
DZ: Did it occur to you immediately
after coming onto the Daily Worker staff to start a campaign
to end the color line in Major League Baseball?
LR: Not initially. First I was overwhelmed
with the job of establishing us as a bona fide sports section.
It was only a matter of time after that when I said, "Look
at this huge void here! No one is talking about this!" When
Negro League teams came in, we showed from the beginning who
the good Negro players were and gave something of their background
and history. That took investigative reporting. The other papers
just said, "The Kansas City Monarchs will play the Baltimore
Giants at such and such a time tomorrow" with no mention
that any of them could have played big league baseball or even
minor league baseball. It's amazing. You go back and you read
the great newspapers in the thirties, you'll find no editorials
saying, "What's going on here? This is America, land of
the free and people with the wrong pigmentation of skin can't
play baseball?" Nothing like that. No challenges to the
league, to the commissioner, to league presidents, no interviewing
the managers, no talking about Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson
who were obviously of superstar caliber. So it was this tremendous
vacuum waiting. Anybody who became Sports Editor of the Daily
Worker would have gone into this. It was too obvious. And some
of the white comrades who had never paid attention to sports
before began saying, "Is this an all white sport?"
People didn't think about it. It was the culture of the times
and it was accepted. We also developed a relationship with the
Black Press and printed each other's articles about the Negro
League players and the color line which in those highly segregated
times opened up new audiences for both of us.
DZ: How did the push to integrate
the Major Leagues come off the sports' page and turn it into
an activist campaign?
LR: I spoke to the leaders of the YCL
(the Young Communist League). They were enthusiastic about the
sports page. We talked about circulating the paper. It just evolved
as we talked about the color line and some kids in the YCL suggested,
"Why don't we go to the ballparks - to Yankee Stadium, Ebbets
Field, the Polo Grounds - with petitions?"
DZ: Did they ever encounter any hostility
from fans when they went to the parks?
LR: No, people were mostly receptive.
People would say, "Gee, I never thought of that." And
then they'd say, "Yeah, I think if they're good enough then
they should have a chance." We wound up with at least a
million and a half signatures that we delivered straight to the
desk of [baseball commissioner] Judge Landis.
DZ: How did integrate covering the
teams and the movement?
LR: I'll tell you a story: In 1937 we
were in the dressing room at Yankee Stadium and somebody asked
a young Joe DiMaggio, "Joe, who's the best pitcher you've
faced?" And without hesitation young Joe said, "Satchel
Paige." He didn't say "Satchel Paige who ought to be
in the big leagues," he just said Satchel Paige. So that
was a huge headline in the next day's Daily Worker sports page
in the biggest type I had: "Paige best pitcher ever faced-
DiMaggio." No other paper reported that, they didn't go
into this. If the other reporters would hand that in, their editor
would say, "Come on, you're not stirring this thing up."
But we didn't see it as a virtue that we were the only people
reporting on this. We wanted to broaden this thing and end the
damned ban.
DZ: Did you ever get in trouble with
players when you would take those quotes and put them in big
print on the sports' page?
LR: I was sensitive to the players. I
made sure they knew who they were talking to. If they wanted
to be a little reticent with me, fine, but we were citizens of
the press box and I carried the magic card, the Baseball Writers'
Association card. But the campaign evolved step by step and it
became a many sided thing. The interviews were very meaningful
when white players like Johnny Vander Meer or Bucky Walters,
said "I don't see why they shouldn't play." That shot
down the myth the owners would repeat that white players would
never stand for it. It was a long haul, but it spread out among
sports writers of conscience especially when the World War II
began. Here were black guys dying for their country and they
wouldn't be eligible to play in the national past time. That
sort of accelerated the whole thing. Every story we did had a
purpose, and the Daily Worker was on the desk of every other
newspaper. The Daily Worker had an influence far in excess of
its circulation, partly because a lot of our readership was trade
union people. When May Day came along, the Transport Workers
Union, or Furriers District 65, would march with signs that said
"End Jim Crow in Baseball."
DZ: When Robinson finally broke through
in 1947, how was he treated?
LR: The grief that Jackie took the first
two years when he pledged not to fight back or even to glare
back, young people today can't really grasp. Think of Tiger Woods.
Let's just suppose he's walking along the fairway and the people
in the stands are screaming racial epithets at him and vile things
to the white players about him. He knows that some of the white
players on the tour have banded together with a petition to bar
him, and when he gets to the putting green somebody throws out
a big black cat in front of him, which happened to Jackie in
Philadelphia. You've got to imagine all that plus the physical
thing. Jackie was hit by more pitches by far than anybody else
in the league his rookie year. Enos Slaughter veered and came
down on his heel when he was at first base. Lenny Marillo, I
remember, slid into him and jumped on him again. They had immunity;
they knew he wouldn't fight back. So Jackie was suppressing his
very being, his personality. In 1949, his third year, he could
finally emerge as the person he really was. He was an articulate,
aggressive ballplayer, a four-letter star at UCLA, tough and
outspoken. White ballplayers with those qualities like Eddie
Stanky and Leo Durocher, they're called scrappers, the tough
winners. As soon as Jackie emerged as an aggressive ballplayer,
the Sporting News, the baseball bible at that time, called him
"shrill and irritating." The double standard immediately
made itself felt. Some people are thrust into roles in history
that they didn't seek or maybe even comprehend. Jackie was different.
He was a fiercely intelligent man. He knew exactly what he was
doing. Which is why this proud man, after taking this shit for
two years, didn't somewhere along the line say, "This is
too much, the hell with it, I'm out of here." He knew his
role and he accepted it. And the Black players who followed him
knew what he meant too. Joe Morgan, the announcer and hall of
fame second baseman, was on the field for an old-timers' occasion
at Yankee Stadium. Jackie was at that time gray and his eyesight
was going. Joe had never met Jackie so he ran after him as he
was being lead off the field and he came back and his wife asked
him, "What did you tell him," and Joe said, "I
just said thank you."
DZ: Jackie Robinson spoke critically
of Paul Robeson in front of the House of Un-American Activities
Committee. What are your reflections on that?
LR: He changed his mind about that in
later years. I'm one of the few people who ever read the full
transcript of what Jackie said in Washington. Only a small percentage
of it was about Paul Robeson. He was asked if Robeson was right
that Black soldiers would never fight against the Soviet Union.
Jackie said in effect, "That's silly and no one person can
speak for all Negroes." But then Jackie went on to begin
attacking segregation in the United States, and they were very
uneasy with him on that. A few years later when he began to look
back, to revisit his HUAC appearance, he told the sportswriter
Roger Kahn, "If I had that to do all over again I would
have never in a million years, knowing what I know now, gone
down to the House Committee to speak anything against Paul Robeson."
He said, "Sure we had our disagreements, but our agreements
were much greater. We were both Black men in a racist society."
DZ: Were you and Robinson friendly?
LR: We got along professionally. I interviewed
him often. [Dodgers General Manager] Branch Rickey was a sophisticated
anti-communist, and he obviously passed down the word that Jackie
should realize not to get too close to the Communist press.
So what does "too close" mean? If I walked up to him
at the batting cage before a game and said "Jackie, last
night you hit that double off Warren Spahn" and he'd talk
to me just like anyone. He wasn't cordial with me like [African-American
Hall of Fame Dodgers catcher] Roy Campanella was. I got a tip
that he and Campanella were up at the Harlem Y, spending time
with the kids there. So I went up there and had a wonderful interview
with both of them. Sports writers sometimes say that Campanella
and Robinson didn't get along because Campanella wasn't militant
enough. That is such nonsense. Campanella knocked around the
Negro Leagues, had to eat in the back of the restaurants and
had to get on the bus without taking a shower and play in another
game. He certainly knew what Jim Crow was.
DZ: In your book Press Box Red, you
talk about the exhibition games the Robinson-era Dodgers played
in the south. Do you think that had an effect on the civil rights
movement?
LR: There was a game in Atlanta I describe
in the book. It wound up with the Black fans being allowed in
because they had overflowed the segregated stands, they had poured
in from outlying districts to see the first integrated game in
Georgia history. The Klan had said, "This must not happen."
That night there was this tremendous sight of Robinson, [Dodgers
African-American pitcher] Don Newcombe and Campanella coming
out and the Black fans behind the ropes and in the stands standing
and roaring their greeting. A large sector of whites were just
sitting and booing. Then other white people, hesitantly at first,
stood up and consciously differentiated themselves from the booers
and clapped. This was an amazing spectacle. This was the Deep
South many years before the words civil rights were known. So
it had its impact. People used to say "never in Shreveport,"
"never in Mobile," "never in New Orleans"
but it did and the Atlanta scene happened everywhere black and
white took the field that year. I went on the first road trip
with the Dodgers. I remember in Chicago amazing things used to
happen in the stands. Like a white guy would say to a black guy
like, "Hey! You're rooting for the visiting team? You're
from Chicago aren't you? You should root for the Cubs!"
The black guy would say: "Hey! What are you asking me? You
see this color? Our Cubs won't let anybody with this kind of
skin play, and you're asking me to root against a team that broke
the damned ban, and is mixed!" Roy Campanella, once said
to me, "Without the Brooklyn Dodgers you don't have Brown
vs. Board of Education." I laughed, I thought he was joking
but he was stubborn. He said, "All I know is we were the
first ones on the trains, we were the first ones down south not
to go around the back of the restaurant, first ones in the hotels."
He said, "We were like the teachers of the whole thing."
DZ: How did this affect the white
players on the Dodgers?
LO: [White Dodgers Outfielder] Pete Reiser,
when he was seeing what was happening to Robinson said, "Well,
democracy means that every is equal so that means we should treat
everybody equal." Pee Wee Reese, the captain, he took it
a layer deeper and said, "Well that's true, but Jackie is
catching special hell because he's the only black player. Maybe
we ought to do something to make it more equal." And that
is an amazing thing to say 37 years before the words affirmative
action were ever uttered. Reese was from Louisville, Kentucky
and he was conflicted at first when he heard that they were having
a black player, but he was a decent person, and the abstraction
wears away after a while. (White Dodgers Outfielder] Carl Furillo
is the most dramatic example I ever saw of how someone could
change.
DZ: You witnessed Furillo's transformation
first hand, didn't you?
LR: You have no idea what that meant
to me, having heard him say "I ain't gonna play with no
niggers," initially. Then in 1955 when they finally beat
the Yankees in the World Series and had a big celebration party
in the old Brooklyn Hotel lobby, when Jackie and [his wife] Rachel
came in, Furillo jumped out of his chair like he got an electric
prod. He was the first one hugging Jackie, their cheeks pressed
together, saying, "We did it! We did it!" You tell
that to a kid today, they say, "What's the big deal?"
Today we see players in the NBA hugging, but then it was meaningful.
That's what sports can do. Historically when the 'powers that
be' clamped the Jim Crow ban on baseball, which was by far the
national past time by the turn of the century, and fought like
hell to keep it there for another fifty years, the breaking down
of these walls were one of the things they were worried about.
It sounds to some people a bit stretchy, but they knew that baseball
was that meaningful.
DZ: You were at the famous game when
Reese put his arm around Jackie. That was such a historic moment.
Were you shocked when you saw Reese do that?
LR: I was thrilled, but I wasn't totally
shocked because I had already seen Reese evolving as of that
incident. It was just a wonderful thing to do. And Cincinnati
fans were shouting such vile things and nobody was stopping them.
But by the middle of Jackie's second year in 1948, it stopped.
You began to get the feeling that the racists were in the minority,
and they may still be racist to the core but at least their mouth
was shut! And you never heard that again. On an official level
the racism continued. Before the 1950 season, Ford Frick who
was now the president of the American League, issued a warning
about sliding roughly into bases and he only mentioned one name
in particular: Jackie Robinson. That's what he went through,
a double standard.
DZ: Please talk about Satchel Paige.
LR: Satchel Paige is an American tragedy.
He was arguably the best pitcher this country has produced, or
one of the top three, and in his prime he was playing in the
Negro Leagues. Some people still say, "Well maybe he wanted
to stay with his own." I shot that down with an interview
I did with him in which he challenged Major League Baseball to
give him a try-out. He was twenty nine at the time and I told
him, "Satch, Dazzy Vance is in the Hall of Fame and he didn't
reach his peak until he was thirty-four." He said, "Okay,
well I'll surely be in there by then." Thirteen more years
went by and he was a forty-two year old rookie. America's gotten
off the hook pretty lightly on this. Josh Gibson was the greatest
catcher who ever put on a uniform. If you want to say Johnny
Bench was the greatest catcher you ever saw, Gibson was at least
as good as Bench defensively. And at bat he was nothing less
than a right-handed hitting Babe Ruth. That's how good he was.
In any ballpark they played in they have places where Josh Gibson
hit it out, and it measures 480 feet. That's how good he was.
He became embittered and was over the hill and began drinking.
It came too late for him. That kind of tragedy was for him more
than Satchel because Satchel at least got a chance to make a
cameo appearance and show the world how good he would have been.
DZ: Did you ever get a chance to engage
Satchel politically?
LR: I didn't have to engage him. He was
bitter and political without any help from me. He actually wanted
me - the guy from the Daily Worker! - to do his biography but
was talked out of it by his agent.
DZ: Would you have jumped at that?
LR: Oh yes, and I would have done a good
job. Although these players were embittered, they had fun, they
enjoyed it, and like any oppressed people they had their own
spirit. That doesn't mean that they wanted to be playing in Podunk,
and that they didn't want to be center stage of the national
past time and making that kind of money. I am highlighting Satchel
Paige and Josh Gibson, but there were any number of players.
[African-American Sportswriter] Wendell Smith estimated that
the Homestead Grays, the Black team in Pittsburgh around 1939,
had six players in particular of potential All-Star, Big League
quality.
DZ: Last question. What are your reflections
now on Jackie Robinson and his impact?
LR: I gave a speech in 1997 at a forum
about the 50th anniversary of his debut. At this forum I said,
"There are very few people of whom you can say with certainty
that they made this a somewhat better country. Without doubt
you can say that about Jackie Robinson." Then I said, and
this brought me an ovation and was featured in the New York Times
the next day, "His legacy was not, 'Hooray, we did it,'
but 'Buddy, there's still unfinished work out there.'" He
was a continuing militant, and that's why the Dodgers never considered
this brilliant baseball man, who would have made a wonderful
manager or coach. It's because he was outspoken and unafraid.
That's the kind of person he was. In fact the first time he was
asked to play at an Old Timer's Game at Yankee Stadium, he said
"I must sorrowfully refuse until I see more progress being
made off the playing field on the coaching lines and in the managerial
departments." He made people uncomfortable. In fact it was
that very quality which made him something special. He always
made you feel that "Buddy, there's still unfinished work
out there."
Dave Zirin
is the News Editor of the Prince George's Post in Prince George's
County Maryland. He can be reached at editor@pgpost.com.
His sports writing can be read at www.edgeofsports.com.
Weekend
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