SAM LACY AND WENDELL SMITH

Dawkins presents a dual biography of two desegregation heroes.

In this new entry in Routledge’s Historical Americans series, the author tells the life stories of Sam Lacy and Wendell Smith, from their childhoods and early years through their careers as baseball journalists for Black-owned ventures (Lacy for Baltimore’s Afro-American and Smith for the Pittsburgh Courier) to the very different ends of their lives: Smith only lived until his 50s and died in 1972 (Chicago mayor Richard Daley paid his respects: “We have lost a great citizen, who was interested in the city and most of all the city’s children”), whereas Lacy lived into his 90s and eventually moved to writing for the white-majority-owned Chicago American. As Dawkins notes, however, they shared the same journalistic mission: “To reason, ridicule, and report to owners and the commissioner that Black ballplayers deserved to compete on Major League Baseball teams.” The author fleshes out the tense racial politics of the 1930s and ’40s in densely documented pages (the book has extensive notes and a bibliography) and fills his narrative with many notable personalities of the period, from Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the adamantly pro-segregation baseball commissioner, to his successor, former United States senator A.B. Chandler, who ended the unofficial ban on Blacks playing professional ball. And, of course, the narrative returns frequently to the iconic figure of Jackie Robinson, who was often caught up in the intricacies of standing against the institutional racism of the sport he loved. Robinson is by far the book’s most three-dimensional character, but Dawkins also excels at bringing his two main subjects to life, skillfully distilling the bite and acerbity of their writings and capturing their voices (when a manager said of a former Negro League pitcher, “Johnny’s not ready yet,” Lacy responded, “Certainly he can’t get ready riding the bench”). Much like its subjects, the book strikes a fine balance between baseball and civil rights.

A biographical look at a pivotal period in the racial history of baseball.