Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball

This book explores how the campaign to desegregate baseball was one of the most important civil rights stories of the 1930s and 1940s, and how Black and white newspapers, and Black and white America, viewed racial equality. It reveals how Rickeys move came after more than a decade of work by Black and left-leaning journalists to desegregate the game.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 416 pages
Publication date: 01 October 2021
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

The campaign to desegregate baseball was a significant civil rights struggle that took place in the 1930s and 1940s, yet it received little attention from mainstream newspapers. This book reveals how Branch Rickey's signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945 was just the culmination of over a decade of work by Black and left-leaning journalists to end the color barrier in the sport. Chris Lamb's research, which includes hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews with journalists, sheds light on how Black and white newspapers and Americans viewed racial equality during this time. Black newspapers and the communist Daily Worker published numerous articles and editorials advocating for the end of baseball's color line, while white mainstream sportswriters perpetuated the color line through a "conspiracy of silence." The efforts of the alternative presses to desegregate baseball, documented in Conspiracy of Silence, are one of the great untold stories of baseball and the civil rights movement.

Weight: 634g
Dimension: 211 x 229 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496229373