Rodney, Lester

RODNEY, LESTER (1911-1998). Famed as a sports writer for the Daily Worker, Lester Rodney was born in Manhattan, later moved to the Bronx with his family and onward to Brooklyn for most of his childhood. His businessman father was bankrupted by the stock market crash of 1929, and after Rodney gained admission to Syracuse University on a track scholarship, the family could not afford for him to continue. Drawn toward the Left as teen, and formerly a writer for his high school paper, Rodney turned to the Daily Worker for a job.

Rodney eagerly took on the paper’s sports column, and arguably was the first Left writer in the United States to understand sports and athletes sympathetically, through a leftwing grasp of politics. By 1936, he had become sports editor for the Daily Worker. There, his writing attracted wide attention, especially from readers, but not quite as much admiration from the Daily Worker editors who tended to regard sports as an escape from the class struggle.

In the same years that C.L.R. James wrote on cricket for the Manchester Guardian, Rodney urged the watching of sports as an appreciation of a unique art form. If James devoted energies in later decades to promoting the role of nonwhites in every avenue of cricket, Rodney gained his greatest fame in the struggle to integrate baseball’s major leagues. Thanks largely to Rodney’s urgings and reader responses, the campaign was integrated into the Party’s antiracist work of the 1930s-1940s. As Rodney said in 2004, “I spoke to the leaders of the YCL [Young Communist League]. We talked about circulating the paper [at ballparks]. It just evolved as we talked about the color line and some kids in the YCL suggested, ‘why don't we go into the ball parks, to Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds, with petitions.’ We wound up with at least half a million signatures that we delivered straight to the desk of [baseball commissioner] Judge Landis.”

“Red” Rodney was a favorite of boxing champ Joe Louis and the outstanding journalist to cover the famous fight at Yankee Stadium between the “brown bomber” and Hitler’s favorite, Max Schmeling. He also one of the first to write about a young Negro League prospect named Jackie Robinson. There were, as he recalled, no official challenges to the racial barriers in baseball, no discussions of Negro League superstars Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, players Rodney covered in Negro League activity even as he urged the integration of the majors. His work in helping to bring about the integration of Brooklyn’s beloved Dodgers would be among his proudest accomplishments.

After service in the Pacific during World War II, Rodney returned to the Daily Worker, where he devoted his energies until 1956. Joining the rebellious faction of the Communist Party gathered around John Gates, Rodney quit the paper and looked for a journalistic career elsewhere. He landed a job in 1958 as religious editor at a daily in Long Beach, California. A standout among senior citizen tennis players, he moved to Walnut Creek in his final years.

Buhle, Paul. “Lester Rodney,” Oral History Interview, UCLA, 1982, housed at New York University, Tamiment Library and available on Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/user-488941364/sets/lester-rodney

Silber, Irwin. Press Box Red: Lester Rodney. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.