THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 12, 1996 TAG: 9603120001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By CHRIS LAMB
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
Jackie Robinson integrated baseball a half-century ago, during the spring training of 1946. Rarely, if ever, has a sports story in this country had such ramifications for society at large. Yet the story failed to capture the interest of the nation's press. Only in African-American newspapers did it get the attention and context it deserved.
The point is not without relevance today. The mainstream media are criticized, and with good reason, for marginalizing stories on African Americans. What's true today was truer in Robinson's day, when racism was more overt and more grotesque.
Baseball wasn't just the first sport to become integrated; it was one of the first institutions in the country to do so. This was eight years before the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education.
And yet most of the country read little about the progress of Robinson, who was trying out with the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers' AAA team. There were few interviews with Robinson in the mainstream dailies, little about the burden he was carrying, and little about the unseemly episodes when cities refused to let him play.
In the black press, however, sportswriters such as Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American, Joe Bostic of The People's Voice, Fay Young of the Chicago Defender, and Lem Graves Jr. of the Norfolk Journal and Guide poignantly recognized the story was bigger than a ballplayer trying out for a minor-league team. It was a story about hope.
When Montreal announced it had signed Robinson on Oct. 23, 1945, Smith called it ``the most American and democratic step baseball has made in 25 years.'' And after the first few days of spring training in Daytona Beach, Fla., in March 1946, Lacy wrote: ``It is easy to see why I felt a lump in my throat each time a ball was hit in his direction those first few days; why I experienced a sort of emptiness whenever he took a swing in batting practice.''
Segregation laws prevented Robinson from playing in every city that spring, but one - Daytona Beach. When Richmond canceled a game with Montreal rather than allow Robinson to play, the Journal and Guide published a cartoon of a Confederate flag flying high above the Richmond ballpark. Graves praised Montreal for supporting Robinson: ``This positive stand for tolerance by the Montreal club and the Brooklyn Dodgers should be commended by all fair-minded sports fans, of all races.''
Today's press is criticized for telling us more than we want to know, yet it often fails to give stories a larger context. Fifty years ago, the press told us less than we wanted to know and less than we needed to know. Only in the black press did readers learn the importance of what was happening. MEMO: Chris Lamb is an assistant professor of journalism at Old Dominion
University in Norfolk.
by CNB