Lester Rodney

Lester Rodney
Lester Rodney, September 2007, photograph by Byron LaGoy
Born	(1911-04-17)April 17, 1911 Manhattan, New York, United States
Died	December 20, 2009(2009-12-20) (aged 98) Walnut Creek, California
Occupation	Journalist

Lester Rodney (April 17, 1911 – December 20, 2009) was an American journalist who helped break down the color barrier in baseball as sports writer for the Daily Worker.

Rodney was born in Manhattan, New York City, the third of four children of Isabel Cotton and Max Rodney. The Rodneys moved from the Bronx to Brooklyn when Lester was 6, where his lifelong love of the Dodgers developed. Rodney’s father lost his business, and then the family home, in the 1929 stock market crash that began the Great Depression, an era in which communism and other radical social philosophies captured the attention of the intelligentsia. Rodney earned a partial track scholarship to Syracuse University, but his family could not afford the other half of his tuition so he did not complete his formal education. To supplement the family income, he took odd jobs, including helping his attorney brother-in-law and chauffeuring rich children to school.

Rodney's favorite jobs though involved sports, and in 1936 he parlayed his high school background in sportswriting into a job with the Daily Worker and its Sunday edition, the Sunday Worker, the party organ of the Communist Party USA, or CPUSA. There Rodney was able to combine sports journalism with his developing sense of social justice, to champion social issues, most notably the desegregation of major league baseball. Many American Jews felt as persecuted as African Americans, and it was not a stretch for a young Jewish intellectual to see the contradiction of the fight against Hitler's bigotry and the continued oppression of black people in the United States. Rodney was given wide discretion in his sportswriting, permitted to criticize baseball, America, and Hitler in order to prove his point that some African American ballplayers were equal to white major leaguers. He leveled much of this criticism at Branch Rickey, the general manager of his beloved Dodgers.