Sam Lacy

By James Floto

On an April afternoon one year in the 1930s, an elderly black gentleman stood amidst a mostly white crowd to cheer on the parading Washington Senators as they headed from hotel to ballpark for Opening Day celebrations. In those days before TV, the annual Opening Day Parade, held in all big league cities, was one of he few ways doting fans could see their heroes up close.

The old man had been attending Washington games and following the club for decades. The 79-year-old was the scion of a remarkable family. His had been the first black detective on the D.C. police force. Before retiring, the old man himself had been a researcher of a key Washington law firm. Now days, with a plethora of African American judges and attorneys, it might be difficult to understand what an honor such a position was back in the early years of the century, or how it was to come by.

Which made even more painful for him the indignity he suffered, along all all black fans, of having to sit in the segregated right field bleachers, the area designated by Senators' owner Clark Griffith for his African American patrons. Nevertheless, the man followed the club through its prolonged dry spells and cheered as loudly as any white fan on the rare occasions when they hit paydirt, like winning the American League pennants of 1924 and '25. He even kept a scrapbook of important events in Senators' history.

There he was, then, on the sidewalk, cheering his team on, when a Senator player with venom in his heart and fire in his eyes came up and spit directly in the old man's face.

Sam Lacy will not reveal the name of the sickening Senator, indicating it is probably a name we would be familiar with. Sam, now himself in his late 90s, does reveal that his father, who lived seven more years after the indignity, never attended another baseball game.

This story contains many parallels with Sam's own career as one of the finest sportswriters of all-time. It reflects the glory (the peak of which was his central role in covering the breaking Jackie Robinson story), the humiliation (although the majority of white sportswriters accepted Sam, one Tom Swope, head of the Cincinnati branch of the Baseball Writers' Association, had him barred from the press box at old Crosley Field, not the first time Lacy had faced Jim Crow attitudes as a sportswriter) and the dedication (more than six decades of fighting the good fight with his typewriter, most of it for the same newspaper, the Afro American of Baltimore.)

Lacy grew up a Senator fan and as a teenager he shagged flies in Griffith Stadium for the likes of Goose Goslin, Joe Judge, Clyde Milan, and Walter Johnson. A three sport star in high school, he played some semi-pro black ball against barnstorming Negro League teams and actually played against future Hall of Famers Oscar Charleston and Martin Dihigo, as well as Biz Mackey, who was to be Roy Campanella's mentor. Thus Lacy was in an almost unique position, as an athlete and then a sportswriter, to judge both sides of the divided world of U.S. baseball.

Although it took awhile for the seed to sprout, by the 1930s Lacy became convinced that organized baseball could be integrated. "I felt that not only were blacks being deprived of the opportunity to make some money, but that whits were being deprived of the opportunity to see these fellows perform. I could see that both of them were being cheated."

By then, with the white world jumping to jazz and cheering for Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Germany, Lacy perceived a slight crack in the heavy, tightly closed door of racial equality. In 1938 he brought a suggestion to Griffith, who had a history of hiring light-skinned Cubans to his ballclub. Lacy suggested that Griffith integrate his woeful club to improve their performance. Griffith often rented his park to Negro League clubs when the Senators were on the road, so he had seen Josh Gibson and the other great black stars of the day. Griffith told Lacy that if he hired blacks, the Negro Leagues would be destroyed. That, of course, is what happened when the majors were integrated. But Lacy wasn't buying it. "The Negro Leagues were a symbol of segregation. The black leagues were by definition separate and unequal."

Furthermore, with reactionary Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis sitting in the Commissioner's chair, there was no push from above to integrate the game. Landis, who took the job in 1920 in the wake of the Black Sox scandal, died just as World War Two was winding down and in April of 1945 was replaced by a Southerner, Happy Chandler, U.S. Senator from Kentucky. Naturally, the conservative baseball establishment (with the important exception of Branch Rickey) didn't worry about Chandler pushing integration.

In one of those strange, wonderful twists of history, they were mistaken. Soon after his tenure began, Chandler announced, "I don't believe in barring Negroes from baseball just because they are Negroes." On October 23, Jackie Robinson signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers' Triple A club in Montreal. Lacy was assigned by the Afro American to cover Robinson.

It would be pleasing to report that things went smoothly for Lacy following Jackie's signing, but he went through a lot of the same torment that the great ballplayer went through. Black players and writers had often stayed together at black boarding houses, especially in the South, while the white players stayed in first class hotels.

Before an exhibition game in Macon, Georgia, a cross was burned on the lawn of one such boarding house, in which Lacy was staying. There was the aforementioned incident at Crosley, as well as the refusal of some unctuous underling at Yankee Stadium to allow him into the press box to cover the 1947 World Series, even though he had valid press credentials. Fortunately, New York sportswriter Milton Richman happened along and chewed out the lout and persuaded him, however reluctantly, to admit Lacy into the pressbox.

In New Orleans one spring for an exhibition game, Lacy was again banned from the press box and was forced, in tears, to climb atop the dugout with his typewriter to report from there. This time a bevy of white reporters, expressing their solidarity, climbed on the dugout roof with him. Lacy asked them what they were doing, and one crusty sportswriter said, "Working on our tans, Sam." Lacy appreciated the ruse, but saw through it, "They already had tans. They'd been in Florida for a month." The irony of the incident was a group of white people consciously darkening their skins while other white folks wouldn't let those with naturally dark skin enjoy equal accommodations.

Lacy endured, always reporting on Jackie and the other early black major leaguers who followed him. He never reported on his own considerable trials and tribulations.

Another significant accomplishment occurred in the late 1950s while the Giants were still a New York ballclub. Despite their star status, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks and Frank Robinson, like all other black players, had to spend spring training, whether in Florida or Arizona, in some accommodating black family's home, while white players, many of them scrubs who wouldn't survive the first cut, stayed in first class hotels. (Black Dodgers like Robinson, Campanella and Don Newcombe didn't have to endure this because the Dodgers had the foresight to create Dodgertown at Vero Beach so all the players could stay together.) Sam pointed out this discrepancy to Giants' general manager Chub Feeney, who responded with, "You're right, Sam." Within the week, Mays, Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson were staying with the rest of the Giants. The door of equality was further, thanks once again to Sam Lacy. Unfortunately, it took most clubs much longer to catch on--as late as the 1960s Aaron and Banks were still staying with black families during spring training.

Sam Lacy continued to fight right on through the 1980s, climbing the 36 steps to his office at the Afro American when he was well into his eighties. He applauded the hiring of Frank Robinson as the first black manager in the American League, then with the Giants in the NL and finally as assistant GM of the Orioles. He was also gratified that Bill White was the National League's first black president, still as high as any African American official has climbed on the Major League ladder. He was especially glad to see black salaries reach parity with white players with the coming of free agency. He ruefully recalled the early 1960s, when Bob Gibson asked Cardinal management for a raise because he wanted to buy a new house in an integrated neighborhood, but was told that black players didn't need to make as much money as whites because their material needs were less!

Even as late as 1995, when this reporter briefly spoke to Lacy on the phone, when there were about half a dozen black mangers but still very few African Americans in front office positions, Mr. Lacy said, "We have come a long way, but there is still a long way to go."