How sports writer Wendell Smith helped Jackie Robinson break baseball's color barrier 75 years ago
Smith chronicled Robinson's rise to the bigs for The Pittsburgh Courier
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6 min read
In the opening scene from the biopic "42," sports writer Wendell Smith sits in front of a manual typewriter and bangs the keyboard. Against his click, clack, click in the background, a narrator booms the words Smith writes.
"Baseball was proof positive that democracy was real," the narrator says. "A baseball box score, after all, is a democratic thing. It doesn't say how big you are or what religion you follow.
"It does not know how you voted or the color of your skin. It simply states what kind of ballplayer you were on any particular day."
The biopic isn't about Smith; it's the story of Jackie Robinson, the Black man who took the field April 15, 1947, for the Brooklyn Dodgers and crashed baseball's color barrier on this day 75 years ago. Yet neither Hollywood nor historians can tell the Robinson story without making Smith, a sports columnist for The Pittsburgh Courier, a central figure in its narrative.
If any person had a role in helping Robinson integrate Major League Baseball, Smith was that person.
Based on archival material his wife Wyonella donated to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997, Smith's role is spelled out in black ink on the white pages of The Courier, then the largest Black newspaper in America. Those columns and letters in Cooperstown establish Smith as a confidante, a counselor and a traveling companion to Robinson from October, 23, 1945, when he signed a minor-league contract with the Dodgers.
Smith never doubted the "grand experiment," as historian Jules Tygiel called it, would work. For almost a decade, he had led a cadre of Black sportswriters in a campaign to desegregate the Majors.
Exploring integration in a 1939 column for The Courier, Smith shared the sentiments of white ballplayers he interviewed on how Blacks might fare in the bigs. Leo Durocher, a baseball lifer, put it best when he told Smith: "I've seen plenty of colored boys who could make the grade in the Majors. Hell, I've seen a million!"
The bespectacled Smith said the national pastime didn't need to see a million "colored boys." It first needed to see one -- the right one.
In letters and conversations with Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, Smith offered various names for Rickey -- long interested in looking at Black talent -- to consider.
Smith made the picking easy. He was convinced that a ballplayer with a me-first bent -- he singled out Satchel Paige -- would hinder the integration effort instead of ensuring its success, so he recommended the Dodgers sign Robinson, an Army veteran with a college education.
"When I said, 'Jackie Robinson,'" Smith was quoted as saying in a 1997 article in the Chicago Tribune, "Mr. Rickey raised his bushy eyebrows and he said, 'Jackie Robinson! I knew he was an All-American football player and an All-American basketball player. But I didn't know he was a baseball player.'"
"He's quite a baseball player," Smith told him.
Three months after the Dodgers signed Robinson, Smith wrote Rickey: "It is, of course, interesting to note that you still have a very deep interest in following up on the history-making initiative when you undertook last fall. I am most happy to feel that you are relying on my newspaper and me, personally, for cooperation in trying to accomplish this great move for practical democracy in the most amiable and diplomatic manner possible."
Through it all, Smith understood the task ahead. Robinson would not find it easy to fit seamlessly into an all-white world. He would endure slights and taunts. He would be alone for most of this.
In a Feb. 4, 1947, letter, part of the material the Hall of Fame has in its archives, Smith wrote to Robinson, "You should not worry about the plans they have for you. As I see it you are definitely going to get a chance. All you have to do is keep a cool head, play the kind of ball you are capable of playing and don't worry about anything else. ... I don't see how you can miss."
Smith proved prophetic.
In April of 1947, a date in American history that smells as fresh now as it did 75 years ago, a crowd of 26,623 fans came to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers open the season and to watch Robinson.
Newspapers large and small covered the opener. In a ho-hum game of baseball, Robinson went hitless in three at-bats.
Gayle Talbot of The Associated Press wrote this afterward: "If Jackie Robinson felt his nerves jumping or was even conscious that he was about to take part in a momentous baseball event, he kept his feeling remarkably well concealed."
Talbot echoed what others said about the game. Everyone there knew the game was bigger than Robinson's 0-3 statistics in the box score. They were seeing history unfold. White men like Talbot were going to write about it.
So was Smith, who had seen his work behind the scenes pay off in front of white team owners, white general managers, the white press and, most of all, white fans. Sitting in a New York City hotel, Robinson told Smith how pleased he was with how fans reacted to him. Robinson showed Smith a pile of handwritten letters and telegrams that he had received. Smith used snippets of them in his April 26, 1947, column "The Sports Beat."
One letter, signed "WHITE BOY," came from Portland, Oregon, and it read: "Hi, Black Boy! Glad to read you arrived. Had a good idea that you had the stuff and would make the grade. You are a credit to your race -- the human race, son. Very glad to see you in the big leagues."
In another letter, a woman named Maud Hawkins told Robinson: "Cried tears of joy when I saw you standing at the Dodgers' club house. May God bless you."
At season's end, Dodgers fans had been blessed. So had white sportswriters, although Smith thought them ambivalent about Robinson and integration. They had watched segregation in baseball unravel, a moment more than 50 years in the making.
Smith loosened the last threads.
"Everywhere we went, Wendell Smith was there," said Brooklyn right-hander Don Newcombe, a former Negro Leaguer who followed Robinson to the bigs in May 1949. "He was instrumental in so many things that happened."
Wendell Smith, too, was an American hero. The behind-the-scenes architect of Robinson's breaking the color barrier, Smith continued to write commentary until his death Nov. 26, 1972. He was the right journalist at the right time, the optimist who could see what perhaps nobody else could: a change in American attitudes. Maybe Smith was more a pragmatist than anything else.
As he and Robinson rolled through the 1947 season, Smith watched and wrote about how the anti-Robinson crowd gave way to baseball fans who just wanted to see a great player play.
Both saw how teammates warmed to the rookie. After a difficult series in Pittsburgh, Robinson and the Dodgers headed to Wrigley Field in Chicago. Smith was on the train with them. In his last item in his May 31 column, he interviewed Brooklyn coach Clyde Sukeforth, who said he sensed a "new attitude" among fellow Dodgers toward Robinson.
"The guys on the team are all for him," Sukeforth told Smith. "You could see that by the way they acted when he got hit. Yes, sir, Mr. Jackie Robinson's going to be all right."
Smith followed Sukeforth's quote with this line: "I think he is, too!"
Justice B. Hill, a former senior writer with MLB.com, practiced sports journalism for more than 25 years before settling into a teaching gig at Ohio University. He quit May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He continues to do both.
