copyright National Baseball Hall of Fame

One of Wendell Smith’s first encounters with racial prejudice came as a high school senior in his hometown of Detroit, Mich., playing American Legion baseball. Smith pitched his team to a 1-0 playoff victory. After the game Wish Egan, one of the Detroit Tigers’ top scouts, signed Smith’s catcher, Mike Tresh, who would play sixteen seasons in big league baseball. Egan signed the losing pitcher, as well, and told Smith he would sign him, too, if only he could. But Smith was black, and major league baseball barred black players. Smith dedicated himself that day to doing “something on behalf of the Negro ballplayers.”[1]

True to his word, after college Smith became a crusading black press journalist described by contemporaries as one of the very best of his time.[2] His career began at the Pittsburgh Courier in 1937 and continued at the Chicago American as its first black sports columnist, the Chicago Sun-Times, and finally as the sports anchor at WGN-TV.[3] Yet few outside of baseball scholarship have ever heard of him. When the literature refers to Smith, it mentions him as the man who recommended Jackie Robinson to Branch Rickey as the Negro League player best suited to break pro baseball’s color barrier.[4] Smith’s ten years laboring to bring down baseball’s color barrier have been overshadowed by Rickey’s bold stroke. Almost completely ignored has been the sportswriter’s largely successful campaign four decades ago to both raise awareness about the conditions under which black players annually were forced to spend spring training and to promote change of those conditions. His 23 January 1961 article in the Chicago American was hailed by future baseball hall-of-famer and Cub shortstop Ernie Banks, who told Smith, “I am sure I am speaking for every Negro player in the big leagues when I say we are very grateful to the Chicago American for bringing this situation to the attention of the American public.”[5] Banks also praised the tenor and dignity of Smith’s 23 January story. In the same article, Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League when he broke in with Bill Veeck’s Cleveland Indians late in the 1947 season,[6] saluted the campaign “started by the Chicago American to secure equal treatment for Negro big leaguers in the South.”

This paper begins an effort to correct the oversight by examining the very deliberate campaign waged throughout 1961 by Smith and the Chicago American to ensure equality for white and black players during big league baseball’s annual spring training season. On the field, 1961 was a glittering year.[7] Off the field, as it was for the country in general, the year proved a  turbulent one in the area of race relations.[8] In analyzing how inequities between black and white ballplayers during spring were addressed by Smith and the Chicago American, a perspective can be gained on what conditions were like fourteen seasons after Robinson broke into major league baseball.[9] Smith’s approach was consistent with that of Martin Luther King, Jr., in its tone, dignity, and first-hand experience with the conditions being challenged. Though Smith is due credit for the spring training campaign, which, according to one columnist, was hugely successful,[10] that credit has for the most part eluded him. An important chapter in the histories of the black press, baseball, the South, and Smith himself, therefore, has not previously been written. Preliminary findings about that period are presented here.

For baseball and for the nation, 1961 began with a debate over race relations and Jim Crow policies in the South. A front page story in the 23 January 1961 edition of the Chicago American newspaper punctured the picture of racial tranquility in pro baseball, a sport that had been integrated since Opening Day of the season Jackie Robinson led the Brooklyn Dodgers to the World Series in 1947. In the article, which was tagged, “Spring Training Woes,” Smith revealed to the nation the “growing feeling of resentment” among black players who continued to suffer “embarrassment, humiliation, and even indignities” during the six weeks of spring training in Florida.[11] Each spring star players such as Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, and Minnie Minoso were segregated from their white teammates, forced to sleep, eat, and recreate in separate and largely inferior facilities. White players, in contrast, were put up in some of south Florida’s finest hotels, such as St. Petersburg’s Soreno and Vinoy Park, and the Sarasota Terrace in Sarasota.

By 1961, the black players had had enough. Smith, who already had played a crucial role in the integration of baseball, continued his career-long fight against racial discrimination by giving black players a voice. Three years before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to abolish legal segregation, Smith’s campaign encouraged strides by baseball to erase the barriers of segregation during spring. Again, baseball was leading the way toward a more racially integrated society. For example, in 1946, baseball’s integration preceded by eight years the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision on 17 May 1954 outlawing segregation in public education.[12] The integration of baseball in 1946 and 1947, as Lamb and Bona wrote, happened when it did, why it did, and how it did for several reasons, including the efforts of black sportswriters.[13] In some instances, integrating spring training occurred in part as the result of efforts by activists in Florida’s communities, most notably St. Petersburg.

Smitty’s first crusade, 1937-1945

In 1939, with the world at war, Smith compared the treatment of blacks in the United States with that of Jews in Nazi Germany. He reacted in particular to the hypocritical exclusion of blacks from baseball, which was held up as a great paradigm of democracy, American moxie, and fair play. He pointed out the contradiction of these values, which the government extolled and defended against Nazi oppression, with the reality for black players.[14] When the United States entered the war, Smith reminded all-white major league baseball that it was “perpetuating the very things thousands of Americans [including a disproportionate number of blacks] are overseas fighting to end, namely, racial discrimination and segregation.”[15]

After the war, in the 1940s, Smith met with Commissioner Landis and baseball’s top officials to prod them to articulate their policies on race so they could then be challenged.[16] He polled players and managers about race to keep it a part of the national debate, and to keep pressure on baseball.[17] Smith conducted many interviews, mostly in hotel lobbies, determining where players, managers, and coaches stood on whether blacks should be allowed to play in major league baseball. He found that 75 percent were in favor. Among those interviewed were the Pittsburgh Pirates, New York Giants, and Brooklyn Dodgers, including Dodger manager Leo Durocher, who later, when asked if he’d play Robinson should Rickey sign him, responded, “Would I use him? Hell yes. I’d sleep with him and watch him like a mother watches her newborn baby.”[18]

Smith’s survey had a huge impact. First, many fans, perhaps even a majority, were not even aware of baseball’s color line.[19] Secondly, the results showed that a majority of white athletes supported integration. Third, in finding that white players were in support of integration, the survey erased one of the owners’ main excuses, which was the claim that white players would not tolerate playing with black teammates or against black opponents. Finally, the survey led to support for Smith’s crusade among white sportswriters and columnists, as The Sporting News’ Jerome Holtzman pointed out. The Pittsburgh papers, The Sporting News, and the wire services started running Smith’s stories. Later, influential white sports columnists joined the fight. Jimmy Powers of the New York Daily News, Shirley Povich of the Washington Post, Dave Egan of the Boston Record, and Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror were some of the more prominent Smith allies in the campaign.

Though gentle in person, in print Smith could be scathing and punishing of individuals found to have racist views or, even worse in Smith’s view, to have acted hypocritically. Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators baseball team, was a prominent Smith target in 1943 for his public, unvarnished resistance to desegregation.[20] Effa Manley, owner of the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues, was lacerated by Smith in several 1948 columns for publicly fighting human rights and garnering publicity about her efforts, then, hypocritically preventing her best players from breaking through to the major leagues. Smith called her “the publicity-mad Queen of Newark,” “two-faced,” and said she had “stuck her fine feminine hand” and “raised her monotonous howl” where they did not belong.[21] St. Louis Cardinal great Rogers Hornsby was questioned by Smith in a 1947 column about the former slugger’s suitability to his appointment as manager given his opposition to integration a few years prior.[22]

One of the more effective ways Smith extended his influence was by holding white sportswriters accountable. As Chris Lamb pointed out, for the most part white sportswriters were silent on integration, either ignoring it altogether or stating, as The Sporting News infamously did in 1942, that no good would come from raising the issue.[23] Smith criticized sportswriters in general for “a passive attitude toward the fight for Negro players in the majors . . . They can’t justifiably denounce such a campaign (for integration), so they put their tongues in their cheeks and write something that appears to be in support of the effort.” As an example of the hypocrisy, Smith wrote about a show put on by the New York chapter of the baseball writers’ organization during their annual banquet. Part of the evening’s entertainment was a sketch set in the South. A Negro butler dusts a table, turning slowly to face the audience and revealing a Montreal uniform (Robinson broke the color barrier first by playing for the Montreal Royals in 1946). As Smith describes it, “a character supposed to be Commissioner Chandler appears and after making a speech, claps his hands and calls, `Robbie-eee!’

Butler: `Yassah, Massa. Here Ah is!’
Chandler: `Ah! There you are, Jackie. Jackie, you ole woolly-headed rascal, how long have you been in the family?’
Butler: `Long time Kun’l. Marty long time. Ever since Massa Rickey done bo’t me from de Kansas City Monarchs.’

That is a sample of the stuff the so-called liberal New York baseball writers heaped on their guests in that `burlesque!’ . . . Thus, the next time you read a story in the New York Times, Post, News, Mirror, Journal, Herald-Tribune, or any other `highly regarded’ New York publication, dealing with racial equality in baseball, just remember that it will probably come from the pen of a writer who was a part of that `act.’” [24]

Showing balance, Smith also hailed the white writers when they did take a stand, praising, for example, Dave Egan of the Boston Daily Record. Egan chided baseball’s owners for their discriminatory and economically foolish ways.[25]

Smith and Robinson, 1947-1961

The heroic story of Jackie Robinson becoming big league baseball’s first black player is one of the game’s most familiar. Ironically, most accounts of baseball’s desegregation have paid little attention to the vital role played by Smith, who recommended Robinson to Dodger president and general manager Branch Rickey. Made in a private meeting in Rickey’s office in October 1945, it was in some ways the culmination of more than ten years campaigning for baseball’s integration, mostly in the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier.[26] He also arranged tryouts with pro teams for black players, lobbied team owners, and pleaded the case before the commissioner of baseball, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. It was Smith who championed Robinson’s jump to the big leagues after a batting title and a championship in the minors in Montreal.[27] And it was Smith who was a constant companion to Jackie and his new wife, Rachel, during the player’s tumultuous first season in Brooklyn.[28]

In Robinson’s autobiography, I Never Had It Made, he wrote that he would be “forever indebted to Smith for the recommendation made to Rickey.”[29] Personal letters reflect Smith’s behind-the-scenes, personal support of Robinson.[30] Smith’s reporting and opinion pieces demonstrate the gifted writer’s public support. Put on the payroll by the Dodgers explicitly to ease Robinson’s transition and secure housing in segregated towns,[31] Smith produced a steady diet of newspaper copy supporting Robinson, chronicling his celebrated pro start, and providing historical context, something the mainstream press rarely did.[32] David Wiggins cited both the Courier as proving “most effective in seeing that the game’s racial barrier was finally lifted” and Smith, who “most doggedly fought for the inclusion of Blacks in organized baseball.”[33] And it was the Courier, led by Smith and the paper’s president, Ira Lewis, who had first made public the previously unwritten rule that big league clubs not sign up black players.[34]

In July 1959, fourteen years after Smith arranged a tryout with the Boston Red Sox for Robinson and two other players, the Red Sox became the last team in big league baseball to suit up a black player when Elijah “Pumpsie” Green took the field at Fenway Park.[35] It should not come as a surprise, then, that fourteen years after Robinson took baseball’s center stage by playing with the Dodgers in a World Series, the social norms and racial policies of the South still were largely unchanged. By spring 1961, only the Dodgers had desegregated their spring training facilities, doing that by leasing a former naval station in Vero Beach, Fla., and building their own living quarters.[36] Brooklyn’s Dodgers were the only big league players who could room together, eat together, and train together without running up against local authorities. As one player told the Baltimore Afro-American, the only segregation in Dodgertown existed “by ability, not color.”[37]

By that same spring, Smith was recognized as one of the first sportswriters to expose the segregated lifestyles of big league camps each spring in Florida and Arizona.[38] Smith had established a reputation as a kind of moral and social conscience both for professional baseball and for black Americans. In his first piece for the Pittsburgh Courier, on 14 May 1938, Smith lashed out at blacks for supporting major league baseball while the Negro Leagues were struggling.[39] Black baseball fans threw their money at lily-white baseball, he wrote, which greeted them in return with a figurative “not welcome” sign.[40]

Although Smith has been most completely ignored in popular accounts of the integration of baseball and in histories of the sport in general, he has received better treatment from academic scholarship, thanks mainly to a very small circle of historians – Jules Tygiel, Chris Lamb, Jim Reisler, and David Wiggins. Tygiel stands alone in giving Smith’s career and contributions careful attention. In several books he notes the sportswriter’s campaign against Jim Crow and to integrate baseball, a crusade that began immediately after graduating from West Virginia State College and signing on with the Courier in 1937.[41] Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment is his best known and one of the most celebrated books on Robinson.[42] In it, Tygiel gives a great deal of credit to Smith, Joe Bostic, and Sam Lacy for “informing the American people of the existence and injustice of Jim Crow athletics” while falling victim to it themselves.[43] Lamb and Glen  L. Bleske have focused on the efforts to integrate baseball prior to the 1947 season.[44] Jim Reisler has written more extensively on Smith perhaps than anyone else, but Reisler has been interested mostly in the sportswriter’s coverage of the Negro Leagues.[45] Wiggins, in his valuable book, Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America, devotes a chapter to Smith,[46] but the period of Smith’s career he covers ends in 1945 with Robinson’s signing by the Royals.[47] This paper adds to the literature by examining a key period in the latter part of Smith’s newspaper career.

Though much has been published about the integration of baseball, scant stories have been written about the lingering segregation in the South experienced by professional baseball players each year during spring training. A review of the literature found nothing at all on Smith’s and the Chicago American campaign to create awareness of and spur corrective action on the disparate living conditions afforded white and black ballplayers each spring. In fact, one of the few scholarly works to investigate segregated spring training conditions, a 1992 article by Jack Davis,[48] gave credit for spring training’s desegregation almost entirely to black community leaders, especially in St. Petersburg.

This paper is partly a response to Davis, who describes Smith’s efforts as “joining in the chorus of public denunciations” by quoting a 1 April 1961 Courier article.[49] This characterization is at best unfair since it was Smith’s 23 January 1961 article in the Chicago American that first raised awareness of spring training conditions and, as subsequent Chicago American articles throughout the rest of 1961 claim, significantly contributed to the movement to correct them. Smith has been denied the credit he and, more broadly, the Chicago American and other black newspapers deserve for leading the fight, not merely joining in a chorus.

Elsewhere in Florida, home to thirteen of the eighteen big league clubs,[50] Jim Crow laws, customs, and unwritten policies kept blacks and whites apart. Seating at ball games also was segregated.[51]

Despite calls to action by Smith, Lacy, and others, black players for the most part did not protest Jim Crow practices in the South, and, without complaint from their black players, neither did the ball clubs. Some of the players said they were content just to be in the major leagues. The Giants’ Monte Irvin told Tygiel that black players “wanted to play so badly, that (segregation during spring) didn’t bother us that much.”[52] Additionally, a culture among players discouraged disputes with management for fear of expulsion from baseball.[53] Some southern players had partly grown accustomed to segregation and, therefore, didn’t challenge it, at least not directly.[54]

 It was 1959 before Henry Aaron would complain to Milwaukee Braves management about segregated housing during spring training in Bradenton, Fla. Baseball’s all-time home run hitter called the segregation in the state’s hotels “the hardest thing to break down” because they stuck together, much as the big league clubs had successfully done prior to Rickey and Robinson. [55] The hotels’ owners knew that if one gave in, it would make it very difficult on the others. Aaron’s complaints were heard, but at a cost to the entire team. Rather than tolerate segregated housing in Bradenton during the spring of 1959, the entire team moved to nearby Palmetto for a “two-bit” motel with inferior food.[56] Smith, Aaron, and Jackie Robinson agreed it would require economic pressure to force change, and they believed the clubs had the influence of the millions of dollars spent in Florida each spring.

In an interview with The Sporting News in 1956, Robinson blasted baseball saying that major league teams should lean on the Florida communities to “remedy a lot of the prejudices that surround the game as it’s played below the Mason-Dixon line.”[57] Robinson repeated and elaborated on his charges in his controversial 1963 book, Baseball Has Done It, in which he eloquently argued that baseball’s dollar would speak with more force than anything else.[58]

In the crucial year of 1961, with Smith and the mainstream newspaper Chicago American leading the charge, the Major League Baseball Players Association demanded that the teams do more to integrate spring training.[59] But giving credit to those responsible for desegregating training in Florida is difficult. It is always difficult to know who to give credit to – and everyone wants it. For example, Bill White, in 1961 a first baseman with the St. Louis Cardinals and later president of the National League,[60] remembers telling a UPI reporter about the St. Petersburg Yacht Club issuing invitations only to white players for its annual “Salute to Baseball” breakfast.[61] The reporter, Joe Reichler, ran a story about segregation during spring training, a story White credits for getting “the ball rolling. . . . After Reichler’s article, there was a lot of pressure in St. Louis to do something about the segregation.”

White said he believed his words to UPI were what sparked his club to act. The Cards became the first team after the Dodgers to take dramatic action, leasing an entire hotel in St. Petersburg and housing all its players there. Aaron’s autobiography, in which White gives his account of the Salute to Baseball breakfast, does not dispute White’s account. White, along with black teammates Curt Flood and Bob Gibson, certainly had influence, and undoubtedly contributed to the Cardinals’ actions. But White, according to Aaron, had the exchange with Reichler during spring training in March, fully two months after Smith launched on the front page the Chicago American that newspaper’s campaign to stop baseball’s segregation in the South.

White spoke also to the Courier about the yacht club incident specifically and about segregation in general for an article that appeared on 18 March.[62] He told the Courier that the segregation policies were “gnawing at my heart. When will we be made to feel like humans?” But in Davis’ journal article, “Desegregating Major League Spring Training Sites” (1983), Davis described White as merely “following the lead of Florida black citizens who were engaged in their own struggle for equality.”[63]

Documenting the activism of these citizens, most notably local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People members Ralph Wimbish and Robert Swain, is the main purpose of Davis’ article, in which it is argued that Wimbish and Swain were the change agents. Because the claim relies wholly for its veracity on Wimbish and Swain, who were interviewed about their efforts by Davis thirty years after the fact, it is difficult to dispute. Clearly grassroots efforts contributed greatly to the pressure the individual clubs felt, especially in St. Petersburg by the New York Yankees. Davis states that the NAACP’s Florida headquarters joined Wimbish and Swain, hoping to generate national attention and support.[64]

The relationship between the black press and the NAACP clearly was a close one. Wiggins, in his exploration of Smith’s 10-year campaign to integrate baseball, states that Wendell Smith proposed in a column in January 1939 the formation of an organization like the NAACP.[65] Such an organization would allow blacks to attack segregation “until we drop from exhaustion,” Smith wrote. As Smith explained it, twenty-two years prior to spring training’s desegregation, by uniting in one national association, blacks could put more pressure on organized baseball to admit players of color. Players seemed to recognize the importance of the Chicago American campaign and its precedence before other efforts.

The chronology of events points more to Smith’s role and that of the Chicago American in leading the way, however instrumental and successful Wimbish, Swain, and others in the St. Petersburg community were. According to the New York Times, Wimbish held a press conference on 31 January 1961 to announce that he would no longer find housing in St. Petersburg for the New York Yankees, most notably black catcher and superstar Elston Howard.[66] Smith and Chicago American kicked off their campaign on 23 January 1961.[67] It is unknown how interrelated were Smith’s coverage in Chicago with local efforts in St. Petersburg and other spring training host cities in Florida. According to Davis, the NAACP worked closely with the Pittsburgh Courier and Smith’s replacement at that paper, Mal Goode, describing the Courier as acting as a “public voice for the NAACP in their activities in Florida.”[68] This characterization, too, depends on a long memory, however, in this instance that of former Florida NAACP field secretary Robert Saunders three decades after the struggle.

According to Smith, in two weeks the Chicago American campaign already had garnered national support and had led to a competition among newspapers as to which one should get the credit for the progress made thus far. More research is necessary to verify this claim. In an editorial in that same 6 February edition, the Chicago American publisher, Stuart List, hailed the progress made toward desegregation in the two weeks since the paper’s campaign began and pledged that his newspaper, “which began this campaign for equal treatment, will continue to watch developments carefully and report them fully.”[69]

Several aspects of Smith’s first salvo on 23 January are interesting. By using personal pronouns, as in, “his patience is growing short,” Smith claimed to speak for all Negro players, something few writers could have credibly done. Second, Smith relied exclusively on unattributed sources, presumably to avoid putting the players in jeopardy with their respective clubs. This method also inferred a high level of cooperation and confidentiality with the players. Third, he referenced first-hand experiences, in particular, his successful alliance with Jackie Robinson in breaking the color barrier, to add weight to his description of the problem and to his very specific plan for taking steps to solve it. Finally, Smith prodded baseball’s owners carefully, proposing humble first steps and saying that the black players “realize, of course, that the owners are not responsible for their plight.” The players were going about their struggle “in their own quiet way” and not enlisting the aid of the NAACP “or any other such group.” It was this conciliatory tone that Banks had praised. Similar to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s espousal of pacifism, Smith’s approach was one of conciliation, give-and-take, and dialogue.

Spring training was more than four weeks away at the time of the initial article, and though the players, according to Smith, wanted to avert a “fiery debate” over civil rights in baseball, they were “tired of being second class citizen(s) in spring training.” Afforded respectability during the regular season, all the black players wanted was “the same treatment in the South during spring training that they had earned in the north,” Smith wrote. This meant no longer staying in flophouses and eating in second-rate restaurants. The article contained muted but perceptible threats, such as when Smith cautioned that “at the moment he [the black ballplayer] is not belligerent. He is merely seeking help and sympathy, and understanding, and a solution . . . (but) his patience is growing short.”

Now that black players could eat and sleep in the same hotels with their teammates in cities such as St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, they  turned “southward to correct the evils they encounter there,” Smith wrote in the approximately 40-inch article, which was entitled, “Negro Players Want Dixie Rights.” One of the more bothersome inequities for black players, according to Smith, was the inability of black players to spend spring with their families. It was customary for white players, who were put up by the teams in nice hotels close to the training field, to bring their families and make a vacation out of the six weeks spent south. But the Negro players, facing poor housing conditions and discrimination in town, naturally were reluctant to bring family members into a hostile environment.[70]

The plan Smith proposed, citing the players as its source, included meeting with club owners to discuss the problem, giving player representatives the authority to negotiate and make decisions, and selecting one former player to explain the black players’ position to baseball’s top executives. Organizing the article like a legal argument, Smith then described the contributions black players had made since Robinson broke through in 1947, specifically those of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, and Minnie Minoso.[71] Echoing Robinson’s argument in The Sporting News in 1956, Smith also cited the money clubs spent in and attracted to the Florida towns in which they trained, revenue few towns would have wanted to lose.

California towns, for example, would be glad to host spring training, he wrote. Smith followed up two weeks later with a deeply personal article on 6 February that gave the 23 January piece full credit for no fewer than eight steps major league baseball and its teams were taking. Among them were hotel changes for the Chicago White Sox, owned at the time by a long-time critic of segregation, Bill Veeck. The White Sox were in negotiations with the Sarasota Terrace, where white players stayed in Sarasota, Fla., during camp to win accommodations for six black Chicago players.[72] The black players had to find accommodations with area families, like the Lucille and Chester Willis in Tucson, Ariz. The Willises housed black Cleveland Indian players for spring training camps during the years 1949-51. Among those players hosted were Larry Doby, Minnie Minoso, Luke Easter, Jose Santiago, and Art Wilson. For the six weeks of training camp, the couple “moved the piano from the living room to the back porch to make space, and sent the two oldest of their three children to their grandmother’s, in San Diego.”[73] So large at 6-foot-four, 220 pounds, Easter had to shower at the ballpark because the Willis’ bathtub couldn’t hold him. Banks quotes Sam Lacy, who noted the irony of the players playing, showering, and dressing with their white teammates, but becoming “colored” upon stepping outside the locker room.” Tucson’s hotels began desegregating in the early 1950s.

According to Smith, Veeck also moved reservations for his team from Miami’s McAllister Hotel to the more tolerant Biscayne Terrace hotel for a pair of games two months later, in April, against Baltimore. According to Jack Davis’ article, however, Veeck was responding to the Wimbish press conference held on 31 January when he canceled reservations in March at the McAllister. Smith’s article, however, was published on 6 February indicating that Veeck canceled the reservations long before March and possibly even before the Wimbish press conference.

McAllister Hotel, Miami

Also, according to Smith’s 6 February story, the Cubs made the decision to house all of its players together in Mesa, Arizona, at the Maricopa Inn, and not to play exhibition games in cities where black Cubs players would be forced to sleep in separate quarters. Baseball’s commissioner, Ford Frick, had said four days prior to Smith’s story that he was “sympathetic” with the problems of the black players. Lee MacPhail, at that time general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, also reported that he was working to keep his team together at a Miami hotel.[74] Finally, Smith listed a formal statement from New York Yankees president Dan Topping that the team wanted all its players training in St. Petersburg to “live under one roof.” Davis claims that Topping’s announcement was “in response to Wimbish’s demands” made at the 31 January press conference in St. Petersburg.[75] In this instance, it is possible Davis is correct. According to his article, the Fort Lauderdale News quoted an anonymous source “close to the Yankee organization” as saying that Wimbish’s demands had backed Topping against a wall.

As both Smith and the New York Times reported, the Yankees’ St. Petersburg home, the Hotel Soreno, and the Cardinals spring home, St. Pete’s Vinoy Park Hotel, had no intention of changing their policies, advising the two clubs to “look for other hotels.”[76] The Yankees did just that, moving to Fort Lauderdale and ending 36 years spent training in St. Petersburg. Topping, however, claimed it had nothing to do with segregation.[77]

By April 1961, Smith was with the White Sox in Sarasota, Florida, documenting firsthand the conditions black Sox players were facing with a flood of almost daily copy. This was a situation far different than Smith worked with at the Pittsburgh Courier, when his copy was printed only weekly. The Sarasota Terrace Hotel refused accommodations both to the black players and to Smith, citing economic reasons for refusing blacks.[78] According to Smith, Veeck was working hard to change the situation, as was the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce. Smith chronicled the tedium he and the players faced at night. Black players staying in a white section of town had few recreational options. Public eating places, bowling alleys, and most taxis were off limits. There were no accommodations for family members. And special permission was required even to visit the Sarasota Terrace, where their white teammates were housed.[79] Smith also reported from Florida the story of the two white hotel owners who were willing to house Chicago’s black players, a couple isolated both by their white neighbors and by civic leaders.[80]

The Sarasota Terrace Hotel, Sarasota, Fla.

Smith’s campaign picked up a huge endorsement in June 1961 when the Major League Players Association formally joined the struggle. The MLBPA’s legal representative said the association not only approved of the campaign, but said “the issue raised by Chicago American” would be “thoro[ugh]ly discussed” at its annual meeting in August.[81] Just prior to the meeting in Boston, Smith published the thoughts of several top black players on segregation during spring. Minoso, Howard, Aaron, and others went on the record with their grievances. Their anger and thinning patience were clear.

At the same time, the Cardinals, Yankees, and Orioles announced they had secured integrated spring training housing, but under different circumstances. The Cardinals benefited from the Yankees’ decision to vacate St. Petersburg for Fort Lauderdale. The town did not want to lose another club, so the Cards were given permission to keep its team together.[82] The Braves moved their living quarters from Bradenton to nearby Palmetto to keep their team together. MacPhail’s Orioles, meanwhile, finally came to terms with their Miami hotel.

The White Sox at this time, in mid-season, were still in negotiations with the Sarasota Terrace, but in November, announced they were buying the hotel outright “so that all of their players can live under the same roof during their training season.”[83] Smith called it an “extreme step” that came as “a direct result of the campaign waged thru [sic] last season” by the Chicago American. In response to the hotel purchase, the city of Sarasota agreed to chip in three baseball fields and clubhouse accommodations, according to Smith. There still were teams with segregated spring training, including Washington (Pompano Beach, Fla.), Minnesota (Orlando), Detroit (Lakeland), and Kansas City (West Palm Beach), but Smith reported that he had checked in with each team and that all were “taking measures” to end the segregation.

Full integration throughout spring training in Florida and Arizona would require two more years,[84] but Smith and the Chicago American should be credited for helping to first begin the debate and then to raise it to a national level. Smith helped to legitimize black players’ complaints and to de-stigmatize them by providing context and first-hand experience, by avoiding winner-take-all confrontations, and by acknowledging progress when and where he saw it.

Areas for future research include examining the level of cooperation between the press and grass roots efforts in the Florida communities, the reactions by the individual local communities in Florida and their governments, and the degree to which coverage in the Chicago American was picked up by other papers, how often it was reprinted, and in what ways it was treated.

The stance taken by the Chicago American so early in the effort and then sustained is significant enough, but additional research is necessary to find greater evidence of the paper’s impact. This study depends greatly on evidence found in the Chicago American’s own pages, its writers, and their attributed sources. It is an acknowledged trap journalism historians fall into to assume the media are central to historical events, movements, or social change, but in this case there is corroborating evidence of a significant contribution, if not a decisive one.

As Smith did during his entire career, he gave black athletes a voice. He also kept individual teams accountable as they worked to change their training conditions. As Chicago American writer Milton Gross put it in December 1961, perhaps baseball would have made the changes without the newspaper’s pressure and accountability, but the swift changes big league clubs made in 1961 to breach Jim Crow barriers, collectively, were “a great step forward.”[85]

Upon Smith’s induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame, the Chicago Sun-Times credited him for having “led the campaign for equal treatment of black baseball players in housing and meals during spring training and on the road.”[86] Prominent black players, including several future hall-of-famers, recognized Smith for the campaign, players such as Ernie Banks, Larry Doby, the American League’s first black, and Minnie Minoso.[87] The Major League Baseball Players Association cited the Chicago American for raising the issue of conditions black players faced each spring, pledging to join the fight. An examination of the chronology and chain of events also point to Smith as an author and a principal sustainer of the fight for equal rights and fair conditions.

As it had in 1945-47, baseball led and in some ways paved the way for society to re-evaluate and, ultimately, to begin formally abolishing segregation. Upon Smith’s death in 1972, the Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, wrote that Smitty had “a vision of an American society, where ability, skill and character are the sole measures of a man and not the color of his skin. He pursued that idealism . . . not with the militancy of the new breed of black spokesman, rather with the calm and patient logic of a wise man whose vision was sharp enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel. He has made his contribution. History will not pass him by.”[88]

Note about primary sources

The primary source documents for this paper were the Wendell Smith Papers, which are housed and arranged at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. These papers include biographical material, correspondence, and newspaper clippings of Smith’s columns for the Courier and Chicago American newspapers. The correspondence dates from 1945 to 1949 and includes letters between Smith, Rickey, and Robinson. The newspaper clippings are more comprehensive, covering 1943 through 1961. A majority of the clippings are Smith’s columns for the Courier, the nation’s top black weekly during Robinson’s historic breakthrough,[89] and for Chicago American. Smith’s papers were donated in 1996 by Wyonella Smith, widow of Wendell Smith. The material in the informational folder includes items photocopied from Hall of Fame Resources. Papers were arranged and described by Corey Seeman, 27 January 1997.--National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank for their invaluable editing and suggestions, Prof. Christopher Lamb of the College of Charleston, Prof. Chuck Stone of UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and Mrs. Hisayo Carroll. For their essential help during research, thanks go to Tim Wiles and Eric Enders at the National Baseball Hall of Fame's Research Center and Library.