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You can see why the conspiracy had to be unwritten: It was morally wrong. But there are reasons why so many people clung to it. One of the unintended consequences of integration would be that many white ballplayers would lose their jobs to better black players. Another reason to keep from integrating was that the white owners would lose a stream of revenue, as they rented out their ballparks for Negro League games. With integration, that income would vanish.

The Negro Leagues were separate, but they were hardly equal. Contracts weren’t worth anything, and players jumped from team to team all the time, in search of a few extra dollars. Even the star players were paid relatively little. It wasn’t uncommon for fans in the stands to pass a hat around, taking up a collection for the players. Negro League players slept on busses and traveled great distances, and needed to play year-round just to earn a living.

There was no way that the nation would have been able to handle integration in the 1920s, anyway, as the Ku Klux Klan wielded considerable influence throughout the country. According to the 1920 census, the population of white males eighteen years and older was about thirty-one million, and though many of these men would have been ineligible for membership in the Klan because they were immigrants, Jews, or Roman Catholics, Klan membership peaked at between four and five million in the early 1920s. Any way you slice it, a big percentage of American men were members of the KKK. Some of these men are enshrined in Baseball’s Hall of Fame, including Tris Speaker. Speaker, born in 1888 in Texas, grew up in a time and place where local KKK members were considered heroes, and lynchings were common. Speaker, who played between 1907 and 1928, would never have played with black teammates (although in his later years as a coach he is reported to have accepted integration). Ty Cobb, another proud Southerner and Hall of Fame ballplayer, came from a similar background. And these are just a few examples.

By the 1930s, however, society appeared to start acceping black sports heroes—especially after the 1936 Olympics, when runner Jesse Owens became famous for winning four gold medals. To find out more about the conspiracy that kept baseball segregated at that time, I spoke with ninety-six-year-old Lester Rodney, a champion of racial integration in sports. Beginning in 1936, he served as sports editor and columnist for the influential newspaper, the Daily Worker. He began a movement, a crusade—devoting hundreds of columns to this issue.

EK: Were you a Communist, or a journalist who happened to be working for the Communist paper, the Daily Worker?

LR: My father was a Republican. The stock market crash in 1929 changed everything, not only for me but for a lot of people. We lost our house. Anyway, if you were around in the 1930s and didn’t question capitalism, you were brain-dead, in my opinion. I joined the Communist Party in 1936, when I joined the Daily Worker. It was nothing remarkable, or way out.

EK: Can you tell me a little about your newspaper, the Daily Worker?

LR: We had a very low budget, which is why we were only an eight-page paper. If we were getting gold from Moscow, as was long whispered, we would have been larger, and more effective. I used to do the fund-drive, which depended on readers contributing $10 or $20, [which was] pretty significant in those days.

The Daily Worker was published in New York, and it was a national paper until similar papers appeared in Chicago and Los Angeles. I believe in L.A. it was called People’s World. The later papers had their own columnists, but we exchanged, so my columns, for instance, were read in other cities. At our peak, circulation was 125,000 during the late 1930s, and our Sunday paper even exceeded that.

EK: My conspiracy theory starts at the top of the baseball establishment. Tell me what kind of a man Judge Landis was?

LR: He was a racist. It was barely disguised. The owners of that period couldn