Lacy, Sam

Sam Lacy

Sam Lacy (1903–2003) became a pioneering sports-writer for the Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore and was one of the most important early forces in the integration of Major League Baseball.

The sportswriter inherited his pioneering spirit from his grandfather, Henry Erskine Lacy, who was the first black detective on the Washington, D.C., police force. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Lacy's story is not that he covered all the giants of the twentieth-century sporting world—Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammed Ali, to name a few—but that he continued to cover sports well into his nineties. He left home for the office at the Afro-American at three o'clock in the morning. to do three weekly columns and supervise the layout of the paper. When he became too old to drive after suffering a stroke in 1999, his son brought him to work. When his fingers became too riddled with arthritis to type, he wrote out his column longhand, continuing until shortly before his death in May, 2003. Lacy's story began with his selling peanuts to the Jim Crow section of old Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., and it continued until he reached a place of honor in the writers' wing at baseball's ultimate shrine, the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Lacy was born on October 23, 1903, in Mystic, Connecticut, to Samuel Erskine Lacy, a researcher in a Washington, D.C. law firm, and Rose Lacy, a full-blooded Native American from the Shinnecock tribe. Lacy's family moved to Washington, D.C., early in his life. Lacy's father taught his son to love baseball, and Lacy began to hang around the stadium. The young fan would do errands for the players such as buying cigarettes and picking up their laundry. By the time Lacy was nine years old, he was shagging balls in the outfield before games at batting practice and eventually worked at the stadium selling popcorn and peanuts in the stands. He also caddied for Englishman "Long Jim" Barnes, the winning golfer at the 1921 U.S. Open, which earned Lacy the sum of $200. His tip was so enormous that the young man had a difficult time making his mother believe he had earned the princely sum by carrying around a golf bag for four days.

Advocated for Desegregation in Sports

Lacy attended Armstrong High School in Washington, D.C. and played football, baseball and basketball. After he graduated from high school, he was good enough to play baseball in the local semipro leagues but decided he needed to further his education. He attended Howard University and earned a degree in education with the intention of becoming a coach. Little did he know that his part-time job would turn out to be his career and his crusade.

While attending school in the 1920s Lacy worked part-time at the local African-American paper, the Washington Tribune, earning a nickel for every inch of copy he wrote. After graduation he joined the paper full-time and soon moved into the sports department, where he began a lifelong crusade for fairness in the world of sports. The first big story Lacy wrote involved a black football player at Syracuse University; to allow the player to continue on the team, the university claimed that he was not black but a Hindu with Indian ancestry. Lacy wrote a story in 1937 proving that the player was not Indian, but born in Washington, D.C., to African-American parents. When the University of Maryland found out about the black player, it refused to play the game with Syracuse unless Wilmeth Sidat-Singh was removed from the team. The player was taken off the team and Syracuse lost, but the reaction against both universities was so strong that Sidat-Singh played against Maryland the following year.

Lacy then turned his attention to the game of baseball. He met with Clark Griffith, the owner of the Washington Senators, then the local major-league team that eventually became the Minnesota Twins. Lacy suggested that Griffith's last-place team could be turned around by an infusion of new talent from the Negro Leagues: Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, and Josh Gibson were suggested to the owner. Lacy told Sam Donnellon of the Philadelphia Daily News about his first meeting with a major-league owner: "I used that old cliché about Washington being first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League, and that he could remedy that. But he told me that the climate wasn't right. He pointed out there were a lot of Southern ballplayers in the league, that there would be constant confrontations, and, moreover, that it would break up the Negro Leagues. He saw the Negro Leagues as a source of revenue."

But a cause was born: Lacy became one of the earliest and most outspoken voices for desegregation in baseball. In 1940 Lacy moved to Chicago to join the Chicago Defender, a black paper with a national readership. On numerous occasions he sought a meeting with baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to talk about the integration of Major League Baseball, but Lacy never received a reply. After three years of wrangling and agitating, Lacy finally was given a place on the agenda at the 1943 baseball meetings in Cleveland to discuss the issue. At the last minute the paper decided to send noted athlete and actor Paul Robeson to make the case for the black baseball player, a decision on the part of the paper that Lacy took very personally. He told D.L. Cummings of The New York Daily News about his reaction to the snub: "That made me furious. All this work I had done on this, for them to send Paul Robeson, who had known Communistic leanings, I questioned the good sense of it all. I knew when the owners saw this guy who admitted to being Communist-oriented, they would simply say, 'OK, we heard you and don't call us, we'll call you.'"

Lacy immediately moved to the Afro-American in Baltimore and continued to press the race issue. He wrote to the owners and suggested an integration committee be formed. Lacy was named to just such a committee with Branch Rickey of the National League's Brooklyn Dodgers and Larry MacPhail of the New York Yankees. The group tried to meet, but MacPhail never attended any of the meetings, so Rickey told Lacy that he was going to be integrating baseball on his own. In April of 1945 Major League Baseball got a new commissioner who was not opposed to integration, and six months later the league got its first black ball player when Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a contract for Brooklyn's Triple A team in Montreal.

Covered a Pioneer

The Afro-American allowed Lacy to cover Robinson exclusively for the next three years. The black press was unanimously in support of Robinson, and all agreed he was the man to take the first giant step in integrating Major League Baseball. Robinson had attended UCLA, a racially mixed college, competed against white players, had served with honor in the military, and was engaged to be married. Lacy traveled with Robinson from Montreal, where Robinson played Triple A ball, to the deep south for spring training, and even to Cuba for winter baseball. Lacy witnessed all the trials that Robinson experienced and told Kevin Merida of the Washington Post that it was difficult for Robinson to keep all of his pain and frustration to himself: "There were a lot of things that were bothering him. He was taking so much abuse that he said to me that he didn't know whether or not he was going to be able to go through with this because it was just becoming so intolerable, that they were throwing everything at him."

Lacy endured many of the same indignities as Robinson, eating with him in separate facilities and staying at the same segregated rooming houses. Once they woke up in the middle of the night to find a cross burning in front of the rooming house where Robinson and other black journalists were staying. Lacy faced discrimination in the press box also. Lacy had to report on some Dodger games from the dugout because he was not allowed to sit with the other reporters. In New Orleans he was forced to go up on the roof of the press box, but there he was joined by some white writers from New York. As late as 1952 Lacy was denied entry into Yankee Stadium to cover the World Series, though he had been a member of the Baseball Writers of America since 1948 as the organization's first African-American member. But Lacy never dramatized his own situation; he kept the focus on the athletes. He told Merida, "It would have been a selfish thing for me to be concerned about myself and how I was treated."

After his victory in desegregating Major League Baseball, Lacy continued to press for fairness in sports. He saw that black ballplayers were having a major impact on their team's records and also on their team's bottom lines. He campaigned to increase their salaries and to have the "separate but equal" accommodations eliminated. Lacy first brought up the issue of blacks and whites staying in different hotels with the New York Giants (before the team moved to San Francisco). He told the story to Sports Illustrated 's Ron Fimrite: "I pointed out to Chub Feeney (then the team's general manager) that he had guys like Willie Mays and Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson holed up in some little hotel while the rest of the players, people who might never even wear a major-league uniform, were staying at the famous Palace. Chub just looked at me and said, 'Sam, you're right.' He got on the phone to (owner) Horace Stoneham, and that was the end of that."

A Legend was Born

After twenty years in the business Lacy earned recognition as one of the best sports journalists in the profession. He received numerous offers to move on to bigger and more widely read publications—Sports Illustrated came calling as early as 1950—but he stayed at the Afro-American. He told Bill Kirtz of The Quill why he stayed put in Baltimore: "No other paper in the country would have given me the kind of license. I've made my own decisions. I cover everything that want to. I sacrificed a few dollars, true, but I lived a comfortable life. I get paid enough to be satisfied. I don't expect to die rich." Lacy continued to work nearly until his death at the age of 99, always striving to achieve a greater sense of fairness in the sporting world. He fought the major networks for their refusal to hire black broadcasters; he chastised major corporations for their failure to sponsor more black golfers; he fought for the inclusion of players from the old Negro Leagues into baseball's Hall of Fame in Coopers-town; and he took the National Football League to task for hesitating to hire black head coaches. In addition to his crusading, Lacy helped edit the paper and covered six different Olympic Games and some of the biggest prizefights of the twentieth century.

In 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Robinson's integration of Major League Baseball, everyone suddenly wanted to speak to Lacy. He was given an honorary doctorate at Loyola University, was honored by the Smithsonian Institute with a lecture series, and then the following year won the Associated Press's Red Smith Award and the Baseball Hall of Fame's J.G. Taylor Spink Award for sports writing. In 1998 Lacy achieved the ultimate reward for a baseball writer. He was inducted into the writers' wing of baseball's shrine. Though Lacy was awestruck that he was even considered for induction into the Hall of Fame, others recognized the important role he played in the history of baseball and racial desegregation in the United States. Jackie Robinson's widow, Rachel, told Cummings of The New York Daily News about Lacy's contribution: "We had a great deal of respect for Sam and the other black journalists. They were really crusaders. They really paved the way for the integration of baseball because they were so persistent in their criticism of the owners. They never gave up and I don't think their efforts have ever been properly recognized or appreciated for the role they played behind the scenes." Upon his death on May 8, 2003, broadcasting great Bob Wolff told Editor & Publisher that Lacy was "a monument in the business."

Periodicals

Editor & Publisher, May 19, 2003.

New York Daily News, February 7, 1997.

Philadelphia Daily News, April 9, 1997.

Quill, January-February, 1999.

Sporting News May 26, 2003.

Sports Illustrated, October 29, 1990.

Washington Post, June 11, 1997.