Lacy, Samuel Harold “Sam”

Impact on the world

Lacy began pressing baseball’s color line as a young sportswriter in the 1930s, and after Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis—a firm opponent of integration—died in late 1944, Lacy opened a direct dialogue with Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey that helped lead to Jackie Robinson signing with the Dodgers’ Montreal Royals farm club on October 23, 1945, coincidentally Lacy’s 42nd birthday. He covered Robinson’s rise for three consecutive seasons, often barred from press boxes alongside his white colleagues because of his race, and in 1948 became one of the first Black members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, a year after fellow trailblazer Wendell Smith, also profiled in this collection. Lacy continued writing his popular “A to Z” column for the Afro-American into his late 90s, dictating or hand-writing entries after arthritis made typing impossible, and in 1998 became the first Black sportswriter enshrined in the writers’ and broadcasters’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Life & background

Born October 23, 1903, in Mystic, Connecticut, to a Shinnecock mother and Black father, and raised in Washington, D.C., Lacy began writing for the Washington Tribune in the late 1920s, became its sports editor from 1934 to 1939, moved to the Chicago Defender as national sports editor from 1940 to 1943, and joined the Baltimore Afro-American as sports editor in January 1944, remaining there for the rest of his life. He also worked as a television sports commentator on Baltimore’s WBAL-TV from 1968 to 1976, wrote his final column from a hospital bed just days before his death, and died of heart and kidney failure in Washington, D.C., on May 8, 2003, at age 99.

Sources

1. Society for American Baseball Research; National Baseball Hall of Fame; AFRO American Newspapers