Smith, John Wendell

Impact on the world

As sports editor of the Pittsburgh Courier from 1940, Smith surveyed dozens of major-league players and managers in 1939 about integrating baseball, finding far less opposition than club owners publicly claimed, and helped organize unsuccessful tryouts for Black players with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Boston Braves, and Boston Red Sox in the mid-1940s before persuading Branch Rickey that Jackie Robinson, rather than a bigger Negro Leagues star, was the right player to break the color line given his character and education. The Courier paid Smith’s expenses to travel with Robinson through the 1946 minor-league season and 1947 rookie year, during which Smith also ghostwrote Robinson’s newspaper column and, in 1948, co-authored his first biography, Jackie Robinson: My Own Story; that year Smith also became the first Black sportswriter to work for a white-owned daily, the Chicago Herald-American, and, in 1948, the first Black member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. He continued advocating for the desegregation of spring-training facilities into the 1960s and, fittingly, wrote Robinson’s obituary in 1972 as his own final published piece before his death a month later; actor André Holland portrayed Smith in the 2013 film 42.

Life & background

Born March 23, 1914, in Detroit, Michigan, the son of a chef in Henry Ford’s household, Smith was the only Black student at his Detroit high school and pitched college baseball at West Virginia State College, where he also became sports editor of the campus paper. He joined the Pittsburgh Courier immediately after graduating in 1937, rising to sports editor by 1940, moved to the Chicago Herald-American (later Chicago American) in 1948, later worked in Chicago television and radio sports broadcasting, and died of pancreatic cancer on November 26, 1972, one month after Jackie Robinson’s own death, at age 58.

Sources

1. Society for American Baseball Research; National Baseball Hall of Fame; MLB.com