Jackie Robinson's contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in October 1945 formally lifted the color line in baseball. Robinson biographer Chris Lamb (Blackout), however, believes the campaign to desegregate the major leagues had been developing for many years prior to that signing, an effort which he contextualizes in Conspiracy of Silence.
Lamb details how Negro League games added revenue to white baseball owners who rented out their stadiums to black teams, even as they claimed that blacks and whites could not share a ball field without racial incident. He believes white mainstream sportswriters, seeing themselves as part of the game, were not just reluctant to question the color line but actively protected it by fostering a "convenience of ignorance" and "a conspiracy of silence." But black and left-leaning sportswriters, resisting this status quo, used their pens and typewriters in an effort to convince ball club owners that black stars, if allowed entry into the major leagues, would improve team quality and put more fans in the stands. As the number of black and alternative newspapers grew in circulation, their writers banded together to challenge the white baseball establishment, forcing it to deal with the issue.
Lamb's thorough journalistic exposé chronicles the drama and history behind the game, while tracing how the desegregation of baseball parallels the story of the civil rights movement in the United States. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines