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December 24, 2009

Crusading Sports Journalist Lester Rodney, 98, Dies
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And the influential sports writer Lester Rodney has died at the age of
ninety-eight. From 1936 to 1958, he worked as sports editor of the Daily
Worker, the newspaper of the US Communist Party. Rodney campaigned to
allow African Americans to play Major League Baseball. The sportswriter
Dave Zirin said of Rodney, “He crusaded against baseball’s color line
when almost every other journalist pretended it didn’t exist.”



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