Sam Lacy

Samuel Harold Lacy was born in Mystic, Connecticut, on October 23, 1903, and moved to Washington as a small boy. The family lived at 13th and U streets, five blocks from Griffith Stadium, and the ballpark was his first employer: he sold food in the segregated right-field section as a teenager. In 1921 he caddied for Jim Barnes at the U.S. Open at Columbia Country Club, and when Barnes won, the tip was two hundred dollars.

One family story explains a good deal of what followed. His father, a devoted Senators fan, went to an opening-day parade wearing a pennant reading “I Saw Walter Johnson Pitch,” and a white player spat in the old man’s face. He was seventy-nine. He never went back. His son took a physical education degree from Howard University in 1923, worked part time at the Washington Tribune while in school, joined it full time in 1926, and was its sports editor from 1933 to 1941.

Lacy began lobbying Clark Griffith, owner of the Senators, to sign Black players in 1936. In December 1937 he got a face-to-face meeting and got nowhere. He moved to the Chicago Defender in August 1941 as assistant national editor and kept up the pressure from there, aiming some of it at Black team owners whose businesses depended on the color line staying where it was. In January 1944 he joined the Baltimore Afro-American as sports editor and columnist, the job he would hold for the rest of his life.

Jackie Robinson signed with Montreal on October 23, 1945. It was Lacy’s forty-second birthday.

After Commissioner Landis died in 1944, Lacy opened a dialogue with Branch Rickey of the Dodgers, and the following October Rickey signed Robinson to the Montreal Royals. Lacy then covered Robinson’s minor-league season and his 1947 arrival in Brooklyn from the inside, sharing the hotels that would take them and the press boxes that would not. He was not a cheerleader. In 1948 he criticized Robinson in print for reporting to camp fifteen pounds overweight. That same year he became a member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, a year after Wendell Smith had become the first Black writer admitted.

His Afro-American column ran under the heading “A to Z,” and the range was literal. He had covered Jesse Owens in 1936 and Joe Louis’s title fights, and he went on to Althea Gibson’s Grand Slam titles, Arthur Ashe’s, Wilma Rudolph’s three gold medals in 1960, and Lee Elder’s first Masters in 1975. In 1949 he reported on the first interracial college football game in Maryland. From 1968 to 1976 he added a sports commentary slot on WBAL-TV in Baltimore.

The working habits of his last decades are the part younger reporters repeat. When arthritis took his typing hands in his late seventies he wrote the columns longhand. Three days a week he got up at 3 a.m., drove from Washington to the paper’s Baltimore office, put in eight hours, and played nine holes on the way home. A stroke in 1999 ended the driving but not the column. He died in Washington on May 8, 2003, at ninety-nine, days after dictating his final piece from the hospital.

The recognition came in the order these things usually do, which is to say decades after the work. The spring and summer of 1998 were the busiest stretch: the University System of Maryland’s Frederick Douglass Award in April, a scholarship in his name from the United Negro College Fund two days later, the Red Smith Award from the Associated Press Sports Editors on June 26, and induction into the writers’ wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame on July 26. He was ninety-four.

Lacy’s grandfather had been the first Black detective on the Washington police force. His son, Samuel Howe “Tim” Lacy, wrote sports for the Afro-American as well. Between the two of them and the man in the middle, the family covered most of a century of American sport from the side of the stadium where the seats were worse and the story was better. The 1998 award was the A.P.S.E.’s acknowledgement that the story had been true all along.