Wendell Smith

Wendell Smith died in 1972. The Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the Red Smith Award in 2014, the longest gap between death and recognition in the award's history. The editors were not correcting an oversight of their own, since the award did not exist in his lifetime, but they were correcting one that belonged to the profession, which for most of his career treated the Black press as something other than journalism.

The 2014 vote followed a period in which Smith's part in baseball's integration had become widely known again. He was a character in the 2013 film 42, and the story of the Courier reporter who travelled with Jackie Robinson because the Dodgers would not house him reached an audience that had never read a line he wrote. The award put his name where the sports editors could see it every year.

John Wendell Smith was born in Detroit on March 23, 1914. He pitched for West Virginia State College and was, by his own later account, good enough to interest a scout who could not sign him. In 1937 he joined the Pittsburgh Courier, then the most widely read Black newspaper in the country, as a sportswriter, and in time became its sports editor.

The Courier was campaigning to end the color line in the major leagues years before any club moved, and Smith's column was part of that campaign. He was not a neutral observer of integration. He was one of the people pushing for it, and when the chance came he acted as a reporter, an adviser and an agent at the same time.

Some precision about what a Black sportswriter's job looked like in 1937 is in order. The Courier could not get its man into most press boxes, and the major-league clubs he wrote about did not return his calls. What the paper had was a national circulation among Black readers and a sports page that treated the Negro leagues as major-league baseball, which they were. Pittsburgh was home to the Homestead Grays and the Crawfords, two of the best teams of the era, playing in the same city as the Pirates, and the Courier's sports page ran the comparison every week. The contrast was the argument.

Smith is credited with recommending Jackie Robinson to Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn general manager, and the recommendation stuck. When Robinson signed and went to Montreal in 1946, the Courier paid Smith's expenses to travel with him. In 1947, Robinson's first season with the Dodgers, the paper did it again. On the road in cities where the team hotel was closed to Black guests, Smith found the rooms, sat at the meals and filed the copy.

The Pittsburgh Courier paid his way to travel with Robinson in 1946 and 1947.

Out of that year came Jackie Robinson: My Own Story (1948), written by Smith under Robinson's name. The relationship held to the end: Smith wrote Robinson's obituary in October 1972, a month before his own death.

The same season settled an older argument. The Baseball Writers' Association of America had rejected Smith's application on the grounds that he worked for a Black paper. In 1947 it admitted him, generally counted as the first African American member, though the same distinction is sometimes claimed for Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American, and the two men's careers ran on parallel lines.

Smith left the Courier for the Chicago Herald-American, a mainstream daily, and covered boxing there for most of a decade. In 1964 he joined WGN-TV as a sports anchor, one of the first Black sportscasters on a major-market station, and wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Sun-Times at the same time. He was still on air when he died of pancreatic cancer in Chicago on November 26, 1972, at fifty-eight.

The move to a white-owned daily was itself a consequence of 1947. The Black press had made its case, and one of the ways the mainstream papers absorbed the point was to hire the reporters who had made it. Smith took the boxing beat rather than baseball, which kept him in a sport where the color line had never been drawn quite so hard, and in Chicago, where he lived for the rest of his life. The television job came late and was a second career rather than a coda: eight years on WGN, in a city that watched a great deal of sport on that station.

Moving to the Herald-American meant Smith had to introduce himself all over again to editors who had never read a line of his Courier work, a version of the problem faced by anyone changing employers or countries mid-career and having to make that record legible to someone new. Structora's guide to writing a cover letter in English as an ESL professional covers that same kind of introduction, translating experience built somewhere else into terms an unfamiliar employer will trust.

The honors came in the order the institutions got round to him.

The Spink Award is the writers' wing of the Hall of Fame, and it went to him in December 1993 from the same association that had once refused him a card. Twenty-one years after that the sports editors followed. Both were late. Neither was wrong.