The Last Integrationist

by Gary Phillips

You've never heard of him, but Lester Rodney died at the grand ol' age of 98 this past December 20. He was a sports writer, but not just any guy having guffaws with the boys of summer in the dugout. Rodney was the sports editor of the Daily Worker, the newspaper to arouse the proletariat, published of the Communist Party U.S.A. he was also, as recounted by Richard Goldstein in his New York Times obit of Mr. Rodney, a card carrying member of the Baseball Writers Association of America.

I had the pleasure to meet Mr. Rodney on the occasion of a publication party at the people's repository, and mouthful, the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research (www.socallib.org) for a book about him, Press Box Red, by an old-time lefty writer friend of mine, Irwin Silber. The sub-title of the book says it all, The Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist who Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports. Along with unsung black sports writers like William Nunn in the Pittsburgh Courier and Hally Harding in the L.A. Sentinel, years before Branch Rickey brought Jackie Robinson into major league baseball, these writers had been advocating for integrating professional sports in the pages of their respective newspapers.

So I guess that makes swingin' dick Tiger Woods the Last Integrationist. Try as he might to be the Cablinasian (his word for being part Caucasian, black, Native American and Asian) for us all, as far as Vanity Fai's editors are concerned, the one drop rule applies. This a Jim Crowish axiom if you had even a small amount of black ancestry, you were black enough. On the cover of the issue out now, Tiger is shown looking rough, bare-chested, wearing a watch cap and curling two dumbbells. The photo was taken in 2006 by big time, and now broke, photographer Annie Leibovitz. Context is context and I suppose at the time when she had him pose for this shot, among others, it was a goof on his then clean cut image. Like when Wayne Brady played against type and did a turn as a bad mufu on Chappelle's Show.

"What you crying about, motherfucker?" Brady joked ruthlessly to Chappelle as he sat next to him in a car terrified by the "real" Brady.

That was funny...Tiger getting pimped to sell issues by playing into black stereotypes, albeit he's managed to do this on his own in reality, by Vanity Fair isn't. It's just sad.

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