Word: negro
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...lowest, least publicized levels of a sport that does not interest very many liberal-minded, middle-class people. Scott broke in on tiny, rural dirt tracks in the Deep South, getting his first opportunities to race only because promoters thought crowds might be interested in seeing a Negro crash and burn. He could expect no mercy from the white stock-car drivers, very few of whom carried N.A.A.C.P. membership cards in their wal lets. The worst Robinson could expect from his prejudiced competitors was something like a spike wound; the men Scott was running against had, at every race...
...empty stadium in western Massachusetts, struggling to keep your head down on the ground balls as the fourth inning oozes imperceptibly into the eighth, while meantime all the fans are home watching the Red Sox on the tube. It is the memories of having to play in the shadowy Negro Leagues, jousting with the equals of Ruth and Cobb, and then packing your clothes in a cardboard suitcase and hitching to the next fleabag hotel for tomorrow's exhibition with the Black Barons. Finally, baseball is the ultimate game, corporate-American style, where paunchy men gamble for high stakes...
...baseball season spent roaming the country with the boys and the boys-turned-men who make up baseball. There is Walter O'Malley, cigar-puffing grandee of the Los Angeles Dodgers. And Stan Musial, of the .330 lifetime average and undying fame. Then there is Artie Wilson of the Negro Leagues, who outshone Jackie Robinson and won only mildly-regretted obscurity, and Early Wynn, the Hall of Fame pitcher who threw at the head of any batter who stood between him and his historic 300th career victory--including, in one exhibition, his own son. There are countless anecdotes, profiles, memories...
...they say, a two-way street. The party was interested in him only insofar as it could use him. He was promptly elected executive secretary of his unit because the faction supporting him figured that the opposition would not dare vote against a bona fide Negro...
...worked at menial jobs, he was constantly under suspicion as an intellectual. "He talks like a book," a comrade complained. Observed Wright: "That was enough to condemn me forever as bourgeois." Disregarding warning signals, he tried to interview party members for a series of articles explaining Communism to the Negro masses. Party suspicion became sulfurous. A comrade pointedly reminded him that intellectuals were frequently shot in the Soviet Union. Wright became certain that if his American comrades ever came to power, that would be his fate as well. "I began to feel an emotional isolation that I had not known...