Long before Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a Brooklyn Dodger contract in 1945, Lester Rodney, the newly hired and first sports editor of the Communist Daily Worker, launched the campaign that proved decisive in eventually breaking baseball's color line. But in the hostile anti-Communist climate of those years and for many years after, Rodney's story remained largely unknown. It therefore came as a surprise to many when Arnold Rampersad, in his authoritative 1997 biography of Jackie Robinson, wrote: In the campaign to end Jim Crow in baseball, the most vigorous efforts came from the...

Long before Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a Brooklyn Dodger contract in 1945, Lester Rodney, the newly hired and first sports editor of the Communist Daily Worker, launched the campaign that proved decisive in eventually breaking baseball's color line. But in the hostile anti-Communist climate of those years and for many years after, Rodney's story remained largely unknown. It therefore came as a surprise to many when Arnold Rampersad, in his authoritative 1997 biography of Jackie Robinson, wrote: In the campaign to end Jim Crow in baseball, the most vigorous efforts came from the...

The chasm between huge individual wealth and the abject misery of hundreds of millions of people persists and can, in many cases, be said to be widening. The author's view is that the conflict between the rapaciousness of "the system" and popular discontent has to provide the conditions for a new social order. Socialism, in some form, argues Silber, is an essential element in a future for the whole human race. This book is an attempt to look at both the doctrines of Marx and Lenin, weighing this against the practice of socialism in the Soviet Union. The author argues that it is now incumbent...