Conspiracy of Silence : University of Nebraska Press : 9781496229373 : 1496229371 : 01 Oct 2021 : Named a top 50 baseball book of all time by the Huffington Post Named 2013 Best Book on Journalism and Mass Communication History by the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Named a top book for 2012 by Choice The campaign to desegregate baseball was one of the most important civil rights stories of the 1930s and 1940s. But most of white America knew nothing about this story because mainstream newspapers said little about the color line and still less about the efforts to end it. Even today, as far as most Americans know, the integration of baseball revolved around Branch Rickey's signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization in 1945. This book shows how Rickey's move, critical as it may have been, came after more than a decade of work by Black and left-leaning journalists to desegregate the game. Drawing on hundreds of newspaper articles and i