And the influential sports writer Lester Rodney has died at the age of ninety-eight. From 1936 to 1958, he worked as sports editor of the Daily Worker, the newspaper of the US Communist Party. Rodney campaigned to allow African Americans to play Major League Baseball. The sportswriter Dave Zirin said of Rodney, “He crusaded against baseball’s color line when almost every other journalist pretended it didn’t exist.”