As virtually everyone knows, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, and broke the color ban in baseball. But few Americans know Lester Rodney -- the sports editor of the Daily Worker, New York's Communist Party newspaper, who prepared the ground, repeatedly calling the ban "un-American" and "the Crime of the Big Leagues." . For over ten years, Lester Rodney's columns put unrelenting pressure on baseball's establishment. Who would have thought that a communist writer would become the loudest voice in the fight to desegregate America's national pastime?