workingclasshistory:

On this day, 19 April 2004, Jewish baseball player, son of Syrian immigrants, oil worker and communist Sam Nahem died in Berkeley aged 88. He began his professional baseball career in 1938, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, then later the St Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies, with a gap due to volunteering for military service in Europe during World War II, and was a prominent supporter of racial integration in the sport. Subsequently he was frequently blacklisted from jobs during the McCarthyist years, so he moved to California. He resigned from the Communist Party following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. There he became a rank-and-file worker leader, helping to organise a historic strike at Chevron Chemical and remaining active at the company for 25 years until his retirement.
Learn more about the radical history of sports in these books: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/collections/all/sports https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1698315847020225/?type=3