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80 YEARS AGO, A JEWISH RADICAL AND TWO NEGRO LEAGUE STARS LED A
CRUSADE TO INTEGRATE BASEBALL THAT PAVED THE WAY FOR JACKIE ROBINSON
 
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Peter Dreier
September 7, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown
who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler's Nazi
Germany and broke down historic barriers. _

The Oise All-Stars featuring Willard Brown (front row, 2nd from
right) and Leon Day (far right, front row), both of whom are
Cooperstown Enshrinees. Sam Nahem is in the back, far left , Baseball
in Wartime

 

Eighty years ago this week—on September 8, 1945—a little-known
episode in the struggle to challenge racial segregation took place in,
of all places, Germany’s Nuremberg Stadium, where Adolf Hitler had
previously addressed Nazi Party rallies. It was led by Sam Nahem, a
left-wing Jewish pitcher who had a brief career in the major leagues,
and included two Negro League stars, Leon Day and Willard Brown, who,
like other African Americans, were banned from major league teams.

Their efforts were part of the wider “Double Victory” campaign
during the war to beat fascism overseas and racism and anti-Semitism
at home.

For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s
color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive
white activists and sportswriters, labor unions, and radical
politicians waged a sustained protest movement to end Jim Crow in
baseball
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They believed that if they could push the nation’s most popular
sport to dismantle its color line, they could make inroads in other
facets of American society. They picketed at big league ballparks,
wrote letters to team owners and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw
Mountain Landis demanding tryouts for Black athletes, and interviewed
white players and managers, most of whom expressed a willingness to
integrate major league rosters. Most white newspapers ignored the
Negro Leagues, but black newspapers (and the Communist
Party’s _Daily Worker_) covered their stars and games, including
exhibition contests between Black teams and teams comprised of white
major leaguers, many of which were won by Negro League players.

Nahem’s parents immigrated to America from Aleppo, Syria in 1912.
Born in New York City in 1915, Nahem, one of eight siblings, grew up
in a Brooklyn enclave of Syrian Jews. He spoke Arabic before he
learned English.

Nahem demonstrated his rebellious streak early on. When he was 13,
Nahem reluctantly participated in his Bar Mitzvah ceremony, but
refused to continue with Hebrew school classes after that because
“it took me away from sports.” To further demonstrate his
rebellion, that year he ended his Yom Kippur fast an hour before
sundown. Recalling the incident, he called it “my first
revolutionary act.”

The next month—on November 12, 1928—Nahem’s father, a well-to-do
importer-exporter, traveling on a business trip to Argentina, was one
of over 100 passengers who drowned when a British steamship,
the _Vestris_, sank off the Virginia coast. Within a year, the Great
Depression had arrived, throwing the country into turmoil. With his
father dead, Nahem’s family could have fallen into destitution.

“Fortunately we sued the steamship company and won enough money to
live up to our standard until we were grown and mostly out of the
house,” Nahem recalled. He remembered how, at age 14, he “used to
haul coal from our bin to relatives who had no heat in the bitterly
cold winters of New York.” So, despite his family’s own relative
comfort, “I was quite aware of the misery all around.” That
reality, Nahem remembered, “led to my embracing socialism.”

Education was Nahem’s ticket out of his insular community and into
the wider world of sports and politics. In the early 1930s, he
enrolled at Brooklyn College. The campus was a hotbed of radicalism.
Like a significant number of his classmates, Nahem joined the
Communist Party, but he primarily focused his time and energy on
sports and his literature classes. He was a star pitcher for Brooklyn
College’s baseball team and a highly-regarded fullback on its
football team, gaining attention from the New York newspapers and
baseball scouts.

Signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1935, after his sophomore year, he
spent several years in the minor leagues, where he confronted
anti-Semitism among his teammates and other players.

“I was aware I was a Jewish player and different from them. There
were very few Jewish players at the time,” Nahem said. (There were
only 10 Jews on major league rosters in 1938, Nahem’s rookie year.)

“Many of them came from where they probably had never met a Jewish
person. You know, they subscribed to that anti-Semitism that was
latent throughout the country. I fought it whenever it appeared.”

Because he was from New York, someone gave him the nickname “Subway
Sam” while he played in the minors, and it stuck throughout his
baseball career. During the off-seasons, Nahem, a voracious reader,
earned a law degree at St. John’s University. He passed the bar in
December 1938.

Two months earlier, he made his major league debut on October 2, 1938,
the last day of the season. The 22-year old Nahem pitched a complete
game to beat the Phillies 7-3 on just six hits. He also got two hits
in five at bats and drove in a run.

Despite his stellar start, the Dodgers sent Nahem back to the minors,
then traded him to the Cardinals, who assigned him to their minor
league team in Houston and brought him up to the big league club the
next season. In his first starting assignment for the Cardinals, on
April 23, 1941, Nahem pitched a three-hitter, beating the Pittsburgh
Pirates 3 to 1. That season, Nahem won five games, lost two, and
registered an outstanding 2.98 earned run average.

Despite that performance, the Cardinals sold Nahem to the Philadelphia
Phillies before the 1942 season. He made 35 appearances, posting a 1-3
won-loss record and a 4.94 ERA.

Like most radicals in those years, Nahem believed that baseball should
be racially integrated. In both the minor and major leagues, he talked
to teammates to encourage them to be open-minded.

“I did my political work there,” he told an interviewer years
later. “I would take one guy aside if I thought he was amiable in
that respect and talk to him, man to man, about the subject. I felt
that was the way I could be most effective."

Nahem entered the military in November 1942. He volunteered for the
infantry and hoped to see combat in Europe to help defeat Nazism. But
he spent his first two years at Fort Totten in New York, where he
pitched for the Anti-Aircraft Redlegs of the Eastern Defense Command.
In 1943 he set a league record with a 0.85 earned run average,
finished second in hitting with a .400 batting average, and played
every defensive position except catcher. In September 1944, he and his
Ft. Totten team beat the major league Philadelphia Athletics 9-5 in an
exhibition game.

Sent overseas in late 1944, Nahem served with an anti-aircraft
artillery division based in France. After Germany surrendered in May
1945, the American military expanded its baseball program. Over
200,000 troops, including many professional ballplayers, played on
American military teams in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Italy,
and Britain. Nahem, based in Rheims, France, managed and played for a
team that represented the army command in charge of communication and
logistics, headquartered in Oise, an administrative department located
in the northern part of the country.

The team was called the OISE All-Stars. Besides Nahem, only one other
OISE player, Russ Bauers, who had pitched for the Pittsburgh Pirates,
had major league experience. The rest of the team was comprised mainly
of semi-pro, college, and ex-minor-league players who were so
little-known that news stories simply identified them by their
hometowns.

Many top Negro League ballplayers were in the military, but they faced
segregation, discrimination and humiliation, at home and overseas,
assigned to the dirtiest jobs and typically living in separate
quarters from white soldiers. Most black soldiers with baseball
talent, including Jackie Robinson, were confined to playing on
all-black military teams.

Monte Irvin, a Negro League standout who later starred for the New
York Giants, recalled: “When I was in the Army I took basic training
in the South. I’d been asked to give up everything, including my
life, to defend democracy. Yet when I went to town I had to ride in
the back of a bus, or not at all on some buses.”

Although the military was segregated during the war, some white and
Black soldiers found opportunities to form friendships across the
color line, or at least had enough exposure to challenge stereotypes
and biases. Despite pervasive racism, some interracial camaraderie
developed out of necessity or shared experiences. During the Battle of
the Bulge in late 1944, for example, a shortage of infantrymen led
General Dwight D. Eisenhower to temporarily desegregate units. Black
and white soldiers fought alongside each other, and their teamwork on
the battlefield was often better than expected. For many, these
encounters helped shift opinions when they returned to their normal
lives after the war. In addition, civilians in many European countries
extended hospitality and friendship to Black Americans, which was the
first time they felt welcome and equal among whites.

Defying the military establishment and baseball tradition, Nahem
insisted on having African Americans on his team. He recruited Willard
Brown, a slugging outfielder with the Kansas City Monarchs, and Leon
Day, a star pitcher for the Newark Eagles, both of whom were stationed
in France after the war in Europe ended.

In six full seasons before he joined the military, Brown, who grew up
in Shreveport, Louisiana, led the Negro leagues in hits six times,
home runs four times, and RBIs five times, batting between .338 and
.379. Brown participated in the Normandy invasion as part of the
Quartermaster Corps, hauling ammunition under enemy fire and guarding
prisoners.

Day, who grew up in segregated Baltimore, was the Negro League’s
best hurler with the exception of Satchel Paige and helped the
Monarchs win five pennants. In 1942, he set a Negro League record by
striking out 18 Baltimore Elite Giants batters in a one-hit shutout.
Day also saw action in the Normandy invasion as part of the 818th
Amphibian Battalion. He drove a six-wheel drive amphibious vehicle
(known as a duck) that carried supplies ashore.

Nahem’s OISE team won 17 games and lost only one, and reached the
European Theater of Operations (ETO) championship, known as the G.I.
World Series. The opposing team, the 71st Infantry Red Circlers,
represented General George Patton’s 3rd Army. One of Patton’s top
officers assigned St. Louis Cardinals All-Star outfielder Harry
Walker, a segregationist from Alabama, to assemble a team and pulled
strings to get top major league players on its roster—even lending
him a plane to bring players to the games. Besides Walker, the Red
Circlers included seven other major leaguers, including Cincinnati
Reds’ 6-foot-6 inch sidearm pitcher Ewell “the Whip” Blackwell.

The GI World Series took place in September, a few months after the
U.S. and Allies had defeated Germany. Few people gave Nahem’s OISE
All-Stars much chance to win against the hand-picked Red Circlers.

They played the first two games in Nuremberg. Allied bombing had
destroyed the city but somehow spared the stadium
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where Hitler spoke to huge rallies of Nazi followers, highlighted in
Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film, “Triumph of the
Will.” The U.S. Army constructed a baseball diamond within the
stadium and renamed it Soldiers Field.

On September 2, 1945, Blackwell pitched the Red Circlers to a 9-2
victory in the first game of the best-of-five series in front of
50,000 fans, most of them American soldiers. In the second game, Day
held the Red Circlers to one run. Brown drove in the OISE team’s
first run, and then Nahem (who was playing first base) doubled in the
seventh inning to knock in the go-ahead run. OISE won the game 2-1.
Day struck out 10 batters, allowed four hits and walked only two
hitters.

The teams flew to OISE’s home field in Rheims for the next two
games. The OISE team won the third game, as the _New
York_ _Times_ reported, “behind the brilliant pitching of S/Sgt
Sam Nahem,” who outdueled Blackwell to win 2-1, scattering four hits
and striking out six batters. In the fourth game, the 3rd Army’s
Bill Ayers, who had pitched in the minor leagues since 1937, shut out
the OISE squad, beating Day by a 5-0 margin.

The teams returned to Nuremberg for the deciding game on September 8.
Nahem started for the OISE team, again in front of over 50,000
spectators. After the Red Circlers scored a run and then loaded the
bases with one out in the fourth inning, Nahem took himself out and
brought in pitcher Bob Keane, who got out of the inning without
allowing any more runs and completed the game. The OISE team won the
game 2-1. The _Sporting News_ adorned its report on the final game
with a photo of Nahem.

Back in France, Brigadier Gen. Charles Thrasher organized a parade and
a banquet dinner, with steaks and champagne, for the OISE All-Stars.
In _Victory Season_, about baseball during World War 2, Robert
Weintraub noted: “Day and Brown, who would not be allowed to eat
with their teammates in many major-league towns, celebrated alongside
their fellow soldiers.”

Although major white-owned newspapers, and the wire services, covered
the GI World Series, no publication even mentioned the historic
presence of two African Americans on the OISE roster. Almost every
article simply referred to Day and Brown by name and position, but not
by race or their Negro League ties. One exception was _Stars &
Stripes, _the armed forces newspaper, which in one article described
Day as “former star hurler for the Newark Eagles of the Negro
National League,” and Brown as “former Kansas City Monarchs
outfielder,” hinting at their barrier-breaking significance.

If there were any protests among the white players, or among the
fans—or if any of the 71st Division’s officers raised objections
to having African American players on the opposing team—they were
ignored by reporters.

It isn’t known if Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey was aware
of this triumph over baseball segregation in the military. But in
October 1945, a month after the OISE team won the GI World Series,
Rickey announced that Jackie Robinson had signed a contract with the
Dodgers. In April 1947, Robinson became the first African American
player in the modern major leagues.

On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order
9981, which mandated the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces,
including equality of treatment and opportunity regardless of race,
color, religion, or national origin.

After the war, Nahem returned to Brooklyn and played baseball on
weekends for a top-flight semi-pro team, the Brooklyn Bushwicks, who
often played and beat the best Negro League teams and sometimes even
defeated teams comprised of major league All-Stars. In October 1946,
Nahem captained the Bushwicks team that represented the U.S. at the
Inter-American Tournament in Venezuela. Nahem led the team to the
championship, including winning the final game over Cuba. He remained
in Venezuela to play for Navegantes del Magallanes, a racially
integrated team in the professional winter league, pitching 14
consecutive complete games to set a league record that still stands
today.

In 1948, Nahem got a second fling in the majors, but he lasted only
one season with the Phillies. In one game, he threw an errant pitch
that almost hit Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ African American rookie
catcher.

“He had come up that year and had been thrown at a lot, although
there was absolutely no reason why I would throw at him,” Nahem
later explained. “A ball escaped me, which was not unusual, and went
toward his head. He got up and gave me such a glare. I felt so badly
about it I felt like yelling to him, ‘Roy, please, I really didn’t
mean it. I belong to the NAACP.”

Nahem pitched his last major league game on September 11, 1948. In his
four partial seasons in the majors, he logged a 10–8 won-loss record
and a 4.69 ERA. After leaving the Phillies, Nahem pitched briefly in
the Puerto Rican League, then rejoined the Bushwicks for the 1949
season.

Nahem worked briefly as a law clerk but was never enthusiastic about
pursuing a legal career. He took jobs as a door-to-door salesman and
as a longshoreman unloading banana boats on the New York docks. The
FBI kept tabs on Nahem, as it did with many leftists during the 1950s
Red Scare. Agents would show up at his workplaces and tell his bosses
that he was a Communist. He lost several jobs as a result.

To escape the Cold War witch-hunting, and to start life anew, Nahem,
his wife Elsie, and their children moved to the San Francisco area in
1955. Nahem got a job at the Chevron fertilizer plant in Richmond,
owned by the giant Standard Oil Corporation. During most of his 25
years at Chevron, he worked a grueling schedule — two weeks on
midnight shift, two weeks on day shift, then two weeks on swing shift.
He left the Communist Party in 1957, but he remained an activist. He
served as head of the local safety committee for the Oil, Chemical and
Atomic Workers union at the Richmond plant. Nahem was often offered
management positions, but he refused to take them, preferring to
remain loyal to his coworkers and his union. As late as 1961, the FBI
kept Nahem under surveillance, according to his FBI file.

In 1969, he lead a strike among Chevron workers that attracted support
from the Berkeley campus radicals. Nahem died in 2004 at 88.

Upon his release from the military, Day returned to the Newark Eagles,
leading the Negro Leagues that season in wins, strikeouts, and
complete games. Alongside other WW2 veterans Larry Doby, Monte Irvin,
and Max Manning, he lead the team to the 1946 Negro League World
Series. Day spent two years playing in the Mexican League for better
pay, then spent the 1949 season with the Baltimore Elite Giants,
helping them win the Negro World Series.

Day spent the rest of his baseball career in the minor leagues. In
1951, when he was 34 and well past his prime, he pitched for the
Toronto Maple Leafs of the Triple-A International League. He retired
in 1955 at age 39, then found work as a bartender and security guard.
Day was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on March 7, 1995, but he
had been admitted to St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore with a heart
condition a few days earlier and died on March 14, at aged 78, and
thus unable to attend his induction in Cooperstown. (Negro League
players were banned from the Hall of Fame until 1971).

After the war, a few months after Jackie Robinson broke the major
league color barrier, the American League’s St. Louis Browns signed
Brown for the 1947 season. Despite becoming the first Black player in
the league to hit a home run, he was a bust, batting only .179 in 21
games. The Browns let him go and he returned to the Monarchs for the
1948 season. For the next decade, he played in Mexico, Puerto Rico,
Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and in minor and independent
leagues. When his playing days ended, Brown retired to Houston. He
suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for several years and died in 1996
at age 81. He was elected posthumously to the Baseball Hall of Fame in
2006.

Understandably, most Americans know about Jackie Robinson’s feats
inside and outside of baseball. Almost forgotten are the Jewish
Communist who had been an average major league pitcher and two Negro
League superstars who were banned from major league baseball during
their peak years. They, too, played a part in the crusade to battle
racial injustice.

PETER DREIER is the E.P. Clapp distinguished professor of politics at
Occidental College. He joined the Occidental faculty in January 1993
after serving for nine years as Director of Housing at the Boston
Redevelopment Authority and senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray
Flynn. He is the author of "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th
Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame" (2012) and an editor (with
Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin) of "We Own the Future: Democratic
Socialism, American Style" and co-author of "Baseball Rebels: The
Players, People and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and
Changed America" (2022).

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