Kaplan: Claire Smith: Pioneering journalist enters Cooperstown
From Dave Kaplan at The National Pastime Museum on July 26, 2017:
Claire Smith remembers feeling different, usually alone, often invisible. Such was life as a young black girl growing in the 1960s in the overwhelmingly white Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County.
It didn’t get much better in high school or college, as she drifted without a sense of belonging, identity, or purpose. “One of life’s lost souls,” she describes herself then.
It was not the likeliest beginning of someone who would find a life in baseball, as a pioneering and inspiring journalist. Decades before Sheryl Sandberg implored women to stand up and lean in for gender equity, Claire Smith leaned into her male-dominant environment with grace, eloquence, and uncomplaining courage. Now, after a three-decade journey of covering baseball—and enduring oafish slights and blatant sexism—she is honored in Cooperstown as the first African-American woman to receive the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor accorded to a baseball writer.
Read the full article here: https://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/claire-smith-pioneering-journalist-enters-cooperstown
Originally published: July 27, 2017. Last Updated: July 27, 2017.