Fifty years ago Saturday, the plane crash that killed Mike Todd, producer of "Around the World in 80 Days" and husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor, shocked the nation. The Long Beach Press-Telegram's banner headline screamed "LIZ HYSTERICAL, COLLAPSES." But on Page One the P-T also remembered one of its own, the only other passenger on Todd's plane. "Art Cohn," the obituary read, "was the most controversial sports writer ever to hit Long Beach."

The obit writer erred. Cohn was the most controversial sportswriter on the West Coast -- ever! T.J. Simers is a wimp compared to Cohn.

Cohn began covering sports while still a student at Wilson High, with the morning Sun in 1926, then at the Press-Telegram. He moved to the Oakland Tribune as sports editor a decade later, and at the time of his death was a San Francisco Examiner columnist. Thus the outspoken Cohn, a champion of social reform, toiled for three of the most conservative publishers in California: the Prisks, Knowlands and Hearsts.

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For the record
An earlier version of this story said that UCLA lost the 1939 football game to USC. The teams played to a scoreless tie.

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Cohn made his mark by telling it the only way he could, tarnishing idols and exposing the seamy side of professional and amateur sports. Critics dismissed him as a naysayer who gained notoriety by knocking the sports he covered.

Mixed in with that contentious bashing of pompous owners, coaches and players was a genuine commitment to make sports truly All-American.

How, he asked, could the organization that controlled bowling be named the American Bowling Congress when its bylaws limited membership to white males? How could anyone's All-American football team omit UCLA's Kenny Washington, arguably the best player in the nation, simply because he was black? How could two black Oakland tennis champions be denied entry into the Pacific Coast championship tournament? And all of that was written before there was a civil rights movement.

Cohn wanted to end the racial segregation that permeated nearly every major sport in the country. To that end, as sports editor of the Long Beach Independent in 1945, he challenged his readers with a series of questions:

"Why is a Negro barred from the Davis Cup team but welcomed on the Olympic team though both represent the United States in the same altruistic realm of amateur sport?

"Why is a Negro allowed to sit on the heavyweight boxing throne while no member of his race is allowed to wear a golf crown?

"Why are Negroes welcome as patients in the Shrine hospital for crippled children but barred from playing in the game that supports the hospital, the East West classic each New Year's day?

"Indeed, why is a Negro accepted as the social equal of his White brother as long as he has mitts on his fists, a football under his arm or can run the 100 yards in 9 2/5 and why does that same Negro become an outcast the moment he exchanges his boxing gloves for a golf club, his javelin for a tennis racket or his football for a baseball or bowling ball?"

While sports fans were aware of this discrimination, few bothered to protest. After all, integration had its limits, even in progressive California.

To correct that, Cohn had begun a campaign in the late 1930s to pressure university officials, tennis tournament selection committees and boxing promoters to open their venues to black Americans or to insist that those already on the team be allowed to participate against any opponent.

Cohn attacked those who knuckled under to bigots or were bigots themselves.

He never forgave Avery Brundage for insisting that the U.S. Olympic team must participate at Berlin in 1936.

In a 1945 column he posted an open letter to Brundage:

"I thought we had lost you in the war but I guess that was expecting too much. I'm prejudiced and admit it. I never liked you and never could. You and your bootlickers forced the United States to send an Olympic team to Nazi Germany in 1936 when every decent-thinking American was dead set against it. But you had to have the free ride and all the phony glory that went with it.

"That was no sport festival, it was a political demonstration. You, as America's representative, made no outcry when Jesse Owens was insulted by the Nazis. Hell, you didn't even bat an eyelash when a couple of Jewish boys couldn't make the trip to Berlin because, it was said, they might affront Herr Hitler.

"No, Avery, you have never stood up for the so-called principles for which the Olympic Games are supposed to stand. The only time you ever became righteously indignant was when you caught Eleanor Holm at a champagne party, whereupon you kicked her off the Olympic team. Brave man, Avery."

Football provided Cohn with glaring examples of rank discrimination.

Although Los Angeles reporters remained silent, from Oakland Cohn condemned Loyola for benching its two star running backs when the team traveled to Texas for a game with Baylor's all-white team in 1937.

Since the winner of the 1939 UCLA-USC game would face undefeated, untied Tennessee in the Rose Bowl, Cohn pointed out that Tennessee did not play integrated teams. If UCLA beat USC, would the Volunteers consent to play against Kenny Washington, Woody Strode and Jackie Robinson? Cohn was convinced that the Bruins would not bench their three stars.

"Tennessee happens to be one of the colleges that does not recognize the Emancipation Proclamation. Not only does it bar Negroes from playing on its own team, but it also refuses to compete against any college having Negro players.

"Below the Mason and Dixon, men feel strongly. In their blind devotion to a prejudice that makes a mockery of tolerance and justice, they gladly sacrifice everything, even $100,000 gravy-bowl games."

When the UCLA-USC game ended in a scoreless tie, conference officials voted to send the Trojans to Pasadena and Tennessee had its bowl game. So where was Kenny Washington on New Year's Day? Not in San Francisco's Shrine East-West game.

Cohn: "Fourteen East-West games have been played. But no Negro, no matter how outstanding, has ever played in them. It is an unwritten law, immutable as the commandment that bars Negroes from organized baseball.

"The Washingtons and Strodes cannot understand why they are not allowed to do their bit. And it hurts when their teammates, far less talented, will be invited. They are white. But Washington and Strode are not considered good enough to play in a charity game that benefits all God's chil'lun."

Washington did not play for the Shriners. Instead, he was relegated to a semipro game in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve.

Two years later, Cohn smarted when University of California authorities considered benching black players. Cal and UCLA scheduled games for late December 1941, with Georgia Tech and the University of Florida.

Cohn recalled the incident in the Independent:

"The wind was right and I smelled a story all the way from Atlanta. On a hunch I telegraphed Bill Alexander, the Georgia Tech football coach:

'Will there be any objections from Georgia Tech on the appearance of Walter Gordon Jr., a Negro, in the University of California lineup at Berkeley, December 27?'

"Within a hour I had a reply: 'No comment -- W.A. Alexander.'

"Stub Allison, the California character builder, was not as reticent. 'We want to play Gordon,' he said, 'but we will not have any fuss with Georgia. If there is any question the boy will be held out.'

"California -- your California and mine, the taxpayers' alma mater -- would not fight for the civil liberties and moral rights of Gordon, and every other Negro student attending the many branches of the state university."

Because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the game was never played, so Gordon escaped the ignominy of being benched. But nearly 70 years later, Gordon's widow still remembers the trauma the threatened snub created.

The UCLA-Florida game was not canceled. But Clarence Mackey, the brilliant African American back who led the team in scoring, didn't make the trip to Jacksonville, Fla. While other first-stringers stayed home to work during Christmas vacation, Mackey was left home because he couldn't play against Florida.

Cohn: "Mackey is a Negro and Southern teams are allergic to Negroes. This is your university, fellow taxpayers, supported by your money, reflecting your beliefs. You must be proud of it."

It was discrimination in youth baseball, not professional ball, that rankled Cohn in 1940. Tournament officials surrendered to Southern prejudice and prohibited two black players on a San Diego team from playing in the championship game against Albemarle, N.C.

"Before the series began, Albemarle protested two San Diego players and the boys were declared ineligible because they had committed the crime of being born black. Without these two key players, who had been in the lineup all season, San Diego lost the title.

"This happened in the championship series of a tournament sponsored by . . . the American Legion."

Cohn's civil rights crusade was lost in the backwater of West Coast sports.

Minor league baseball bowed to the whites-only policy of the majors.

Golf, tennis and bowling, controlled by Eastern interests, ignored Cohn's barbs. In 1945 Cohn gave up. He left Long Beach for a highly successful screenwriting career.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast in the 1930s and '40s, New York sports editor Lester Rodney led a painstakingly slow but eventually successful campaign to integrate major league baseball. Ironically, Rodney would end his career where Cohn's started, at the Press-Telegram.

Neither man received the recognition they deserved. Their reward came with the end of the color line.

For a planned Art Cohn biography, readers with Cohn anecdotes or who knew Cohn are asked to contact Shaffer at reshaffer@csupomona.edu.