John Wendell Smith was an American sportswriter and civil rights activist who was influential in the choice of Jackie Robinson's career as the first African American Major League Baseball player. Similarly, Smith was one of the first African American sport-writers to be a member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, and was posthumously awarded the J. G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1993.

The Pittsburgh Courier was an African American weekly newspaper published in Pittsburgh from 1907 until October 22, 1966. By the 1930s, the Courier was one of the leading black newspapers in the United States.