Jocko Maxwell, the forgotten sports broadcasting great

“This was the first African-American sports broadcaster on radio,” Donna Halper, a professor at Lesley University, SABR researcher, and the first woman to ever host a broadcast at Northeastern University, said in a recent phone call. “He’s the first—and I love firsts, I’m a media historian—but given all the things that Jocko Maxwell achieved, what does he have to do to get into Cooperstown?”

It started out as five-minute segments, giving the scores and updates of the day. Soon it grew to 10 minutes, then 15. He went from WNJ to WHOM, he held call-in broadcasts on Brooklyn’s WLTH, and eventually went to WWRL, where he would be named its sports director in 1942. His shows aired multiple times a week on multiple stations across the dial.

Far more than simply reading out the scores of the day, Maxwell was known for his devotion to the Negro Leagues—giving them time on stations that would never usually pay any attention to them.

“Jocko was on his own mission,” sportswriter Jerry Izenberg wrote in The Star-Ledger after Maxwell’s passing in 2008. “He let the world know what was going on in places like Ruppert Stadium and Forbes Field and Comiskey Park when the ‘other’ teams (which meant Blacks) took over from the regular tenants. And in his way, he made the part of America that would listen know all about these Black knights of the open road.”