by Jonathan Eig
The driver went for help. Soon a couple of military police officers arrived and took Robinson to meet their captain. In the meeting, Robinson not only complained about the bus driver but went a step further, accusing his interrogator of being a racist. “Captain, tell me,” Robinson said, seeking to provoke, “where are you from anyway?” Now it was the captain’s turn to get angry. Robinson soon found himself under arrest.
At the military trial, he took the stand in his own defense, and while he admitted using obscenity in his argument with the driver, he justified his behavior. He told the jury about his grandmother, Edna Sims McGriff, his mother’s mother, who had been born a slave in Georgia in 1858 and who had come to live with Mallie and the kids in Pasadena in the 1920s, a reminder of his family’s bitter legacy right under his roof. He discussed the definition of the word nigger, and how it felt to be called by the name: “I looked it up once, but my grandmother gave me a good definition, she was a slave, and she said the definition was a low, uncouth person, and pertains to the negroid or negro. . . . I objected to being called a nigger by this private or by anybody else. . . . I told the captain, I said, ‘ . . . I do not consider myself a nigger at all. I am a Negro, but not a nigger.’ ”
Robinson’s lawyers presented character witnesses, and then wrapped up their defense by arguing their client had been accused not because he’d committed any real crime but because a group of white men didn’t like getting lip from an “uppity” black man. After a four-hour trial, he was found not guilty of all charges.
So it always seemed to go for Robinson, as he dashed in and out of trouble. Later in life, he would establish a reputation as the most cunning base-runner in the major leagues. For almost all other ballplayers, getting caught in a rundown on the base paths was considered a grave error, and an almost certain out. For Robinson, it was often an opportunity. Sometimes after a hit, he would pretend to have taken too big a turn off first base, hoping to draw a throw. And then, when the toss came in behind him, he would bolt for second. It was remarkable how often he fooled opponents. It was as if it had never occurred to the outfielders that he might outsmart them. Like the black men and women who sang the blues, he made an art form out of hardship and trouble.
• • •
After the army, it was time for Robinson to decide what he intended to do with his life. A job offer came from his former pastor, Karl Downs, who had moved from Pasadena to Austin, Texas, and now served as president of Samuel Huston College. Downs recruited Robinson to teach physical education and coach basketball at the all-black school. Not surprisingly, Robinson proved a tough coach, punishing players who missed practices or skipped classes. He grew frustrated at times, though, because his players were neither as determined nor as talented as he. In exhibition games, when his team fell behind, he would insert himself in the lineup, teaching his young athletes the absolute wrong lesson: that it was winning that mattered more than how you played the game. “He liked to play around the basket, rebounding and all that. He was tough around the basket,” said Harold “Pea Vine” Adanandus, who was then the team’s trainer. “He was just an exceptional athlete, and you could tell he still wanted to play.”
Before the season’s end, Robinson got a job offer from the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the top teams in baseball’s Negro leagues. He considered himself a mere dabbler in baseball, and not even much of a fan. If he’d collected baseball cards as a kid, he never mentioned it. Still, he longed for real competition, and he knew he lacked the patience for coaching. The Monarchs were one of the most successful squads on the Negro baseball circuit, and their offer of four hundred dollars a month in salary looked much better than any of his other options. Yet he soon came to despise his first foray into professional baseball. A “pretty miserable way to make a buck,” he called it. For a perfectionist such as Robinson, the Negro leagues were torture. Sometimes the ballplayers were permitted only on the diamonds and not in the locker rooms, because the white men who controlled the facilities didn’t want their showers used by black men. Sometimes there were no hotels willing to take them, sometimes no restaurants. The men considered themselves lucky if they were permitted to go in through the back door of a putrid roadside rest stop, pay for some hamburgers, and walk back to the bus with grease-stained brown bags in hand. Every day offered new lessons in humiliation. Most of the Monarchs were accustomed to the indignities, but Robinson would never get used to them.
“We . . . pulled up in service stations in Mississippi where drinking fountains said black and white, and a couple of times we had to leave without our change, he’d get so mad,” teammate Othello Renfroe recalled of Robinson. Once, when the white owner of a gas station refused to let the men use the rest room, Robinson ordered the driver of the team bus to stop filling the bus’s enormous twin tanks. They’d buy their gas elsewhere, he announced. The station’s owner relented. The Monarchs had faced similar indignities in their travels, but never had one of them responded so forcefully.
Even the ballgames frustrated Robinson. The action was sloppy. Some games were never completed. If teams were in a rush to get back on the road, they might knock off after six or seven innings. The Monarchs played hard at times, but only at times. Robinson fit in like a schoolmarm in a brothel.
The Negro leagues were not exactly a business juggernaut, but they were mostly profitable in the years after the war, one of the few black-owned and black-operated institutions with national recognition and a widespread support. The best-known black player in the country was Leroy “Satchel” Paige, one of Robinson’s teammates, and a celebrity of the brightest wattage. Paige, long-legged and long-armed, spoke as cunningly as he threw. He bragged that his aim was so precise that he could “nip frosting off a cake with my fastball.” But he had much more than a fastball. “I use my single windup, my double windup, my triple windup, my hesitation windup, my no windup,” he once said. “I also use my step-’n-pitch-it, my submariner, my sidearmer, and my bat dodger. Man’s got to do what he’s got to do.” Which might well have become the motto for Negro-league baseball. Paige and the slugger Josh Gibson were the two greatest black ballplayers in the country. Either one of them could have been a star in the major leagues. Paige had proved on the barnstorming circuit that his pitches worked as effectively on white hitters as they did on black, but he still doubted the major leagues would give him a chance. Even if they did, he was fond of saying, they would never pay him anywhere near what he made in the Negro baseball business.
In one interview, Paige blasted black journalists for pushing integration, warning that it would only bring trouble. “You keep on blowing off about getting us players in the league without thinking about our end of it . . . ,” he said, “without thinking how tough it’s going to be for a colored ballplayer to come out of the clubhouse and have all the white guys calling him nigger and black so-and-so. . . . What I want to know is what the hell’s gonna happen to good will when one of those colored players, goaded out of his senses by repeated insults, takes a bat and busts fellowship in his damned head?”
Robinson’s career with the Monarchs was brief. Researchers have recovered box scores from only fourteen league-sanctioned games in which he played. He almost certainly played more than that, but there’s no telling how many. In those fourteen outings, Robinson hit .434, with one home run and one stolen base, which is astounding given how little experience he had in baseball.
Traveling with the team, Robinson longed for a reunion with Rachel. He wrote to her several times a week. But he didn’t know what to do next. There seemed no future in the game, and as long as he kept kicking around with the Monarchs, his future with Rachel remained on hold, too. “I never expected the walls [of segregation] to come tumbling down in my lifetime,” he wrote years later. “I began to wonder why I should dedicate my life to a career where the boundaries for progress were set by racial discrimination.” He was not one of those ballplayers who loved the game so deeply that he would find a way to play no matter the pa
y and no matter the conditions. If baseball didn’t need him, then he didn’t need baseball.
TWO
“SOME GOOD COLORED PLAYERS”
On August 24, 1945, the Kansas City Monarchs visited Comiskey Park to play a double-header against the Chicago American Giants. Robinson was nursing a sore shoulder. Between games, columnist Fay Young of the Chicago Defender cornered the young ballplayer and asked if he planned to go east to meet with Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey was scouting players for a new Negro league, according to news reports, and promising that his organization would be more stable and more professionally managed than the other Negro leagues.
Rickey was known throughout the land of baseball as a careful calculator, but something about his plan didn’t add up, and Fay Young sensed it. Negro-league baseball was a tricky business, full of hustlers and fly-by-nighters. Like the used-car trade, it was lucrative and professionally run in some locations, and a complete mess in others. Young couldn’t understand why Rickey, a man of famously high standards, would want to slop around in such muck. The writer wondered if the Brooklyn boss had an ulterior motive, and he pressed Robinson for whatever information he had.
Was he going to Brooklyn? Was he meeting Rickey?
“Just rumors,” the ballplayer insisted.
Robinson was a newcomer to Negro-league ball, and far from the best player around. But his football heroics at UCLA had made him famous, which meant he might be a nice catch for a white businessman trying to bring attention to a new league. If Robinson planned to cut a deal with Rickey, the athlete had a duty to inform readers of the African-American Defender, Young argued.
“Well, it’s a rumor,” Robinson said, smiling. “If you don’t see me here tomorrow, then there’s something to it.”
The next day, Robinson was gone.
• • •
During the war years, when other teams had scaled back their scouting operations to save money, Branch Rickey, sensing opportunity, doubled the budget for Dodger scouts. He was a staunch patriot and never doubted that the United States would win the war quickly. At the same time, he addressed a secret meeting of the Dodgers’ board of directors and asked their approval to pursue black ballplayers. In the meeting, which was held before the start of the 1943 season at the exclusive New York Athletic Club, the directors granted their permission, although they warned Rickey that it was one thing to seek a competitive advantage on the ball field and another thing to set out to change the world. Rickey declared his priorities: “First, to win a pennant. I think there’s some good colored players. The second reason is . . . it’s right!” So he sent his scouts to look for black ballplayers as well as white—and to keep quiet about it.
The pressures facing Rickey in 1945 were not like those facing baseball executives in Pittsburgh, Boston, and Cincinnati. New York City was a political powder keg. Black activists, trade unionists, integrationists, communists, pacifists, and religious leaders in New York were exceedingly well organized and highly combative, and they had decided to make the integration of baseball one of their core goals. It seemed to them a relatively easy target. How could any game calling itself the national pastime, they asked, get away with excluding 10 percent of the population? The hypocrisy was so jolting that even the Japanese had picked up on it during the war, showering black troops with leaflets intended to sap their morale. “If Americans are fighting for the freedom and equality of all people,” the propaganda read, “why aren’t Negro Americans allowed to play baseball?”
In New York after the war, Ben Davis, a black communist running for city council, printed his own pamphlet saying the Japanese had been right. He vowed to make integration of the major leagues one of his top priorities in office. Davis was elected—with the endorsement of Tammany Hall and the Communist Party—and he told his cheering supporters in 1945 that he intended to make New York “the most liberal city in America,” entirely free of racism, with equal rights for everyone, from busboys to ballplayers.
Indeed, New York did become the most liberal city in America. And the liberal factions were not the only ones pushing for baseball’s integration. Many mainstream writers and hardcore baseball fans believed integration would prove good for the game. The principles soldiers fought for in World War II remained vivid in people’s minds, and Americans were eager to continue the fight on the home front.
“If baseball belonged to all the people and the people had a vote in its conduct,” the popular sportswriter Damon Runyon wrote in 1945, “Negroes would be permitted to play in organized ball if they could make good by the same standards set for the whites.” Dan Parker of the New York Daily Mirror wrote, “There is no good reason why, in a country that calls itself a democracy, intolerance should exist on the sports field, most democratic of all meeting places.” Others in the press tried to explain why the integration of the national pastime would never work. Jimmy Powers of the Daily News said black ballplayers weren’t talented enough to crack a big-league team, while Stanley Frank of the same paper worried about the black ballplayer’s safety. “I know Southern ballplayers will brandish sharp spikes with intent to cut and maim Negro infielders,” Frank wrote, “that there will be an unprecedented wave of murderous bean-balls thrown at Negro batters; that jockeying from the benches will descend to subhuman levels of viciousness.”
But the issue at hand was nevertheless straightforward, which made it popular among activists. One was either for the integration of the game or against it. So the black newspapermen buttonholed big-league players, coaches, and owners at every opportunity, asking them to vote yea or nay. Although they might have spoken differently in the privacy of their all-white clubhouses, most of them voted yea: “It’s too bad those colored boys don’t play in the big leagues,” the legendary pitcher Dizzy Dean once said, “because they sure got some great players.”
In 1945, the New York state legislature passed the Quinn-Ives Act, a ban on discrimination in hiring. The same year, New York City’s mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, appointed a commission to investigate discrimination in hiring and appointed the sociologist Dan Dodson chairman. When Dodson turned his investigation to baseball and interviewed Branch Rickey, the Dodger boss was thrilled. He believed the public pressure and the commission’s investigation would make it easier for him to integrate his team, and he quickly shared the details of his secret plan with Dodson. What’s more, he asked Dodson for his help. Rickey told the sociologist he wanted to learn the politics and psychology of integration. He wanted to study the track records of institutions that had already integrated. He also wanted Dodson to help him stall. With a little more time, Rickey knew, he would have the chance to corner the market on black players, select just the right black man to break the color line, and prepare his white players for the new man’s arrival. Dodson, thoroughly charmed, agreed to do whatever Rickey asked of him.
Rickey thought of everything, and then he thought of more. He was a lawyer by training and believed that baseball, like the law, required careful analysis as well as bold action, but more of the former than the latter. Reporters said he was the smartest man ever associated with the game, and Rickey tended to believe his press clippings. Rickey was famous for his long-winded sermons. The writers who covered the Dodgers sometimes rolled their eyes, but they nevertheless cherished him. He was nothing if not good copy. “Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen,” he once said, just warming up. “Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference or inattention are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.” He uttered the concluding sentence of that refrain—Luck is the residue of design—so often that it would become his credo. He hung a sign with that maxim in his office. The other epigram hanging in his office, attributed to the Scottish philosopher William Drummond, read: “He who will not
reason is a bigot; he who cannot reason is a fool; he who dares not reason is a slave.”
Reporters tended to leave Rickey’s wood-paneled office (“the Cave of the Winds,” they called it) in a terrific hurry, exuberant, convinced that they had filled their notebooks with pure gold, only to start typing and realize that they had nothing but blabber. He was a heavy man, five-foot-nine, 215 pounds, “massive, benign, and bucolic,” in the eyes of one correspondent. A cowlick poked from the top of his head. Bushy eyebrows climbed up and over his glasses, threatening to take over the whole face. He sucked fat cigars at all times of day. Though his extra-wide bowties were custom-made at Lord & Taylor and Brooks Brothers, one sartorial splash was not enough to fool anybody. He was a mess. Even his shoes looked rumpled.
Rickey was a deeply religious man, the son of a Methodist preacher, calm and careful, as tight with money as he was loose with lips. Though he didn’t finish high school, he nevertheless earned baccalaureate degrees in art and literature and a doctorate in law. He coached the University of Michigan’s baseball team while pursuing his degree in law. Later, he claimed to own every book published on the life of Abraham Lincoln, and he always kept Shakespeare, Plutarch, Boswell’s Johnson, and the Bible close at hand in his office. He preferred reading to sleeping. “Who wants to sleep anyhow?” he once asked, and then tossed in a little Shakespeare to make his point. “What’s it good for outside of ‘knitting up the ravell’d sleaves of care’?”
Multitasking was not in the lexicon of the day, but Rickey certainly took to the concept. He sometimes summoned his secretary to join him in the bathroom so he could dictate letters. He shaved in the bathtub, without benefit of mirror or cream, in order to save a few precious minutes, a process that left his face as rough as an avocado skin. He may indeed have been the most brilliant man ever to wrap his mind around the game of baseball. On the other hand, with his bloated rhetoric and moralistic sermons, he may have been the game’s all-time greatest swindler, too. Like a great revival preacher, he made the pursuit of profits seem somehow holy. He wouldn’t go to the ballpark on Sundays, keeping a promise he’d made to his parents as a young man (“Dear Ones at Home,” he addressed the 1904 letter containing his oath), but he had no trouble keeping his share of the receipts collected on the Lord’s day.