by Jonathan Eig
Robinson trotted out to first base in the top half of the inning, a smile creasing his face. The Braves sent their first batter, Dick Culler, to the plate. Culler hit a ground ball to third base, where Jorgensen scooped it up and threw to first. Robinson squeezed it for the out. It was a simple catch, but the crowd expressed its delight as if they’d never seen anything quite like it.
It was official now. The game had begun. A black man was playing big-league ball.
Stanky started the bottom half of the first inning with a ground-out. Then came Robinson, greeted by another cheer, this one much bigger than the last. In the stands, some fans stood to get a better look. Shouts of “C’mon, Jackie!” and “We’re with you, boy!” rang out across the field. The great Johnny Sain, winner of twenty games the prior year, stood on the mound, ready to go. The Braves’ third baseman, Bob Elliott, crept in on the grass in case of a bunt. Catcher Phil Masi crouched behind the plate.
Robinson squeezed his Louisville Slugger, roughly thirty-three ounces and thirty-five inches long, holding the bat high. Sain pitched not at Robinson’s head or at his rib cage, as some had feared. He threw wicked curves and whistling fastballs, better pitches than most Robinson had seen, and he threw them for strikes. Robinson swung at one and slapped a sharp ground ball to third base. Elliott grabbed it and tossed to first for the easy out. As Robinson jogged back to the dugout, the crowd roared yet again.
There were more cheers when he came to bat in the third inning. This time he hit a soft fly ball to left for another out. By the fifth inning, the score was tied, 1–1. The Dodgers had a man on base when Robinson, stepping to the plate for the third time, had a chance to play the hero. Once again, the Braves’ infielders crept in on the grass, looking for a bunt. As the pitch arrived, Robinson took a hack. It was not a pretty swing—too much shoulder, not enough wrist, same as usual. He hit it hard and up the middle, but not quite hard enough. Just as the ball was about to skip safely into center field, shortstop Culler dove, gloved it, and, while lying on his stomach, flipped to second base to start a double play. If there were highlight reels in 1947, Culler’s gem would have been all over them.
“Too bad about that double-play,” said Harry J. Boger, an insurance broker from Brooklyn, talking to a reporter as he watched the game, “but that colored fellow is just under terrific pressure.”
Stanky began the bottom of the seventh with a walk—his specialty. With Stanky leading off first, Robinson stepped to the plate once more. The Dodgers trailed, 3–2. The crowd buzzed. Long shadows fell across the field as Robinson raised his big bat high once again, and, once again, the Braves looked for him to bunt. This time he didn’t disappoint. He pushed the ball delicately up the first-base line, perfectly placed. Earl Torgeson, the first baseman, grabbed it and spun around to throw to first. But by now Robinson was dashing down the line, and Torgeson had to hurry. He threw to second baseman Connie Ryan, who was covering the bag, but the throw sailed wide to the right. The ball glanced off Robinson’s right shoulder and rolled into foul territory. Stanky zipped to third and Robinson to second. When Pete Reiser followed with a double, Stanky and Robinson both scored to give the Dodgers a 4–3 lead.
Later, the left-fielder Gene Hermanski drove in another run to push the score to 5–3, where it remained. Nearly sixty years later, his memory smoothed by time, Hermanski would tell friends and strangers that it was he who had driven in Robinson with the winning run on Opening Day. “George Washington and Abraham Lincoln didn’t know what people were going to say about them twenty-five, fifty years later,” he noted. “We didn’t know this was history. You wouldn’t realize it until later on. Jackie was the first black guy to touch home plate in a big-league game, and I was the one who knocked him in. At least I think I was.”
• • •
How closely was Robinson being watched? One reporter, Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American, took a seat opposite the Dodger dugout in order to provide his readers an inning-by-inning account of Robinson’s seating choice and facial expressions. Throughout most of the game, the story said, Robinson sat next to Sukeforth, like a new kid at school sticking close to the teacher, although at times he was joined by Pete Reiser, catcher Bruce Edwards, or Tom Tatum, the part-time outfielder who had been his teammate at Montreal. At other times he sat alone. In the bottom of the seventh, after he’d scored the winning run, according to Lacy, Robinson allowed himself a yawn.
The Pittsburgh Courier devoted almost its entire front page to Robinson. The Chicago Defender ran pictures above the masthead and included four stories and a photo essay on its inside pages. The Richmond Afro-American led with two big headlines, Robinson’s debut and a report that the city’s police department planned to double the number of Negro officers on the force, from four to eight. In the communist Daily Worker, Lester Rodney wrote: “It’s hard this Opening Day to write straight baseball and not stop to mention the wonderful fact of Jackie Robinson.” The People’s Voice of Harlem ran a picture of Robinson in uniform on its front page but dedicated its biggest headline to the story of a black artist beaten by a white mob in Greenwich Village. The Boston Chronicle described Robinson as “very colored” and predicted he would open doors for black Americans well beyond the baseball field.
Elsewhere, however, the response was subdued. There was no notice made from the White House, and no pronouncement from Mayor William O’Dwyer. The New York Times confined the story to the sports page, and even then Robinson was not deemed headline-worthy. His actions on the field were described in the day’s game story, but there was no mention of his race and no description of how he was received by fans. Arthur Daley, a sports columnist for the Times, waited until the tenth paragraph of his dispatch to mention Robinson’s breakthrough, which he described as “quite uneventful.” It was much the same in New York’s Daily Mirror, where Robinson went unmentioned until the fourth paragraph of the game story.
It was a pattern that would repeat itself all season long. White journalists had little experience writing about integration, and sportswriters were even more unfamiliar with the subject. Rather than plunge into unfamiliar waters, they stuck close to the shore, treating Robinson as just another ballplayer, except when some unavoidable piece of news like a death threat or a threatened boycott came across their desks and forced the issue.
“Having Jackie on the team is a little strange,” one member of the Dodgers told Daley of the Times that day, “just like anything else that’s new. We just don’t know how to act with him. But he’ll be accepted in time. You can be sure of that. Other sports have had Negroes. Why not baseball? I’m for it if he can win games. That’s the only test I ask.”
Only a handful of people fully appreciated what had happened during the ballgame’s two hours and twenty-six minutes. Seldom do heroes recognize their heroics in the instant. In 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier; Jackson Pollock dripped paint on canvas for the first time; Jawaharlal Nehru declared the people of India free at last from British colonial rule; scientists at Bell Labs assembled the first transistor from strips of gold foil on a plastic triangle, held down gently by a piece of germanium; Thor Heyerdahl sailed a balsa raft called the Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia; Miles Davis joined Charlie Parker’s quintet, which reshaped the sound of jazz; and Jack Roosevelt Robinson, as ambitious as the rest, played nine innings of baseball. When he was done, a mob of 250 people, most of them white, waited for him outside the ballpark. It took him thirty minutes to work his way through the crowd of backslappers and autograph hounds. When he finally escaped into a friend’s car, his body sagged into the cushioned backseat, and he released a heavy sigh.
• • •
Back at the McAlpin Hotel that evening, he and his wife took turns going out for dinner so that one of them might stay in the room at all times with the baby. Early in the evening, Ward Morehouse, a drama critic for the New York Sun, knocked on the door of the Robinsons’ room and asked for an interview. It took a writer who didn’t cover sports to lan
d the best story of the day.
How was your first game? Morehouse asked, as Robinson and Jack Jr. sat on the bed swatting at toys.
“It was all right,” Robinson answered. “I did all my thinking last night. Before I went to bed I thanked God for all that’s happened, and for the good fortune that’s come my way. I belong to the Methodist Church in Pasadena and I used to be a Sunday school teacher at U.C.L.A.; they gave me the bad little boys, and I liked it. I was determined not to give too much thought to it being my first game and that’s the way I did it. I didn’t want too much pressure. . . .
“I was comfortable on that field in my first game. The Brooklyn players have been swell and they were encouraging all the way. The Brooklyn crowd was certainly on my side, but I don’t know how it will be in other parks. The size of the crowd didn’t faze me and it never will.
“Now I realize that to stay in the National League, I’ll have to hit. I hit .349 for Montreal last year and I was pretty fast, but I already realize there’s a difference. The big league pitchers are smarter. I realize that, although I haven’t seen but a few of them. Take that fellow Sain. . . . He works on you. He has good control. I’m aware that I have to make it this year—this is my great chance. Will I hit? I hope I’ll hit. I believe I’ll hit. I’m sure I’ll hit.”
He picked up Jack Jr., lowered him into his crib, and went right on talking.
“I know that a lot of players, particularly the southern boys, won’t be able to change their feelings overnight on the matter of playing ball with a Negro. I can understand that. I have encountered very little antagonism, however; I really expected a great deal more . . . I guess now it’s all up to me.
“ . . . I know that I have a certain responsibility to my race, but I’ve got to try not to feel that way about it because it would be too much of a strain. I’ll do my best.”
As Rachel returned from dinner, the reporter said good-bye and moved for the door.
Robinson gave him one final instruction: “Just say that I know that this year is the test.”
FIVE
UP IN HARLEM
After two games at Ebbets Field, the Dodgers traveled across town to play the Giants at the Polo Grounds. At that moment, it was still not clear if Robinson would be an everyday player.
The team had a new manager, Burt Shotton, known to friends as Barney. Shotton hadn’t been to the Polo Grounds since 1922, when he’d played there as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, and he had a hard time finding the place again. At one point, he said, he wound up “on that Triple-Borough Bridge, traveling east in a westbound lane,” and as a result arrived too late to introduce himself properly to his players before the game. Gray-haired and gray-eyed, Shotton was a soft-spoken, grandfatherly man. He’d been around professional baseball since 1908, and now, at sixty-two, he considered himself too old to be strutting around in a baseball uniform. He would wear street clothes in the dugout, he declared: proper slacks, starched shirt, bowtie, topped by a Dodger windbreaker on cooler days. Sometimes he would put on a ball cap, and at other times a fedora. Without a uniform, he would be prohibited by the rules of the game from stepping onto the field. That meant no shouting at umpires, no cajoling of pitchers, no chance for the fans ever to set eyes on him. Shotton didn’t care. He would be managing a team of misfits, a pennant-contending lineup if all went perfectly well, but nonetheless a team full of obvious flaws. Staying out of sight might have struck him as a good idea.
Then there was his biggest challenge: Robinson. There was no blueprint for the job ahead. No one had ever managed under the conditions now facing Shotton. He didn’t seem worried. He stared out placidly from behind his wire-rimmed glasses and made clear that he saw nothing to get excited about. Ever. In fact, though he had agreed to take the job, he had not bothered to ask Rickey for a contract, or even to inquire how much the job paid.
“Heck,” he told Red Barber’s radio audience before his first game, “I don’t even have a hotel room to sleep in tonight!”
On the eve of the Dodgers’ first game with the Giants, there were at least three men hoping the new manager might park Robinson on the bench. One was Ed Stevens, who had been the leading contender for the first baseman’s job before Robinson came along. Stevens was known by his teammates as “Whistling Ed” for the bizarre whistling noises—part bird call, part taxi-hailing screech—he made while fielding his position. He did it to keep his fellow infielders on their toes, he said. Stevens had grown up in poverty in Galveston, Texas, and played sandlot ball with kids of every color. He had no problem being on the same team as a black man. It was losing his job that bothered him.
“I was considered one of the best-fielding first basemen in the league,” he said. “I had power. I could hit home runs. I was a clutch hitter. I felt my abilities were major-league stature.” But he felt he wasn’t getting the playing time he needed to show his talent. Branch Rickey’s big experiment was getting in his way. He considered himself a victim of something like affirmative action, a term not yet in use, but he decided to keep his mouth shut.
The second was Howie Schultz, the team’s other first baseman, although by now Schultz had a good idea that his Dodger days were numbered. He was thinking about giving up baseball and trying his luck at professional basketball.
The third man who may have wanted to see Robinson take some time off was Ford C. Frick, the former sportswriter now serving as president of the National League. The Giants played in the Polo Grounds, in Harlem, and it was Frick’s fear that Harlem’s enormous black population might celebrate Robinson’s arrival with more enthusiasm than the nation’s grand old game could handle. He had no qualms about integration, just as long as people didn’t get too worked up over it. Frick suggested that it might be a fine idea if Robinson were to sprain an ankle and miss a few games.
Harlem was a place of extraordinary wonder and woe. As black families moved to the North throughout the 1940s, the community grew painfully crowded and desperately poor. In 1940, 458,000 black people lived in New York City. By the time of Robinson’s debut, the number was approaching 700,000. Harlem wasn’t just packed, it was packed with anxious energy. Lines at the unemployment office in Harlem were growing longer by the month in 1947, even as prices for everyday goods soared. Men who had proved their competence in the army were out of work and they were angry about it. Businesses all over the neighborhood were struggling with the drop in income, which led to more lost jobs. Black families in New York tended to earn less money than white families. They spent a greater portion of their income on rent. They paid more for groceries. They sent their children to inferior schools. They received inferior medical care and they tended to die younger.
Now, in the years after the war, discontent rumbled through Harlem like a subway train. In the vast trench between hope and reality, a political movement took root. “The Negro people,” said Adam Clayton Powell, the black congressman who represented Harlem, “will be satisfied with nothing short of complete equality—political, economic, educational, religious, social.”
America’s history books tend to set the birth of the modern civil rights movement in 1954, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, or in 1955, when Rosa Parks defied an order to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. But a case can be made, as Martha Biondi contends in her book, To Stand and Fight, that the struggle really began in Harlem in 1945, at about the time that Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a minor-league contract. As Biondi and others have noted, Rickey’s decision to sign Robinson had a lot to do with the political heat rising from Harlem. Businesses all over the city, from big military contractors to small, family-owned restaurants, faced pressure to integrate. Labor leaders, church ministers, Communist Party organizers, Jewish activists, and famous entertainers led the campaign, and they won some impressive victories, raising hopes throughout all black America.
Robinson had connected with at least two left-wing groups in 1946, according to his FBI file
and newspaper clippings. An article in the People’s Voice newspaper said Robinson had agreed to become chair of the New York State Organizing Committee for United Negro and Allied Veterans of America, and to speak at one of the group’s conferences in Harlem. The organization sought to help black veterans adjust to life after war, although the increasingly suspicious FBI later described it as a communist front. “I consider it a great honor. . . .” Robinson wrote in a telegram. “The burning problems of discrimination in housing, employment, education and on-the-job training facing Negro veterans demand an immediate solution. I am happy to join Joe Louis, honorary national commander of UNAVA, in the fight to solve these problems.”
Robinson was also identified in a newspaper article as a member of the advisory board for a new cultural center in Harlem. The center was created by the International Workers Order, a left-wing labor group with alleged communist ties. And in December of 1946 he had agreed to speak at a couple of fund-raising events for the Detroit Committee to Fight Racial Injustice and Terrorism, another group that the government would later label subversive. Robinson canceled his appearance in Detroit at the last minute, perhaps on orders from Rickey, a staunch anticommunist, who said repeatedly that he wanted his player to focus entirely on baseball.
“Branch Rickey was not favorably inclined toward his involvement, and in fact he was hostile toward it,” recalled Lester Rodney, the sportswriter for the communist Daily Worker, who covered Robinson and the Dodgers in 1947. “Jackie was personally an outspoken and intelligent guy. . . . His instinct was to get involved. . . . [But] he knew in this particular situation he couldn’t alienate Rickey.”
But before Rickey intervened, Robinson had tipped his hand. Free of restraint, he had aligned himself with the radical left. He was an athlete first, but he was a battler to the core, and he appeared eager to place himself at the center of the fight for civil rights. He was proud to be a symbol of the push for integration, but he was prepared to do more. Athletes and entertainers had always been at the front of the civil rights movement. Even before Robinson, the actors Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, and Canada Lee had been outspoken in their political views. After Robinson, black athletes from Muhammad Ali to Arthur Ashe would use their fame to push for social change. They were fighting for their people, but they were also fighting for themselves. Racial discrimination in housing would have a direct effect on Jackie Robinson’s family in the months and years ahead. When Rachel Robinson had difficulty hailing a cab in Manhattan to take her to Ebbets Field on Opening Day, she learned something black New Yorkers had known for years—and know still today—about the city’s taxi drivers.