by Jonathan Eig
At about that time, the rector of a church in Scarsdale asked Barber to give a talk on the radio about the growing tensions in Scarsdale between Christians and Jews. “Men and Brothers” was the suggested title for the broadcast. Barber’s father was a Baptist, his mother a Presbyterian, his wife an Episcopalian. He attended the Episcopal church with his wife. In working out something to say about relations between the religions, Barber’s thoughts turned again to his lunch with Rickey. He was still trying to decide what to do, still trying to figure out who he was. “What was my job? What was my function? What was I supposed to do as I broadcast baseball games?”
Barber recalled how the great umpire Bill Klem had always said that he blocked out the crowd noise, the score, and the names of the players on the field so that he might concentrate entirely and objectively on the ball. He called it umpiring the ball. Was it fair or foul? A ball or a strike? Did it stick in the glove or pop out? Under Klem’s system, it wouldn’t matter if the man hitting the ball happened to be black or white, a star or a nobody. It didn’t matter if he was working an exhibition game or a World Series clash. Maybe the same approach ought to apply to a broadcaster, Barber reasoned. It wasn’t his job to decide who should play the game. His job was to describe what he saw, simple as that.
“If I did do anything constructive in the Robinson situation,” he recalled, “it was simply in accepting him the way I did—as a man, as a ballplayer. I didn’t resent him, and I didn’t crusade for him. I broadcast the ball.”
With Barber calling the action in 1947, Robinson came to life for fans in the best possible way. When he finally started to hit, he became a hero, his color not a factor. In person, Robinson could be irritating. He was standoffish at times. But over the radio, he was all action. Listeners heard of his deeds and were left to imagine the rest. Based on what they were reading in the newspapers, they imagined a man showing up every day to play despite enormous pressure and deeply personal attacks. Had there been television cameras waiting for him in the clubhouse, or outside his home, fans might have seen some anxiety furrowing his brow. Perhaps they would have detected some sadness in his voice. But Robinson came across largely as Red Barber described him. As far as anyone listening to the radio could tell, the Dodgers—black and white, northern and southern, Jewish, Italian, and Irish—were as undifferentiated as a bag of peanuts.
• • •
In New London, Connecticut, thirteen-year-old Margot Hayward and her cousin wouldn’t go outside, no matter the weather, when Barber was broadcasting a Dodger game. Margot’s mother finally draped an extension cord out the window and lowered the radio down from Margot’s room so the kids could play in the yard and hear the game. Hayward sensed the excitement whenever Robinson reached base. The crowd got louder as Barber described Robinson taking his lead off first base, always a threat to steal. Hayward had read about the indignities the Dodger first baseman had been forced to endure. To that point in her life, she had given little if any thought to race. “I always thought their lives were fine,” she said of black people. “They were just separate. It never occurred to me there was any injustice in the world.” The black kids her own age, along with some of the poor white children in the community, usually attended technical high schools, training for blue-collar jobs, while she and her friends went to mainstream high schools. Margot didn’t see anything wrong with that. In 1947, Robinson instantly became her favorite player, in part because he was so exciting and in part because he was different. As a girl of thirteen, she thought she knew something about feeling different. She began keeping a scrapbook dedicated exclusively to his rookie year. She began noticing black people in her community. One day she asked her parents if she could invite a new friend to a party she was having at her house. The girl was white, but she was the daughter of a garbage collector. Margot’s father, a lawyer, said he didn’t want his daughter mixing with someone not in her social class. But Margot thought of her scrapbook. Robinson wasn’t her kind. He wasn’t Red Barber’s kind, or Pistol Pete Reiser’s kind, or Eddie Stanky’s kind. They mixed. She stood up to her father, saying she would rather not have the party if her friend couldn’t come, and her father backed down.
“At age thirteen, that was total victory,” she recalled. The arrival of Jackie Robinson, she said, “was something that changed a lot of things in my life. You grow up in a society that’s pretty rigid . . . and eventually you start to rebel.”
• • •
Malcolm Little was another of Red Barber’s regular listeners in the spring and summer of 1947. He, too, knew something about rebellion. He was twenty-one years old and following the Dodgers from his cell at the Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts. Beginning with Opening Day, which created a huge sensation throughout the prison, and for every game thereafter, Little would sit next to his radio, pencil in hand, keeping track of Robinson’s every at-bat. At the end of each game, he would calculate the Dodger first baseman’s batting average.
A light-skinned black man from Lansing, Michigan, Little was serving a ten-year sentence for burglary. “Red,” his friends called him, for the rusty color of his hair. Later, he would change his name to Malcolm X. Before he became a convicted criminal, Little had been engaged in a long series of auditions for the part. For years, he’d been dodging the law as a shoplifter, drug dealer, street hustler, numbers runner, and pimp. He was an angry young man, though thoughtful enough that he directed the anger mostly at himself.
As he listened to baseball on the radio, he might have recalled his own brief athletic career, as the only black basketball player on the Mason Junior High School team. Little was one of a handful of black students at the school, and the only one in the seventh grade. His father had been murdered, his mother had been confined to a state mental hospital. Their children were scattered among state institutions. Malcolm’s gift for trouble landed him in a detention home in Mason, Michigan, which is how he came to enroll at Mason Junior High. He liked Mrs. Swerlin, the woman who ran the detention center where he lived, and he respected his English teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, who encouraged students to “become something in life.” But he sensed, only dimly at the time, that these white people who offered their encouragement did not always have the best intentions. He felt as if he were accepted in Mason merely as a mascot, a curiosity, never as a fully formed human being. No one was able to see past his color, he believed.
As a member of the junior high basketball team, Little traveled to nearby towns such as Howell and Charlotte, where fans taunted him with cries of “nigger,” “coon,” and “Rastus.” “It didn’t bother my teammates or my coach at all,” he recalled years later, “and to tell the truth, it bothered me only vaguely.”
After the games, there would be school dances. Whenever Little walked in with his white teammates, everyone in the room would freeze. Someone would lift the needle from the record player and the room would go silent, or so it seemed to him. People smiled, but Little usually understood that he was not supposed to dance with the white girls. Only when the others could see that that black boy was smart enough to show restraint and humility would the record player restart, with Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” or the Ink Spots’ “If I Didn’t Care,” scratching through the public address system.
In his second semester at Mason, Little was elected president of his class. He was surprised and proud. He had good grades. He had friends. His teachers offered encouragement. But he understood—again, only vaguely at the time—that there was another force at work. He was elected because he was different, he sensed, not because he deserved to win. “I was unique in my class,” he wrote years later, “like a pink poodle.” In Little’s mind, his election was part cruel, part kind; part joke, part tribute.
At the time, there were few role models for a young black man trying to fit into a white man’s world. For every source of pride, like Joe Louis, there were a dozen or more sources of shame, like Butterfly McQueen, who played Prissy in Gone With the Wind and shouted
“Lawzy, we got to have a doctor!” The movie, which Little saw that year in Mason, made him want to crawl under the carpet. Still, he was doing well in school, fitting in nicely, thankful for the attention. But one day he found himself alone in a classroom with Mr. Ostrowski, the English teacher he so admired. Mr. Ostrowski asked Little if he’d given any thought to a career.
“Well, yes, sir, I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a lawyer,” he said. He hadn’t been giving it any thought, in fact, but he had a job at the time washing dishes after school, and he knew for certain that lawyers didn’t have to wash dishes.
Mr. Ostrowski half smiled. “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic,” he said. “Don’t misunderstand me now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic. A lawyer, that’s not a realistic goal for a nigger. You’re good with your hands, making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry. People like you as a person—you’d get all kinds of work.”
The remark poisoned Little. None of the white students in class had been told to scale down their ambitions, and his grades were better than most. He began to change, to pull away, to lose interest in trying to please his white teachers and classmates. Now, when he heard “nigger,” he turned and glared instead of letting it roll off his back. Soon he would drop out of school and board a bus for Boston to live with his half-sister.
After years of petty crimes and misadventures in Boston and New York, he found himself locked up in the Massachusetts state pen, listening to Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers in the summer of 1947. Red Barber danced nimbly around the subject of race, scarcely mentioning the first baseman’s color, but Little could think about nothing else. His own attempt at integration had failed. Mason Junior High’s seventh-grade class had not been ready for him. Now he wanted to see if the Dodgers and the rest of America were prepared to do better. He passed his time to the steady rhythm of balls, strikes, and outs, monitoring Robinson’s batting average, praying for it to stay above .300, the benchmark for excellence in the majors.
That same year, Little began to turn his life around ever so slightly. He took a correspondence course in English, working on grammar, vocabulary, and penmanship. He read as if books were food and he was starving. Five years later, when he was released on parole, he embraced the Muslim religion and dropped his last name, which he considered a vestige of slavery, and replaced it with the letter X. He did not become a believer in integration—at least not in the brand exemplified by Robinson and endorsed by mainstream civil rights leaders. He took a more militant approach, arguing for black separatism and urging black people to use violence if necessary to achieve power. In the 1960s, he would attack Robinson, saying the ballplayer had been “used by the whites,” starting with Branch Rickey, throughout his career. He would ridicule Robinson for his conservative political stances. “You, yourself would never shake my hand,” he wrote in a letter to Robinson, “until you saw some of your white friends shaking it.”
But all that came later, much later. In 1947, Malcolm was spellbound by Robinson, captivated by his speed and daring, just as so many others were. He listened to Red Barber’s broadcasts and pictured this burglar, this black man stealing the white men’s bases, running circles around them, making them look helpless. He was truly tearing up the pea patch. “Jackie Robinson had, then, his most fanatic fan in me,” he wrote.
TEN
PEE WEE’S EMBRACE
For one month Jackie Robinson had been a clenched fist—frozen, cramped, joyless. He had kept his mouth closed, backed down from provocation, made no waves, just as Branch Rickey had asked. It wasn’t until the Dodgers made their first extended road trip that something clicked and he found a way to fight, and to play the kind of baseball he most enjoyed.
In Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis, they waited for him. America was a nation in flux. Beginning around 1940, hundreds of thousands of black men and women had begun moving from the rural South to the urban North. The migration continued through the war, as black men arrived, hoping to secure some of the high-paying factory jobs abandoned by men off fighting. Even after the war, the waves continued to roll from south to north, strong enough to scare some people. “If tens of thousands of black Southerners descend upon communities totally unprepared for them psychologically and industrially, what will the effect be upon race relations in the United States?” David Cohn, a white southerner, wrote in 1947. “There is an enormous tragedy in the making.” The African-American writer Richard Wright had reached much the same conclusion a few years earlier: “Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city; we were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall and sprawling centers of steel and stone. We, who were landless upon the land; we, who had barely managed to live in family groups; we, who needed the ritual and guidance of institutions to hold our atomized lives together in times of purpose; we, who had known only relationships to people and not relationships to things; we, who had our personalities blasted with 200 years of slavery and had been turned loose to shift for ourselves—we were such a folk as this when we moved into a world that was destined to test all we were, that threw us into the scales of competition to weigh our mettle.”
That was Jackie Robinson, a man thrown into the scales of competition. But he was not the only one. Millions of Americans, black and white, were feeling the pressure. The black migration, the biggest internal resettlement in the nation’s history, created enormous competition for jobs and housing and all sorts of consumer goods. Cars, for instance, were in short supply because for years auto plants had been cranking out jeeps and tanks instead of sedans. Men who had seen their bravery tested on the battlefields had come home to find that their wives, after working in factories and running households for a couple of years, had become more self-reliant. Some men could not be sure where they fit anymore. A nation united by battlefield triumphs and confident in the destiny of the American way suddenly found itself dazed and confused by the changes.
Black families moving north often set out with no fixed destination in mind. They would try St. Louis, or Cincinnati, or Dayton, and if they found no work, they moved on, perhaps to Cleveland, perhaps to Pittsburgh, or perhaps to Chicago.
Cincinnati was a fairly typical stop along the route, more North than South, more recipient than sender. The Queen City prospered in the 1940s, with a population approaching half a million, and booming factories that manufactured jet engines and machine tools. From 1940 to 1950, the black population in the city grew from fifty-six thousand to seventy-eight thousand. By 1947, roughly three out of every four black Cincinnatians were clustered in the West End, a sprawling slum filled with falling-down houses, aging factories, and empty lots. About 80 percent of black families lived in homes that the city deemed beneath acceptable standards. “Police rookies patrol the streets in pairs,” reported the WPA Guide to Cincinnati in 1943, “and victims of knife slashing in this section are numerous among regular patients of the city’s General Hospital. Despite the law-abiding nature of the better element, the reputation of the area is bad.” The West End might have been shunned completely by white Cincinnatians if not for one concrete-and-steel structure, located at the corner of Findlay Street and Western Avenue: Crosley Field, home to the Cincinnati Reds, set in the northern end of the impoverishment, between a smoky railroad yard and a long bank of tenements, with the Superior Towel and Linen Service Building out behind left field.
Cincinnati, having never prepared for the huge influx of black families, was feeling the strain of its growth, its urban center breaking down. The war had helped postpone certain problems, as everyone rallied around the flag. So long as the manufacturing sector continued to boom, jobs remained in good supply for men black and white. When the war ended, though, everything and everyone felt the pressure. Jobs got scarce. Schools and playgrounds grew crowded. Crime rates ticked slowly higher. Poor people, unable to find affordable housing, bega
n doubling up with brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. Families that could afford it pushed beyond the city’s boundaries, planting new suburbs on soil that had once been farmed.
This was no small demographic shift. This was an earthquake. A baby boom was coming, and while most social scientists would not notice for years, planners in Cincinnati were more alert than most. In 1947 they were at work on a comprehensive plan to repair the city’s dissolving infrastructure. They would build highways through the West End slums. They would tear down countless thousands of dilapidated homes with little regard for their inhabitants. And though the city’s black population was growing as its white population fell away, the black community in Cincinnati, with no elected representation, would have no say in the plans. The neighborhood never enjoyed a sustained period of glory, but if ever there were a moment when the West End swelled with pride, it was Tuesday, May 13, when Jackie Robinson came to town, making his midwestern debut.
This time he didn’t stare out the window on the train. En route to Cincinnati Robinson played cards with a couple of the guys who’d been his teammates in Montreal: Marv Rackley and Johnny Jorgensen. Eddie Chandler, a rookie pitcher and an Alabaman, was their fourth. They played for no more than twenty-five cents at a time. From the train station, the Dodgers—including Robinson—went to the Netherland-Plaza Hotel, opposite the city’s famous Fountain Square, where, seemingly, they had no problems at check-in. Reporters following the team congratulated the hotel manager on his progressive attitude, failing to mention that Robinson couldn’t use the pool or dining room during his visit.
Down the block from the hotel, William Mallory bussed tables that afternoon at the Hub Café. He was a fifteen-year-old high-school dropout, wiping tables for the restaurant’s white customers, making twenty-five dollars a week, and dreaming of a career as an elected government official. Sixty years later, Mallory couldn’t recall whether he witnessed Robinson’s first or second game in Cincinnati, but he remembered with clarity the mood of the city as the Dodgers came to town. It was just another ballgame for the white men who stopped in at the Hub Café for dinner on their way to Crosley Field. But not in the West End. “Oh, it was really something to see,” he said. Black people filled the neighborhood as if from nowhere, like some magician’s trick, pouring out of every bus, every taxi. But what looked like magic to Mallory was simply a matter of practicality to the travelers. They had taken off from faraway homes that morning, planning to make the trip back and forth to Cincinnati in one long day to avoid hotel charges. Unsure whether they’d find restaurants willing to serve them as they traveled, many carried shoeboxes lined with wax paper and filled with fried chicken, a whole day’s supply.