testimony, Robinson recalled that his grandmother, Mallie’s mother,
who had been born a slave, told him that a “nigger” was “a low, uncouth person.” Robinson said he objected to being called one by the MP. “I am a negro,” Robinson said, “but not a nigger.”
At the end of the four-hour trial, Robinson’s defense counsel insisted that he was innocent of all charges. The case was, Robinson recalled,
“simply a situation in which a few individuals sought to vent their bigotry on a Negro they considered ‘uppity’ because he had the audacity to seek to exercise rights that belonged to him as an American and as a soldier.”
Robinson was acquitted of all charges, and the court-martial made
him more determined than ever to confront racial discrimination. By
the time Robinson was acquitted in August, the 761st Tank Battalion
had left for Europe, where they distinguished themselves and suffered heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge. The court-martial had been a dehumanizing experience for Robinson. But it saved him from going
to Europe. It also made it possible for him to be playing in the Negro leagues when Rickey was looking for someone to confront segregation
in baseball.
In late November, Robinson, almost twenty-six years old, was dis-
charged from the army and wondering what he would do next. “Pro-
digiously gifted as an athlete, with a fierce will to succeed, he was yet without a vocation or a profession or a skill that could be marketed easily in a nation divided by race and indifferent or hostile to its black citizens and their dreams,” Rampersad wrote. “Robinson was still drifting, drifting still largely at the mercy of fate and the whims and wishes of whites, even as he continued to nurture the faith that he yet might be destined by God for something great.”
“you are a cHIld of God”
45
Robinson then wrote to Thomas Y. Baird, owner of the Kansas
City Monarchs, asking if he could play for the American Negro League team. Baird offered him $400 a month, if he could make the team.
He told Robinson to report to spring training with the Monarchs in
Houston, Texas, in April.
At the beginning of 1945, Robinson was living in Texas, working for
Karl Downs, who had left Pasadena to become president of Samuel Hus-
ton College in Austin, a black school affiliated with the Methodist Church.
The college was struggling to enroll enough students to stay in business.
But Downs was able to raise money for the school with help from a local congressman, Lyndon Johnson, a segregationist who believed in the vital-ity of black colleges, in part no doubt to keep colleges segregated. “The college was a ghost,” a newspaper later reported, “and it was Downs’s duty to give this dead institution life and meaning in the community.”
To help accomplish this objective, Downs hired Robinson, the her-
alded college athlete. “Bringing Jackie Robinson to campus was vintage Karl Downs,” one of Downs’s friends said. “It was the same spirit that led him to put in a visiting artists program that brought in all sorts of celebrated musicians, and that in turn made some very influential local whites take note of our little college. Nothing like that ever happened before Karl came.”
Downs hired Robinson to teach physical education at the col-
lege. Robinson introduced the first physical education program in the school’s history and coached the school’s basketball team. The experience was a highly positive one for Robinson, and he left with some
reluctance to join the Kansas City Monarchs for spring training.
Robinson had a national reputation as an athlete as he departed for
the Monarchs, but he had not played baseball since his junior year at UCLA, when he hit .097. Nevertheless, in his first year of professional baseball, he was fortunate enough to become part of one of the most
storied teams in the Negro leagues. The Monarchs roster included
Leroy “Satchel” Paige, Hilton Smith, “Double Duty” Ratcliffe, and
manager John “Buck” O’Neil.
Black sportswriters covered the Negro leagues, but they also simul-
taneously called for the end of the color line in white professional baseball. These sportswriters probably knew that if the color line was broken in white baseball, it would sound a death knell for black baseball because many of its best players would leave for white baseball.24
Sportswriters Wendell Smith, Sam Lacy, Joe Bostic, and others cam-
paigned for the integration of baseball for several years, but the white
46
JACKIE ROBINSON
baseball establishment ignored them. In April, Bostic, the sports editor of the People’s Voice, which was published in Harlem, refused to be ignored any longer. He showed up at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ spring training
camp in Bear Mountain, New York, demanding a tryout for two aging
Negro leaguers, Terris McDuffie and Dave “Showboat” Thomas.
Branch Rickey, Brooklyn’s team president, was livid about the con-
frontation because it was done publicly. Rickey also did not like that Bostic was accompanied by Nat Low, a sportswriter with the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker. Rickey hated surprises, and he hated communism more. If Rickey allowed the tryout, Bostic and the
Communists would make names for themselves. If he rejected it, he
would be criticized as an obstructionist. Both players were given tryouts, but neither was young enough nor talented enough for Rickey to be interested.25
Bostic was not alone in his efforts. Isadore Muchnick, a Jewish councilman in Boston, told the city’s major-league teams, the Red Sox and the Braves, that if they did not engage in a good-faith effort to consider black players, he would revoke the teams’ Sunday permits, prohibiting them from playing. When Wendell Smith learned that Muchnick was
putting pressure on the Boston teams, he volunteered to bring black
prospects to Boston. Smith selected established Negro leaguers Sam
Jethroe and Marvin Williams for the tryout. He also handpicked Jackie Robinson, who had not yet played a game in black baseball.26
The Red Sox ignored Muchnick, Smith, and the ballplayers when
they showed up in Boston. Smith said that he and the players would
remain in the city until the team gave the players the tryout they were promised. “We consider ourselves pioneers,” Robinson told Smith.
“Even if they don’t accept us, we are at least making the way easier for those who follow. We want to help make that day a reality.”27
On April 12, the Red Sox allowed the players into Fenway Park.
The team, however, made it clear that while it could be pressured into giving a tryout, nothing could force them to sign black players. A white Boston sportswriter who sat in the bleachers said that he heard someone, perhaps owner Tom Yawkey, holler: “Get those niggers off the field!”28
High school pitchers threw batting practice to Jethroe, Williams,
and Robinson. Wendell Smith called it demeaning.29 Robinson agreed.
“It would be difficult to call it a tryout because they had these kids throwing,” he said. “I sort of laughed within myself at what I felt was the uselessness of the venture. I didn’t feel anything would come of it.” None of the ballplayers heard from the Red Sox, and Robinson
“you are a cHIld of God”
47
returned to the Monarchs, angry and more discouraged than ever about blacks playing in the major leagues anytime soon.30
Robinson was aware that his teammates had played baseball much
longer than he had and sought them out for advice on how to adapt
his game to the faster tempo of the Negro leagues. “ ‘Look, I’m here to learn. I know I don’t play the brand of baseball you guys play. But help me, I’m here to learn,” he told Sammie Haynes.
Once, on a crowded
bus, he impressed his teammates by sitting on the stairwell. “This is my seat,” he said, “I’m a rookie.”31
Robinson, however, was quickly disenchanted with the business of
black baseball. He was used to the discipline and structure of college sports. He found himself trying to adjust to schedules and rosters that were subject to change, sometimes on a daily basis. Teams traveled by bus, often playing two or more games in a day, and the Jim Crow conditions made finding a place to sleep or eat problematic.
“There was no hotel in many of the places we played. Sometimes
there was a hotel for blacks, which had no eating facilities. No one even thought of trying to get accommodations in white hotels,” Robinson
remembered. “Some of the crummy eating joints would not serve us
at all. You could never sit down to a relaxed hot meal. You were lucky if they magnanimously permitted you to carry out some greasy hamburgers in a paper bag with a container of coffee. You were really living when you were able to get a plate of cold cuts.”32
Robinson, who did not smoke or drink, hated the carousing life-
style of the Negro leagues, and much to the amazement or perhaps
consternation of his teammates, refused the alcohol and accommodat-
ing women on the road. “His sense of self was tightly wound around
core values of dignity and self-esteem, and he believed in God and the Bible,” Rampersad wrote about Robinson. “Absurdly or not, he drew
a line in the dirt between himself and sin, and tried not to cross it.”33
Robinson’s teammates, including Sammie Haynes, who often
roomed with Robinson, grew tired of Robinson extolling the virtues
of Rachel Isum. “Well,” Haynes said, “have you been to bed with the
woman?” Robinson replied he had not. Haynes was astounded. “Are
you going to marry somebody you haven’t been to bed with? Are you
crazy?” Robinson held his ground. “Sammie, this is the lady for me. I don’t have to go to bed with her.” Haynes then responded, “Man, this thing’s crazy. You’re crazy.”34
Robinson, given his unimpressive statistics at UCLA, responded
well to the Negro leagues, hitting .345 with the Monarchs and making
48
JACKIE ROBINSON
the East-West all-star game. But he was distant to his fellow players, and his temper flared with teammates, opponents, and umpires. “It
was hard to anticipate seeing any black player crack the major leagues, and with Jack’s temper being the way it was, it didn’t seem likely that a major league team would be willing to take a chance with him,” said Quincy Trouppe, who played in the Negro leagues against Robinson.35
Most of the Negro leaguers accepted segregation. Robinson did not,
whether in baseball or in anything else, and he would tell his team-
mates that it would not be long before blacks were accepted into the major leagues.36 Even before Robinson played his first game with the Monarchs, Wendell Smith and Sam Lacy agreed that Robinson had
the qualities to play in the major leagues.37 He was a devout Christian who would be unlikely to waste his opportunity on alcohol or risky
behavior. He was educated, and his self-respect was readily apparent.
Branch Rickey, the archly conservative owner of the Brooklyn
Dodgers, was on the move at this point, quietly searching to sign
black players. He contacted Wendell Smith and asked him to provide
updates on Robinson’s performance with the Monarchs. Smith and
Rickey exchanged telegrams, referring to Robinson as “the young man
from the West.” Rickey was told of Robinson’s temper and expressed
that concern to Smith. “I didn’t want to tell Mr. Rickey, ‘Yes, he’s tough to get along with.’ A lot of us knew that.” Smith told Robinson that Rickey was scouting him for a new Negro league team. He told
Robinson to “watch himself.”38
By August 1945, Robinson was sick of the Negro leagues and
decided he would not play again after the season ended. He would
return to California, marry Rachel, and perhaps find a job as a high school coach.
But on August 24, as Robinson was sitting out a game in Chicago with a sore shoulder, a white man introduced himself as Clyde Sukeforth. He said he was there on behalf of Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and that Rickey was starting a team, the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, in a new black league. Robinson and Sukeforth talked more after the game.
He told Robinson that Rickey wanted a meeting with him.
On August 28, Sukeforth met Robinson outside of Rickey’s office in
Brooklyn. History was about to change.39
part two
A Boundary-Breaking Faith
4
“I Have Kept My Promise”
Branch Rickey and the Push for Integration
Wesley Branch Rickey was born December 20, 1881, in rural Stock-
dale in Scioto County in southeastern Ohio, not far from the Ohio
River. Religion played a part in his name, as it played a part in seemingly everything in his life. His parents, Jacob Franklin Rickey and the former Emily Brown, named their son Wesley after the founder of
Methodism. John Wesley preached that it was the practice of Method-
ism to serve the poor and the less fortunate. Emily Rickey taught her son Wesley’s words: “Having, first, gained all you can, and secondly, saved all you can, then give all you can.”1
Rickey’s middle name came from Isaiah 11:1 in the Hebrew Scrip-
tures: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” Rickey biographer Lee Lowenfish suggests that the name also might have come from John 15:2 in the New
Testament: “He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” When
Rickey was a teenager, he began using his middle name because he
liked it and because it distinguished him from a cousin named Wesley.2
The Rickeys believed that God would take care of their family. If
that was true, God did it just barely. Frank Rickey was a vegetable
farmer who toiled long hours on unforgiving soil, often making just
enough money to pay his bills and feed his growing family. Frank—
unlike his wife, who came to her faith naturally—long struggled with religion. He was raised a Baptist but converted to Methodism because 51
52
JACKIE ROBINSON
he found being a Baptist as unforgiving as the soil he farmed. Frank reminded his family that they owed what they had to God. “The Lord
is the head of this house,” he said before meals.3
Branch Rickey owed his spiritual guidance, however, to his mother.
Before Branch could read, Emily taught him story after story from
Scripture. As Rickey grew into boyhood, the Bible stories continued, reinforcing, as Lowenfish put it, “the belief that there was a right way and a wrong way to live.” Emily had an abiding faith that her son was capable of achieving great things, for himself but also for his community and for God.4
This required that God come first. Rickey, in deference to God, did
not attend baseball games on Sundays, whether as a player, manager,
general manager, or team president. Rickey said he was brought up a
Methodist and taught that Sunday belonged to the Lord.
In 1930, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat quoted Rickey as saying he did not have any objections to Sunday baseball himself. “But my good mother had,” he said, “and she made me promise when I first became a professional player that I would never play on Sunday. I have kept my promise.”5 Lowenfish doubted the veracity of the quote. “Regardless of what Rickey may have told the G
lobe-Democrat in 1930 or what that writer put down,” he said, “I don’t think Emily Rickey ever told him outright not to work on Sunday. He thought it was a way of honoring
her religious spirit.”6
Rickey embraced faith at an early age and never let go of it, and
because of the intensity of that faith, he stood out from his classmates in school and then at Ohio Wesleyan, a Methodist university that
required attendance at chapel. Many of his classmates went unwillingly to chapel, but “it thrilled Rickey,” his biographer Murray Polner wrote.
Whenever Rickey found himself in stressful circumstances, whether as a child or an adult, he turned to the Bible.7
Frank and Emily Rickey were not formally educated themselves
but saw to it that their children were. The education of all the Rickey children began with the Bible. Frank bought several volumes of books at a fire sale and brought them home to his family. The collection
included a book of illustrated drawings by a French artist, Gustave
Doré, a lay Christian preacher. “Dore’s graphic representations of biblical struggles and his depictions of stormy and heavenly skies,” Lowenfish wrote, “would remain permanently imbedded in Branch Rickey’s
consciousness.”8
“I Have kePt My ProMIse”
53
Unlike Jackie Robinson’s father, who left his son with nothing but
a name, Rickey’s father helped make his son into the man he became.
Rickey did not stray from his father’s faith or his love of country, politics, and sports. He inherited his father’s hard work, patriotism, Republicanism, and athleticism. But Branch would not be a farmer
like his father. “He could sit down on a hoe faster than anyone I ever knew,” his mother remembered with a smile.9
By the time Rickey was a teenager, his family had moved several
miles away to Lucasville. Rickey, a good student and a good athlete, wanted to go to college but lacked the money. He taught school for
two years before leaving to attend Ohio Wesleyan. At college, Rickey found himself an outsider, a “hayseed,” as Lowenfish describes him,
wearing ill-fitting clothes and carrying a straw suitcase in one hand and his catching equipment in the other. If this made him self- conscious, he gave himself little time to think about it. He took a full load of classes, worked several jobs to pay his tuition and room and board,
Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography Page 7