Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography

by Long, Michael G.

  the Dodgers. “We said, ‘Oh Lord, don’t let him strike out,’ ” Powell remembered. “The greatest fear was that he wouldn’t do well, and that would be a mark against all of us.”11

  Robinson succeeded, and in doing so he changed the way that

  whites saw blacks and, more importantly, how blacks saw themselves.

  Roger Wilkins, nephew of NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, was fifteen

  years old in 1947. He said that young blacks like himself saw in Robinson that things which once were impossible were suddenly possible.

  “This man, in a very personal sense,” Wilkins said, “became a perma-

  nent part of my spirit and the spirit of a generation of black kids like me because of the way he faced his ordeal.”12 Poet Langston Hughes,

  who lived in New York City, marveled at what happened that sea-

  son. “Anyhow, this summer of our Lord 1947, the Dodgers are doing

  right with Jackie Robinson at first,” Hughes said. If Robinson and the Dodgers succeeded, he added, “a hundred years from now history will

  still be grinning.”13

  Robinson represented hope for some, but for others he touched on

  darker impulses: anxieties, fears, bigotry. If his teammates did not want to play on the same team with him, it stood to reason that players

  on other teams did not want to play against him. St. Louis Cardinals’

  owner Sam Breadon learned of a possible plot among his team’s players to go on strike on May 6 rather than play Robinson and the Dodgers. The conspirators hoped that if they succeeded, players on other National League teams would follow, forcing Robinson out of baseball.

  Breadon took his concerns to National League president Ford Frick,

  who thought the talk of a strike was just talk.14

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  Stanley Woodward, the veteran sportswriter of the New York

  Herald Tribune, wrote a column about the plot. Woodward praised Robinson, “whose intelligence and degree of education are far beyond that of the average ball player,” as one who “has behaved himself in an exemplary manner.” Tom Meany, who wrote for the liberal New

  York City newspaper P.M., criticized the Cardinals and anyone else who would refuse to play against Robinson. “The world, they should

  learn, is made up of many different races and religions, of Protestants, of Jews, of Catholics, of whites, of yellows, and of blacks,” Meany

  wrote. Walter Winchell, whose syndicated radio program was heard

  by millions, denounced anyone who opposed Robinson or any other

  black in baseball.15

  Frick announced that anyone who refused to play against Robinson

  would be suspended.16 The Cardinals took the field against the Dodg-

  ers on May 6 without incident. If there was talk of a league-wide boycott against Robinson, it never materialized.

  After a good start to the season, Robinson went into a hitting slump.

  One New York City newspaper headlined a story, “Robinson’s Job in

  Jeopardy.”17 He read the newspapers and knew what people were saying and thinking. He began doubting himself under the unrelenting pressure.

  But he hid those doubts from his critics who did not want him in the major leagues. “By checking his temper and remaining stoic, Robinson established an image of strength and courage,” Eig wrote. “Still, he would admit at the end of the season that the controversy affected his performance on the field, and he worried that he would survive the taunting only to find himself back in the minors because he couldn’t hit.”18

  Robinson believed that he was given a purpose—not just by Rickey

  but by a higher authority—to confront baseball and history. Other

  blacks drew on their faith and on Robinson’s courage. From that first game when he took the field, black Americans discussed with one

  another what Robinson did that day and in every game after that. People talked about Robinson in churches, barbershops, taverns, and on

  the streets, in small towns and in big cities.

  In the years before teams used chartered jets, teams often arrived

  by train late in the evening before a road game. When the Dodgers

  disembarked, they would inevitably be met, no matter the hour, by

  crowds—by fathers, most of them African American, with their young

  sons, who sought, in respectful silence, a glimpse of Jackie Robinson.19

  Railroads made special runs to accommodate black fans who came

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  from distant cities and towns to Brooklyn or other National League

  ballparks to see Robinson play.20

  Wendell Smith, who sometimes roomed with Robinson when the

  ballplayer was not allowed in the hotel with the rest of his team, recognized that Robinson could not go about his life as another ballplayer could. Wherever Robinson went, people wanted to get his autograph,

  to shake his hand, to wish him well, or to tell him how much they were praying for him. “He seldom has a moment to himself,” Smith said.21

  Robinson broke out of his slump in early May, and from that point

  on, few questioned whether he had the ability for the big leagues. But his skill did not prevent the recalcitrant from maintaining that he did not belong on a Major League Baseball field.

  When the Dodgers took their first trip to Philadelphia, Rickey

  received a phone call from the team’s general manager, Herb Pennock, once a pitching great for the New York Yankees. “You can’t bring that nigger here with the rest of the team,” Pennock told Rickey. “We’re

  just not ready for that sort of thing yet.”22

  Rickey told him that if the Phillies did not take the field, Brooklyn would win the game on forfeit. Only then did Pennock relent.

  In the movie 42, Rickey tells Pennock: “You think God likes baseball, Herb?”

  “What?” Pennock responds. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means someday you’re gonna meet God, and when he inquires as to

  why you didn’t take the field against Robinson in Philadelphia, and you answer that it’s because he was a Negro, it may not be a sufficient reply!”

  The exchange in the movie, in all likelihood, did not happen.

  “Must be a Hollywood concoction,” Rickey biographer Lee Lowen-

  fish said.23

  When the Dodgers arrived at their hotel in Philadelphia, the Ben-

  jamin Franklin, the hotel’s manager told the team they would not be

  allowed to stay at the hotel “while you have any Nigras with you.”24

  Bigotry trailed Robinson like a curse. He did not know where or

  how it would rear itself next. Robinson was, by nature, an introvert, a private man; most of the time he suffered in silence and by himself, on the train, at a restaurant, in the dugout, or in the dressing room. This did not go unnoticed by sportswriters. Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post described Robinson as “the loneliest man I have seen in sports.”25

  Robinson was playing well, and so were the Dodgers. Robinson was

  a big part of that success, and yet his teammates kept their distance, some because they did not want him on their team but others because

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  they did not know what to say to him. For some, it was the first time they had been so close to a black person. Others, those perhaps more sympathetic, had never seen anyone take such a beating, physically and verbally, and simply did not know to respond.

  Ralph Branca said he felt guilty for not doing more to express his

  support. “Shouldn’t I do more to help him?” he asked himself. He

  prayed for a response. After one game on the road, he asked Robinson if he wanted to have dinner. Branca did not think that anyone on the team had yet invited Ro
binson to dinner after a game.

  The dinner conversation was limited to baseball at first, but then

  the pitcher asked Robinson, “How do you just sit silently and take it?”

  Robinson told Branca the story of his first meeting with Rickey two

  years earlier, when the Dodgers manager had read from Giovanni Pap-

  ini’s Life of Christ, and about his promise that he would not fight back.

  “Ralph,” Robinson said, “many nights I get down on my knees and

  pray to God for the strength not to fight back.”26

  Robinson’s prayer time was intensely private, Rachel Robinson

  said. She left him alone to pray for strength to deal with the unrelenting pressures of what was demanded of him. When those pressures

  wore him down, she dealt with his moody silence. Through everything

  Jackie faced, Rachel stood by him and with him, a towering source of strength who gave him unconditional love.

  His teammate Carl Erskine said that Robinson could not have sur-

  vived the ordeal without Rachel. “Rachel is a story in herself because she stood by Jackie, as the Good Book says, tempered his fire, and

  affected his life in a positive manner,” Erskine said. “The first couple of years in Brooklyn, Jackie told me, took their toll on him, but not on her. She held back the tears—for his sake—and the angst so that they could persevere together. She made Jackie a calmer person and in doing so made him a better player. I don’t think he would have lasted without her by his side.”27

  Jackie often brought the day’s agony home with him. He sometimes

  talked about what happened but other times kept it to himself, suffering in silence. There were days when the hatred came to the door in letters from bigots. Rachel turned over the worst of the letters—the ones that threatened to kill Jackie or to kidnap Jackie Jr.—to the police.28

  Other hate mail went to Robinson at Ebbets Field. Some of the letters, Rickey’s assistant Harold Parrott said, were “scrawled and scribbled like the smut you see on toilet walls.”29

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  Not all the players in the National League were against Robinson,

  but few outwardly expressed their support either. One of those who

  did was Hank Greenberg, the first baseman of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1947. Greenberg, as a Jew, had played his career hearing racial epithets and vile names such as “Christ killer.” He, too, had been the subject of pitchers who threw at his head and base runners who ran into him, hoping to cause an injury. “I think Hank was abused more than any

  other white ballplayer or any ethnic player except Jackie Robinson,”

  said Birdie Tebbetts, who had played against Greenberg.30

  During a game in Pittsburgh, Robinson, trying to beat out an infield grounder, ran into Greenberg as the big first baseman reached across the baseline for the errant throw. The ball got away from Greenberg, and Robinson advanced to second. Later in the game, Robinson was

  on first base when Greenberg told him he hoped he had not hurt the

  ballplayer when the two collided. Robinson said he had not been hurt.

  Greenberg then gave Robinson a few encouraging words. “I know

  it’s plenty tough,” he said. “You’re a good ball player, however, and you’ll do all right. Just stay in there and fight back, and always remember to keep your head up.”

  During the series, Pittsburgh pitcher Fritz Ostermueller, who

  had once pitched for the Dodgers, threw a pitch that sailed toward

  Robinson’s head. Robinson threw up an arm in self-defense, and the

  ball hit him in the wrist, leaving him in the dirt, in considerable pain.

  Robinson’s teammates showered Ostermueller with verbal abuse.

  “Don’t forget you guys have to bat, too,” the Brooklyn players yelled.31

  Robinson faced the possibility of a brutal injury every time he

  stepped across the white lines in the batter’s box or crossed a white baseline to take his position in the field. “Players slid into the base Jackie was covering with their spikes high to draw blood,” Rachel remembered, “pitchers threw balls at his head, intending to injure him, not just brush him back from the plate; and the bench jockeying crossed

  the line from insulting repartee to inciting, abusive language intended to provoke rage.”32

  During a June game in Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from the

  former slave state of Kentucky, Reds pitcher Ewell Blackwell was two outs away from throwing a no-hitter in consecutive games, something

  that had happened only once in major-league history. Eddie Stanky

  broke up the no-hitter with a single. An out later, Blackwell threw his first pitch at Robinson’s head. Robinson fell to the dirt, then stood up and glared at Blackwell.

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  “Come on you black . . . ,” Blackwell yelled at Robinson, “stand in

  there and hit.”

  Robinson then smiled and told Blackwell he was just mad because

  Stanky broke up his no-hitter. Robinson then got a hit.33

  Branca saw, as others did, that the best thing Robinson could do to

  silence his critics was to play well. Robinson’s skin color set him apart from everyone else on the field, but so did the way he played baseball.

  He fought against prejudice by succeeding on the field, with his bat and glove, but also by running the bases with such speed and ferocity that it unnerved pitchers and confounded infielders. “While other men made it a point to avoid danger on the base paths,” Jonathan Eig wrote,

  “Robinson put himself in harm’s way every chance he got. His speed

  and guile broke down the game’s natural order and left opponents cursing and hurling their gloves.”34

  Robinson made opponents worse and his teammates better. “Jackie

  was one of those rare athletes who had the ability to make those of us around him better athletes,” Carl Erskine said.35

  In August 1947, the first-place Dodgers played the second-place

  Cardinals, the defending National League champions, at Ebbets Field.

  In the fifth inning, Enos Slaughter, a North Carolinian with the revealing nickname Country, who was believed to be one of the conspira-

  tors in the purported plan to strike at the beginning of the season, came down hard on Robinson’s ankle with his spikes. The spikes barely missed Robinson’s Achilles tendon, risking a season-ending or perhaps career-ending injury. Slaughter denied that he had intentionally tried to hurt Robinson.

  But Robinson did not believe him. Neither did Robinson’s team-

  mates, sportswriters, and many of those in the crowd, including Douglas Wilder, then sixteen, who had made the trip from Richmond, Virginia, to root for Robinson but also, paradoxically, for the Cardinals, his favorite team. Wilder later said he learned an important lesson as he watched Robinson, writhing in pain, rise to his feet to complete the game. “ ‘I will show you I can rise over and above,’ ” Robinson’s actions said to Wilder. “It’s not a matter of forgiving you for doing it. It’s a matter of saying, ‘No matter, not withstanding what you did, it doesn’t prevent me from being the man I am.’ It was a tremendous lesson.”

  Wilder worked his way through college waiting tables and then

  became a hero in the Korean War. When he returned from the war,

  he went to law school and then became the first black to win statewide

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  office in Virginia since Reconstruction. In 1990, he became the state’s first black governor.36

  Perhaps no ballplayer ever left such a profound impact in so many

  different ways as Robinson. Black parents named their children after him. White business owners integrated their businesses and factories because of him and then wrote him letters expressing their gratitud
e for opening their eyes to racial discrimination. Black boys imitated him on sandlot fields—and so too did white boys, running pigeon-toed from

  base to base.

  “Jewish families in Brooklyn gathered around their dining-room

  tables for Passover Seders,” Eig says, “and discussed what Moses had in common with a fleet-footed, right-handed hitting infielder with the number 42 on his back.”37 Jews saw in Robinson someone who represented their own struggles to be accepted without prejudice. Some Jews saw Robinson as one of their own. “We called him Jackie Rubinson,”

  said one Jewish man who grew up in Brooklyn.38

  Robinson also felt a kinship with Jews. As he became more involved

  in civil rights, he sought out the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL). During a meeting with ADL general counsel Arnold Foster,

  Robinson impressed him by asking questions about the methods and

  strategies employed by the Jewish organization to fight anti-Semitism.

  Robinson thought that blacks could benefit from such strategies in

  their own fight against discrimination.

  In September, Karl Downs visited the Robinsons, attending one

  of Jackie’s games at Ebbets Field. Shortly thereafter, he began having chronic stomach pains. Rachel took him to a hospital and urged him

  to remain in Brooklyn for further tests. A few days later, Downs began feeling better and returned to his job at Samuel Huston College in

  Austin.39 Robinson was concerned about his good friend. He owed so

  much to Downs, who had rescued him from the streets of Pasadena

  and instilled in him the Christian faith that he relied on so heavily during his season of pain and torment. Robinson knew he never would

  have achieved what he had if it had not been for Downs and his spiritual guidance.

  The same was true of Branch Rickey, who now believed that Rob-

  inson could help the team win its first pennant in a quarter century.

  He was right about this, too. The Dodgers won the National League

  pennant, and Robinson was a big part of his team’s success, hitting

  .297 and leading the team in several offensive categories, including runs scored and stolen bases with twenty-eight, which led the National