Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography
Page 29
We don’t typically think of Rogers as a radical, no doubt partly because he didn’t appear that way: His voice was gentle, his body was vulnerable, his hair was in place. He wore colorful, comfortable, soft sweaters made by his mother. Nor do we usually imagine him as a pacifist; that adjective seems way too political to ascribe to the host of a children’s program known for its focus on feelings.
In a very real sense, we’ve domesticated Fred Rogers and his radical pacifism. We’ve restricted him to the realm of entertainment, children, and feelings, and we’ve ripped him out of his political and religious context.
Just the Way He Was xiii
The most popular YouTube video of Rogers—with over 10 million
views—is a remix created for PBS Digital Studios by the mash-up artist John D. Boswell.3 The fun and engaging piece shows Rogers singing a lovely song about growing ideas in our minds. But there’s no hint anywhere in the video that, for Rogers, our ideas would do well to include really radical thoughts—
such as imagining the Persian Gulf War as a form of child abuse.
Another YouTube video—this one with over 2 million views—shows
Rogers appearing at a 1969 U.S. Senate hearing on cutting the proposed bud-get for the newly formed Corporation for Public Broadcasting.4 The video is powerful and compelling because Rogers uses slow and gentle language to persuade a fast-talking, slick, and rough-and-tumble senator, John Pastore of Rhode Island, to reinstate funds President Nixon wanted to cut. What the 2
million viewers don’t learn from the video is that in the late 1960s, Rogers used his program to offer a counter voice to Nixon’s conduct of the Vietnam War and his concerted effort to depict poor people as lazy and subversive of the American work ethic.
Still another wildly popular video of Rogers attracts hundreds of thousands of views every time there is a violent crisis in the United States, especially those involving school shootings. In the emotionally gripping clip, Rogers tells us that looking for “the helpers” in violent situations can comfort us and provide us with a sense of hope.5 But the backstory to the video is that Rogers made it during the War on Terror, and that he was deeply opposed to President George W. Bush’s violent response to terrorism—points left unknown to the viewers watching the decontextualized clip.
The popular image of Fred Rogers, as depicted in these videos and many other places, separates him from his faith-fueled pacifism and progressive politics as well as from the historical context in which he shared his treasured convictions. The result is that Rogers often appears benign, anemic, even
“namby-pamby,” as the late folk singer Pete Seeger once described him.6
Rogers disliked that image of himself—especially when he sensed it in parodies served up by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live. “I’ve told Johnny that I like humor as much as anybody,” Rogers stated in 1983. “But what concerns me is the takeoffs that make me seem so wimpy! I hope it doesn’t communicate that Mr. Rogers is just somebody to be made fun of. Only people who take the time to see our work can begin to understand the depth of it.”7
The purpose of this book is to take Fred Rogers and his Neighborhood seriously. And why not? For more than three decades, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a “national powerhouse” that reached more than 3.5 million
xiv Introduction
viewers weekly.8 Nielsen ratings indicate that at certain points, the number of viewers even ran as high as 9 million people a week. While the program’s target audience was children ages two to five, its viewers also included countless siblings, parents, and grandparents, to the point that Rogers became a national icon by the time of his death in 2003. Ongoing sales of his program and books, coupled with online views of him and his work, suggest he remains a beloved figure more than a decade after his untimely death from stomach cancer.
Discovering the real—and radical—Fred Rogers requires setting aside the video clips and the parodies. For me, it demanded suspending my own initial point of entrance into the life and legacy of Fred Rogers. Because I was at the back end of his target audience by the time his program went national in 1968, I did not spend my childhood years watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. But I did eventually grow to be a huge fan of Saturday Night Live, and if truth be told, my first significant encounter with Mister Rogers was through Eddie Murphy’s hilarious character “Mister Robinson.”
It was thus quite an eye-opening experience, as if I was meeting him for the first time, when I began to dig through his papers at the Fred Rogers Archive at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania; to read his speeches at the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Archive at the University of Pittsburgh; to study numerous episodes of the national run of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001); to listen to the many interviews he gave; and to talk with people who knew him well. Here, at last, was the Fred Rogers far beyond the comedy sketches of Saturday Night Live.
What I found, much to my delight, was a quiet but strong American prophet who, with roots in progressive spirituality, invited us to make the world into a countercultural neighborhood of love—a place where there would be no wars, no racial discrimination, no hunger, no gender-based discrimination, no killing of animals for food, and no pillaging of the earth’s precious resources.
This is the Fred Rogers I have come to know: not a namby-pamby, mealymouthed, meek and mild pushover, but rather an ambitious, hard-driving, and principled (though imperfect) creator of a progressive children’s program designed to subvert huge parts of the wider society and culture.
That’s right. Rogers was politically subversive—and stubbornly so. Of course, this is not the figure many of us typically remember celebrating as a national icon. We normally recall an angelic figure hovering above the dirtiness of politics and culture, smiling tenderly at our spellbound children, and speaking to them ever so peacefully. But, as he told Goodman, Rogers sometimes felt obliged to address public policy issues when they negatively affected the children and families who comprised his viewing audience.
Just the Way He Was xv
Although he was deeply engaged in politics and culture, Rogers was well aware of his personal and professional limitations in addressing public policy. As he conceded to Goodman, he well understood that he was not a poli-cymaker who could craft legislation or sign executive decrees to eliminate war and its abuse of children. But he also realized he could use his own particular bully pulpit to shape the moral character of his viewers and extol certain virtues and practices subversive of public policies that enshrined violence, discrimination, and injustice.
That’s exactly what he did, and not just with public service announcements. Rogers hinted at this in his letter to Goodman when he noted that he did not lament for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Rogers did not have to lament for Make-Believe, with its colorful mix of puppets and adults, or for the “real” neighborhood in which his television house was situated, because he created both as provinces within the peaceable kingdom he desired for humanity and all of creation.
While it’s true that many of his shows “tackled the fears and the sadnesses of childhood,” they also focused on the politics of violence and injustice—a fact that becomes all the clearer when we study them in their historical context.9 Indeed, his television neighborhood and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe are virtual oases of peace and justice in a violent and unjust world.
But they’re more than that, too; they’re plain and simple invitations for his viewers to adopt the virtues and practices of peace and justice as they negotiate a world that conquers and kills so much.10 Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it turns out, is far from sappy, sentimental, and shallow. It’s a sharp political response to a civil and political society poised to kill, a fact that will surprise all those elites who dismiss him as a lightweight not worthy of critical engagement.
Rogers also extended his peaceable invitation through numerous ser-
mons, prayers, speeches, letters, boo
ks, and interviews, understanding all this countercultural work as part and parcel of his vocation as a Presbyterian minister—a minister called to embody and enact the unconditional and expansive love of God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, Rogers sought to ensure that his work of creating peacemakers was a faithful continuation of the ministry of Jesus—an ongoing effort to create the peaceful and just reign of God on earth.
As a Christian peacemaker, Rogers understood Jesus to be the nonviolent love of God incarnate, and he turned to the life of Jesus for concrete guidance about ways to create the peaceable kingdom right here and now. As he put this in a 1979 letter to a friend, “What a tough job to try to communicate the gift of Jesus Christ to anybody. It can’t be simply talked about, can it?
xvi Introduction
Jesus himself used parables—so I guess that’s our directive: try to show the kingdom of God through stories as much as possible.”11
Hence, Rogers’s bully pulpit wasn’t really about bullying at all. He fashioned his program and outside engagements as opportunities to tell compelling and inviting stories about peace and justice. Fred Rogers was a storytelling peacemaker, and a powerful one at that.12 His activism, at once militant and gentle, came to expression not through making policy, marching in the streets, or rallying in the squares, but in the stories he shared on his program and in other public venues. By turns affectionate and comical, poignant and provocative, these stories—a major subject in this book—came straight from a heart concerned for the underprivileged, oppressed, and wounded.
Rogers was also a Zen-like peacemaker. His personal and professional style, especially as revealed on his program, demonstrated a deep appreciation not only for quiet storytelling but also for slow pacing and the sounds of silence—those moments when “inner turbulence can settle.”13 The slow way he talked, the careful transitions he made from his “real” television neighborhood to Make-Believe, the silence he insisted on—all this gave us a model for being peace.14 As a model of being peace, Rogers showed us how to practice deep listening, deep thinking, and deep understanding—each of them antidotes to violence in any form.
He also showed us how to take tough action when others undermine our efforts to be peacemakers. In December 1998, for instance, he instructed his lawyer to file a lawsuit against a Texas novelty chain store that was selling T-shirts depicting him, clad in his red sweater, as sporting a handgun and saying, “Welcome to my hood.”15 He was so angry that he insisted that the store not only stop selling the shirts but also destroy them. Fred Rogers was no passive pacifist.
Modeling peacefulness was one of his preferred methods for creating
peacemakers because he believed the old Quaker saying “Attitudes are caught not taught.”16 It’s perhaps this belief, coupled with his quiet style, that is the underlying reason for our failure to recognize Fred Rogers as one of the most radical pacifists of contemporary history. Because he did not grab headlines by pouring blood on files at the Pentagon, climbing atop the cones of nuclear weapons, leading rallies against the Persian Gulf War, or publicly lobbying against the War on Terror, Rogers has long remained deep in the shadows of the history of progressive dreamers—a history populated in the United States by the likes of William Garrison and Lucretia Mott, Jane Addams and Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day, Robert Kennedy and Marian Wright Edelman.
Just the Way He Was xvii
But as you will see in the pages ahead, although he is one of the most underappreciated peacemakers in U.S. history, Fred Rogers richly deserves a place in the pantheon of pacifists who tried to shake the foundations of society and culture. To the day of his death, he was a radical Christian pacifist—
fervently committed to the end of violence and the presence of social justice in its full glory. The time has come for us to pull him out of the shadows so we can celebrate him just as he was—a fierce peacemaker.
“We know Jackie Robinson for his athletic prowess and his courageous breaking of the color barrier in baseball. Little did we know how deep was the bedrock conviction that Jac
the presence of God in his life was strong enough to see him through the darkest nights or the fi ercest storm. How this faith was etched into his spirit and how it helped him kie Robinson
overcome unbelievable odds is told chapter after chapter in such a riveting manner that the reader becomes more sensitive to his or her own spirituality. This book could become a textbook for how our nation can break down the remaining barriers that still divide us.”
—JAMES A. FORBES JR., President and Founder of the Healing of the Nations Foundation and Senior Minister Emeritus of the Riverside Church in New York City
★
“A masterly exploration of the neglected religious side of Jackie Robinson. Required reading about a man who Martin Luther King Jr. lauded as ‘a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the freedom rides.’”
A Spir
—LEE LOWENFISH, author of the award-winning biography
Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman
itual Biog
“Michael G. Long and Chris Lamb provide an illuminating retelling of the Jackie Robinson story with a keen eye to faith dimensions that are often overlooked or de-emphasized in the telling we usually hear. Readers are sure to draw inspiration and encouragement from this book, as well as new insight on how the way of Jesus played out so powerfully in Robinson’s work for civil rights and a just society—and could do so in our society today r
if given the chance.”
aphy
—TOM KRATTENMAKER, author of Onward Christian Athletes and Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower
Jackie Robinson believed in a God who sides with the oppressed and who calls us to see one another as sisters and brothers. This faith was a powerful but quiet engine that drove and sustained him as he shattered racial barriers on and beyond the baseball diamond.
LONG
Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography explores the faith that, Robinson said, carried him through the torment and abuse he suffered for integrating the major leagues and Jackie Robinson
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
drove him to get involved in the civil rights movement. Marked by sacrifi ce and service, AND
A Spiritual Biography ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
inclusiveness and hope, Robinson’s faith shaped not only his character but also baseball and America itself.
THE FAITH OF A BOUNDARY-BREAKING HERO
LAMB
MICHAEL G. LONG is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Peace and Confl ict Studies at Elizabethtown College and is the author or editor of several books on civil rights, religion and politics, and peacemaking in mid-century America, including First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson, which was named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly.
CHRIS LAMB is Professor of Journalism at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis and is the author or editor of several books, including Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training and Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball, which was called one of the best nonfi ction baseball books of all time by the Huffi ngton Post and was named the Best Book on Journalism and Mass Communication History by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2013.
www.wjkbooks.com
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Biography
ISBN-13: 978-0-664-26203-7
MICHAEL G. LONG AND CHRIS LAMB
Document Outline
Contents
Acknowledgments
part one The Exodus
part two A Boundary-Breaking Faith
part three Fighting for Freedom
Notes
Index