Jackie Robinson gets ready to play the Pittsburgh Pirates at Forbes Field during his first season as a Brooklyn Dodger, 1947.
SPORTS
8
“JACKIE’S BOSWELL”
ON A HOT FLORIDA afternoon in March 1946, two Pittsburgh Courier reporters sat in a Greyhound bus station in Daytona Beach, waiting for the two passengers they had been sent to pick up. Billy Rowe had driven from Harlem, where he was settling back into his work as the paper’s entertainment columnist after two years of reporting on black troops in the Pacific. Wendell Smith, the paper’s sports editor, had come all the way from Pittsburgh. With his wide face, tortoiseshell glasses, and ever-present fedora, Smith had a naturally friendly look, but today he seemed anxious. Although they were in Florida working for the paper, the two reporters had been quietly hired to keep an eye on the man who six months earlier had become the most talked about minor league baseball prospect in America. But the recruit was two days late for spring training, and no one knew what had happened to him. Looking around the bus station, Smith and Rowe were relieved to see no other reporters, but as the hours ticked by a small crowd of black citizens from Daytona Beach began to gather. A curious white bystander asked a porter what was going on. “Don’t you know?” the porter answered. “Jackie Robinson is coming in.”
At last, a bus from Jacksonville pulled into the station and Robinson stepped off, accompanied by his bride of three weeks, the former Rachel Isum. Rachel appeared weary, the strain of two sleepless nights showing on her normally radiant face. Her ermine coat, a wedding present from her husband, was stained with the grime of a fieldworker who had squeezed next to her on the bench at the back of the bus. Jackie, his dark face flushed and his double-breasted suit rumpled, looked furious. “Well, I finally made it,” he snapped at the two newsmen. “But I never want another trip like this one.” Rowe grabbed the couple’s valises and showed them to his red Pontiac sedan. “I’m your chauffeur!” he said cheerfully. Robinson was in no mood for friendly banter. “I’ve had better chauffeurs and I’ve had better cars!” he grumbled.
That night, as Rachel went to bed, Robinson stayed up and raged to Smith and Rowe about the indignities the couple had suffered since they boarded an American Airlines plane in Los Angeles two nights earlier. The following morning, the plane landed for a layover in New Orleans. When the Robinsons went to reboard, they were told that they had been bumped “for military reasons.” At an airport restaurant, they were allowed to order sandwiches but not to sit down. Stuck in New Orleans for the night, they could find lodging only in a segregated black hotel with tiny, foul-smelling rooms and plastic mattresses. The next day, they boarded another plane for Daytona Beach only to have it land in Pensacola for refueling. A flight attendant informed them they would have to get off to compensate for the fuel’s weight—just as three new white passengers got on.
Despairing of reaching their destination by air, the Robinsons took a train from Pensacola to Jacksonville, then boarded a bus for Daytona Beach. They stretched out in the seats in the front of the bus to finally get some rest. But as the bus filled, a white passenger told them to move to the back, calling Jackie “boy.” Stifling the urge to strike the man, Robinson escorted his bride to the rear, where they rode upright through the night, trying not to breathe in the engine fumes that wafted through the open windows.
“Get me out of here!” Robinson pleaded to the reporters. “Just get me out of here!” He would never get a fair tryout—not here in the South, he seethed. He didn’t want to put his wife, a California girl who had never experienced the worst of Jim Crow, through more humiliation. He would go back to the Negro Leagues, back to the Kansas City Monarchs.
As Robinson sulked, Smith and Rowe listened sympathetically and tried to calm him down. “You can’t do that,” they said, reminding him of all the people who were counting on him. They recalled what Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers president, the man who had signed Robinson to play for the Montreal Royals farm team and hired Smith to watch over him, had said when the two men first met. Rickey had chosen Jackie not just for his skill on the field but also for his temperament, because the first Negro in the big leagues had to be man enough not to fight back.
Finally, after the three men had talked all night, the sun lifted and so did Jackie’s mood. He would stay, he told the relieved reporters. He wouldn’t let everyone down.
Wendell Smith modestly referred to himself as “Jackie’s Boswell”—after the British writer known primarily for his biography of a more famous writer, Samuel Johnson—but he was far more than that. Movie and book versions of the Jackie Robinson story would dwell on Smith’s role as Jackie’s travel companion and mouthpiece during his challenging first years in the Dodgers organization. But long before that, Smith helped lay the groundwork for Robinson’s rise with a decade-long crusade for baseball integration in the Courier. It was then Smith who first called Branch Rickey’s attention to Robinson and who helped persuade the Dodgers president that Jackie could handle the pressure of being the first black player in the pro game. Other journalists also deserved recognition, from Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American and Frank Young of the Chicago Defender to Smith’s bosses and colleagues at the Courier. But if Branch Rickey was the visionary “Mahatma” of the Robinson story—the pious Methodist driven as much by moral zeal as financial opportunism—then Wendell Smith was the indispensable Sherpa, the scout who studied the terrain beforehand and who protected Jackie from danger, settled his moods, and bore witness to his historic ascent.
Unlike most blacks of his generation, Smith grew up around white people. Born John Wendell Smith, he was named for his father, who was raised on a Canadian farm and made his way to Detroit as a riverboat kitchen hand. Eventually John Sr. became the personal chef to Henry Ford. The auto tycoon started inviting the elder Smith to functions at his Dearborn mansion, and at the age of ten Wendell began to tag along. He became friends with Ford’s son Edsel, and during the summers he invited Wendell over to play ball. “He’s a fine looking boy,” Henry Ford once remarked to John Smith as they observed the children. “What does he want to be when he grows up?” John answered that Wendell dreamed of being a major league pitcher—and didn’t understand yet that that wasn’t possible for a Negro boy.
At age nineteen, Smith learned that lesson the hard way. He pitched for an American Legion team, and in the playoff that year he hurled a 1–0 shutout. Wish Egan, a top scout for the Detroit Tigers, was in the stands. Afterward, Egan offered contracts to the opposing pitcher and to Wendell’s catcher, Mike Tresh, who went on to have a long pro career. “I wish I could sign you too, kid,” Egan told Smith. “But I can’t.” That night, Wendell cried harder than he ever had before. “That broke me up,” he recalled to sportswriter Jerome Holtzman years later. “It was then that I made the vow that I would dedicate myself and do something on behalf of the Negro ballplayers.”
The way to make good on that mission, Smith decided after graduating from West Virginia State College, was by becoming a journalist. Moving to Pittsburgh, he took a job with the Courier for $17 a week, writing photo captions and covering high school sports. A year later, at age twenty-four, he was promoted to sports editor and began to write a column, called “Smitty’s Sport Spurts,” which he turned into a soapbox on the subject of race and baseball. Seeing how the Courier’s crusades—from Joe Louis to the war in Ethiopia—roused readers and drove sales, Wendell proposed a new one. “I suggested a campaign for the admittance, the inclusion of Negro ballplayers in the big leagues,” he recalled.
As National League teams passed through Pittsburgh to play the Pirates, Smith polled their players and managers about their views on integration. The Baseball Writers Association of America had denied Wendell’s application for a press card—on the flimsy grounds that he covered other sports—so he couldn’t do business inside Forbes Field. Instead he went to the Schenley Hotel, where the visiting teams stayed, and buttonholed them there. “Have you ever see
n any Negro ballplayers who you think could play in the major leagues?” he asked everyone he interviewed.
Smith’s investigation was a big hit with readers and his bosses, who rewarded him with a raise. Every week for more than a month, the results were splashed across the Courier’s sports pages. Twenty percent of the baseball men he interviewed opposed integration, Wendell estimated. Five percent ventured no opinion. But 75 percent voiced support for opening pro baseball’s doors. That list included such All-Stars as Dizzy Dean, Honus Wagner, Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell, and Pepper Martin. Smith also got positive responses from managers of eight ball clubs: the Chicago Cubs, Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis Cardinals, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Philadelphia Phillies, and Boston Bees. “I’ve seen plenty of colored boys who could make the grade in the majors—hell, I’ve seen a million,” said Leo Durocher, the garrulous Dodgers skipper.
When America entered World War II, the Courier editors made the baseball crusade part of their Double V Campaign. Their scoop on Dorie Miller’s heroism at Pearl Harbor had led Navy Secretary Frank Knox to end the practice of restricting blacks to mess duty. Chester Washington seized on the news to write an open letter to Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of Major League Baseball. Washington pointed out that all the arguments marshaled against giving blacks a shot at big league baseball—tradition, training, morale—had once applied in the Navy. White sportswriters picked up on the theme. “Now that the Negro has proved himself good enough for the Navy, what must he do to demonstrate that he is fit to participate in organized baseball?” wrote Dan Parker, the veteran columnist for the New York Daily Mirror.
Landis, the trust-busting federal judge who had been appointed baseball’s first commissioner after the 1917 Black Sox gambling scandal, prided himself on having cleaned up the game and enforced its integrity with an iron fist. But for two decades he had dodged the integration issue. Now the wartime arguments and positive statements from the likes of Leo Durocher shamed Landis into taking a position for the first time. “I have come to the conclusion that it is time for me to explain myself on this important issue,” he declared in a written statement eight months after Pearl Harbor. “Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner and never have been during the 21 years that I have served as commissioner . . . . If Durocher, or any other manager, or all of them, want to sign one, or 25 Negro players, it is all right with me.”
Sensing an opening, Smith called on Landis to meet with leaders of the black press. On December 3, 1943, the commissioner finally consented, inviting a delegation from the National Negro Press Association to an annual meeting of club owners and league officials in a second-floor conference room at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel. John Sengstacke of The Chicago Defender was scheduled to speak first, but before he could begin Landis introduced a guest: Paul Robeson, the actor and former college sports star. Landis had called Robeson away from performing Othello on Broadway to try to impress the newspapermen and preempt their complaints. “This man has sense,” Landis said of Robeson, “and this man has not been fooled by the propaganda that there is an agreement in this crowd of men to bar Negroes from baseball.”
When Robeson spoke, he didn’t address the conspiracy suspicions but told the owners it was high time to allow black players into the major leagues. Sengstacke went next. But it was the third speaker—Ira Lewis, the tiny, baldheaded publisher of the Courier—who delivered the morning’s most memorable remarks. Lewis began by appealing to the club owners as businessmen, making a dollars-and-cents argument for integration. Citing the boost that Joe Louis had given to boxing, Lewis argued that “the lifting of this ban against Negro baseball players . . . would make such a difference in your turnstiles as to make you wonder why you hadn’t done this years before.” Then Lewis took direct aim at the commissioner’s denial of an “agreement” to bar blacks from the big leagues. “We thank Judge Landis for this statement,” he said. “We believe, however, that there is a tacit understanding; there is a gentlemen’s agreement, that no Negro players be hired.”
Although the publishers presented a list of demands, Landis moved on to other business and then abruptly adjourned the meeting without giving any response. When Smith chased him down for comment, Landis shifted responsibility to the club owners, most of whom had fled to catch trains to their home cities. “I can’t speak for the owners at all,” Landis said. “Really, there is absolutely nothing I can tell you.” Ford Frick, the National League president, mixed evasiveness with condescension. “I really think they were impressed by the presentation,” Frick said of the owners. “But I can’t say what will happen.”
A follow-up letter went unanswered and another year of inaction passed until, in late November 1944, Kenesaw Mountain Landis died at the age of seventy-eight. In the Courier, Smith gave Landis credit for everything else he had done for baseball but did not sugarcoat his disappointment at the judge’s legacy on the racial ban. “The fact remains he never used his wide and unquestionable powers to do anything about the problem,” Smith wrote. “Landis played a subtle ‘fence game’ on this question.”
Throughout the Roosevelt Hotel meeting, the journalists from Pittsburgh did notice one team representative quietly taking notes. He was Branch Rickey, the burly, bespectacled general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Around the Courier newsroom, the question of what team might be the first to give black players a chance was a frequent topic of conversation. For a long time, the editors hoped it might be the Pittsburgh Pirates, but in 1943 owner William Benswanger had backed out of a promise to audition colored prospects.
Brooklyn was seen as another possibility. It had the kind of fans who might accept black players, and manager Leo Durocher had been unusually outspoken in his support for giving Negroes a shot. Although Rickey held his cards closely, he was known to be a man of deep religious conviction (he never attended ball games on Sunday) as well as a daring innovator (he had all but invented the farm system as an executive for the St. Louis Cardinals). So as the 1945 season approached, the Pittsburgh editors approved a scheme to test Rickey on the integration issue.
On the morning of Friday, April 6, four black men walked into the Dodger spring training camp at the U.S. Army field house in West Point, in the Bear Mountain range north of New York City. Two of them were reporters: Jimmy Smith, from the Courier bureau in Harlem, and Joe Bostic, the sports editor of The People’s Voice, a smaller black paper. The other two men were veterans from the Negro Leagues: Terry McDuffie, a thirty-six-year-old pitcher for the Newark Eagles, and Dave “Showboat” Thomas, a thirty-nine-year-old outfielder for the New York Cubans. Bostic approached Robert Finch, Rickey’s right-hand man, and asked if the two players could try out. Finch replied that the schedule for the day was set, but he invited the journalists to meet his boss. Over lunch at the Bear Mountain Inn, Rickey told the reporters that he didn’t appreciate being put on the spot but that he would watch Thomas take batting practice and McDuffie pitch the following day.
Rickey didn’t say much after the brief audition, and he didn’t have to. As Smith conceded in his account for the Courier, McDuffie and Thomas were too old to be taken seriously as major league prospects. To be truly impressed, Smith wrote, white baseball front office executives like Rickey would have to see “young players, who have better records and greater possibilities” and would merit “a real trial, one that will last long enough for the players to adjust to the situation.”
Although Smith didn’t say so at the time, he had just such a player in mind. For five years, he and the other Courier sportswriters had been following the rise of a remarkable young athlete from Pasadena, California. The Courier had first written about him in 1940, while he was at UCLA, mistakenly referring to him in a headline as “Jackie Robertson.” That story described the collegian as “America’s top athlete” after he earned varsity letters in football, basketball, track, and baseball. Since then, Jackie Robinson had excelled in military competition during an Army stint and had made a
promising start in the Negro Leagues, as a shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs.
Now Smith was working at lining up a pro tryout for Robinson. A month earlier, Wendell had read that a city councilman from Boston named Isadore Muchnick was in a tough reelection battle in a racially mixed neighborhood. He wrote Muchnick and suggested that he appeal to black voters by coming out in support of integrating Boston’s pro clubs, the Red Sox and the Braves. Smith urged Muchnick to threaten to call for a ban on Sunday baseball—a position that would win favor with Boston’s Catholic Church—if the teams didn’t agree to audition black players. When Muchnick agreed, the two men made a deal: Smith would select qualified players and bring them to Boston if Muchnick set up tryouts with the Red Sox and Braves.
Smith chose three players: Marvin Williams, a second baseman for the Philadelphia Stars; Sam Jethroe, a speedy outfielder and .350 hitter for the Cleveland Buckeyes; and Jackie Robinson, the rookie shortstop for the Monarchs. Of the three, Robinson was the least proven, and Wendell selected him as much for his demeanor and background as for his baseball skills. “He wasn’t necessarily the best player,” Smith recalled, “but he was the best player for the situation.”
Like Wendell, Jackie was accustomed to being around white people, having attended UCLA and served in the Army. He knew the value of hard work, as the son of a woman who had supported five children on a domestic’s wages after her husband abandoned the family. He could also stand up for himself, as he had in the Army when a driver ordered him to the back of a military bus. Jackie refused and was court-martialed for insubordination, but he managed to win an acquittal and an honorable discharge. Just as impressive to Smith, Robinson had a winning smile and a thoughtful, earnest manner that masked his fierce drive and prickly pride and that would go over well with white fans and baseball executives.
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