Over the next week, the Royals played the Dodgers seven times, and Jackie more than rose to Rickey’s challenge. He got twenty hits in thirty at bats, stole seven bases, and played error-free defense at first. When he returned to Cuba, the word he had so long awaited finally arrived, via Wendell Smith. Jackie was reading in his Havana hotel room one night when Wendell walked in, beaming. “I just left Mr. Rickey’s hotel room,” he said. “He told me he’s going to put you on the Dodgers on April 10th.”
In the March 29 edition of the Courier, Smith shared the historic scoop with his readers. “An unimpeachable source revealed to The Pittsburgh Courier this week,” he wrote, “that Jackie Robinson . . . will be promoted to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the night of April 10 and will play for the big league club on opening day against the Boston Braves.” Jackie’s torrid showing in Panama had sealed the deal, Wendell reported. But then he added an ominous note: “The only obstacle in his way currently is the possibility of a wholesale rebellion on the part of the present members of the Brooklyn Club.”
During his meeting with Smith at the Havana hotel, Rickey had shared worrisome details about an attempted revolt in the Dodger clubhouse. Two players had tried to circulate a petition objecting to signing Robinson, but had backed down after they were called on the carpet. “If you want to play in the majors, don’t try to pick the personnel of my ball club,” Rickey lectured them. Without citing Rickey as his source, Smith reported on the resistance to Robinson in the Courier. He singled out Ed Stanley, a Texan who stood to lose his job at first base, and “Dixie” Walker, the right fielder from Georgia, as the players most opposed to Robinson. He added that second baseman Eddie Stanky “appears to be prejudiced, but will play with him”—an impression Wendell may have formed after watching Stanky hurl a ball into the stands after Robinson embarrassed the Dodger infield with two perfect bunts in Panama.
When it came time for the Dodgers and Royals to break camp, Rickey continued to leave nothing to chance. After playing a final game in Cuba on Easter Sunday, both teams were scheduled to take a boat to Miami, then travel by train through the South so that the Dodgers could play another exhibition in South Carolina. But at the last minute, the Royals management informed Robinson that they were putting him on a plane straight from Miami to New York City. Once in Manhattan, Jackie checked into the McAlpin Hotel on Herald Square and waited for the rest of the Dodgers and Royals to arrive for a final head-to-head preseason game scheduled for the 10th of April, the date that Smith had specified in his story predicting Robinson’s promotion.
That morning, a phone call awoke Jackie from a sound sleep. “Good morning, this is Mr. Rickey’s secretary,” said a woman’s voice. “He wants you to get over here right away and sign your contract.” Dressing hurriedly, Robinson rushed to Brooklyn to find Rickey and his top lieutenants assembled on the fourth floor of 215 Montague Street. “Jackie, you’re a big leaguer now,” Rickey declared after he and Robinson signed the documents that made it official. “You’re going to play with the Dodgers and we’re announcing it to the world today.”
Several hours later, Robinson donned his Montreal uniform for the last time. In the sixth inning, the Royals were threatening to tie the 4–2 game when Jackie hit into a double play. As fans in the stands moaned in disappointment, a Rickey aide named Arthur Mann walked into the press area of the bleachers and started handing out copies of a one-page press release. Suddenly dozens of sportswriters raced to find telephones to report the news that Wendell Smith had broken in the Courier two weeks earlier. “The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson from the Montreal Royals,” the press release announced. “He will report immediately.”
When Robinson arrived at Ebbets Field at noon the following day, a locker still hadn’t been assigned to him, but a uniform had, stitched with the number 42. Jackie’s teammates greeted him with dutiful nods rather than welcoming handshakes. Quietly, he joined a pregame strategy session. Two days earlier, Commissioner Happy Chandler had abruptly suspended Leo Durocher for accusing Yankees owner Lee McPhail of consorting with gamblers. So it was coach Clyde Sukeforth, substituting as manager, who advised the players on what to expect when they met the Yankees in the first of a three-game exhibition series. In the middle of the chalk talk, Sukeforth turned to his newest rookie. “Robinson, how are you feeling today?” he asked. Fine, Jackie replied. “Okay, then you’re playing first today,” Sukeforth said matter-of-factly, as Robinson gulped hard.
In Pittsburgh, Courier editors pulled out all the stops in covering Robinson’s first weekend as a Dodger. The next issue devoted six full pages to stories and photographs of the three games against the Yankees. More than 24,000 spectators showed up for the first game on Friday, followed by 30,000 on Sunday—the largest crowds ever for the annual subway series. Thousands of black fans jammed into the bleachers, cheering Robinson each time he took the field and booing Dixie Walker, the rumored leader of the player revolt. Scores of photographers jostled to take pictures, including one photo that would become an instant classic: of white youngsters from Ocean Parkway who suspended themselves over the dugout to beg for Jackie’s autograph.
Robinson managed only two hits in three games and the Yanks took the series 2–1. Still, when the first game was over police had to block the dugout tunnel to keep fans from mobbing him. As Jackie emerged from the dressing room, more screaming fans chased him as he ran to Billy Rowe’s Pontiac. In his diary for the Courier (ghostwritten as usual by Smith), Robinson thanked his fellow Dodgers for their support, and singled out one in particular for the advice he had given about how to play individual Yankees at first base. “Ed Stanky, a great player, helped me the first day,” Jackie reported, making amends for the earlier doubts that Smith raised about Stanky.
In a special Managing Editor’s note, Bill Nunn touted the paper’s role in the historic breakthrough. “The Pittsburgh Courier, who first mentioned Jackie as a major league prospect and who followed his every move from the moment he first entered the ranks of organized baseball . . . has done its part, thus far,” Nunn wrote. But then Nunn pleaded with black fans to do their part. “AND NOW . . . the real challenge faces Negro America,” he wrote. “The challenge . . . to leave whiskey bottles at home or on the shelves of the liquor stores . . . to leave out loud talking, obscene language and indecent dress on the outside of the ballpark . . . to learn something about the game [so we] won’t humiliate Jackie by our lack of knowledge . . . to stop our booing over some untoward incident which might happen on the ballpark. Remember that Jackie might be ‘roughed up’ some, because that’s the way they play in the majors—for keeps.”
Smith had more good news to report the following week after the Dodgers began their regular season at home. In two games against the Boston Braves and two more against the New York Giants, Robinson came alive for six hits in fourteen trips to the plate, including a homer and a double. He performed ably at first base, where he was gradually becoming more comfortable. Heartened by the public response, Branch Rickey joked that Jackie would soon need police protection—from his fans. At the McAlpin Hotel, more than five hundred letters piled up, from as many white people as black, writing from as far away as the Deep South and the Far West. “Hi, Black Boy!” read one letter from Portland, Oregon. “Glad to read that you have arrived. Had good idea that you had the stuff and would make the grade. You are a credit to your race—the human race, son. Very glad to see you in the big leagues. Good luck. Sincerely, WHITE BOY.”
The honeymoon didn’t last long, however. After a brief trip to Boston, the Dodgers returned to Brooklyn to face the Philadelphia Phillies. As Robinson made his way to the on-deck circle in the first inning, he heard a chorus of catcalls from the Phillies dugout. “Hey, you black nigger!” one player shouted out. “Why don’t you go back where you came from!” another jeered. “Yeah, pretty soon you’ll want to eat and sleep with white players!” a third shouted. Robinson was startled at first, having grown used to racis
t taunts in the South but not expecting them so far north. Next he became enraged, and imagined himself rushing the Phillies dugout to respond with his fists. But then he reminded himself of Rickey’s lectures on self-restraint, and instead he proceeded calmly to the plate and answered with his bat, by hitting a single.
The abuse didn’t end there. For the rest of the game and the two more that followed, the Phillies baited Robinson with increasingly bigoted slurs: “Hey nigger, why don’t you go back to the cotton field where you belong?”; “They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!”; “Hey, snowflake, which of those white boys’ wives are you dating tonight?!” The insults were so relentless that they infuriated the rest of the Dodgers team as well, and caused Jackie’s white teammates to come to his defense and to rally together to sweep the series, 3–0. The cantankerous Stanky was particularly offended. “Listen, you yellow-bellied cowards,” he shouted in the Phillies’ direction. “Why don’t you yell at someone who can answer back?”
In the following days, the Courier exposed the source of the attacks. In an interview with the paper’s Philadelphia reporter, the Alabama-born Phillies manager, Ben Chapman, bragged that he had encouraged his players to “ride Robinson unmercifully.” Chapman said he was only observing the time-honored tradition of hazing rookies. But his boastful admission caught the attention of columnist Walter Winchell, who made them a national story by chastising Chapman and the Phillies in his Sunday radio program. With that, the incident became too big for Happy Chandler to ignore. Chandler phoned Phillies general manager Herb Pennock and informed him that no more insults on the basis of race would be tolerated. The Courier hailed Chandler’s intervention as “the first time in the history of organized baseball that the commissioner has taken action in matters of a racial nature.”
Yet Wendell Smith had a different response to the Phillies’ display. Instead of expressing outrage, he encouraged Robinson to use it as a public relations opportunity, to show how philosophical and unperturbed he could appear. In the Courier, their “Jackie Robinson Says” diary dismissed the tormentors with a weary shrug and a wry quip. “Some of the Phillies bench jockeys tried to get me upset last week, but it didn’t really bother me,” the diary read. “The things the Phillies shouted at me from their bench have been shouted at me from other benches and I am not worried about it . . . . In fact, the fellows who are sitting on the bench when I come to bat probably don’t have much work to do. If they did, they’d be out there playing, wouldn’t they?”
In addition to reassuring black fans, the Courier diary offered cover to league officials. As Brooklyn prepared to meet the St. Louis Cardinals on their first long road trip, the New York Herald Tribune broke a sensational story: the Cardinals were planning to strike rather than play against Robinson. When the rumor reached Ford Frick, he issued a stern warning to the Cardinals. “The National League will go down the line with Robinson whatever the consequences,” he declared. Applauding Frick’s hard line, Smith argued that it had been made easier by the earnest image of Robinson that he had helped project in the Courier. “By maintaining his composure at all times and acting the part of a gentleman,” Wendell wrote, “Robinson has given the offices of baseball plenty of ammunition to use against his would-be oppressors.”
When the Dodgers reached St. Louis, there was no strike, but there was more razzing. When Robinson came to the plate for the first time, Joe Garagiola, the Cardinals’ portly second-year catcher, yelled out to his teammates in the infield.
“Watch this guy!” Garagiola cried. “He gets all his hits bunting. That’s the only way he can get them.”
“I can’t hit, eh?” Robinson snorted as he dug into the batter’s box. “Well, Garagiola, what’s your batting average?”
“Oh, about two points below yours,” Joe responded, “but if I could run as fast as you, I’d have a real good average.”
“No matter how fast you can run, Joe,” Jackie shot back, “you couldn’t hit as much as you weigh.”
Historians would later cite the exchange as one more example of the bigotry Robinson had to endure during his rookie season. Yet Smith dismissed it as a harmless case of joking and “riding,” and suggested that Garagiola was trying to rattle Robinson into not laying down a bunt.
Writing his weekly column on the train back to New York, Smith chose instead to describe what it was like now for Robinson on the road, where Wendell was his roommate. Far from the run-down buses and dusty roadhouses of the Negro Leagues, they were riding in Pullman cars and being put up at plush hotels such as the Stevens in Chicago and the Schenley in Pittsburgh. Only in St. Louis did they receive word that the Chase Hotel, where the Dodgers were booked, was “not anxious” to put up Robinson. Instead, Jackie and Wendell stayed at the black-run Deluxe Hotel, where the owner provided a suite of rooms and round-the-clock use of his Cadillac. Before the Dodgers left town, the Chase Hotel reversed itself and informed the team that Robinson would be welcome during their next visit, but Smith told Courier readers that it was “doubtful” Jackie would accept. He would “return to the Deluxe Hotel and stay with those who befriended him on his first visit there,” Wendell reported.
On the next Dodger road trip, Smith and Robinson continued to use their Courier columns to show gratitude to welcoming teams and players. Arriving in Pittsburgh, they made a point of praising Hank Greenberg, the former Detroit slugger who had signed with the Pirates after serving a stint in the Army. In the first game of the series, Robinson was beating out a bunt when Greenberg reached for a wild throw from the pitcher and knocked Jackie to the ground. The next time Jackie got on base, Hank asked him if he was all right. Then he shared some wisdom earned as one of the first Jews to become a big league star. “Listen, I know it’s plenty tough,” Greenberg said, “but 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.” In his diary, Robinson wrote that Greenberg and Frank Gustine, the Pirates third baseman, “made me feel that they were glad to see me in the majors and that I was a real good player.”
While in Pittsburgh, Smith was able to sit in the Dodgers dugout and observe the growing solidarity between Robinson and his teammates. Proof came when Pirates pitcher Fritz Ostermueller threw an inside pitch that clipped Jackie’s arm and knocked him to the deck. For several minutes he lay on the ground grimacing with pain, and the other Dodgers all rose from the bench to see if he was all right. From the dugout steps, they shouted at Ostermueller and vowed to get even—with Eddie Stanky leading the chorus. “As profane as they were,” Smith wrote, “the things the Brooks shouted were simply expressions of their regard for Robinson and they sounded good to anyone who once feared that Jackie couldn’t win the support of his teammates.” Yet when it came to describing the incident in Robinson’s diary, Wendell once again rose above the fray. “Ostermueller is a very good pitcher,” Jackie declared in the diary. “I am sure he didn’t intend to hit me. It was just one of those things.”
His teammates’ growing acceptance of Robinson was becoming evident outside the ballpark as well. On the road, the other Dodgers welcomed him into their nonstop games of hearts, rummy, bridge, and pinochle. When the team stopped in Danville, Illinois, to play an exhibition game, Robinson and Smith snuck off to play a round of golf. A foursome including Pee Wee Reese was playing ahead of them, and after four holes they invited Jackie and Wendell to join them.
By the time the Dodgers returned from their second long road trip in late June, Jackie had hit in nine straight games and was leading the National League in stolen bases, including the first time in the majors that he had stolen home. Although no one expected him to be chosen as starting first baseman in the All-Star Game over Stan Musial or Johnny Mize of the New York Giants, he received a surprising number of votes for a newcomer to the position. Most important, he had helped the Dodgers pull into first place, a position the scrappy “Bums” would cling to for the rest of the season.
Robins
on’s success had also emboldened Bill Veeck, the innovative young owner of the Cleveland Indians, to bring a second black player up the major leagues: second baseman Larry Doby of the Newark Eagles. As it happened, two Pittsburghers figured in that less remembered milestone as well. Hearing that Veeck was open to the idea of signing a black player, Bill Nunn traveled to Cleveland to lobby for Doby. “Look the kid over real good,” he urged. Taking Nunn’s advice, Veeck sent his public relations director to contact Doby. The PR man was Louis Jones, Lena Horne’s ex-husband, who had moved from Pittsburgh to Cleveland after their divorce and taken the job with the Indians. When he tracked down Doby, Jones made it clear that Veeck was prepared to move fast. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were in Cleveland in three weeks,” he said.
By mid-September the Dodgers were on their way to a pennant. They had a six-game lead and only one hurdle left: a three-game series against the second-place Cardinals. In the second inning of the first game, Robinson’s nemesis, Joe Garagiola, came to the plate with a man on and hit a ground ball to short. Jackie tagged Joe out, but not before Garagiola’s cleats dug into his foot, tearing Jackie’s shoe. Garagiola would claim that he was only rushing to avoid a double play, but this time Jackie didn’t laugh it off. When he came to the plate the next inning, he started jawing with the catcher. Garagiola leapt up and started shouting in Robinson’s face. The umpire had to separate the two men, and Clyde Sukeforth rushed out of the Dodgers dugout to prevent a fight.
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