When Maury wrote his piece, neither of the New York clubs had a single black man working in the front office. In April, 1969, appearing on a radio interview, I took exception to the statement reportedly made that black players can make it as players but not in the front office. MacPhail had been quoted in the press as saying this and apparently had not demanded a retraction. A week later, when I referred to the statement on the air, however, he wrote me complaining that I had attacked him unfairly and misquoted him. I replied and asked why he had been so long in denying the statement, requested that he let me know what he had really said, and that if I had done him an injustice, I would apologize publicly. MacPhail sent me a long letter in which he denied the exact quote but went on to say something very similar. He said, “In my opinion there had not been a black league manager or many black coaches or executives because, until recently, there had not been a large number of black players qualified for such jobs, who were finishing their active careers.”
He went on to say that it was his personal opinion that there were then (in 1969) many black players active in baseball who were qualified and that as these players finished their active careers, he felt sure many of them would stay in baseball in nonplaying positions. He said he had Bill White in mind, for instance, and he pointed out that the Yankees had recently signed Elston Howard as a coach. He added that Elston, the first black player hired by the Yankees, had been offered the choice of managing a minor club in the organization.
I wrote Lee a final note saying I had no desire to carry the exchange further. Later that year, I received MacPhail’s traditional letter inviting Rachel and me to attend the club’s twenty-third annual “Old Timers Day.” I was informed that the fans had selected me as among the “Greatest Ever” in a national polling and that I would be an honored guest. There was to be a weekend celebration that sounded quite glamorous. I wrote MacPhail thanking him for the invitation but telling him that “my pride in my blackness and my disappointment in baseball’s attitude requires that until I see genuine interest in breaking the barriers that deny black people access to managerial and front office positions, I will make my protest by saying no to such requests.” I knew this would not have much effect on those who run the game, but this was my position.
I feel strongly about the hypocrisy of the moneyed club owners who try to cover up their bigotry. I am not the only one who feels that way. I quote from a feature by Associated Press sportswriter Mike Rathet who wrote from Fort Lauderdale:
There are 24 major league baseball teams. And there are 24 major league managers.
They are all white.
Why?
Eliminating the possibility that Negroes don’t want to be managers, there are three possible answers to that sensitive question which rose to the surface again last week when Frank Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles discussed the subject.
1. No Negro has been qualified.
2. The time isn’t right yet.
3. Discrimination.
To be the black athlete, particularly one with major league managerial aspirations in a world where no black athlete has ever attained that position, is to look at the color of your skin and wonder.
But no matter how much the black baseball player wonders he can’t escape the one conclusion that has to be drawn:
All managers are white and have been hired by white owners: no white owner has yet hired a black man as a manager.
That inescapable conclusion was frankly stated by Frank Robinson:
“There’s only one reason a Negro has never been a manager—his color,” he said. “The reason there hasn’t been a Negro manager is that no one has ever given a Negro a chance to be one.”
I say that the answer is discrimination, bigotry, and racial prejudice on the part of the same kind of men who bitterly fought against Branch Rickey and who do not want to see black men in power.
I’ve always admired Bill White for refusing to cop out when asked what he thought about the situation. Bill has a fighting spirit, anyhow. He led the fight which brought about integration of housing and eating facilities for the Cardinals during spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Bill wrote a courageous article in Sport magazine, entitled “A Man Must Say What He Thinks Is Right.” He attacked the policies excluding blacks from administration in baseball and even pointed out that there were few bench warmers or second-string players in the game. The black man, he said, had to be first rate or doomed to the minors.
The day of the black manager is coming, but only because it is inevitable. It will get here when an owner finally realizes that the argument that white players will not accept advice and orders from a black is phony.
Bill Russell proved, in basketball with the Celtics, that the business about whites not being able to take orders from blacks was absurd. I was so proud of Bill after he first took command and a press guy asked him if he anticipated any trouble out of his men because he was a black boss now. Bill’s answer was a quick and firm “No.” That’s all he said. “No.”
I would have eagerly welcomed the challenge of a managerial job before I left the game. I know I could have been a good manager. I know that the average ballplayer then would have welcomed and accepted leadership from any fellow player who he sincerely felt could help produce a victorious team. This was proven to me during my closing years with the Dodgers. My associates in baseball over the years were men of broad and reasonable thinking. Managers don’t make players. Players make managers. The best example I can think of is Casey Stengel. I like Casey, and I suppose he was good for baseball, but he was a clown and a loser with the Mets. It was fantastic to me to see the way the press protected an old man whose greatest contribution to the new Brooklyn team was sleeping on the bench during most of the game.
Baseball had better wake up. You can’t keep taking all and giving practically nothing back. I’m not speaking in personal terms. I figure baseball and I are even. I got a lot. I gave a lot. I am talking about a big business which makes fortunes for a few people and which fails to concern itself with more than the size of a stadium and the price of a ticket.
I’m happy that Roy Campanella and I survived the attempts at the old business of “divide and conquer” that some people tried to use to make us enemies. It didn’t work. There’s no use in my pretending that we didn’t have serious differences of opinion, but I think we always had mutual respect for each other. A coolness did exist between us for a number of years while I was in baseball and after I left. However, as time went by, my respect for Campy deepened, and I was convinced that his attitudes had changed. We all have to grow and learn. Not everyone is man enough, as Campy was, to admit that he might have been wrong in his thinking about the right of a black man in sports to express himself.
In 1964 Campy and I were in the office of his Harlem liquor store. He sat in his wheelchair, an intrepid athlete rendered helpless. We were reminiscing and I remember him saying, “It’s a horrible thing to sit here and realize what a situation like this means to an individual—to be born an American and have to go to court to find out how much of an American he is. It’s a horrible thing to be born in this country and go along with all the rules and laws and regulations and have to battle in court for the right to go to the movies—to wonder which store my children can go to in the South to try on a pair of shoes or where to sleep in a hotel. I am a Negro and I am part of this. I don’t care what anyone says about me. . . . I feel it as deep as anyone and so do my children.”
Campy had broadened and deepened his view and I respected his manhood in expressing his maturity.
The year 1968 was the year that Mallie Robinson passed away.
It was mid-May when I received the message that my mother was dying in Pasadena. I got on the first plane to go to her, but when I reached her she was gone. After my first feeling of disbelief, I felt I couldn’t go into the room where she lay. I didn’t think I could bear to look upon her face. Somehow I managed to and I shall always be glad t
hat I did. There was a look, an expression on her face, that calmed me. It didn’t do anything about her hurt, but it made me realize that she had died at peace with herself. She had been out in the garden working when she was struck down. Mallie Robinson. She had been one of those strong black women you always hear about, women who have been the very salvation of the black people.
I had fulfilled my boyhood dream of providing her with a decent home, a nest egg in the bank and a garden for her to work in and watch green and glorious colored things grow. After we had been able to give her all this, we constantly discovered that she was still sacrificing her own pleasures and security to help others—friends, members of the family, even strangers. Many times I felt that my mother was being foolish, letting people take advantage of her. I was wrong. She did kindnesses for people whom I considered parasites because she wanted to help them. It was her way of thinking, her way of life. She had not been a fool for others. She had given with her eyes as open as her heart. In death she was still teaching me how to live.
XXIV
Epilogue
Life, in spite of all the ups and downs, has been very good to me individually. Personally, I have been very fortunate. Why, then, do I insist that “I Never Had It Made”?
It is because I refuse to kid myself about the value of having a comfortable home, about having a little money in the bank, about having received awards and trophies and honors and having had the opportunity to talk and work with some of the most influential people in the world in all phases of activity.
A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.
Everything I ever got I fought hard for—and Rachel fought by my side—but I know that I haven’t got the right to say truthfully that I have it made. I cannot possibly believe I have it made while so many of my black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare. I cannot say I have it made while our country drives full speed ahead to deeper rifts between men and women of varying colors, speeds along a course toward more and more racism.
Life owes me nothing. Baseball owes me nothing. But I cannot, as an individual, rejoice in the good things I have been permitted to work for and learn while the humblest of my brothers is down in a deep hole hollering for help and not being heard.
That is why I have devoted and dedicated my life to service. I don’t like to be in debt. And I owe. Some of my friends tell me I’ve paid the note a thousandfold. But I still feel I owe—till every man can rent and lease and buy according to his money and his desires; until every child can have an equal opportunity in youth and manhood; until hunger is not only immoral but illegal; until hatred is recognized as a disease, a scourge, an epidemic, and treated as such; until racism and sexism and narcotics are conquered and until every man can vote and any man can be elected if he qualifies—until that day Jackie Robinson and no one else can say he has it made.
I have so many memories.
Rachel and I are not given to sloppy sentimentalism. But we can honestly say that each of us has stood at the center of the other’s existence; that we have honored and loved each other; that we have never broken our marriage contract and that we wouldn’t trade a day of it—not the sorrows or joys—for all the gold in the world.
Memories.
Of my mother who was a simple, understanding, loving, and courageous woman who gave me both tools and weapons to help in living my life.
Memories of people who have impressed me as vital to the cause of black leadership.
Remembering first observing and getting to know Reverend Jesse Jackson, the country preacher. When he was head of Operation Breadbasket, I accepted his invitation to go to Chicago and be guest speaker at one of his remarkable Saturday morning meetings. Remembering my time as a guest at Jesse’s and Jacqueline’s home in Chicago, observing this dedicated young leader’s almost around-the-clock devotion to his job.
I was proud to become first vice-president when Jesse organized the fast-growing PUSH (People United to Save Human-ity) at the beginning of 1972 after he resigned from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The organization, which some predicted would exist for a brief while and then fail, has made incredible strides. This has been a result of the outstanding leadership of the thirty-one-year-old who is a protégé of the late Dr. King. Bitterness and rivalry with SCLC has apparently dissolved into some semblance of understanding and cooperation. Powerful alliances have been formed with the other civil rights agencies. With Jesse’s gift for major fund-raising and inspiring fellowship, the organization has been able to promote something like a million dollars, mostly from blacks themselves, and has been able to buy its own national headquarters in Chicago. Activity on the national scene has included confrontations with large corporations which are not giving blacks their fair share of jobs, agency business, newspaper advertising, public relations work, and philanthropic support. PUSH was one of the major moving forces in the historic Black Political Convention in Gary, and Reverend Jackson rates the great credit for his role in unseating the Richard J. Daley delegation at Miami, although the press has chosen to give most of the praise for this to whites.
I have hopes for Jesse Jackson. I think he offers the most viable leadership for blacks and oppressed minorities in America and also for the salvation of our national decency. I think Jesse’s leadership is potentially one of majestic proportions. He is totally dedicated, and if we are to arise out of this deepening pit of polarization between us as a people, it will be by supporting the kind of leadership Jesse Jackson offers.
Memories of Adam Clayton Powell. During Adam’s latter years I did not agree with him on many subjects, but in his early career he was one of my idols. I thought he could become a commanding force in the nation. He did for a while and he accomplished a great deal, but it was such a bitter disappointment to see him come to the place where he apparently no longer cared. Racism drove him from the Congress, but Adam, I feel, helped to write his own ticket to disaster.
Memories of leaders! The dean of them all, A. Philip Randolph. Courtly, eloquent. A man of integrity. The late Whitney M. Young, Jr., a family friend and a man much misunderstood because he acted out his role as a racial diplomat in the board rooms and the drawing rooms of the mighty.
Leaders. Some, I think, failed us. With all his gifts, Bayard Rustin, in his latter years, has come across to me as one of those who wants to please white people even if the favors and spotlight he gets cost black people a heavy price as in the race-baiting activities of Albert Shanker.
Angry memories.
The people who write or call or tell me in person that they are about to punish me for expressing my views with which they disagree.
As though they’re talking to some school kid! Then they go on to threaten to withdraw their approval of me. One day, twenty years ago, they liked the way I stole home or admired my capacity to be insulted or injured and turn and walk away. For that admiration they have given me, I am supposed henceforth and forevermore to surrender my soul. I am not allowed an opinion. If I become naturally, normally indignant, they describe my mood as one of rage. Look what we did for this guy by admiring him and here’s how he repays us—by thinking he has the right to say something we don’t agree with. I don’t owe any living person my soul, my integrity, my freedom of thought and speech. People who believe they have the right to restrain and repress these freedoms are mentally sick.
Ironic memories!
Thinking about how inept many people of my generation are in judging youth. When I requested a meeting with Black Panthers in Brooklyn, I wanted to talk to them, man to man. I had read about their programs and platforms and found them, in the main, admirable. I believe that most people who have attacked them have not studied their programs. I wanted to hear their response to the main charge that concerned me—that they were initiators of violence. I had a meeting with them in their headquarters in the heart of the black communit
y. I was deeply impressed with them, although not sold on every point raised. But as I came out of the meeting, I saw on the surrounding streets a dramatic example of one of the most serious grievances they had expressed. Groups of white policemen were clustered in the area.
I remember my own dangerous confrontation with a white policeman in the lobby of the Apollo Theater recently. It was a day soon after a couple of police officers had been killed in Harlem. I came from my office at Freedom National Bank a few doors down 125th Street to the Apollo. On my way into the lobby, an officer, a plainclothesman, accosted me. He asked me roughly where I was going, and I asked what the hell business it was of his. He grabbed me and spectators passing by told me later that he had pulled out his gun. I was so angry at his grabbing me and so busy telling him he’d better get his hands off me that I didn’t remember seeing the gun. By this time people had started crowding around, excitedly telling him my name, and he backed off. Thinking over that incident, it horrifies me to realize what might have happened if I had been just another citizen of Harlem. It shouldn’t be necessary to be named Jackie Robinson to keep from getting brutalized in John Lindsay’s Fun City or Dick Daley’s Chicago.
Another memory about young people and how we condemn them just on the basis of rumor. When the kids at Cornell University were photographed in 1969 confronting faculty and administration people with rifles, the media and black and white leaders condemned them. I wrote them a letter, asking for their point of view. I received an answer which seemed to indicate that the whole story had not been told. I got some papers to publish their side—but only after that first damning impression against them had been spread. We’d better stop using generation gap as an alibi for alienation. Young and old are guilty of that. We’d better build a bridge over that gap. Just because young people are quieter today, we’ve no right to assume that the problems are solved.
I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson Page 27