by Roger Kahn
He served the U.S. Army more as athlete than as soldier. “Sixteen months after I was drafted before I touched a rifle. I pitched a lot.” After World War II he signed with the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro National League and resumed studying at Morgan. Pitching earned enough to pay full tuition. With a degree, he could coach and teach. His own lot would be better than his father’s. If not content, he was amiably resigned.
Then in 1946 Rickey signed Robinson. Black ball players rooted. “Come on, Jack. Come on, big black man. Show those white guys. After you, comes us.” The new hope receded cruelly. Black was the fastest pitcher on the Baltimore Elites, but year after year no white cared. White scouts picked the very best of a rich plantation harvest—Robinson, Newcombe, Campanella, Monte Irvin, Satchel Paige—to fill the narrow quotas. Baseball was not segregated one day and integrated the next. First came one black, then two, then four, then ten. The Yankees carried none as late as 1954. Branch Rickey made a mistake with black pitchers. The first one he signed, Dan Bankhead of Empire, Alabama, lacked major league ability. Bankhead was failing before Brooklyn scouts signed Joe Black to a minor league contract in 1950.
Black felt pleased, but not exhilarated. He was a twenty-six-year-old college graduate who had erased white baseball from his plans. All right. He’d go. There was nothing to lose. He’d have to accept abuse, but he might as well give the white minor leagues a try. He signed to play where Robinson had, far from the American South in Montreal.
He can still imitate a sound from opposing benches, ringing in two notes, a mix of bird call and obscenity. “Black,” begins a voice, stretching the vowel sound so that the name sounds “Bla-a-a-ack.” Then, a few tones higher, “nigger.” The second word is tightly clipped. The sound went “Bla-a-a-ack nigger, bla-a-a-ack nigger. Nigger!” He ignored it and took his pitching pay.
No other career on the team was both so brilliant and so brief. I can still see Black trudging from the bullpen, in foul territory beside the right-field corner of Ebbets Field. He wore Number 49 and he approached with all deliberate speed, holding a jacket in one hand, reaching the mound, exchanging a sentence with Dressen, who was half his size, taking a ritual pat on the flank from the pitcher he replaced and, with evident confidence and a certain impatience, going to work.
Black coming in against the Giants, whose bean balls disquieted Hodges and Campanella, threw at heads. In 1952 the Giants were afraid of Black. They could not beat him when they had to. Black stopped Stan Musial in St. Louis and Del Ennis in Philadelphia and Ted Kluszewski in Cincinnati. He stopped all the best hitters by throwing to spots and keeping them loose, and his relief pitching won the pennant. But the next season Dressen’s tinkering and Black’s own concerns shunted him back to the second line. A year later he was in the minors. Then back again; then Cincinnati and a final weary effort for Washington. He was not a star, but a nova, appearing, flaring and disappearing, each phase following the other so rapidly that before there was time to contemplate one phenomenon it had been succeeded by another.
As we sat in the rectangular house on Yates Street, almost everything in Black’s life, and everything that we discussed, hinged about the single year 1952, and actually less than that, the brevity of a season. Out of the forty-six years, everything built toward and sloped from a starburst.
“Does it seem real?”
Black laughed, sound gurgling up from his big chest. “You trying psychological stuff on me?” The laugh exploded. “What’s that over there to my left?” The bronze glove. “You want to see my trophies? They’re in the basement. I show ‘em to Chico when he visits. Yes, it seems real. I remember it very clearly. You trying to psych a psych major?”
“What happened, Joe?” I said.
“The last time I pitched in the Stadium, I could hear Stengel yelling at the hitters, ‘Don’t let him fool ya. Watch out for the fast ball. He can throw harder than that.’ But I couldn’t. My arm had started to hurt a few years before. I had them take X-rays. The humerus was cracked. Throwing. I don’t know when I’d cracked the bone. The Stadium was the finish. I packed up and came back to Plainfield and took courses for my master’s, and went to work teaching. And I figured, what the hell, there’s a lot worse ways to end up.”
A young teacher, where twenty-five years before he had worn frayed shirts to school, he had seen black America and white America and come to believe in the unity of both, a moderate position to which he brought immoderate intensity. About 60 percent of the students at Plainfield Junior High were black. Most of the white 40 percent were Jewish. One Friday, late in the autumn of 1959, Black learned that some of the Negroes were extorting money from some of the Jews. On the next Monday, he stood up, moved to the front of his desk and began to address his home-room class. “People should live,” Black said. “I’ve been some places and I’ve seen some things and pitched in the World Series, and I can tell you that is basic. We’ve got this one life, and it isn’t very long, and we all want to live. I’m going to talk to you about living.
“Some of you are black and some of you are white and I know it’s hard to get along. It was harder when I grew up. I honestly think things are easier now. There’s more bread. But things aren’t the same. They’re different. You with me?”
A noncommittal murmur.
“All right, you black kids. I was a black kid here. I know the disadvantages. But I know some of you are punching the white guys and don’t try to deny it. And I know why. Because every day you can get fifty cents not to hit him. Well, that’s against the law. If I brought a policeman in here and made you admit what you were doing, which I am strong enough to do, you’d get locked up.
“Now you white guys, you got a little money. You’ve got the fifty cents. I want to ask you right here and now, why don’t you fight back?”
A Jewish boy said, “They can beat us up.”
“Okay. That’s a good reason not to fight. You don’t want to get killed. But we’ve got the gym on Wednesday and I’m going to teach combatives. Boxing. We’re gonna have headgear, that’s like helmets, and mouthpieces, and big sixteen-ounce gloves. Nobody’s gonna get hurt bad.”
In the gymnasium on Wednesday, the boys were loud with excitement. The black children arrayed themselves at one side of the ring. “Get in there, man, and dig, dig, dig, dig.”
The middle-class Jewish children stood at another side. Black walked toward them towering.
“Don’t worry. You box in your own way. They’re gonna bang on you in the beginning. Let them bang on you. I’m the referee. Nothing terrible will happen.”
In each of a half dozen bouts, the black banged on the white. But heavy gloves softened the punches, and after the first blows, the blacks became less violent. Throwing punches with heavy gloves is exhausting. A boy swings hard for thirty seconds. Then he loses the desire to swing and wants very much to lower his arms.
When the boxing was done, Black again stood among the Jewish children. “So they banged on you,” he said. “Bomp, bomp, bomp. And you didn’t die, did you?”
The boys began to smirk.
“All right,” Black said. “Your turn is coming.”
A day later he asked one of the whites, a wiry boy of one hundred pounds, to meet him in the gymnasium. “I want to show you judo,” Black said. “You’re gonna throw me.”
“I don’t want to, Mr. Black. You’re too big.”
“It’s not size, it’s weight distribution and leverage.”
They worked together, and in an hour the hundred-pound boy was able to throw the compliant 250-pound teacher. The boy would grab an arm, press hard and move into Black, who yielded to the pressure and rolled over the boy’s shoulder. Black then slammed against the mat on his back. There is no way a hundred-pounder can throw a powerful 250-pound man who does not want to be thrown. Effect was what Black sought. Effect would be enough.
“All right,” Black announced the next Wednesday, “today we wrestle.”
The Negro children chattered, “Say
, Mr. Black. We’re gonna do our thing.”
“Hold it,” Black said. “There’s a difference between wrestling and rasslin’. You guys are thinking about rasslin’. In wrestling there are rules.”
“What rules?”
“Well, there’s a lot to learn, and the first thing is how to fall.” Black contemplated. “I’ve got to get somebody to fall. Let’s see.” He looked about. His eyes found the white hundred-pounder. “You,” Black said. “Come on out.”
“Hey, wait, Mr. Black,” one of the Negroes said. “He’s too small. You shouldn’t throw him.”
Black said easily, “He’s gonna throw me.”
Black students laughed. “That kid’s gonna throw you, teach? Ain’t gonna. Hey, kid, don’t get hurt throwin’ Mr. Black.”
Gigantic Joe Black and the small white child met at the center of the mat. In seconds the boy threw his teacher. As Black landed, he struck the mat with open palms for volume and added a resounding “Ooof!” Then he rose and proceeded to teach serious wrestling.
He laughed to himself as he remembered. “You know what happened in a few weeks? The Jewish kids, who were pretty sheltered, got over their fear and whipped the black guys good. They paid attention to my talks, and when they got into the ring, they knew how to maneuver. The black guys kept trying to get a gargantua hold. Instead, they ended up pinned. All right. What happened?
“The Jewish kids found out that because a guy is black doesn’t mean he’s tough. The black kids found out that because a guy is Jewish doesn’t mean he’s chicken. The extortion stopped all by itself. By the end of that year they were getting along.”
“Since then?”
“Since then there’s been trouble in Plainfield. They brought in a player from somewhere else and a black television announcer. Celebrities. What do celebrities mean to these kids? You have to get somebody to sting conscience. It isn’t just that I could relate to tough black kids. I’d gone to school with their mothers and fathers. I‘d lived where they did, in the shanties by the track. Sting a boy’s conscience and reward him with a little honest hope. The day is done when it was niggers across the tracks, white trash down the dirty end of the river and the rich living upstream. You got to get those words to the kids.”
“Does it bother you to have left the ghetto?” I said.
“I didn’t leave it,” Black said. “I got pushed. Society told me, ‘Joe, get out.’ I’ve got alimony, and child support for Chico. I thought I was doing good work in the ghetto. But society didn’t rate it very high. To teach and coach with a master’s degree, my salary was forty-two hundred a year.”
“That was before everybody got frightened,” I said. “Now you could get Ford Foundation grants. Real money.”
“Maybe. But what you learn is that then and now don’t mix. If I’d gone into organized ball at eighteen, the way I could throw … But I couldn’t go into organized ball until Jackie made it and the quotas let me, and if we want to get sad, we can think that I pitched my greatest games in miserable ball parks, in the colored league, with nobody watching.
“But I’m not a sad guy. Things are bad in Plainfield. My sister stays in school all day with her kid. Parents patrol the halls. But look here, I’m a black executive in a big corporation. That’s now, and now is my chance to show that this big colored guy, me, is no dummy.”
Martha Jo had finished her bottle and fallen asleep on her father’s shoulder. We adjourned, to resume the next day at the headquarters of the Greyhound Corporation, 10 South Riverside Plaza in downtown Chicago, close to ghettos, to be sure, but 850 miles away from the railroad tracks in Plainfield, New Jersey.
The Greyhound Corporation, Gerald H. Trautman, president, is not, as Black is always telling somebody, a bus company. It is that mixed bag of industry and finance, legerdemain and hustle, the conglomerate. The bus company is a subsidiary. So is a moving company, a computer company, a finance company, a range of a dozen businesses all joined under Greyhound, Inc. Joe Black is vice president for special markets. He works among Negroes and among whites. He stood among whites, speaking at a dinner of advertising men in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the day Martin Luther King was shot. He sensed a stirring and someone handed him a note saying, “Dr. King shot. Not serious.” The white chairman did not want to unsettle the black guest. The chairman waited until the speech was over and then, privately, recounted what had happened. Black flew to Atlanta and served as an usher at the funeral. Although King was an idol, he remained composed and after the services found himself clearing a path for Sammy Davis, Jr., among poor Atlanta blacks.
“My people, my people,” Davis cried. He threw out both hands in deep emotion.
“Some,” Black said, “are your people. Some will steal the rings off your fingers. Stay close and keep your hands in your pockets, Sam.”
Black’s office at Greyhound was a large square, with cold fluorescent lighting and a picture window over the Chicago River. Black pointed out several awards. I asked why he lived far south on Yates when, as a corporate vice president, he could afford a fashionable neighborhood.
“It’s a nice house,” he said, “and a nice mixed block. It’s comfortable. I want to be comfortable where I live, same way that I want to be comfortable with myself.”
“Meaning?”
“There are plenty of places where, if a black man wants to live there, he has to fight a war. The war affects his family. I speak English, right? My wife is not ugly, right? I have a college education, a good job. I’m a vice president. I’m in five figures, right?
“One afternoon Mae Nell and I visited white friends in Lombard, a suburb on the North Side. We saw signs advertising a development, nice houses with a garage for thirty-two thousand dollars. This was one of those places with a community pool and tennis court and a big social room where everybody meets socially.
“We applied. The manager had a list of names. Next to it were the people’s salaries and how much each person had to make as a down payment. Nobody on the list was making what I am. I could tell because I can read upside down.”
“How much down?” he had asked the manager.
“We’ll get to that. Where do you work?”
“The Greyhound Company.”
“What are you? A driver?”
Black handed him a card. “A vice president,” the manager said. “That’s very good. What do you make?”
“Put down in excess of thirty-five thousand a year.”
“In excess of thirty-five. Not bad. Say, do you travel?”
“Quite a bit,” Black said. “Making speeches. Things like that.”
“Well,” the manager said, “you certainly earn enough, but if you travel, I can’t encourage you to buy. We don’t let anyone use the recreation room until they’re eighteen, and some of these seventeen-year-olds, pretty husky fellers by the way, are kicking up a fuss. Rebelling. Throwing stones. Acting up. Now, Mr. Black, it certainly would be a terrible thing if these white seventeen-year-olds threw rocks through the window of your thirty-two-thousand-dollar house, possibly injuring your wife while you were traveling and not here to protect her.”
Later Black’s friends in Lombard offered to buy one of the development houses. “Then, instead of us, you and Mae Nell move in.”
“Like hell,” Black said. “Something like that happens to you every day in your life if you’re black.”
He has adjusted to bigotry, without accepting it. His talks argue against nihilism and riot.
“Dropout,” he tells black youths, “is another word for quitter. Quitting is a cinch. You walk away. For the time being you’re the boss. Free as a bird. And because you’re young, people excuse a lot of things. But when you get older, people stop feeling sorry, and that gets you sore, but what are you good for? A quitter is trained for nothing but being angry.
“This reawakening of racial pride,” he tells black adults, “is a fine thing. African styles in clothing, jewelry and hairdos are important. But what’s more important is what we do
to solve community problems. The future is the young; it’s in the schools. A new hairdo solves no problems, but wearing the new hairdo to PTA meetings is something else. That’s feeling racial identity and trying to make the ghetto school a better place. But if you had to pick one to skip, skip the hairdo. Make the PTA.”
During a recent Honors Day Program at Virginia Union, a black university in Richmond, Black spoke about the responsibilities as well as the rewards of black power: “Our efforts have to be more positive than shouting, ‘Sock it to him, Soul Brother,’ or, ‘We are victims of a racist society,’ or, ‘Honkey!’ I ‘m in favor of black history because it makes whites realize that American blacks have done more than make cotton king. But I ‘m opposed to all-black dorms, and to violence. If the black student wants to use a loaded gun to make a point, what can we expect of uneducated blacks? By now some of you may be saying I’m a Tom, a window-dressing Negro. But I learned two things early. A minority cannot defeat a majority in physical combat and you’ve got to let some things roll off your back. Because my name is Joe Black, whites called me ‘Old Black Joe.’ After a few years of scuffling, I still hadn’t silenced all of them and throwing all those punches had made me a weary young man. Call me ‘Old Black Joe’ today and you agitate nobody except yourself.”
He makes one point to everyone. It is bigotry to exalt the so-called special language of the blacks. “What is our language?” he asked. “ ‘Foteen’ for ‘fourteen.’ ‘Pohleeze’ for ‘police.’ ‘Raht back’ for ‘right back.’ ‘We is going.’ To me any man, white or black, who says whites must learn our language is insulting. What he’s saying is that every other ethnic group can migrate to America and master English, but we, who were born here and whose families have all lived here for more than a century, don’t have the ability to speak proper English. Wear a dashiki or an African hairdo, but in the name of common sense, learn the English language. It is your own.”