Rickey and Robinson

by Harvey Frommer

  The Negro clubs asked for a committee from organized baseball to work with them for better scheduling and perhaps eventual recognition as part of the structure of organized baseball. At the major-league meetings in Cleveland in the spring of 1945, Larry MacPhail of the Yankees and Branch Rickey were designated by their respective leagues to select two prominent black figures and form a four-man committee to report on the Negro question in baseball. Tabbing Rickey for this role was purely coincidental; no one outside of Rickey’s intimates knew of his search for a black player for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  Joe Bostic, a black sportswriter and the official announcer for the Negro National League and the Negro American League, felt that the time had come to act. Bostic, who could have had no inkling of Rickey’s plan, staged a confrontation with Rickey and the white establishment at the Dodger training camp in Bear Mountain, New York.

  “One of the things back then about being black or Negro was keeping your place,” recalls Bostic, “and I did not know my place. During World War II I had been in the forefront of trying to break the color line in major-league baseball. On two occasions I went down to Two fifteen Montague Street to plead my case, and I was bodily thrown out. Rickey was not there when these incidents took place. I was told that you can’t accuse major-league baseball of being in favor of the color line—that no Negro had tried. We were Negroes; we hadn’t become black as yet. One of my big arguments was the war. They had a one-armed man, Pete Gray, playing major-league ball, and yet they wouldn’t let in a whole great pool of untapped American talent.

  “I got the idea to demand a tryout and show up unannounced with a couple of players.” One of the players was Terris McDuffie, age thirty-six, winner of five of eleven decisions for the Newark Eagles in 1944· The other was a thirtynine-year-old first baseman, Dave “Showboat” Thomas of the New York Cubans. “At that point, those were the only two players I could get who were willing to face the wrath of the man,” continues Bostic. “There was fear among black players that there might be people who could get to the Latin owners and deny opportunities to blacks to play in winter ball. There was also a feeling that what I was doing was senseless, that you couldn’t break through the color barrier by stonewalling.”

  Bostic arrived with Williams and McDuffie, as well as several reporters. Workouts had already begun; there were about a dozen white players who also were being evaluated. “Rickey personally oversaw some pitching by Terris McDuffie. Durocher conducted infield practice and stationed Showboat Thomas at first base. He was called ‘Twinkletoes’ because of the way he handled his feet so slickly at first base. Rickey invited me to go with him into the Bear Mountain dining room. We sat at a table right in the very middle of the big room.

  “‘You have not been as smart as you might have been,’ he told me. ‘You should have informed me about what you planned to do. You should have written to me and told me that you wished to bring people for a tryout.’

  “‘Mr. Rickey,’ I said, ‘I’m on the opposite side of the fence from you.’ He was chewing on his cigar. He was infuriated with me. ‘I can think of eight or ten reasons why you feel it is not possible to accommodate such an adventure as this,’ I told him. .

  “He just listened and puffed on his cigar. ‘You can probably think of thirty or forty reasons why I shouldn’t be here,’ I continued. ‘This way neither of us has to do any thinking. The fellows are here and they’re ready to play.’

  “‘I don’t appreciate what you have done, Mr. Bostic,’ he said. He leaned closer to me. ‘You’ve put me on a spot. If I didn’t try these men out, you’d have the biggest sports story of the century. If I try them out and don’t sign them, you have the biggest sports story of the century. Either way, it is an embarrassing situation for me and the Brooklyn Dodgers.’ “I told him not to worry about any of the complications, that the two guys I brought up could play ball. ‘Let’s not worry about the politics, Mr. Rickey. Let’s get the Dodgers a good ball club.’

  “At that point, he started talking about his concern for the black man. He actually put on a show for me. Rickey cried and talked about religion and so on. I was very cynical. I thought he was a phony. As it later turned out, I was right—at least as far as I was concerned. He didn’t sign the two players, and from that day to the day he died, he never spoke to me again. Of course, my move might have been ill timed from Rickey’s point of view. He might have already had his eye on Robinson.”

  Ironically, two years to the day after this Bear Mountain tryout, both Bostic and Rickey would be at Ebbets Field, witnesses to Jackie Robinson’s first appearance as a Brooklyn Dodger.

  The next day, April 16, 1945, three other black players were given tryouts by the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. The players were Sam Jethroe from Erie, Pennsylvania, an outfielder for the Cleveland Buckeyes; Marvin Williams of the Philadelphia Stars; and Jackie Robinson, age twenty-six, from Pasadena, California. About a dozen white players were also trying out. They had already begun their workouts when the black athletes arrived with Wendell Smith, a black sportswriter. The Pittsburgh Courier, Smith’s newspaper, had helped arrange the tryouts.

  “Nobody put on an exhibition like we did,” Robinson later recalled. “Everything we did, it seemed like the good Lord was guiding us. Everything the pitcher threw up became a line drive someplace. We tattooed the short left-field fence, that is Marv and I did . . . and Jethroe was doing extremely well from the left side, too. And he looked like a gazelle in the outfield.”

  The tryout ended and the three black players were given application blanks to fill out and were told they would be contacted sometime in the future. Boston manager Joe Cronin and his coach Hugh Duffy admitted they were impressed with the three black players, but they claimed it was too short a tryout to come up with any definitive plans as to what to do with the players.

  “Tom Yawkey, the Boston owner, could have had all three of those players for nothing,” said Wendell Smith. “They wouldn’t take any of them.” The Red Sox would become the last team in the major leagues to integrate; their first black player, Elijah “Pumpsie” Green, joined the club in 1959, one year before the Negro Leagues closed down.

  During World War II, Sam Lacy had written in the black newspapers, “With us, the first man to break down the bars must be suited in every sense of the word. We can’t afford any misfits pioneering for us, and for obvious reasons. Unwilling as they are to employ Negro players, they will be quick to draw the old cry: ‘We gave them a chance and look what we got.’”

  Now, Lacy and other black writers were openly hostile. Five black players had auditioned in two days and the bars were still up. Cum Posey in the Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “It’s the most humiliating experience Negro baseball has yet suffered from white organized baseball.”

  Rickey still wished to conceal his plan to break baseball’s color line, yet felt a statement was called for after the Bostic incident received so much attention. At a press conference, he argued that the Communists were using the tryouts as an issue to stir up racial conflict. Refusing to respond to questions about black players entering the major leagues, Rickey instead offered “a legitimate and valuable alternative for Negro players—the United States League.”

  The newly formed United States League consisted of six black baseball teams, one of which was the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. Rickey announced that the Brown Dodgers would play at Ebbets Field when the Brooklyn Dodgers were on the road.

  The existing Negro National and American leagues had exploited black players for years, Rickey claimed, but members of the black press could see no difference between the Negro Leagues and Rickey’s alternative. The proposed United States League only fueled the deep-seated resentment the black community had for white baseball. ‘We want Negroes in the major leagues if they have to crawl to get there,” wrote Frank A. Young in the Defender, “but we won’t have any major-league owners running any segregated leagues for us.”

  An “End Jim Crow in Baseball” committee was form
ed to pressure major-league teams to sign black players. Committee members included the head of the Actor’s Guild, Stella Adler; actors Louis Calhern, John Garfield, Sam Jaffe, and Paul Robeson; the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II; black poet Langston Hughes; William O’Dwyer; and Adam Clayton Powell.

  The New York Yankees’ 1945 season opener at Yankee Stadium was picketed. “If we can pay, why can’t we play?” black demonstrators shouted.

  “I have no hesitancy in saying that the Yankees have no intention of signing Negro players under contract or reservation to Negro clubs,” Yankee president Larry MacPhail responded. “The solution of this problem in professional baseball must be compatible with long-established business and property rights. It is unfortunate that groups of professional political and social drumbeaters are conducting pressure campaigns in an attempt to force major-league clubs to sign Negro players.”

  The appointment of A. B. “Happy” Chandler as commissioner of baseball following the death of Judge Landis in 1945 cheered advocates of integration. Chandler publicly presented a different point of view from Landis’s. His reaction to the picketing, the letter writing, and the articles in newspapers urging that blacks be allowed to play majorleague baseball was candid. ‘’I’m for the Four Freedoms,” said Chandler. “If a black boy can make it in Okinawa and Guadalcanal, hell, he can make it in baseball. . . . I don’t believe in barring Negroes from baseball just because they are Negroes.”

  At this point, Dr. Dan Dodson turned the Committee on Unity’s attention to integrating major-league baseball. He began by getting in touch with Rickey and MacPhail to explore the possibilities. MacPhail responded immediately.

  “We got together at the Squibb Building on Fifth Avenue,” Dodson recalls. “MacPhail laid me out in lavender. ‘You damn professional do-gooders know nothing about baseball. You’re just trying to stir up trouble.’ He said that Negroes weren’t interested in baseball. ‘They don’t play on their sandlots. They don’t play on their college campuses, and none of them would qualify to play in organized baseball. Satchel Paige would have made it, but he’s over the hill now.’ MacPhail argued that baseball was a business. ‘I rented my ballparks to colored clubs this year, and the rental money is the profit I am able to pay my stockholders.’ MacPhail said he didn’t propose disturbing the Negro clubs by hiring one of their numbers; this would rob the black leagues and make it impossible for them to operate. He also said he wouldn’t jeopardize his rental income or the Negro Leagues’ investment until some way could be worked out that wouldn’t hurt the Negro Leagues if the major leagues took an occasional player. But MacPhail had no suggestion as to how this could be done.”

  It was two or three weeks after Dodson sent his letter to Rickey that a meeting between them took place. Rickey apologized for the lag between his receiving the letter and their meeting at 215 Montague Street. He had made a considerable investigation of Dodson’s background and of the Mayor’s Committee on Unity. Rickey spent the first thirty minutes or so of the meeting quizzing the professor while chewing on his cigar.

  “Now, Dan,” Rickey said, “I have decided that I can trust you. I am satisfied that you are not going to cause any trouble. I am sure that we will be able to work together quite well on the cause. I am going to call you Dan because we are going to be working together for a long time. I am from the Midwest and you are from the Southwest. I understand people from out that way. We also share Methodism as a faith. We should be able to get along very well.” Rickey went into a long story about his religious views and how he felt about baseball. “I once made a promise to my mother to never go to a Sunday baseball game. I have never broken that promise. Dan, I do not break any of my promises.”

  At this point, Dodson recalls, Rickey got up and opened a louvered arrangement on the side of the wall. Intricate charts detailed the entire Brooklyn Dodger organizational structure. All the farm clubs were identified-their location, their makeup, the names of all the personnel on them.

  “This is the system we now have, Dan, but it will be changing. I will get to that, but first I want to tell you about an incident that has haunted me throughout my life, one that prompted a promise I made to myself.

  “When I was a football coach at a midwestern college, I took my team to play in a nearby town. They would not allow a Negro player on my team to have a room at the hotel. I finally persuaded them to let him stay in my room on a cot.

  “The player sat on the side of my bed and cried and pulled at one hand with the other and said, ‘God, Mr. Rickey! If I could only change the color of my skin.’

  “Dan,” Rickey said, “this made such an impression on me that I decided that if I ever had the opportunity I was going to do something for the Negro race. I have never forgotten it. I thought of it often when I was in St. Louis and they made the Negroes sit in separate sections of the park. I couldn’t do anything about that. I resolved when I came here that the time had arrived to do something.

  “Now I am ready!” At this point, Dodson recalls, Rickey became excited, and his voice boomed. “I am ready. I have gone way out on a limb. I have taken a great deal of abuse. They have pilloried me in the press and in the Negro community. They do not know that I created the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers as a subterfuge, to mask my true intentions—to scout Negro players without tipping my hand.

  “I have spent more than five thousand dollars scouting players. I feel now I have spotted the player who is most likely to succeed. I am not sure he is the best of the players, Dan, but he is the best hope for doing the whole job.

  “The player I have in mind is named Jackie Robinson. He is college-educated. He is intelligent. He is playing in the Negro Leagues right now.”

  His evangelistic fervor nearly spent, Rickey sat down behind his desk and lit a fresh cigar. Dodson was stunned. He had come to the meeting hoping to reach first base. He found instead that Rickey was already rounding third and heading home. The first person outside of Rickey’s inner circle to know of the secret plan to integrate baseball, Dodson vowed his support and any assistance he could offer.

  “Mr. Rickey said there was a great deal of work to be done,” Dodson remembers. “He asked for my help in getting material on Negroes in other sports. He wanted to know whom he could turn to for guidance in the Negro community and the community at large. He asked if we could get this Committee [the End Jim Crow in Baseball Committee, which Rickey was convin·ced was Communistinspired] out of the way until he had a chance to do something. When, he wondered, should the signing of the contract be announced? What did we know about how integration is accomplished? What experience was there?”

  There were to be many meetings between the professor and the baseball executive in the months ahead. They were to become allies and then friends.

  “I was so sure of Mr. Rickey and his honesty that I was willing to do all he asked,” Dr. Dodson said. The two Methodists meeting in downtown Brooklyn in the final months of World War II forged that day a union of trust and dedication.

  Chapter Seven

  The Signing

  Mrs. Effa Manley, owner of the Newark Eagles, organized a Negro All-Star team to play a five-game exhibition series against a club of white major-leaguers in October 1945. She recruited Roy Campanella to be the catcher for the Negro All-Stars. Four games were played in Brooklyn; one took place in Newark, New Jersey. After the game in Newark, Charlie Dressen, manager of the white team, approached Campanella. “To tell the truth,” recalls Campanella, “I had no idea who Charlie was.” Dressen asked Campanella if he would like to meet with Branch Rickey. “I remember I had to spend quite a time with Charlie to find out how to get to Mr. Rickey in Brooklyn,” notes Campanella, but he eventually found his way through the New York City subway system to 215 Montague Street.

  The meeting was different from the one Rickey had had in August with Jackie Robinson. “Mr. Rickey sat behind his desk and didn’t do any talking for about four or five minutes,” Campanella recalls. “He just looked me over from behind those
horn-rimmed glasses.”

  Finally Rickey told Campanella that he had assigned Oscar Robertson, a former Negro Leagues first baseman, to look into the black catcher’s life. “He had a black book,” says Campanella, “and it was about four inches thick. It was in front of him on the desk. And he kept reading out of it. He knew everything about my family. He was interested in the fact that I had a black mother and a white father, that I went to an integrated school.”

  Rickey put down the black book and began a long speech; Campanella remembers thinking, “If I could catch like he could talk, I would have been a genius, for that Mr. Rickey knew how to catch from behind a desk.”

  “I’ve investigated dozens of players in the Negro Leagues,” Rickey began. “I’ve tried to learn as much as I could about their personal habits, their family life, their social activities, their early childhood, their friends, their schooling. I have attempted to learn for myself all I could about them. I have rejected a number of possibilities who I am sure have the ability because they are lacking in other requisites. It’s either character, habits, or what have you.

  “You’re different, Roy. Your record is good . . . no arrests, no trouble, a good family, a hard worker, a fellow who has the ability to get along with people.” At this point, the Dodger executive paused. He lit a match and put the flame up against his half-smoked cigar, making the end glow a dull orange.