The Black Bruins: The Remarkable Lives of UCLA's Jackie Robinson, Woody Strode, Tom Bradley, Kenny Washington, and Ray Bartlett

by James W. Johnson

  A less than capacity crowd of 26,623 fans, 60 percent of them black, turned out to see the Dodgers and Boston Braves play on Opening Day, April 15, 1947. That was two thousand fewer than in the inaugural game the year before. “This is my first ballgame in ten years,” said Norman Hazzard, a firefighter from Connecticut. “I came out to look at the Negro boy play.” In the past only 5–10 percent of the crowd had consisted of black fans. Now with such a large percentage of blacks it was evident that white fans had stayed away, unaccustomed as they were to being surrounded by African Americans. (Brooklyn’s total in National League attendance declined from 20.18 percent in 1946 to 17.4 percent in 1947 despite a more successful year.)

  In the dugout Robinson’s teammates kept their distance. Many had never shaken hands with or showered with a black man. Sportswriter Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post wrote, “The Dodgers are polite and courteous with him, but it is obvious he is isolated by those with whom he plays. I have never heard remarks made against him or detected any rudeness where he was concerned. But the silence is loud and Robinson never is part of the jovial and aimless banter of the locker room. Robinson is the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.” A teammate told a New York Times reporter, “Having Jackie on the team is a little strange, just like anything else that’s new. We just don’t know how to act with him. But he’ll be accepted in time. You can be sure of that. Other sports have had Negroes. Why not baseball? I’m for it if he can win games. That’s the only test I ask.”

  As Robinson took the field, the Dodgers’ radio announcer, Red Barber, born and raised in the south, reportedly broadcast that “Jackie is very definitely a brunette.” Robinson got off to a horrible start. In four at bats, he grounded out to third, flied out to left, bounced into a double play, and was safe on an error. “Too bad about that double-play,” said a fan, “but that colored fellow is just under terrific pressure.” Robinson called it “just another ball game and that’s the way they’re all going to be. If I make good—well that will be perfectly wonderful.” All spring Branch Rickey kept an optimistic tone. “You haven’t seen the real Robinson yet. Just wait.”

  After the first eight days Robinson began to settle down, and he became more focused. His batting average rose to a lofty .444. Then he went into a spiral that saw his average plummet to .225 after he went hitless in twenty at bats over a week’s period. He was nursing an old college football injury to his right shoulder, and it led to talk that he should be benched. “He should be given a rest in view of his ailing right arm and slump-pressing at the plate,” Dick Young wrote in New York Daily News, “but the Dodger powers appear reluctant to bench him for attendance and possible public relations reasons.” Nonetheless, his faithful African American fans cheered his every move.

  Robinson also was adjusting to racial epithets, attempts to maim him with cleats, pitchers trying to hit him, catchers spitting on his shoes, and death threats. Police took the death threats seriously. “Two of the notes were so vicious that I felt they should be investigated,” Rickey said. Robinson wasn’t too worried, or at least he didn’t let on that he was. Robinson wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier, a black weekly, that “the way they were written I would say they’re from scatterbrained people who just want something to yelp about.”

  Then just as slumps come, they go. Robinson set out on a fourteen-game hitting streak that raised his average to .299. On top of that, despite the slump, no one faulted his play at first base. After a brief learning period Robinson picked up the nuances and was playing stellar defense. “They just handed him a first baseman’s glove,” said teammate Rex Barney, a pitcher. “And he had never played first base. He took it, and never said a word, never complained.”

  Pee Wee Reese knew the slump would end. “The guy has too much talent and too much guts,” he said. Said Barney, “You’d look at him and you knew he was pressing and pushing. He had all that other stuff on his mind. He worked hard to break out of that slump. If we had a night game at eight o’clock, Jackie would be at the ballpark at 10 the next morning to take batting practice. If a pitcher got him out on a slow curve, he would have Sukeforth throw him slow curves until Jackie’s hands blistered. I saw this. He just worked so hard. He could not let himself down. He could not let his race down. He couldn’t let anybody down.”

  One of the most vicious attacks on Robinson occurred on a road trip to Philadelphia for a three-game series against the Phillies. It all started when Phillies general manager Herb Pennock, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1948 for his playing days, called Rickey to tell him, “You just can’t bring the Nigger here with the rest of your team. We’re just not ready for that sort of thing yet. We won’t be able to take the field against your Brooklyn team if that boy Robinson is in uniform.” Rickey told Pennock that he would be happy if the Phillies forfeited the games because the Dodgers would pick up three victories. End of threat.

  The Dodgers took a train to Philadelphia and then a bus to the Ben Franklin Hotel, but before they could even unload, they were told they weren’t welcome to stay there. “And don’t bring your team back here while you have any Nigras with you,” they were told. The white players wound up staying there, but Robinson had to move to the Attucks, an all-black hotel.

  It was in games against the Phillies that Robinson suffered the greatest anguish and humiliation. When the Phillies visited Ebbets Field for the first time that year, Phillies manager Ben Chapman and his players unleashed a vicious tirade against him, voicing epithets like, “Hey, nigger, why don’t you go back to the cotton field where you belong?” and “They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy,” and “Hey, snowflake, which one of those white boys’ wives are you dating tonight?” As a player, Chapman had been traded from the New York Yankees in 1938 for his continual taunting of Jewish spectators at Yankee Stadium, giving Nazi salutes and shouting anti-Semitic epithets.

  “I have to admit that this day [in a game against the Phillies], of all the unpleasant days in my life, brought me nearer to cracking up than I had ever been,” Robinson recounted in 1972. Chapman yelled at Robinson’s teammates that they would get diseases and sores if they touched his combs or towels. The Phillies held up their bats like guns to pretend they were shooting him. Robinson almost broke his promise to Rickey. He thought about attacking Chapman, quitting baseball, and returning to California. All of a sudden “for one wild and rage-crazed minute I thought, ‘To hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment. . . . To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create.’ I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist. Then I could walk away from it all.” Robinson backed off when he thought twice about the promises he had made to Rickey and what he would have to tell his son one day.

  Yankee Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle found it hard to believe that Robinson could keep it together in light of what he went through his first year. “When you think of Jackie’s natural personality—he liked action, arguments, yelling, and taking charge—you wonder how he was ever able to control himself that first year.” Mantle called him one of the best players he ever saw.

  The Brooklyn players began rallying around Robinson after the attacks by Chapman and the Phillies players. Their taunts may have backfired on them. Rickey said Chapman helped to unite the Dodgers. “When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and unified thirty men, not one of who[m] was willing to sit by and see someone kick around a man who had his hands tied behind his back. Chapman made Jackie a real member of the Dodgers.” After the Dodgers and Phillies played their third game, Stanky screamed at the Phillies, “Listen, you yellow-bellied cowards, why don’t you yell at someone who can answer back?” At that moment, Robinson began to feel better about his teammates. The press came to his rescue as well. Dan Parker, sports editor of the New York Daily Mirror, praised Robinson for ignoring “the guttersnipe language coming from the Phillies’ dugout
, thus stamping himself as the only gentleman among those involved in the incident.”

  Public reaction against Chapman was so severe that Rickey asked Robinson to pose for a photo with Chapman the next time the two teams met in the hope that it would save [Chapman’s] job. Robinson agreed. Chapman refused to shake hands with Robinson, quietly telling him, “Jackie, you know, you’re a good ballplayer, but you’re still a nigger to me.” But together they held a bat up between them. “I have to admit, though, that . . . was one of the most difficult things I had to make myself do,” Robinson said.

  Dixie Walker, who was a friend of Chapman’s, was astonished. “I swear, I never thought I’d see Ol’ Ben eat shit like that.” Most of Walker’s disdain for Robinson was for show because he fretted that if he became too chummy with the Dodger’s new star, he would be chastised by friends in his Alabama hometown and that it might hurt his sporting goods and hardware store. Robinson went along with Walker’s cover by avoiding shaking hands with Walker in one of baseball’s rituals after he hit a home run.

  Howie Schultz, who was traded to the Phillies in May, remembered asking Robinson how he could “handle this crap.” Robinson replied, “Oh, I’ll have my day.” Schultz recalled, “That’s all he said. And, of course, he did.”

  Chapman apparently had some regrets about his behavior years later. “A man learns about things and mellows as he grows older,” he began. “I think maybe I’ve mellowed. Maybe I went too far in those days, when I thought it was OK to try to throw guys off-balance and upset them with jockeying. I’m sorry for many of the things I said. I guess the world changes and maybe I’ve changed, too.”

  Robinson was greeted in each ballpark in different ways, mostly with outright hatred because of his skin color. Before a game against Cincinnati a letter signed “The Travelers” threatened, “We have already got rid of several like you. One was found in a river just recently. Robinson, we are going to kill you if you attempt to enter a ballgame at Crosley Field.” Robinson played, hitting a home run in the Dodgers’ sweep of Cincinnati.

  When Robinson took the field in Cincinnati, he was pummeled again and again with racial taunts. Pee Wee Reese had had enough. He walked over to Robinson and put his arm around him in a show of support. The crowd let out a gasp. Robinson said he and Reese talked at that moment, but “neither one of us . . . remembers what we were talking about. We do know what we were saying to the agitators and to the world.” Robinson also said, “After than happened, I never felt alone on a ball field again.” Robinson’s wife, Rachel, recalled that she wanted to hug Reese. “What it did was change the dynamics of the whole team, showing them they had something dramatic to deal with. . . . Jackie felt very close to Pee Wee the rest of his life. Each of them had a strong sense of their impact on social change.” Reese draped his arm around Robinson once again in a game in Boston against the Braves to show that the first time had been no accident. (In 1996 the Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese Monument, which captures that watershed moment, was unveiled in Brooklyn.)

  Early in the season the St. Louis Cardinals were threatening to conduct a protest strike that they hoped would spread throughout the league in an effort to keep baseball white. (Dick Gephardt, the longtime leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, recalled as a boy that he heard fans’ extreme profanity and vulgarity toward Robinson while watching the Dodgers and Cardinals play in St. Louis.) National League president Ford Frick quickly put an end to any strike by threatening to suspend players who participated. “I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years,” Frick said. “This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as another.”

  Robinson still had trouble with some teammates, opposing players rode him unmercifully, and he ducked too many fastballs aimed at his head. Robinson kept his cool outwardly, although inside he was boiling mad. One of the toughest times he had controlling himself was at a game against the Cardinals at Ebbets Field. Outfielder Enos “Country” Slaughter, from Rexboro, North Carolina, and a future Hall of Famer, spiked Robinson while crossing first base, opening a sizable gash on his leg. Several of Robinson’s teammates rushed onto the field to protest Slaughter’s action. “I started the season as a lonely man, often feeling like a black Don Quixote tilting at a lot of white windmills,” Robinson said. “I ended it feeling like a member of a solid team.” The next inning, when Robinson got on first, he laid into first baseman Stan Musial, saying he’d like to rip Slaughter apart. “I don’t blame you,” Musial said quietly.

  Musial was one of two significant players to support Robinson. The other was future Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, a Jew who faced his own nightmare of bigotry. “You’re a good ballplayer, and you’ll do all right,” Greenberg said. “Just stay in there . . . and always keep your head up. A lot of people are pulling for you to make good,” Greenberg stressed. “Don’t ever forget it.” Musial gave Robinson encouragement and a tip or two about how to shift his feet when taking throws at first base.

  Of course Robinson had the support of tens of thousands of black fans across the nation. Vernon Jordan, who had been a president of the Urban League and later a legal and political powerhouse in Washington DC, remembered seeing Robinson play in a preseason game in Atlanta. He was joined by several hundred other blacks who had been bused in to see the game from Robinson’s hometown of Cairo, Georgia. “We blacks were cheering as if he had won something for us,” Jordan recalled. “And, of course, he had. . . . It is literally impossible to overstate what he meant to me, to all of us, to the country. It is as instructive and inspiring a story of courage as you can find.”

  African Americans loved Robinson. When they couldn’t go to the ballpark, they would listen on the radio or follow him in newspapers. Sportswriter Sam Lacy of the Washington DC Afro-American wrote, “No matter what the nature of the gathering, a horse race, a church meeting, a ball game, the universal question is: ‘How’d Jackie make out today?’” Often when the Dodgers’ train pulled into a city, hundreds of fans, nearly all black, would greet Robinson at the depot. Once at a game in Cincinnati Robinson had popped up, and when he returned to the dugout, black fans were “screaming and shrieking,” pitcher Ralph Branca said. “He [Robinson] said, ‘Be quiet. Behave yourselves. I only popped out.’”

  Robinson was starting to relax and play the kind of ball the Dodgers expected. “Until today we just couldn’t get him to take a normal cut at the cripples they were getting him out on,” Shotton said. “Time after time we gave him signals to hit the three-and-one pitch, but very often he didn’t even swing. Guess he had too much on his mind.”

  In midseason teams were getting a taste of what it was like to play against Robinson, especially the Phillies. Catcher Andy Seminick remarked, “Something about certain players: Get ’em mad and they’d hurt you. Jackie Robinson was definitely one of ’em. He rose to the occasion and clobbered the tar out of us. He beat us everywhere—at bat, on the bases, in the field. Finally Ben Chapman said, ‘Let’s lay off him. [Racial taunts are] not doing any good.’”

  Robinson ran away with the Rookie of the Year award at season’s end, after compiling a batting average of .297. He had 175 hits in 151 games, including 12 home runs. He led the league in stolen bases with 29 and was second in runs scored with 125. He walked 74 times and led the league in sacrifices. On defense he committed 16 errors at first base—the second highest in the league—while handling 1,031 chances. Considering that it was his first season in the position, such results were adequate. He finished fifth in the National League’s MVP voting.

  After Jackie won the Rookie of the Year award, he went home to Southern California for a dinner honoring him. Few whites were in attendance. Not much had changed in Pasadena.

  In the World Series the Dodgers fell to the Yankees in seven games in one of the great Series up to that time. Robinson played below average during the Series, hitting .259 with 2 doubles and 3 RBIs. He stole 2 bases and walked twice. One of the most vivid memories Robin
son had of the Series was what he called “a completely new emotion.” That was when the national anthem was played and he felt he belonged. “This time, I thought, it is being played for me, as much as for anyone else. This is organized major-league baseball, and I am standing here with all the others; and everything that takes place includes me.”

  Even one of Robinson’s most severe critics, Dixie Walker, admitted that he “is everything Branch Rickey said he was when he came up from Montreal.” Although there were scattered incidents of racial tension toward the end of the year, integration seemed to be moving along successfully. Soon more African Americans joined teams, including Larry Doby with the Cleveland Indians and Roy Campanella with the Dodgers. Robinson and Doby, who were dealing with the same racial problems, would talk to each other on the telephone to share their experiences.

  By any standards the Dodgers’ season had to be considered a success, even while they lost the World Series. The nucleus of a strong team was in the making, one that would dominate the National League for the next decade. And it showed in attendance, in Brooklyn as well as in other ballparks where fans turned out to see Robinson. Brooklyn’s attendance at home and on the road rose by only eleven thousand over 1946, but the Dodgers still led the league in attendance. Overall attendance in the National League increased by 1.5 million, a record that stood until 1960. Almost 10.4 million fans passed through the turnstiles. Wendell Smith, a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, wrote, “Jackie’s nimble/ Jackie’s quick/ Jackie’s making the turnstiles click.” According to a poll conducted in 1947, Robinson was the second most popular man in the country, behind Bing Crosby.