As he approached his twenty-sixth birthday, he was a man still moving largely in the dark. Prodigiously gifted as an athlete, with a fierce will to succeed, he was yet without a vocation or a profession or a skill that could be marketed easily in a nation deeply divided by race and indifferent or hostile to its black citizens and their dreams. Robinson was still drifting, drifting, still largely at the mercy of fate and the whims and wishes of whites, even as he also continued to nurture the faith that he yet might be destined by God for something great.
CHAPTER 6
A Monarch in the Negro Leagues
1944–1946
Why is Mr. Rickey interested in my arm? Why is he interested in me?
—Jackie Robinson (1945)
NOVEMBER 1944 FOUND Robinson fresh out of the Army and with only the prospect of a job. The prospect had come casually enough. One day, passing by a baseball field at Camp Breckinridge in Kentucky, Jack noticed a black man snapping off some impressive curves. The player turned out to be Ted Alexander, now a soldier, but previously a member of the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro National League. Suddenly it occurred to Jack that this might be an avenue worth pursuing. The war had left the Negro leagues short of talent; at the same time, they were attracting some of the largest crowds in their history. On Alexander’s advice, Robinson sent a letter of inquiry to Thomas Y. Baird, who owned the Monarchs along with their founder, J. L. Wilkinson. Answering promptly, Baird offered Jack $300 a month—if he made the team. Robinson countered by asking for $400. Conceding, Baird ordered Robinson to join the team for spring training the following April in Houston, Texas.
By Christmas, however, Jack was already living in Texas. Early that month, perhaps in response to news from Robinson himself about his offer from the Negro leagues, Reverend Karl Downs, now the president of Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, sent a telegram to Jack inviting him to teach physical education there. Eager to work, and even more eager to repay his debt to Reverend Downs, Jack promptly accepted his offer.
The year before, when Downs left Pasadena to go to Samuel Huston, he became reputedly the youngest college president in the United States. From Camp Hood, Jack had gone to Austin at least once to visit Downs, who had counseled him during his court-martial ordeal. “I believe that my father had even gone up to Camp Hood and tried to help Jackie,” Downs’s daughter, Karleen, later offered. “He and my mother had such great respect and affection for him.” When the athletic director of the college suddenly quit his job in the fall, Downs had turned to Robinson and begged him to come as a replacement.
Jack certainly did not go for the money. In 1945, Samuel Huston College, a black United Methodist Church school founded in 1876, was an institution in deep financial distress, its meager resources reduced further by the war, its student rolls shrinking. Enrollment teetered now at just over three hundred students, of whom only about three dozen were men. “The college was a ghost,” a newspaper recalled some years later, “and it was Downs’s duty to give this dead institution life and meaning in the community and the state.” Downs had responded vigorously; aided by his local congressman, a onetime schoolteacher named Lyndon Baines Johnson, who believed—in part as a segregationist—in the importance of historically black colleges, Downs had launched a building program that soon added five new buildings to the campus. “Bringing Jackie Robinson to the campus was vintage Karl Downs,” a friend of Downs’s would recall. “It was the same spirit that led him to put in a visiting artists program that brought in all sorts of celebrated musicians, and that in turn made some very influential local whites take note of our little college. Nothing like that had ever happened before Karl came.”
In sports Downs gave Jack a free hand, which he needed; Samuel Huston College had nothing that might be called an athletic program. Jack also set about installing the first physical training regimen in the college’s history. To inspire the students, he also put on display most of his many medals and trophies. The response seemed enthusiastic; but when he made a public call for basketball players, only seven students showed up—and not all of them knew the game. Nevertheless, Jack threw himself into coaching the team, which played a sporadic schedule in the Southwestern Conference against other black colleges, such as Grambling and Southern of Louisiana; Bishop, Wiley, and Prairie View in Texas; and Arkansas A&M. The highlight of the season was undoubtedly Samuel Huston’s upset of the defending league champion, Bishop College, 61–59.
At the end of March, a popular figure now on the Samuel Huston campus, Jack moved on to Houston for the start of spring training with the Monarchs. He reached Houston both excited at the prospect and with some reservations about the Negro leagues. In 1937, in Pasadena, he and his friend Nate Moreland had been promised twenty dollars each to sub for a barnstorming “top team from the Negro leagues.” The two youths played their hearts out, only to be stiffed for their pains. “That night,” according to Jack, “we went to a cheap hotel where the team was staying to collect our money. We never could find the man who was supposed to pay us. I decided then and there that Negro baseball was not for me.” Up to April 1945, Robinson had probably never seen an official Negro league game. The Negro National League concentrated on play in the East, the Negro American League in the Midwest; California was not on the schedule. Nor would he have been romantic about the all-black leagues. Robinson’s race pride led him to demand integration, not to glory in separation. His three Army years had only reinforced his contempt for Jim Crow.
Nevertheless, Jack knew that the Negro leagues gave blacks a chance that white baseball denied them. Behind the letters to him from Tom Baird was a controversial but also glorious history arising from the purge of blacks from organized baseball in the late nineteenth century. The decade that saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule that railroads could maintain “separate but equal facilities” for blacks and whites, thus sanctioning segregation, also saw a revolt by white players, officials, and fans against black athletes in baseball. Led mainly by Adrian “Cap” Anson, a star with the Chicago White Stockings, the revolt closed the roster of blacks in the major leagues after several had played since 1872. For some years, efforts to found a separate black league had come to nothing. Then, in 1920, the visionary Andrew “Rube” Foster, a former pitcher, assembled a group of owners and sports reporters from the black press who laid out a league structure to mirror organized white baseball. With a constitution setting the rules of the National Association of Colored Professional Base Ball Clubs, league play soon followed. By 1945, despite many struggles and disputes over the years, the Negro leagues had become for many blacks a cherished fixture of their segregated lives. The leagues were more stable than ever, with better attendance and higher earnings than at any other time in their history.
In joining the Kansas City Monarchs, founded by the only white owner in the Negro leagues, J. L. Wilkinson, Robinson entered black baseball at the top. Respected by most blacks, Wilkinson was perhaps the most generous and farsighted of the owners. The Monarchs traveled in such style as Jim Crow permitted; at home in Kansas City, they enjoyed the support of most of the black leaders and strivers and often outdrew the white club, the Kansas City Blues, with which they shared a stadium. Over the years, their roster of stars included the incomparable pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige; the famed base stealer James “Cool Papa” Bell; and the versatile player, then admired manager, John “Buck” O’Neil. For young black fans, the Monarchs were the height of baseball fashion; Hilton Smith, a pitcher, would claim that “everybody, everybody—anybody that played baseball wanted to play with the Monarchs.” The Monarch players liked to think of themselves as gentlemen. Although boozing and fisticuffs were natural to professional sports, the Monarchs aspired to the high road, as befit aristocracy. According to O’Neil, “a Monarch never had a fight on the street. A Monarch never cut anybody. You couldn’t shoot craps on our bus.… This was the only way to ‘open the door.’ ”
But if the Monarchs were the best of the Negro leagues, Robins
on found them wanting. He was disillusioned before he played his first game. No doubt remembering his youthful fleecing by a Negro league team, “I inquired about my contract and was promptly informed that the letters I received constituted all the contract I needed. This seemed rather strange to me.” The letters were indeed a contract of sorts, but they spelled out few details. The next jolt came on his third day, when he found himself and the team on a bus heading for San Antonio and a game, without any practice, against Kelly Airfield there. “Spring training,” Jack found out to his dismay, “consisted of actually playing baseball games rather than getting prepared for the coming season.”
Thereafter, with the regular season opening on May 6 in Kansas City against the Chicago American Giants, Jack’s experience as a Monarch continued to mix the bad with the good. The long rides in uncomfortable buses left him groggy and cranky at the start of games; he hated, too, the cheap Jim Crow hotels, where “the rooms were dingy and dirty, and the restrooms were in such bad condition that players were unable to use them.” The umpiring was generally poor, and even the scorekeeping unreliable. He would recall a “lopsided game” in Baltimore when the Monarchs scored five runs in one inning. However, “only two showed on the scoreboard. We looked for the official scorer to straighten it out, but he had disappeared. He got bored with the game and went home early.” With no team curfew, some players slept only a little, if at all, before a game, and drank far too much—which offended the abstemious Robinson. Such habits prevented fans from “seeing the best type of ball of which the players were capable of playing. In my opinion the lack of rules, or the failure to enforce the rules, hurts the caliber of baseball and certainly cuts down the interest.”
Still, Jack knew a rare opportunity when he saw it, and tried to fit in. Sammie Haynes, an easygoing center fielder who sometimes roomed with Robinson, recalled: “Jackie was able to say, ‘Look, I’m here to learn. I know I don’t play the brand of baseball you guys play. But help me. I’m here to learn.’ ” On an overcrowded bus heading to New Orleans, when extra chairs were set up in the aisle, Jack caught everyone’s attention by sitting in the stairwell. “This is my seat,” he insisted, according to Haynes. “I’m a rookie. This is my seat. I don’t even want a chair.” With such humility on display, the team took to him “very warmly”; he became “one of the guys.”
Jack’s modesty made sense. Five years after his last competitive baseball season, at UCLA in 1940, he could hardly be sure about his ability to make the team. Later, in fact, some Monarchs would question his skills. A veteran, Newt Allen, claimed to have been assigned to evaluate Jack on the San Antonio trip. Robinson, who ran the bases and picked up signs well, was “a very smart ball player”; but Allen decided at once—or so he said—that Jack “can’t play shortstop.” He could not range far to his right, then gun the ball all the way to first base. Hilton Smith also remembered Robinson as only “an average fielder.” “He didn’t have that strong of an arm,” according to Sammie Haynes, but “he had developed a quick throw, quick release of the ball.” Nor was it at first clear to all, apparently, that Robinson could hit. The veteran pitcher Willie “Sug” Cornelius of the Chicago American Giants, it was said, had Jackie mumbling to himself by throwing him all sorts of junk “instead of the outside fastball that his stance seemed to call for and that Robinson hit so well.”
Nevertheless, Jack not only became the Monarchs’ shortstop when injury forced out the incumbent, Jesse Williams, but also went on to become in the major leagues what one expert has called “perhaps the best curve-ball hitter of his generation.” Years later, when Robinson’s success in the majors would help to destroy the Negro leagues as an attraction, the role of black baseball in his own rise would be controversial. Fueling the argument would be Jack’s open criticism of the leagues, despite his praise of stars such as Paige and Josh Gibson. “All the time I was playing,” he would write in 1948, “I was looking around for something else. I didn’t like the bouncing buses, the cheap hotels, and the constant night games.” In turn, some former teammates, irked by his ingratitude, would recall Robinson as being specially tutored by various Negro leaguers, who somehow knew early that he would be chosen to integrate baseball. “Quickly,” according to one authority, “the old-time baseball men pulled together in an effort to teach Robinson the trade in as short a time as possible.” The former Monarchs manager William “Dizzy” Dismukes is said to have asked Cool Papa Bell to “give Robinson a base-stealing exhibition because the Negro leaguers were not impressed with Robinson’s tagging ability.” Once, sliding safely under Robinson’s tag, Bell schooled him. “See that? They got a lot of guys in the major leagues slide like that. You can’t get those guys out like that.”
In certain quarters, the later criticism of Robinson went further. “He did not fit in very well, and his combative nature resulted in several nasty exchanges” with other players, according to the writer Donn Rogosin. “He was not a popular player in Kansas City.” Allegedly, when word came that his UCLA teammate Kenny Washington might become a Monarch, Robinson “quietly passed the word that there was room on the Monarchs for only one ex-UCLA star.” But such a mean response would have been unlike Robinson, who respected Washington; and reports of special coaching are probably exaggerated. Excellently coached from his youth, Jack had shown all the elements of his mature baseball skills long before he reported to Houston: his inventive, daring base stealing; his sensational fielding at shortstop; his ability to bunt and to hit in the clutch; his sense of the importance of team play; and his unquenchable passion for winning. Whatever his teammates taught him he must have learned very quickly; at mid-season he was chosen to start at shortstop in the annual East-West All-Star game on July 29 in Chicago. In 1940, he had hit a hopeless .097 for UCLA; in 1945, with five years of rust, he batted a team-high .345 with the Monarchs—although, as Jack wrote disdainfully, “I could never figure out my batting average because so many games did not count in the league statistics.… Nobody knew for sure.” In fact, in 1945 the Monarchs probably played 62 league games (and won 32); the team also played about 40 more nonleague games. Playing in 45 league games, Jack hit ten doubles, four triples, and five home runs.
In criticizing loose behavior on the Monarchs, Jack no doubt seemed priggish to some of his teammates. But his sense of self was tightly wound around core values of dignity and self-discipline, and he believed in God and the Bible. Absurdly or not, he drew a line in the dirt between himself and sin, and tried hard not to cross it. Thus, no doubt to the genuine bewilderment of some teammates, he showed little or no interest in easy sex on the road. Women were to be respected; sex had a moral element. One evening, according to Sammie Haynes, Jack broke up a promising little party with Haynes and two eager young women when he threw a glass of whiskey into a lighted fireplace, to demonstrate how lethal Scotch could be. At another point, Haynes became tired of hearing Jack talk about the virtues of Rachel Isum. “Well,” Haynes asked, “have you been to bed with the woman?” Jack told the truth. “He said, ‘No.’ I jumped up. I said, ‘Man, are you going to marry somebody you haven’t been to bed with? Are you crazy?’ He said, ‘Sammie, this is the lady for me. I don’t have to go to bed with her.’ And I said, ‘Man, this thing’s crazy. You’re crazy!’ ”
To some black players, Jack doubtless seemed to be from another world, a world of colleges, California, and a troubling familiarity with white people almost unheard of in Jim Crow America; at times, he himself felt like an outsider. But in the end Robinson owed a huge debt to the Negro leagues, even if he seldom looked back on the 1945 season sentimentally. One reason for his coolness was perhaps his loyalty to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who brought him fame and fortune when the Monarchs could give neither; another reason was his suspicion of segregated institutions, black or white. Yet another reason, however, might have been Jack’s sense that the events that led him to the Monarchs, and then to the Dodgers, suggested that Providence was at work in his life, and that Providence deserved all than
ks. A modest man, he believed nevertheless that God was behind his life, guiding it, and intending him for some important purpose.
Whatever that purpose was, in 1945 it seemed to have nothing to do with baseball. That April, in his first month with the Monarchs, Jack was again teased by white baseball, and again rejected. On April 16, the day before the Red Sox opened their season and the day after the burial of President Roosevelt in Hyde Park, New York, Robinson, along with two other Negro leagues players, strode into Fenway Park in Boston for a tryout before club officials. With him were Sam Jethroe, an outfielder with the Cleveland Buckeyes, and Marvin Williams, an infielder from the Philadelphia Stars. Watching them were two top Red Sox scouts and, from a secluded spot, the Red Sox manager, Joe Cronin.
Behind the tryout was the action of a Boston city councilman and Harvard College graduate, Isadore H. Y. Muchnick. In 1944, seeing his constituency change steadily from mainly Jewish to mainly black, Muchnick had joined the ragtag band of critics fighting Jim Crow in baseball. His main weapon was the annual threat by the Boston City Council to bar professional baseball on Sunday; wielding it, Muchnick pressed the Red Sox and the Braves, the city’s two major-league teams, to allow at least one black player to try out. In 1944, the Red Sox general manager, Eddie Collins, had replied in writing that blacks did not wish to play in the big leagues (because, he claimed, they made more money in their own leagues). In 1945, when Muchnick pressed him again, Collins agreed to a tryout.
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