Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  To play on a new colored Brooklyn team, Jackie replied.

  “No,” Rickey corrected him. “That isn’t it. You were brought here, Jackie, to play for the Brooklyn organization. Perhaps on Montreal to start with, and—”

  “Me? Play for Montreal?”

  “If you can make it, yes. Later on—also if you can make it—you’ll have a chance with the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

  “I was thrilled, scared, and excited,” Jack would recall. “I was incredulous. Most of all, I was speechless.” Silent before Rickey’s revelations, Jack listened in wonder as the Dodgers’ general manager, with rhetorical flourishes, revealed his hand. “I want to win the pennant and we need ball players!” he thundered, whacking his desk. “Do you think you can do it?”

  Clyde Sukeforth would remember that “Jack waited, and waited, and waited before answering.… We were all just looking at him.”

  “Yes,” he finally replied.

  Rickey made it clear that Jack’s ability to run, throw, and hit was only one part of the challenge. Could he stand up to the physical, verbal, and psychological abuse that was bound to come? “I know you’re a good ball player,” Rickey barked. “What I don’t know is whether you have the guts.”

  Jack started to answer hotly, in defense of his manhood, when Rickey explained, “I’m looking for a ball player with guts enough not to fight back.”

  Caught up now in the drama, Rickey stripped off his coat and enacted out a variety of parts that portrayed examples of an offended Jim Crow. Now he was a white hotel clerk rudely refusing Jack accommodations; now a supercilious white waiter in a restaurant; now a brutish railroad conductor. He became a foul-mouthed opponent, Jack recalled, talking about “my race, my parents, in language that was almost unendurable.” Now he was a vengeful base runner, vindictive spikes flashing in the sun, sliding into Jack’s black flesh—“How do you like that, nigger boy?” At one point, he swung his pudgy fist at Jack’s head. Above all, he insisted, Jack could not strike back. He could not explode in righteous indignation; only then would this experiment be likely to succeed, and other black men would follow in Robinson’s footsteps to make a living reality of Rickey’s unspoken promise to Charlie Thomas forty-one years before.

  Robinson sat, transfixed but also stirred. “I had to do it for several reasons,” he now knew. “For black youth, for my mother, for Rae, for myself. I had already begun to feel I had to do it for Branch Rickey.”

  Turning the other cheek, Rickey would have him remember, was not proverbial wisdom but the law of the New Testament. As one Methodist believer to another, Rickey offered Jack a copy of an English translation of Giovanni Papini’s popular Life of Christ and pointed to a passage quoting the words of Jesus—what Papini called “the most stupefying of His revolutionary teachings”: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”

  Thus, cannily acting out of both religious faith and a sympathetic grasp of political history, the Mahatma invoked the Christian counterpart of the ancient Hindu philosophy of satyagraha, or active nonviolence, which Mohandas K. Gandhi, the original Mahatma, had adopted in his long struggle for Indian independence from British imperialism. Within three years, in 1948, India would be free—and Gandhi would be assassinated. Within less than a generation, black and white Christian ministers, led by Martin Luther King Jr., would themselves invoke Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence to bring down the walls of segregation across the South.

  More than two hours after he entered the dark office on Montague Street, Jack stumbled out into the Brooklyn sunshine. He had just signed an agreement, dictated by Rickey, that bound him to the Brooklyn Dodgers organization. On signing a player’s contract he would receive a bonus of $3,500. His salary would be $600 a month. Until Rickey gave the word, Robinson must keep the arrangement a secret. Finally, according to the agreement, he would be signed, probably by the Dodgers’ Montreal club, on or before November 1. This stipulation suggests strongly that Rickey was thinking about the city and state elections in early November and the impact the news of this signing might have on both.

  Returning to the Monarchs, Jack looked on the team with an eye now hopelessly alienated; he could hardly wait to leave. He told no one on the team about Rickey’s invitation. Even with his mother he only hinted at the news; she had no real idea what he was talking about. He was also guarded with Rachel: “On the telephone, he would tell me only that something wonderful had happened that would affect us both. He said he couldn’t tell me, but that I’d know soon enough. He was excited, but he wouldn’t give it away. He never mentioned Branch Rickey or the Dodgers.”

  A few days later, Jack proposed to the Monarchs that he be allowed to play until September 21 only, then go home. But the club, displeased by his sudden, unexcused trip to New York, and fearing the new league and the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, laid down the law; “I was told I would have to play all the games or none.” This threat was delivered in front of other players probably by Richard Wilkinson, the son of J. L. Wilkinson, who “gave me a lecture about my trip to New York and assured me that if I left the club I was through; that I could play no place outside of the Negro National League, and he was sure that Kansas City was the only team with which I could play.” Seizing on this provocation, Jack left the Monarchs and returned to California.

  By this time, some of his excitement about the Dodgers had worn off. Despite the signed agreement, little might come of the electrifying meeting in Brooklyn. Thus he presented the news to Rachel when he saw her. Still, Rickey had impressed him deeply. When he hinted at the news to family and friends—Mack and Willa Mae, Sid Heard and Jack Gordon—he found an unwillingness to listen, because they could not believe it. The white world was unreliable, even treacherous. But Jack’s attitude was different. He had pride and anger, but because of his skills as an athlete he had been too deeply involved with white authority, with white coaches and administrators, who depended on him even as he depended on them, not to know that Rickey was, at the very least, credible. He understood that if something wonderful was to happen to him, as was now promised, a white man would almost certainly be central; and Rickey was more than a plausible white man. In their relatively brief meeting, Rickey had probably shown more concentrated personal fury and passion on the question of race and sports than Jack had ever seen in a white man. Within months, at least one black writer would call Branch Rickey a modern-day John Brown, the brooding, vengeful, God-haunted martyr of Harpers Ferry in 1859. Robinson’s sensitivity and intelligence begged him to submit to this force.

  In October, Jack and Zellee saw Rachel and her roommate Janice Brooks off to New York on their adventure. Then, having agreed to travel with a black barnstorming team in Venezuela, it was now Jack’s turn to head east to join the team. He was in New York City when the call came from Branch Rickey. On October 7, Rickey had written to Arthur Mann, his publicist, indicating that he was thinking of extending the deadline for signing Robinson to January 1. Then he would sign several blacks “and make one break on the complete story”; also, he did not want to sign Robinson with other, “possibly better” players unsigned.

  However, as the New York City mayoral election campaign drew to a close, the issue of blacks and the three city teams—the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers—flared up. On the defensive, and coveting the black vote, Mayor La Guardia was eager to announce that his progressive racial program was yielding results. La Guardia wanted the teams to sign a formal pledge to uphold the spirit and the letter of the Ives-Quinn state law forbidding discrimination in hiring, and he wanted formal assurances that blacks would soon be hired. But the last thing Rickey wanted was to seem to be succumbing to local political pressure to hire a black. He decided to act
preemptively, and to do so not in New York City but in Montreal, where Robinson would be playing.

  On October 23, in the presence of the head of the Dodgers’ farm system, Branch Rickey Jr., and the president of the Montreal club, Hector Racine, Jack Robinson signed a contract to play with the Royals. The terms were exactly those set forth at the August 28 meeting in Brooklyn.

  For all the agitation by the politicians in New York, the news shocked many listeners, including the reporters present. They surged forward to hear what Robinson had to say about his hiring. Jack met the press calmly but said little. “Of course, I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that I am the first member of my race in organized baseball,” Robinson said. “I realize how much it means to me, my race, and to baseball. I can only say I’ll do my very best to come through in every manner.” Branch Rickey Jr., who sought to make it clear that the search had been thorough and expensive (scouting Robinson had cost the Dodgers $25,000, he revealed), tossed in a note of defiance. Racine and his father “undoubtedly will be criticized in some sections of the United States where racial prejudice is rampant. They are not inviting trouble, but they won’t avoid it if it comes.” No doubt, the decision would cost the organization some support, but the Dodgers would not turn back. “Some players now with us may even quit, but they’ll be back in baseball after they work a year or two in a cotton mill.”

  Support came quickly for Rickey’s decision. Horace Stoneham, president of the New York Giants, calling it “a fine way to start a program,” promised to look for black players next year. In Boston, Eddie Collins recalled Robinson’s workout for his Boston Red Sox and warned that “very few players can step into the majors from college or sandlot baseball,” but gallantly wished “more power to Robinson if he can make the grade.” Satchel Paige, the best-known and most admired player in black baseball, was the soul of grace even as he was passed over for the role of ending Jim Crow. “They didn’t make a mistake by signing Robinson,” Paige said. “They couldn’t have picked a better man.” But there was also opposition. The commissioner of minor-league baseball, Judge William Bramham, conceded that he was legally bound to approve Robinson’s contract. However, he ridiculed Rickey as a whiteface version of the black religious charlatan Father Divine. Worse, Rickey was a carpetbagger: “It is those of the carpetbagger stripe of the white race, under the guise of helping but in truth using the Negro for their own selfish interests, who retard the race.”

  The most unkind cuts came from whites who opposed the ban but saw Jack as the wrong choice. In the New York Daily News, columnist Jimmy Powers declared that with the flood of returning talent Robinson “will not make the grade in the big leagues next year or the next if percentages mean anything.… Robinson is a 1000-to-1 shot to make the grade.” The future Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller, who had played in one exhibition game against Jack, “couldn’t foresee any future” for him; a football player, Robinson was “tied up in the shoulders and couldn’t hit an inside pitch to save his neck. If he were a white man I doubt they would even consider him as big league material.” (In fact, Robinson had doubled once in two at-bats against Feller in a barnstorming game earlier that year.)

  The Monarch owners threatened to fight the signing as a violation of Jack’s contract with them. “We won’t take it lying down,” J. L. Wilkinson fumed to the Associated Press. “Robinson signed a contract with us last year and I feel that he is our property.” Wilkinson, who had previously attacked Rickey for venturing into black baseball, snapped again: “Rickey is no Abraham Lincoln or FDR and we won’t accept him as dictator of Negro baseball.” Standing up in support of the property rights of the Negro leagues owners were the venerable owner of the Washington Senators, Clark Griffith, and the Yankee general manager, Larry MacPhail, both of whom profited mightily from renting their parks to black teams. “The Negro league is entitled to full recognition as a full-fledged baseball organization,” Griffith declared.

  But when the black press rallied behind Robinson and the Dodgers, the Monarchs backed off. Rickey himself gave no quarter: “There is no Negro league as such, as far as I am concerned.” Without contracts, and with several eastern clubs in the hands of numbers kings, the leagues “are not leagues and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them.” He then created a further sensation in New York by revealing that his scouts had turned up some twenty-five Negro players who, as the press reported, could play in either the major or minor leagues, “and who are being lined up by the Brooklyn executive to play with the Dodgers or their farm clubs.” “I have never meant to be a crusader,” he insisted, “and I hope I won’t be regarded as one. My purpose is to be fair to all people, and my selfish objective is to win baseball games.” A day or so later, under severe pressure from other blacks, the president of the Negro American League, J. B. Martin, lauded Rickey to the skies: “I feel that I speak the sentiments of 15 million Negroes in America who are with you one hundred per cent, and will always remember the day and date of this great event.”

  With the barnstorming tour of Venezuela delayed by its organizers, Jack remained in New York. There, he saw much of Rachel, who was rooming with Janice Brooks in Harlem next door to the YMCA on 135th Street. The room was in an apartment rented by a family long known to Rachel’s mother. But Rachel’s adventure was not going well. The family treated the girls like roomers, not friends; they were included in nothing. They also had to eat out. Looking for work as a nurse, Rachel had been asked to sign a one-year contract; instead, she took a job on the East Side at a fancy restaurant that exotically used young black women as hostesses. Teetering on high heels and wearing a slinky silk dress, Rachel escorted customers to their tables. The job soon lost its appeal, especially after she found out that the restaurant would not serve blacks. Rachel then signed on to work at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, but also made time to shop for her trousseau. At Saks on Fifth Avenue she had found something really nice—a hammered-satin gown sewn by hand from prewar fabric; a matching ivory-tinted veil adorned with seed pearls; and a pair of dyed shoes. To her surprise, Saks allowed her to pay for all this treasure on layaway.

  These weeks shared by Rachel and Jack in Manhattan were invaluable; the city brought them closer together. But they saw it with different eyes, especially when they looked around Harlem. With his Army and Negro leagues experience, Jack had often known blacks en masse; to Rachel, the sheer vitality and depth of the Negro community on the teeming streets and the crowded subways were a revelation. She found such human density inspiring but also daunting; Jack moved more easily in the volatile mix. As a fellow Californian, he understood her sense of distance from this scene, but it was important to him that they both bridge the gap between themselves and the mass of black people, with whom Jack readily identified despite their differences.

  This difference was not the sort of thing they talked about. Rachel lived and relived in her imagination her reactions to the world. Jack would not talk about his feelings, or even analyze them aloud, for her to hear. But he had a strong sense of knowing who he was, of being unassailable, invulnerable, especially where the color of his skin was concerned. He was satisfied with his constant anger at injustice, although also satisfied that he could control it. Rachel began to think of them as complementing one another. Her identity was fluid; his was a rock. He was impulsive, she was organized and practical. They could help one another; they did help one another. What they needed was a chance, and this was what Rickey and white baseball were offering, although neither Jack nor Rachel knew for sure what lay ahead.

  Late in the autumn, now the best-known black baseball player in the world, Jack left for Venezuela. Apart from his quick trip to Montreal, this was his first journey outside the United States. He needed to make some money for his coming wedding, but above all he needed to hone his baseball skills for the coming challenge. In the latter task, his barnstorming teammates certainly could help him. A brilliant group, they included the catcher and outfielder Roy Campanella of the
Baltimore Elite Giants (who was quietly signed by the Dodgers on his return from Venezuela); the first baseman Buck Leonard; Jesse Williams at second; Parnell Woods at third; the catcher Quincy Trouppe; and one of Jack’s partners in the Fenway Park farce, Sam Jethroe. The pitchers included the talented Roy Welmaker of the Homestead Grays and Verdell Mathis of the Memphis Red Sox. In addition, the team included such stalwarts as Felton Snow, Marvin Barker, and Gene Benson of the Philadelphia Stars. Their schedule called for twenty-four games, played mainly in the capital, Caracas.

  Jack was now the center of attention, with almost every move magnified both by the hopes and dreams many people invested in him and by the envy and resentment he stirred in others. Reaching down like a white God among the Negro leaguers, Branch Rickey had picked—a rookie! The fact that the rookie was almost twenty-seven years old mattered little. Hilton Smith echoed the sentiments of many players when he declared spitefully about Robinson that “it all came down to this, he had played with white boys, he had played football with white boys.” These older Negro leaguers had good reason to be bitter. Soon, the leagues would be finished, destroyed by integration. “We’d get 300 people in a game,” Buck Leonard would say. “We couldn’t even draw flies.”

  Jack found himself caught in a tight place. He had immense confidence in his athletic skills, but hardly wanted to make enemies of people who sought to help him. Inevitably he did, at least according to a few observers. One writer about the Negro leagues would describe the strenuous efforts of his teammates on the Venezuelan tour to help Robinson but also declared that he “did not like being tutored by the self-made Negro leaguers.” Quincy Trouppe recalled: “One day Felton Snow tried to talk to Jackie, about the right way to handle a certain play at shortstop, and Jackie really talked to him bad.” However, Jack’s roommate on the tour, Gene Benson, offered a far more favorable picture. Robinson was “just a swell person. I had been told he was controversial and used to get involved in fisticuffs all the time. But when we started rooming together, I didn’t see any of that.”