His enemies were also legion. On March 21, word came that Jacksonville, about fifty percent black, forbade Robinson and Wright to play in an exhibition game at Durkee Field against the Jersey City Giants, a farm club of the New York Giants. An official of the Playground and Recreational Commission explained: “It is part of the rules and regulations of the Recreational Department that Negroes and whites cannot compete against each other on a city-owned playground.” Clay Hopper, under orders from Rickey, declared his intention of playing Robinson there “unless I get official notice not to.” When the notice came, he canceled the game—to the disappointment of the Giants, who wanted the Royals to leave Robinson home. “We lived up to our agreement,” Rickey made clear. “The city of Jacksonville and the Jersey City Club are responsible for whatever happened.”
A week later, on March 28, when Jacksonville canceled another Royals game, its decision stiffened the backbone of other cities. On April 5, the Royals announced that they had been forced to cancel three additional games—another in Jacksonville, one in Savannah, Georgia, and a third in Richmond, Virginia. In addition, a game planned for April 10 at De Land, Florida, had to be moved to Daytona Beach; local officials claimed that the stadium lights were not working. Jack mused: “What this had to do with the fact that the game was to be played in the daytime, no one bothered to explain.”
The reaction spread further. On Sunday, April 7, at Sanford, which previously had chased out Robinson and Wright, the Royals began a scheduled game against the St. Paul Saints before about one hundred spectators. In the second inning, Jack singled, then scored on a base hit after stealing second. He was about to step onto the field for the third inning when the local chief of police (“Vicious old man Jim Crow,” Wendell Smith wrote) ordered Hopper to remove Robinson or risk prosecution. Hopper replaced him.
The cancellations and disruptions were financially costly to the club and bad for team morale, but Rickey was ready to pay the price. According to the Pittsburgh Courier, he answered the offended cities with defiance: “Without Robinson and Wright, there’ll be no games!” He insisted on official notification, on letterhead stationery, concerning all cancellations; he refused to take the initiative and stay away, or to find excuses to bench his black players. Instead, he pressed on. The Dodgers announced the signing of twenty-five-year-old Roy Campanella, the best-hitting catcher in the Negro leagues, and Don Newcombe, twenty-two, a tall, robust pitcher, and assigned them to Nashua, New Hampshire, in the New England League. (A barrier broke elsewhere. In March, the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington to break the color bar in football. “That’s great,” Jack told the press. “He’s a great football player and Los Angeles will make a lot of money with him in the lineup.”)
By this time, despite only fair hitting, Jack had won a place on the Royals, as had John Wright. Early on April 15, Jack and Rachel boarded a special orange-colored train carrying the Montreal Royals to New York City. Thus ended what Wendell Smith in the Courier called “one of the most unique and sensational training sessions in the history of organized baseball.”
IN JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY, the Royals faced the opening of the sixty-fourth season of the International League with only modest hopes. Although Montreal had won the pennant the previous year, 1945, only three players remained from that squad. The team seemed a hodgepodge of faded Dodgers veterans and untested novices, some fresh from the war. “Poor Hopper,” mused Bruno Betzel, Hopper’s predecessor as manager of the Royals, who was now in charge of the Jersey City Giants—“they’ve sure handed him a wrecked team.”
On April 18, under clear skies and in brilliant sunshine at Roosevelt Stadium, before a capacity opening-day crowd of just over 25,000, with jugglers and tumblers and two marching bands and a seemingly endless parade lorded over by the ebullient mayor, Frank Hague, and with the press box jammed with reporters from every New York City daily and black weekly, all eager to record the historic event, Robinson made his debut.
For him, the moment was fraught with emotion. “I remember the parades,” Jack would recall, “the brass band’s playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and the marvelous beauty of this ‘day of destiny’ for me. Nothing else mattered now.” He heard the strains of the national anthem “with a lump in my throat and my heart beating rapidly, my stomach feeling as if it were full of feverish fireflies with claws on their feet.” Meanwhile, Rachel roamed the stands, unable to sit still, elated by the setting but tingling with a free-floating anxiety. She knew that her anxiety was shared by the thousands of blacks who had crossed the river from Harlem or come from Newark and Philadelphia to be a part of history.
In his first at-bat, which came at 3:04 that afternoon, Jack felt weak in his knees and stomach as he heard the mild cheer that greeted his name. Working the pitcher to a full count, he then topped a weak grounder to the Giants’ shortstop, who threw him out with ease. But the next time up, in the third inning, with two men on and the left-hander Warren Sandell expecting him to bunt, Robinson exploded on a fastball chest-high and down the middle. The ball jumped from his bat and carried high and far until it dropped into the left-field stands, more than 340 feet away. As he passed third base Jack beamed at Clay Hopper, who patted him on the back; George Shuba, moving in from the on-deck circle, pumped his hand vigorously as he crossed home plate.
Next, in the fifth inning, Jack set down a dainty bunt that stunned the Giants’ infield, then flashed across first base steps ahead of the throw. He stole second, then went to third unexpectedly, on a groundout to third base. When a new pitcher, Phil Otis, entered the game, Jack teased him with feints toward home. Twice Otis threw to third; twice Jack scrambled back. Next, the catcher rifled the ball to third, but Jack was safe again. Then, as the now agitated Otis started another pitch, Jack feinted toward home again. Confused, Otis stopped suddenly. The umpire stepped in to call a balk, and Jack strolled home. “Now the crowd went wild,” he recalled. “Not just the Negroes, but thousands of whites, including many Jersey City fans, screamed, laughed and stamped their feet.” Mr. Rickey was right about the fans: “They liked daring baseball.”
This was a day of near perfection for Robinson, a fantasy of a debut. In five at-bats, he hit safely four times, including the homer; he stole second twice and scored four runs, two of them on balks teased out of pitchers befuddled by his daring and quickness. One game was only one game, but Robinson had dealt a stunning blow to the notion of black physical and mental inferiority. Above all, his demeanor captivated the fans—his calibrated recklessness, his cheeky challenge to the white pitchers, the insolence of his base running, the grittiness of his base hits, the violence of the long ball. And, yes, Montreal had won the game, 14–1. (Unfortunately, Jack featured even in the Giants’ scoring, with an error in the fifth inning when he threw low and wide trying to complete a double play.)
After the game, Robinson took no less than five minutes to reach the locker room, the New York Herald Tribune reported, “as he was mobbed trying to leave the field by fans of assorted ages, sizes and colors.” He had “completely stolen the show and the hearts of 25,000 fans” in leading the Royals to victory. The clubhouse was “a mad scene,” with “well-wishers fighting to get in” to congratulate him, according to another report. Jack was “so excited he had to tie his necktie three or four times but he was as happy as a kid on Christmas morning.” Seizing the day, according to the New York Times, he had “converted his opportunity into a brilliant personal triumph.” Two days later, the Montreal Gazette compared Jack’s sense of drama with that of great stars like Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, and Bobby Jones: “Make no mistake, the man can play ball. He is big, abnormally fast for his size, and he can field.” On a double play, “his feet were right, his hands were sure, his throw was perfect and all was accomplished in the minimum amount of time.” Writing mainly for blacks, the New York Amsterdam News summed up: “Thus the most significant sports story of the century was written into the record books as baseball took up the cudgel for demo
cracy and an unassuming but superlative Negro boy ascended the heights of excellence to prove the rightness of the experiment. And prove it in the only correct crucible for such an experiment—the crucible of white hot competition.”
Opposing pitchers took note. Two days later, when the Royals beat the Giants to sweep the series, Jack drew three walks in five times at bat; he singled, drove in one run, stole two bases, and scored twice. The average attendance, twenty-two thousand, was excellent. Large crowds turned out again for the series against the Newark Bears in Newark, New Jersey, and the Syracuse Chiefs in Syracuse, New York, even as Jack’s batting average dropped steadily. The true Royals hitting star was George Shuba, with six homers; the speedy Marvin “Rabbit” Rackley was stealing bases at a record clip. Still, Robinson had shown himself a potential mainstay, if not a star, of Montreal.
However, the next series, in Baltimore against the Orioles, was a setback. Baltimore was a Southern city, below the Mason-Dixon line; two years later, a group of whites and blacks would be arrested for playing tennis together in the city’s Druid Hill Park. The local press warned about a hostile reaction to Robinson, even a possible riot, since a large influx of blacks was expected from Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. “While it’s a ticklish problem with us,” the Baltimore general manager declared, “we don’t anticipate trouble, especially from the colored people.” A Canadian reporter got the point: “He didn’t say so, but the inference was that white hoodlums might cause some rancour.” Only about three thousand fans attended the first game, where Rachel sat horrified in the stands while a man behind her shouted about that “nigger son of a bitch,” Jackie Robinson. “There wasn’t anything I could say,” she recalled, “but I took it all personally. I couldn’t be philosophical at all.” The next day, over twenty-five thousand fans showed up for a doubleheader, with about ten thousand blacks crammed into segregated and inferior seating. Again Jack was subjected to abuse from white fans. The presence of thousands of blacks, who doted on every move he made, both elated and weighed on him. “It put a heavy burden of responsibility on me,” he later wrote, “but it was a glorious challenge. On the good days the cries of approval made me feel ten feet tall, but my mistakes, no matter how small, plunged me into deep depression. I guess black, as well as white, fans recognized this, and that is why they gave me that extra support I needed so badly.”
As the Royals headed home to Montreal, Branch Rickey’s experiment was still alive but by no means a definite success. Once home in De Lorimer Downs, however, Clay Hopper’s team began to come into its own. Its trademark turned out to be a smooth combination of speed and power, experience and youth. The team included former Dodgers stars such as Curt Davis, Herman Franks, and Lew Riggs, as well as younger players such as the left-handed pitcher Steve Nagy; the native-born darling Jean Pierre Roy, another pitcher; the fastest Royal, Rabbit Rackley—and Jackie Robinson. Clay Hopper was calm, authoritative, yet diplomatic. Steadily, the Royals began to overwhelm their opposition.
In Montreal, after about a month in a guest house, and despite an acute postwar housing shortage, Jack and Rachel found a nice apartment. Expecting the sordid resistance that would have come in virtually any white American neighborhood, she was stunned by the genteel response when she answered an advertisement to sublet half of a duplex apartment at 8232 Rue de Gaspé, in the traditionally French-speaking East End. Deliberately, Rachel had chosen the less affluent French-speaking district over its wealthier English counterpart, which she expected to be more exclusive. (Montreal had no distinctly black district.) On De Gaspé, almost everyone spoke mainly or only French, and a brown face was unusual; but the woman of the apartment received Rachel pleasantly, poured tea and talked, and quickly agreed to rent her apartment furnished, with all her own linen and kitchen utensils. Rachel was almost overwhelmed. “The woman didn’t merely agree,” she said; “she insisted that I use her things. She wanted me to be careful—no water on the hardwood floors, that sort of thing, but she was gracious. It left us euphoric, really. All the months in Canada were like that.”
They moved in without incident. Later, when she began to show, an informal delegation of local women visited her to offer not only advice and friendship but also coupons from their ration books, so she could buy any scarce foodstuffs she needed or craved. With the language barrier and the demands of the Royals’ schedule, Jack and Rachel could make very few friends in the neighborhood; but upstairs were the Méthots, with seven or eight children who brightened the house. Rachel and Jack came to know Edgar Méthot and his wife, who had just had a baby; twenty-seven years later, the Méthots would recall the Robinsons as “such good people.” Their closest friends, however, were a Jewish couple, Sam and Belle Maltin. Sam, a Canadian and a socialist, wrote on sports for the Montreal Herald but was also a stringer for the Pittsburgh Courier; like Rachel, Belle was pregnant at the time. Knowing of Rachel’s love of classical music, the Maltins took them to outdoor concerts on Mount Royal that reminded Rachel of visits to the Hollywood Bowl. Belle introduced Rachel to Jewish cooking and also knitted her a sweater she still wore fifty years later. The Maltins had another black friend, Herb Trawick, a football player with the Montreal Alouettes, and the Robinsons got to know him as well.
On the whole, however, the Robinsons aimed for a subdued life when Jack was home. Rachel’s day was bound up in going to the ballpark to watch him. When he was away, sometimes she traveled with him (although the club frowned on wives on the road), but mostly she stayed home and sewed clothes for herself and the coming baby, or worked on a crochet tablecloth she was making for her dream home in California. She got to know some of the neighborhood children because they followed her on the street or carried her groceries home; she also tempted the children living upstairs by leaving a door open and a bowl of fruit in plain sight. Rachel could say little to most of the adults—she had taken Latin but no French—but they remained friendly and protective of her. She liked to watch them come out onto their balconies to take the sun in the lazy summer afternoons; they, no doubt, admired her brown-skinned beauty and grace. In May, an Afro-American woman reporter, recalling Rachel’s night of abuse in Baltimore, wrote admiringly of her unusual calm and poise: “The only person I know who can equal her is that first citizen of the world, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.”
By early June, Jackie was an established presence in Montreal; on June 4, he was dubbed “the Colored Comet” in an illustration in the local Gazette. (His life story was also illustrated in April in Picture News, published by Comic Magazines.) His .356 batting average led the league, and his only important setback was a leg injury that put him hors de combat for a week. Jack then spent several days at Joe Louis’s training camp near Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, as Louis prepared for a title fight against Billy Conn at Yankee Stadium. Perhaps this visit was behind Jack’s first tentative step, soon withdrawn, into political action—into placing his newfound national fame in service of progressive politics.
Jack’s success on the field made him more than a passive symbol of integration; more and more people wanted to acknowledge, and share, or exploit it. Some calls on his time were about money, as the first of the sweet-sounding offers and deals arrived that would tease him for the rest of his life. Some calls were charitable, as when hundreds of wounded servicemen gave him a star’s welcome on the grounds of the Montreal Military Hospital, where he helped to umpire a softball game between the Montreal Canadiens hockey team and an all-star YMHA team. Other invitations were more freighted. Appealing to his conscience, and thus possibly to his vanity, they sought to draw him away from the perceived shallows of sport toward a grander purpose. Late in May, the New York State organizing committee of the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America asked Jack to be its chairman; the national honorary commander of UNAVA was Joe Louis. On the committee, Jack would be associated with such popular political leaders as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, State Assemblyman Hulan Jack, and Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr. Accepting the invita
tion, Jack agreed to speak on June 9 at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem with Powell, Jack, and Davis. “I consider it a great honor to serve as chairman,” he wired the committee. “The burning problems of discrimination in housing, employment, education and on-the-job training facing Negro veterans demand an immediate solution.”
On June 9, however, Jack was not at Powell’s famous church in Harlem. In general, Branch Rickey forbade his players to deliver public speeches or attend public dinners during the season. More important, Rickey, a Republican and a strong anticommunist, would never have approved of the leftist source of Jack’s invitation. That spring, Rickey had flown to Fulton, Missouri, to help give a hero’s welcome to Winston Churchill at Westminster College, where Rickey was a trustee. On that occasion, Churchill had delivered his celebrated “Iron Curtain” speech about the evils of Soviet communism.
In any event, Robinson hardly needed a greater canvas than the ballpark to express himself politically. On the road, he was constantly aware of the price of being a martyr, as abuse came in forms from the subtle and patronizing to the crude and hostile, while he held his peace in compliance with his agreement with Rickey. At Syracuse, a rival player threw a black cat from the dugout onto the field as Jack waited to hit: “Hey Jackie, there’s your cousin.” Jack doubled to left, then scored on a single to center. As he passed the Syracuse dugout he offered his own taunt: “I guess my cousin’s pretty happy now.” He could count on a uniformly warm reception only at home, in De Lorimer Downs. “I owe more to Canadians than they’ll ever know,” he said later. “In my baseball career they were the first to make me feel my natural self.” Robinson would write later about one French-accented rooter who “used to shout from the bleachers, if things were bad, ‘Jackie, ’e’s my boy!’ The man had lungs of brass, a voice of iron, and a heart of gold.”
Jackie Robinson Page 22