Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  But the support of the Montreal crowds, and the black crowds elsewhere, could not make up entirely for the hostility he faced; besides, Jack both liked and disliked being special—he longed simply to play ball like any other Royal. But he was different. In a midsummer game at Syracuse, while one of the worst disturbances of the season raged at home plate, Jack rested stoically at second base. “I’ve reminded him several times,” Clay Hopper told the press, “ ‘Jackie, you stay out of the arguments no matter what they are.’ ” Opposing pitchers threw repeatedly at his head; several base runners, according to Al Campanis and others, aimed their spikes at his flesh whenever they could. To the press, Jack offered hardly a murmur of complaint, but the Royals’ general manager, Mel Jones, knew differently. “He came into the office more than once,” Jones later revealed, “and he’d say, ‘Nobody knows what I’m going through.’ ” At year’s end one Montreal journalist looked back: “Because of his dark pigmentation Robbie could never protest. If there was a rhubarb on the field … he had to stay out of it. Otherwise there might have been a riot.”

  What he was going through would have brought many another man to explosions of rage and perhaps even patterns of psychopathology, and it did not leave Robinson utterly unscathed. The psychological and also the physical cost of so much pent-up indignation is hard to measure. Some things are certain. Anger, which can powerfully inhibit athletic ability, did not make Jack less effective as a player but seemed indeed to intensify his concentration and propel him to greater feats. Rage and hurt did not drive him to the usual, often destructive therapies—alcohol, tobacco, sexual adventuring: with Rachel’s help, Robinson was able to stay on the straight-and-narrow course he had set for himself a long time before. But even such self-discipline carried its price and must have exacted a heavy toll in terms of inner peace and equilibrium of mind. Later, when Jack saw himself as released from Rickey’s prohibitions, his response would sometimes seem excessive to some people, including some of those disposed to admire him. Such people perhaps underestimated or undervalued the depth of feeling he had dammed up in these early years in order to serve the greater cause of freedom and social equality.

  The Royals stayed atop the league, but Jack continued to find his burden heavy. Writing of the infamous black-cat incident in Syracuse and the vile namecalling in Baltimore, he admitted that “the toll that incidents like these took was greater than I realized. I was overestimating my stamina and underestimating the beating I was taking. I couldn’t sleep and often I couldn’t eat.” Rachel’s pregnancy added to that pressure. It was both a disruption of their brief new life together and a source of anxiety when he took to the road without her. At some point, he began to find it hard to sleep; his eating, usually hearty, dropped off. Finally, a doctor examined Jack, found nothing wrong physically, and prescribed rest; even the sports pages were to go unread. The Royals granted him five days off. Three days later, when the team started to lose, he was back.

  Meanwhile, Rachel had her own worries and problems but tried to keep almost all of them to herself. As she became bigger with child, the trips became more dangerous, but Rickey understood what she meant to Jack on the road. “Rachel’s understanding love,” as Jack later put it, “was a powerful antidote for the poison of being taunted by fans, sneered at by fellow-players, and constantly mistreated because of my blackness.” She tried to shield Jack even when a mysterious problem crept into her pregnancy. Starting in her fifth month, she became feverish in the last two weeks of each month; her temperature soared as high as 103 degrees. Her obstetrician, baffled, took blood cultures but finally could only prescribe sulfur. She kept her illness to herself: “I never told Jack about the fever, I never told my neighbors, I couldn’t risk upsetting him. He would call at night from the road and I would say, ‘Everything’s just fine.’ When he got back, I would be better. I had to make the sacrifice, because I had begun to think that I was married to a man with a destiny, someone who had been chosen for a great task, and I couldn’t let him down.”

  Protected in this way, Jack flourished on the field despite his periods of gloom. Typical was a game in Baltimore when he led an injury-ridden Royals team to a 10–9 victory, after Montreal went ahead 8–0 only to have Baltimore tie the game. Jack not only got three of the Royals’ seven hits but also stole home. Such feats made him a lion to his teammates, and to his manager, Hopper, who was now almost a complete convert to Rickey’s view of Robinson. In Newsweek, Hopper saluted Jack as “a player who must go to the majors. He’s a big-league ballplayer, a good team hustler, and a real gentleman.” Race now meant less to other baseball men. “I’d like to have nine Robinsons,” Bruno Betzel, the Jersey City Giants’ manager, declared. “If I had one Jackie, I’d room with him myself and put him to bed nights, to make sure nothing happened to him.”

  “I’ve had great luck and great treatment,” Jack told Newsweek modestly. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.” By September, when the regular season ended, he had completely vindicated Rickey. Robinson became the first Royal to win the league batting crown; his average of .349 also eclipsed the Royals’ team record, set in 1930. Hitting only three home runs, he nevertheless drove in 66 runs; he also scored more runs, 113, than anyone else in the league. His 40 stolen bases put him second only to his teammate Marvin Rackley’s record-setting 65. At second base, he ended the season with the highest fielding percentage in the league. With one hundred victories, the highest number in team history, the Royals won the pennant by eighteen and a half games. They also played before the largest crowds at home and away—more than eight hundred thousand people—in the history of the club.

  In the playoffs, the Royals won two tough seven-game series, first with the Newark Bears and then with the Syracuse Chiefs. Against Syracuse, in the deciding game, Jack went four-for-five. Then, late in September, the Royals traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, for the Little World Series against the Colonels of the American Association. For many of the Louisville players, officials, and fans, Robinson’s presence was the most urgent single consideration; the series brought integrated baseball to Louisville for the first time. The Colonels, who had agreed only reluctantly to his playing, underscored their opposition by sharply limiting the number of seats for blacks, many of whom were left to mill about in confusion outside the park. Some who made it inside probably regretted their luck. “The tension was terrible,” Robinson wrote, “and I was greeted with some of the worst vituperation I had yet experienced.”

  The series opened with three games in Louisville, during which Jack slumped, going one for eleven. His failure only fed the rage of many white fans in the cheaper seats. “The worse I played,” he recalled, “the more vicious that howling mob in the stands became. I had been booed pretty soundly before, but nothing like this. A torrent of mass hatred burst from the stands with virtually every move I made.” As Jack suffered, Montreal dropped two games after taking the first. The abuse was so great that the white Louisville Courier-Journal felt obliged to deplore the “demonstrations of prejudice against Montreal’s fine second baseman, the young Negro, Jackie Robinson,” as well as the “brusque refusal” of the park to accommodate more black fans. However, when the series moved to Montreal, the local fans repaid the Colonels. A storm of abuse, unprecedented at a Royals game, descended on the visitors. Down 4–0 at one point in the first home game, the Royals stormed back to win 6–5 in the tenth inning on a single by Robinson. In the fifth game, Jack doubled and, just after Louisville tied the game 3–all, hit a towering triple; then he laid down a bunt in the eighth inning “which really settled the fate of the Colonels,” according to the Montreal Daily Star. “This was a really heady play, a beautifully placed hit.” With Al Campanis, he also executed superb double plays to kill off Louisville scoring threats. Finally, on October 4, before an ecstatic crowd, the Royals defeated the Colonels once again, 2–0, to win the Little World Series. Robinson, who finished the series batting .400, also scored the last run.

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p; Hustling to leave the ballpark in time to catch a plane, Jack made the mistake of stepping back onto the field before he could shower and change. Deliriously happy Montreal fans snatched him up in celebration. Previously, they had lifted Clay Hopper and a white player to their shoulders. Now, hugging and kissing Robinson, slapping him on the back, they carried him on their shoulders in triumph, singing songs of victory, until he was finally able to break away. Watching, the veteran writer Dink Carroll of the Gazette began to cry: “The tears poured down my cheeks and you choked up looking at it.” Inside the locker room, Hopper warmly shook his hand. “You’re a great ballplayer and a fine gentleman,” he told Jack. “It’s been wonderful having you on the team.” When Robinson reappeared outside in street clothes, a large part of the crowd was still waiting. “They stormed around him, eager to touch him,” the Gazette reported. Knowing exactly what he had accomplished over the season, they sang in tribute, “Il a gagné ses épaulettes”—He has earned his stripes; “they almost ripped the clothes from his back.” In the Courier, his friend Sam Maltin wrote memorably of the astonishing scene: “It was probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind.”

  From De Lorimer Downs, Jack and Rachel rushed to the airport and caught a flight to Detroit, where they parted ways. He went on to join a barnstorming team on a tour that would end in California. In the last month of her pregnancy, she returned directly to Los Angeles, to her mother’s home on West 36th Place.

  On November 18, Jack was at her side when their son was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. The delivery was relatively easy; their baby boy was healthy in every respect. His parents named him Jack Roosevelt Robinson Jr. For Jack and Rachel, his coming was a miracle that left them euphoric. Jackie’s birth capped the most tumultuous year of his father’s life to that point. And yet Jack and others knew that the coming year, 1947, might yet surpass the astonishing year that had just ended. In Los Angeles, he waited for the call that might summon him to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the major leagues.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Brooklyn Dodger

  1946–1947

  I know now that dreams do come true.

  —Jackie Robinson (1947)

  AT THANKSGIVING DINNER in Los Angeles, Jack was grateful for his new blessings, thrilled by the presence of his infant son, Jackie Junior, and surrounded by women who adored him: his wife, Rachel; his mother-in-law, Zellee; and Zellee’s mother, Annetta Jones, who was now living with her daughter on 36th Place. With Jackie Junior the first child born into their family in twenty-five years, Zellee and Annetta doted on father and son. Jack and Rachel were living in cramped conditions, and the future was by no means certain; but Jack felt a substantial debt to God as he led his new family in prayer at Thanksgiving in November 1946.

  He was happy, but also short on cash. Robinson’s brief barnstorming adventure had yielded him nothing; according to Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey’s assistant, “the promoters—Negro, at that—succeeded in swindling him out of his net profits.” Jack had returned from the road with a fat bundle of checks totaling about $3,500, but almost all of them had bounced. With the aid of Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP he pressed his creditors, a Pittsburgh group, but the pressure yielded only promises. Unwillingly, he had then signed a contract for fifty dollars a game to play basketball with a local professional team, the Los Angeles Red Devils.

  Here, as in baseball, Jim Crow was an issue. While the leading professional league, the Basketball Association of America, barred blacks, the Rochester Royals of the upstart National Basketball League, taking a cue from Rickey, had just signed their first black players, William “Dolly” King and William “Pop” Gates, both formerly of the elite all-black New York Renaissance team. (Because of racial friction, Rochester dropped both men the following season. Three years passed before another black played.) In Los Angeles, the Red Devils, seeking admission to the NBL, hired Robinson and two other black players for its otherwise white squad. Shifting gears smoothly from baseball, Jack played well. Against the visiting Sheboygan Redskins, he was the top scorer in a Red Devils victory; in a nonleague game, the Red Devils also defeated the Renaissance team. By early December, the Red Devils had won eight games and lost only once. To local blacks, this success was an important victory for racial integration. “Even if you don’t care for basketball,” a black sportswriter urged his readers, “see them anyhow, if only to get a real glimpse of a team that practices interracial harmony with real success.”

  Despite his solid play, Robinson’s stint with the Red Devils ended suddenly in early December. Quite possibly, he was injured in a game and quit rather than risk a disaster. He had a particularly rough time against the Chicago American Gears, whose commanding center, George Mikan, would later be voted the most dominant basketball player of the half-century. Jack’s friend Jack Gordon, present at these games, recalled how Mikan and the Gears “put a real hurting on Jack; they left him dizzy.” But Jack may have quit basketball after a freak accident on a golf course in Los Angeles, when his back suddenly gave out in the middle of a swing. In addition, Branch Rickey, visiting Los Angeles early in December for a round of baseball meetings, met with Robinson and perhaps convinced him to give up basketball. Through a black boyhood friend and former teammate, Walter Worrill of the Pasadena YMCA, Jack then made several appearances as a speaker before groups of black, white, and Mexican youths in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Phoenix, Arizona. In January, a journalist who watched him interact with his young audience reported that “to say that Robinson inspired the boys is to put it mildly.”

  Nevertheless, the thought uppermost in Jack’s mind early in 1947 was his possible promotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers. On this matter, Rickey had been planning and scheming. Near the end of the Dodgers’ season, claiming that Montreal needed Jack’s services, he had rebuffed calls to bring Robinson up for the National League pennant race. Now, in January, an Associated Press poll of sports editors established that the major question of 1947 was whether or not Jackie Robinson would be promoted; a symposium on this issue in the weekly Sporting News took up an entire page. Of the top ten hitters in the International League in 1946, only Robinson had not moved up to the majors. But Rickey refused to be rushed. “I have made every move with great deliberation,” he reminded a reporter. “If Robinson merits being with the Dodgers, I’d prefer to have the players want him, rather than force him on the players. I want Robinson to have the fairest chance in the world without the slightest bit of prejudice.”

  Carefully, Jack followed Rickey’s plan, as he told a reporter: “I guess Mr. Rickey wants to see if last season was just lucky for me, which I don’t blame him.” Rickey, if not Robinson, was aware of the deep opposition to Jack’s promotion among the single most important group in baseball—the team owners, who in a secret ballot had voted fifteen to one (with Rickey alone dissenting) against integration. One year after Jack’s historic signing, no owner had followed suit. Undeterred, Rickey took a significant step: he moved 1947 spring training for the Dodgers and Royals away from the Jim Crow South to the Caribbean, to Cuba and Panama. He also sought to channel and control the surging black interest in Robinson’s future. This interest, Rickey believed, could wreck his plan if it served to antagonize whites. Consulting a number of black leaders, including Herbert T. Miller, the executive secretary of the Carlton Avenue branch of the YMCA in Brooklyn, Rickey arranged for Miller to invite more than thirty black New Yorkers to a working dinner. At that time, according to Miller’s invitation, the group would discuss with Rickey “the things which are on his mind as well as ours, in connection with projection of what seems to be the inevitable.”

  On the raw, cold evening of February 5, after breaking bread with the group, Rickey laid out his brazen thesis that the major threat to Jackie Robinson’s success—“the one enemy most likely to ruin that success—is the Negro people themselves!” Painting a garish picture of the worst scenario he could imagine after
Robinson’s promotion (just as he had done in his first meeting with Jack), he lashed out at his astonished audience. “You’ll strut. You’ll wear badges,” he told the blacks. “You’ll hold Jackie Robinson Days … and Jackie Robinson Nights. You’ll get drunk. You’ll fight. You’ll be arrested. You’ll wine and dine the player until he is fat and futile. You’ll symbolize his importance into a national comedy … and an ultimate tragedy—yes, tragedy!” Above all, Rickey wanted nobody to use Jack’s triumph as “a symbol of social ‘ism’ or schism,” or, indeed, as “a triumph of race over race.” Many in the audience, which included doctors and lawyers, must have been taken aback by such language, which Rickey himself called cruel; but his obvious sincerity, the directness of his appeal, and their pathetic lack of power within the world he represented won them over. Through the black press and churches, the word went out about the need for moderation at this crucial hour.

  Around February 20, leaving Rachel and Jackie Junior behind, Jack flew to New York. There, according to Roy Campanella, he boarded an Atlantic Seaboard train headed south for Miami. With him were the three other black prospects, including Campanella, now in the Dodger organization. Campanella had been Jack’s teammate in Venezuela in 1945, then had played with Nashua in 1946. At Nashua, under manager Walter Alston, Campanella was hailed as the outstanding catcher and voted the Most Valuable Player in the league, as his team won the league championship. Also at Nashua and now on the train heading south was the six-foot-four-inch pitcher Don Newcombe, who had won sixteen games. The last of the four players was a left-handed pitcher, Roy Partlow, a thirty-six-year-old former Negro-leagues star. Signed the previous season by the Royals after they demoted Johnny Wright in the Dodgers’ farm system, Partlow had pitched inconsistently for Montreal. Sent down to join Wright, he had then overwhelmed the opposition and was now getting another chance with the Royals.