Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Although he would deny its seriousness, Sam Breadon, the Cardinals’ owner, had uncovered a plot among his players to go on strike on May 6 rather than play with Robinson; this action might then spread throughout the league, to turn back the clock on integration. On May 9 in the Herald Tribune, Stanley Woodward declared that Breadon had hurried to New York to confer with Ford Frick, the president of the National League (Woodward also revealed that the strike was the brainchild of a Dodgers player, never named). Without hesitation, Woodward wrote, Frick had then sent the following unequivocal rebuke, through Breadon, to the players: “If you do this you will be suspended from the league. You will find that the friends you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended and I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another. The National League will go down the line with Robinson whatever the consequences. You will find if you go through with your intention that you have been guilty of complete madness.”

  Although Woodward would be accused of overstating the crisis and putting words into Frick’s mouth, the league president himself supported the story and stuck by the words. With this fierce attack by the National League president, which followed the chiding of Ben Chapman of the Phillies both in the press and by the office of the commissioner of baseball, Jim Crow in baseball had lost the war. Individuals and individual teams, such as the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, could continue to fight on, in a protracted rear-guard action. But barring some unforeseen catastrophe, baseball would remain open to blacks.

  Against the feared Cardinals, who had overtaken the Dodgers to win the pennant in 1946, Brooklyn won the first game, then dropped the next two to fall into a tie for first place in the league. For Rickey and Shotton, it was a time for stocktaking. Brooklyn had started the season well, but its pitching remained inconsistent and the team was obviously not yet unified. The season was young. The Cardinals, though, were still expected to be the team to beat as the season and the summer ripened. “We have a great squad,” Rickey remarked to reporters, “but so far we haven’t a great team.” Hurt in part by poor weather, attendance at Ebbets Field was also off. By May 8, when lights went on for the first night game of the year, Ebbets Field had welcomed about fifty thousand fewer paying fans than in 1946 for the same number of games.

  Next, the Dodgers headed to Philadelphia for their second series with the Phillies, starting on Friday, May 9. Now, stung by the criticism of his race baiting, Ben Chapman was a somewhat chastened figure. He defended himself by claiming that he had treated Robinson much as he treated players of Italian or Polish background, that the vile language was nothing but a form of initiation into the baseball fraternity. But actions by the Phillies management showed that Chapman was hardly without club support for his treatment of Robinson. First, in a telephone call, according to Harold Parrott, the Phillies’ general manager, Herb Pennock, urged Rickey not to “bring the Nigger here with the rest of your team” (Rickey had invited Parrott to eavesdrop on the conversation); “we’re just not ready for that sort of thing yet.” Rickey, however, rebuffed Philadelphia; if it declined to play, Brooklyn would claim the games on forfeit. Then, in Philadelphia, the Dodgers arrived at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, their usual haunt, to find the premises barred to them. “And don’t bring your team back here,” Parrott recalled the hotel manager snapping, “while you have any Nigras with you!” Scrambling for accommodations, Brooklyn was forced to stay at the more expensive Warwick Hotel.

  At Shibe Park, too, the visit to Philadelphia was depressing. Several Phillies players kept up a modified but still offensive version of their earlier vile campaign; from the dugout, Jack recalled, some “pointed bats at me and made machine gun-like noises.” Worse, the Dodgers lost three of the four games, including a Sunday doubleheader before a record-breaking crowd, and slipped out of first place. But one person had changed his tune: Ben Chapman, seeing his job in danger, asked Robinson, through Parrott, to pose for a photograph with him. Jack agreed at once. When Parrott offered to escort him to the meeting, Robinson demurred: “This is something I should do alone, not as if I’m being urged.” Behind home plate, the two men held a bat for the cameras. Years later, Jack expressed his true feelings: “Having my picture taken with this man was one of the most difficult things I had to make myself do.” And yet, in his Courier column a few days after the incident, he turned the other cheek, as he had promised Rickey he would do. “Chapman impressed me as a nice fellow,” Robinson wrote, “and I don’t think he really meant the things he was shouting at me the first time we played Philadelphia.”

  By this time, Jack also knew something more about the twisted spirit of a small section of the public. Among his voluminous mail were letters that sickened him, because they revealed levels of hatred triggered by what he, Rickey, and the Dodgers were doing in the realm of baseball. Harold Parrott recalled letters “scrawled and scribbled like the smut you see on toilet walls.” Several emphasized a general rage against blacks, but more than one involved threats to do violence to Rachel and to kidnap Jackie Junior. After he showed these letters to Rickey, a police captain called on the Robinsons at MacDonough Street in Brooklyn, where they were now living. Rickey was not one to panic, but two letters were so vicious that he had turned them over to the police: “I felt they should be investigated.” But the names and addresses of the senders turned out to be fake.

  Despite these threats, insults, and humiliations, Jack was steadily growing in confidence and psychological strength when, near the middle of May, the Dodgers set out on the trip that would complete the first grand cycle of the season, out west to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis. The freak show that had been his presence a month before, at the start of the season, had slowly changed into something far more ordinary, more human, even as he strove to be an extraordinary player. At one level, Rickey’s experiment was a success; at another, more personal level, concerning Jack’s future, it was undecided. Whether or not he would take hold in the major leagues was still very much a question. His fielding and base running often seemed superior, his hitting less so. “I do not profess to be a finished first baseman yet,” Jack wrote on June 7, “and I know that I have made a number of mistakes.” In the New York Times, Arthur Daley, defending Jack’s right to a fair trial in the major leagues, also allowed that “the Negro first baseman hasn’t been any ball of fire.”

  No one was more keenly aware of the challenge than Jack. Away against Cincinnati, on May 13 and 14, with the stands jammed with his supporters, the Dodgers lost both games of their series even as he maintained an eight-game hitting streak. In this city, he could stay with the team at the Netherlands Plaza Hotel—but was not allowed to use its dining room or swimming pool. Next, against the Pirates, Brooklyn dropped two out of three to continue its slide. In the first game, some of the Pirates appeared to balk at taking the field against Robinson and the Dodgers, but quickly came to their senses. But for Robinson the series was a personal triumph, with six hits in thirteen at-bats for his best performance in a series thus far. He was also well received by some Pirate players and fans. In one play, hustling to beat out a hit, he collided with the massive first baseman Hank Greenberg, in his first season with Pittsburgh and his last as a player, after a league-leading forty-four home runs for Detroit in 1946, but the two players dusted themselves off and chatted amiably. Years before, Greenberg had endured nasty baiting from various players and fans as a Jew. “Stick in there,” Jack remembered Greenberg telling him. “You’re doing fine. Keep your chin up.” “Class tells,” Jack commented to a reporter. “It sticks out all over Mr. Greenberg.”

  But not every Pirate was as nice. The pitcher Fritz Ostermueller, formerly of the Dodgers, almost beaned Jack, who threw up an arm but ended up in the dirt, writhing in pain. Some Pirates showed concern
, but to Jack the response of his own teammates was far more gratifying; they rained imprecations on Ostermueller’s head. “The guys on the team are all for him,” Sukeforth commented happily about Robinson. “You could see that by the way they acted when he got hit.… Mr. Jackie Robinson’s going to do all right.” The second game had its own measure of drama. It featured the Pirates pitcher Kirby Higbe, traded by the Dodgers after his part in the move against Robinson. His first pitch to Pee Wee Reese, who had not joined the rebels, was at his head; getting up, Reese hit the next pitch for a home run.

  In Chicago, a record Sunday crowd of 46,572 paying fans at Wrigley Field welcomed Jack, who now had hit safely in fourteen straight games. His streak ended that day—but the Dodgers won the game. In this series, Jack’s patience was sorely tested when the Cubs shortstop Len Merullo kicked him after the two players became entangled at second base on a pick-off attempt. Jack’s arm reared back to strike but he stayed in control. Merullo’s act may have reflected the mood of many Cubs. According to one player years later, this team, too, had been ready to strike rather than play against Jack, until the position of league officials became clear.

  Next, the Dodgers rolled on to St. Louis, where the Cardinals were in last place but, with hitters like the extraordinary Stan Musial (who was always friendly to Jack) and pitchers like Harry “the Cat” Breechen, still to be feared. Rain washed out the first game, at night; but Brooklyn beat Breechen to take the second. Off the field, Jack had to put up with being barred at the city’s elegant Chase Hotel, where the Dodgers usually stayed. Instead, he registered unhappily at the black DeLuxe Hotel.

  Although such humiliations drew no protest from the white players themselves, Jack’s relationship with them steadily improved. In one play against the Cardinals, at first base, he stopped a hot smash with his glove, then comically lost sight of the ball between his feet while the infielders yelled at him to make a throw; later, his teammates, including veterans like Hugh Casey, ribbed him in a way that told him that they were now starting to see him as one of them. On the train, sometimes he played cards with Spider Jorgenson and Marvin Rackley, or Ed Chandler, a pitcher; sometimes he sat casually around the regular bridge game that included Sukeforth, Parrott, and Casey. At one of these games Casey almost curdled Jack’s blood by breezily sharing with him his secret for changing his luck at cards down home in Georgia: “I used to go out and find me the biggest, blackest nigger woman I could find and rub her teats to change my luck.” Casey then rubbed Jack’s hair. In the shocked silence that followed, Jack swallowed hard, dug down deep, and said nothing. Ironically, Casey was one of the older players who liked to help Robinson in practice; he was also quick to back him more than once that season in rough episodes with opposing players. Dixie Walker had also come around. The same player who rudely rebuffed Duke Snider when the rookie outfielder asked for help in learning a certain play—“Find out for yourself, kid”—gave Jack tips about hitting.

  At mealtime—the witching hour of race relations—Jack often ate alone, or with younger teammates like Snider. Growing up in Compton, California, Snider was in junior high school when he began to marvel at Jack’s gifts: “I had been a Jackie Robinson fan long before most of the world heard about him.” To other players, eating in public with a black man was an embarrassment not to be endured. Still, the clamorous interest of whites and blacks in Robinson only grew. Wendell Smith, who roomed with him on one trip, recalled the telephone jangling incessantly with invitations. “Robinson is now paying the price of fame, just as Joe Louis has been doing for years,” Smith declared. “He seldom has a moment to himself. He is the target of well-wishers, autograph hounds and indiscreet politicians who would bask in his glory to win prestige for themselves.” Late in May, the Courier complained about black fans who “displayed too much enthusiasm over Jackie, cheered every time he did so much as walk out on the field.” Later, it confessed to “fears and apprehensions that some unlearned and untutored buffoons would attempt to put on their act and create a scene” over Jack. But to these fans, Robinson was their shining black prince, and they wanted him to know that he could count on their love and admiration in his time of struggle.

  Roger Wilkins, a fifteen-year-old black boy in Grand Rapids, Michigan, would comment years later: “In 1947, Jackie Robinson was as important to me and other blacks, especially young blacks, as a parent would have been, I think. Because he brought pride and the certain knowledge that on a fair playing field, when there were rules and whites could not cheat and lie and steal, not only were they not supermen but we could beat ’em. And he knew what he was doing. He knew what the stakes were every time he danced off a base. If he failed, we failed. Every steal he made could have been a bonehead play: ‘Stupid Nigger!’ He was not a dumb man, doing what came naturally. He knew what he was trying to do. And this man, in a very personal sense, became a permanent part of my spirit and the spirit of a generation of black kids like me because of the way he faced his ordeal.”

  And an ordeal it was in those first few weeks, when many pitchers seemed determined to baptize the black rookie by fire. In the thirty-seven games played before the end of May, Jack was hit by pitches six times; in the entire 1946 season, no National League player had been hit by pitches more than six times. “But as he had promised Rickey,” Red Barber noted, “he said nothing, just took his base, licked his wounds.” While Robinson’s color was almost certainly a factor in these blows, it only compounded the tendency of pitchers to throw at rookies. Robinson was hit by pitches but three more times over the rest of the season. He had passed a key test of courage, one that broke many a young ballplayer. Besides, hitting Robinson meant putting him on base, and few pitchers wanted him dancing and prancing on the base paths while they tried to do their job.

  In the last week of May, after his first complete round of all the other teams in the league, he was happy at last to be back “in dear old Brooklyn.” To celebrate his return he had three hits in four at-bats against the Phillies. His batting average rose sixteen points to a respectable .283; on May 25, he also hit his second home run of the season. He was learning the rhythms of the season, its constant demand for vigilance. If he had found out anything about the major leagues thus far, Jack wrote, “I have learned that you can never stop thinking and that all the time you’re in the ball game you have to keep hustling.” He was sure now that he was up to this challenge. On the last day of May, the Dodgers were only two games out of first place.

  BY THIS POINT, Jack and Rachel were now living in Brooklyn itself. After about two weeks at the Hotel McAlpin, a woman had showed up unannounced with an offer to share with her an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They accepted the offer sight unseen, but soon regretted it. At 526 MacDonough Street, at the corner of Ralph Avenue, they found not the stylish building they had imagined but a tenement infested with roaches. The Robinsons rented a back bedroom, and their landlady had one to the front; but she had a regular visitor who parked himself every evening in the living room. Without a car, the Robinsons found their freedom sharply curtailed. For recreation, they often took the baby and rode the buses about the city. (Their arrangement was not so unusual; that year, Snider and Gil Hodges, then a backup catcher, were sharing a room in a private home in Flatbush and walked to work at Ebbets Field. “Times were simpler in 1947,” Snider would explain.)

  Under such pressures and the demands of a small child, the Robinsons’ room inevitably pulsed with simmering little tensions that were not eased by the unwillingness of both Jack and Rachel to talk much about their most private needs, and by her wish not to add to Jack’s troubles. In those months, according to Rachel, Jack’s worries “were eating at his mind, for he would jerk and twitch and even talk in his troubled sleep, which was not like him.” Sometimes he would raise his voice in anger, but anything more violent was out of the question. Aware of his ordeal, she tried hard to make their home a haven, which Jack appreciated; he had little interest in going out with the boys. Once at home, however
, he felt both contentment and the usual irritations, which he understood only imperfectly, because he was not much given to doubting himself. Around the house he helped a little, but only a little; he had a traditional attitude to what was man’s work and woman’s work. With Jackie he would change a wet diaper but never one soiled; he would feed his son but could not be scheduled to help. He expected peace and quiet as he buried his head in his beloved newspapers, and mornings he wanted a loving send-off as he headed to the park.

  For all the tensions, he was sure that he loved his wife and that she loved him. One day in March, on board a Pan American Clipper flying the Royals to Panama, Jack had poured out his feelings for Rachel and also hinted at the tensions between them. “Darling,” he wrote in a short letter, “As we fly through the air with what seems to be the greatest of ease my thoughts as usual drift back to you and I am again reminded that I love you so very much that life without you would seem empty indeed. I have never in my 28 years been so very happy and I feel that I have just about all in my life a man can ask for.” He knew well enough, he admitted, that his temper was sometimes sharp and that his edges were still rough. “I have loved you very much,” he insisted, “even the times I was angr[y]…. I know I don’t show it but darling these last few weeks away from you proves that my life when you are near is the closest to heaven I have ever been. I have no desire to even look at anyone else because when I do they all seem very sad and I get disgusted.” Now that they had a child, “it is really a wonderful life. I can hardly wait to see you and show you how much of your love I have missed.”