Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Confident about every aspect of his game, Jack opened the 1949 season on April 19, against the Giants. His confidence seemed well placed that day; he hit a home run and two singles. Then he sank into a trance at the plate, as the team itself struggled. With the splendid tandem of Reese and Robinson at shortstop and second, the reliable Gil Hodges at first, and the incomparable Billy Cox at third, the Dodger infield was perhaps the best in baseball; Carl Furillo, Duke Snider, and Gene Hermanski anchored a solid outfield; many people already called Campanella the best catcher in baseball. But the pitching was something else. Rex Barney, projected as the ace of the staff after an excellent close to 1948, was sometimes overpowering, sometimes wild. As quick as Barney, Ralph Branca, who had won twenty-one games for the Dodgers in 1947, when he was twenty-one, started well but then weakened. The devious Preacher Roe had not returned to the form that had made him the top strikeout pitcher in the National League with the Pirates in 1945. Left-handed Joe Hatten, a dominant pitcher in 1947, was on the wane.

  At first, Jack, too, seemed a shadow of himself; but although after thirteen games he was hitting around .200 (Campanella led the league with .463), he was confident enough to joke about his travails. “The Dodgers will have a great club,” he predicted, “the day that Robinson joins them.” At last, a month into the season, Robinson showed up. In a six-game span, he had ten hits in twenty-seven trips to the plate. Before the end of May he was hitting .311, with four home runs, twenty-eight runs batted in, and six stolen bases. Even against Boston, with their aces Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain, who had befuddled Jack into a dismal .159 average in 1948, he was a terror. In one series he had six hits in twelve tries, including a two-run homer against his nemesis, the left-hander Spahn.

  Early June found Jack with a .344 average, second in the league; he led the league in runs batted in, and was tied for most stolen bases with his teammate Pee Wee Reese. Now the Dodgers were doing much better. Along with Robinson and Campanella, another “sepia” star stormed Ebbets Field: powerful young Don Newcombe, summoned in the middle of May from Montreal. Sent into action, Newcombe at first faltered; but he rebounded in his next game to pitch a shutout against Cincinnati. Newcombe had a reputation of being temperamental and even skittish; but Robinson, who saw true ability in the youngster, was determined to teach him how to win. Off the field, he could be cuddly with Newcombe. “This kid’s going to be a great pitcher,” he assured a reporter as Newcombe stood bashfully by. “All he needs to be sensational is a little more experience. He can win the pennant for us.” On the field, however, Jack was often brutal. “I cuss him out from the beginning to the end,” Robinson wrote. “I call him all the bad things I can think of. I got to, to keep him interested in the game.” By the end of the season, with seventeen wins to his credit, Newcombe would be the premier pitcher on the staff.

  By July 1, when Jack’s average had soared to .361 and Newcombe’s record was five wins and only one loss, all three black Dodgers were in contention to play in the All-Star Game, to be played that year at Ebbets Field. To Jack’s deep satisfaction, it soon became clear that he would not only make the team but also be among the top vote-getters in the National League. In the end, he received 1,891,212 votes. Only Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, the finest hitter in baseball, received more.

  On a rain-swept day, July 13, in Ebbets Field, Reese and Robinson started at their positions in the All-Star Game. Five other Dodgers saw action, including Campanella and Newcombe. Jack doubled in the first inning and scored three runs, but the National League fell, 11–7. Playing with or against some of the grandest names in baseball—Musial and DiMaggio, Williams and Feller—Robinson was at ease; he had earned his right to be there. He and the majestic DiMaggio, the ballplayer most admired by Robinson, were photographed together with a little girl as part of a drive to establish two new wings at a cancer hospital: one was to be named after DiMaggio, the other after Robinson. Seen together, Robinson seemed to embody the vital, changing future of baseball, as DiMaggio, hobbled by a foot injury, elegiacally represented its fading past.

  The presence of the three Dodger blacks on an All-Star team was yet another sweet vindication of Branch Rickey’s daring gambit; but it was a hard fact for even some locals to digest. “Negro Troops Fight Bravely in Flock Loss,” went a headline in June in the Brooklyn Eagle over a story about a game between the Dodgers and Cincinnati; “Newcombe, Robinson, Campanella Fail to Put Skids Under Reds.”

  EARLY IN JULY, before the All-Star Game, a telegram arrived from Washington, D.C., to divert Jack’s attention from baseball. To his astonishment (“I couldn’t understand why they wanted me”) a powerful congressional committee wanted him to come to Washington to testify before it. On July 8, John S. Wood, a Georgia Democrat, made the request public for Robinson to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which he chaired, as it conducted hearings on the issue of black Americans and their loyalty to the nation.

  Jack could not refuse the invitation easily; in some respects it was a command. Still, buffeted by conflicting advice from family, friends, and strangers, he pondered the wisdom of testifying in Washington. Rachel was guarded; Jack, she advised, should trust his instincts. Rickey, however, was sure that he should appear, to strike yet another blow for justice and equality. But most of the many letters and messages on the subject opposed Jack’s testifying. An NAACP representative in Washington sent a telegram seeking to find out, with concern, if Jack had actually volunteered to speak: “As you know, over [the] years we have been critical of this committee’s methods, activities, procedures, personnel and orientation.” The NAACP man offered to help Jack in his response, but some of the messages made the mistake of threatening him. “I think it was that attempt to keep me quiet,” Robinson wrote later, “that made me decide to go ahead and do it.”

  At the center of the controversy was Paul Robeson, one of the most famous and admired of living black Americans; the chairman of HUAC wanted Robinson specifically to refute statements by Robeson concerning blacks and the Soviet Union. But Jack had no special desire to join a fight against Robeson. An all-American football player and a brilliant student at Rutgers College and Columbia University Law School, Robeson had endured a host of indignities as a black in America before gaining international fame as a singer and a stage and motion picture star. Europe had received him warmly, but a visit to the Soviet Union in 1934, when he was treated with a humanity he had never known, started him down the road toward a commitment to radical socialism. After the war, his brave identification with radical causes, along with the growing enmity between the United States and the USSR, began to erode his popularity in America. Some concert halls were now denied him; pickets began to haunt his appearances. Then, according to news reports, on April 19 of that year, 1949, addressing a gathering of the leftist World Congress of the Partisans of Peace at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, Robeson had uttered his most controversial words. “It is unthinkable,” he allegedly declared about the United States and the Soviet Union, “that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.”

  Robeson’s remark, as reported, was capable of two different interpretations: either that black Americans would never fight against the USSR or that such a fight would be horribly ironic, given the history of racism in America. But the second interpretation was given short shrift; the first, with its imputation of mass treason, carried the day. An informal poll of five hundred white Americans revealed a distrust of black American loyalty and patriotism. Robeson’s remark was strongly criticized by a number of prominent black leaders, including Mary McLeod Bethune, the president of the National Council of Negro Women, and Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, who saw in the controversy a serious setback to the black cause at a critical juncture in American history. To the House Un-American Activities Committee, founded in the 1930s but freshly sparked by the int
ensifying cold war, the way was clear for a strike against the Communist effort since the 1920s to exploit Jim Crow and convert the black masses to radical socialism. HUAC invited testimony on this subject from several prominent Americans, most of them black but including also General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former supreme commander in World War II, who sent a letter attesting to the devotion of black troops under him during the war.

  Nevertheless, the spotlight was on Robinson. To many people, his brilliant career as a Brooklyn Dodger, capped by his popularity in the All-Star Game balloting, was further proof of the glory of American democracy. But Robinson was well aware of the ironies involved. He had never met Robeson, but knew that Robeson had stood up for ending Jim Crow in baseball. As Jack put it years later, “Now a white man from Georgia was asking me, a ‘refugee’ from Georgia, to denounce Robeson.” In 1943, appearing before Commissioner Landis and the major-league owners, and riding a crest of personal prestige following his Broadway triumph in Shakespeare’s Othello, Robeson had argued so powerfully for an end to Jim Crow in baseball that the owners gave him a “rousing ovation”—even as they tabled his plea. In 1945, while in Montreal for a concert, Robeson had hailed the Royals’ signing of Robinson as “the greatest step ever taken by organized baseball on behalf of the American Negro.”

  Robinson knew that he could attack Robeson only at great risk to his own popularity with many blacks, to whom Robeson was both a glamorous entertainer and a black man of unusual courage; among many whites, too, he was a highly respected, even revered figure. (“I felt so badly about it,” Sarah Satlow, no radical herself, recalled. “I had a hero worship about Paul Robeson. I thought he was justified in every sense of the word. I couldn’t believe that Jack was going to deal with that wretched committee about Robeson.”) Nevertheless, Jack decided to testify; Robeson’s alleged statement had put blacks in a poor position. He then set about preparing a statement to read to the committee, a statement he knew would be widely publicized. At first, Rickey was his main advisor as he sought words to capture his conflicted feelings about the subject; but soon it was clear to Rickey himself that someone else was needed, someone who had both keen insight into political matters and an intimate understanding of the black world. They then turned to Lester B. Granger, the executive director of the National Urban League, who himself testified before HUAC on July 14, when he dismissed the notion of significant Communist influence on black Americans. (In 1948, Robinson and Rickey had received the Urban League’s annual Two Friends interracial award.)

  Robeson’s central assertion, as reported, struck Jack as almost willfully false. Whatever their reasons, black men from the American Revolution down to World War II had struggled at every point for the right to be warriors in defense of the nation. Robeson’s statement was thus an implicit rebuke to these men, who included not only Jack himself, a commissioned officer whose patriotism had survived his court-martial, but also Rachel’s older brother and her father, whose war wounds had only strengthened their patriotism. Moreover, Robinson was already, as he would remain, firmly anticommunist. The main issue for him, as it would be for many other blacks, was the Communist attitude to religion; for Jack, this was reason enough to oppose communism. In addition, he was well aware, as Robeson should have been, that the Soviet Union under Stalin was itself a harshly repressive society. Finally, America was home, and blacks would fight for home as most people everywhere were prepared to fight for home. Robinson recalled the wonderfully elliptical words about America spoken by Joe Louis in facing a similar irony in World War II. “There ain’t nothing wrong with us,” Louis had declared, “that Mr. Hitler can fix.”

  On the morning of July 18, dressed smartly in a tan gabardine suit, Jack flew with Rachel to Washington. They arrived at the House Office Building about forty-five minutes before his scheduled appearance. As they entered the crowded committee room, flash bulbs popped and movie and still cameras shot freely from every angle; for Robinson’s appearance only, HUAC had waived its strict rules limiting photographs. As Jack read his statement in a clear, calm voice, Rachel sat nearby, her eyes fixed on him. She knew the speech by heart—as close observers of the newsreel version later could tell. “Intent on him, unconscious of the cameras,” she told a magazine writer, “I was saying every word of his speech silently along with my husband!”

  In homespun language, leavened only now and then by humor, Jack offered himself as both a humble man and one proud of his deeds; keenly opposed to racism in America but full of hope; alert to the dangers of communism but calm in facing them; aware that Communists were sometimes right but sure that communism was doomed; respectful of Robeson but dismissive of his alleged statement. Knowing little about politics, he said, he had hesitated to accept this invitation because his own field, baseball, “is as far removed as possible from politics as anybody can possibly imagine.” Many people had urged him not to show up, so “why did I stick my neck out by agreeing to be present?” The answer boiled down to “a sense of responsibility.” Although he was not an expert on much else, he was an expert on being “a colored American, with thirty years experience at it.” He had been given a rare chance by baseball to be a star, but other blacks were starting to get a chance too.

  Nevertheless, protesting against Jim Crow was important: “Every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he’s going to use every bit of intelligence, such as he has, to stop it. This has got absolutely nothing to do with what Communists may or may not be trying to do.” Similarly, “because it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality and lynching, when it happens, doesn’t change the truth of his charges.” Blacks were “stirred up long before” the Communists arrived and will be “stirred up long after the party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then as well.”

  Turning at last to Robeson, Jack was light in his touch: “I haven’t any comment to make, except that the statement, if Mr. Robeson actually made it, sounds very silly to me.” Of course, Robeson had a right to express himself as he saw fit, even if there was nothing to his prediction, if prediction it was. In time of war, the few black Communists would probably act as most other Communists would act. But most blacks would act as blacks in general had acted in the last war: “They’d do their best to help their country stay out of war; if unsuccessful, they’d do their best to help their country win the war—against Russia or any other enemy that threatened us.” People were wrong to think of radicalism “in terms of any special minority group.” He could not speak for all blacks (and neither could Robeson) but he, and they, had too much invested in America “to throw it away because of a siren song sung in bass.”

  The arch comment about “a siren song sung in bass,” an allusion to communism’s seductive promises and Robeson’s cavernous voice, was perhaps the only false note struck in the entire statement. Then, his part in the hearing over, Jack and Rachel hurried back to the airport to return home in time for him to play that evening at Ebbets Field against the Chicago Cubs.

  If he had a single misgiving about his testimony, no one at the park could tell. In a 3–0 Dodgers victory before a roaring crowd of twenty-five thousand, according to the Brooklyn Eagle, “the Ebony Express went full steam ahead.” In the sixth inning, Jack drew a walk, induced a poor throw that enabled him to scamper to third, then stole home after a series of impudent challenges to the pitcher. In the eighth inning, he tripled, then rattled a relief pitcher into committing a balk that sent him home. “Public speaking must agree with me,” he cheekily remarked.

  The next morning, and in the ensuing days and weeks, a deluge of congratulations poured over him—especially in the white press. Newspaper editorials and cartoons sang his praises, and the New York Post even offered an excerpt from his speech as an editorial entitled “Credo of an American.” “Quite a man, this Jackie Robinson,” the Daily News mused at the end of its own editorial. “Quite a ball player. And quite a
credit, not only to his own race, but to all the American people.” But the black press was more equivocal. To the New York Age newspaper, Harlemites were “split sharply on the issue.” Robinson had come back from Washington “in the dual role” of leader of his race and “handkerchief head.” The Baltimore Afro-American reported that HUAC’s maneuver in summoning Robinson had “boomeranged,” in that he had been much more severe on racism than on communism. Its headline read: “Jackie Flays Bias in Army.”

  From Lester Granger, Jack heard a far more favorable, if perhaps not altogether reliable, report on reaction on the streets of Harlem. After the first reports of Jack’s testimony on the day of his talk, he had spent five hours sampling the opinions of strangers and friends, but in “not one single case” had he heard “anything but praise” for Robinson.

  As for Robeson himself, he refused to denounce Robinson. “I have no quarrel with Jackie,” he affirmed. “I have a great deal of respect for him. He is entitled to his views. I feel that the House Committee has insulted Jackie, it has insulted me, it has insulted the entire Negro race.”

  The patriotic aspects of Jack’s speech clearly touched many white readers. One congressman, a former commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, cited Jack’s testimony in nominating him for the VFW gold medal for good citizenship. Other honors followed from local organizations, including the Junior Chamber of Commerce of Philadelphia, the Rotary Club of Hudson, Massachusetts, and the Queens Catholic War Veterans, who in December named Robinson to receive a citation of praise. The patriotic Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, named him as an honoree in a group that included General Eisenhower. Not surprisingly, Jack was pleased but also a little defensive about the episode. “I have boxes of letters from many people regarding my testimony in Washington,” he assured the public in August. “Ninety-nine per cent of them are friendly. I can show them to you.” He still had not met Robeson but would like to ask him a question: “Can you sit down in Russia and say the head man is a louse?” The answer was obviously “No. Not unless you want to play centerfield in Siberia.”