Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Within a few days, however, events in upstate New York, in the normally quiet community of Peekskill, shook Jack’s sense of peace about his role in the HUAC affair. On Saturday, August 27, Robeson’s scheduled appearance there at a benefit concert on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization denounced as subversive by the United States attorney general, brought out hundreds of angry opponents. They set up roadblocks, burned crosses, attacked buses and cars, demolished and torched the concert stage, and set off fights with concert patrons in which thirteen people were injured, including three with knife wounds. Friends of the singer, fearing for his life, spirited Robeson away.

  The next day, Jack was sitting quietly in the Dodgers dugout, preparing for a game, when the Daily Worker sports editor, Bill Mardo, approached him with a newspaper account of the riot. Unaware until then of the events, Robinson read in shocked silence. Then he slowly lifted his eyes, as Mardo recalled, and with “anger written all over his face,” gave his considered response: “Paul Robeson should have the right to sing, speak, or do anything he wants to. Those mobs make it tough on everyone. It’s Robeson’s right to do or be or say as he believes. They say here in America you’re allowed to be whatever you want. I think those rioters ought to be investigated.” Communism was not outlawed in the U.S.A., Jack pointed out; thus, “if Mr. Robeson wants to believe in Communism, that’s his right. I prefer not to.” He ended by expressing regret that in America, “anything progressive is called Communism.”

  Near the end of his life, in his autobiography I Never Had It Made, Robinson would write of eventually having grown “wiser and closer to painful truths about America’s destructiveness,” and of gaining thus “an increased respect” for Robeson and his sacrifice. To Mardo, however, Robinson’s change had started with Peekskill. At that point, recognizing how much experience he and Robeson shared as blacks in America, “Jackie Robinson put his hand in Paul Robeson’s, and together they fought the same fight. Each in his own voice, sure. But it was the same fight.”

  AFTER THE ALL-STAR GAME, Robinson’s excellent play continued. Still batting above .360 in August, he became a contender for the Most Valuable Player award. Pee Wee Reese was having the season of his life; but Robinson, who publicly backed Reese as MVP, seemed more important to the Dodgers. “Without Robinson,” Enos Slaughter declared, “they would be in the second division.” In the New York Post, Jimmy Cannon, after listing the myriad troubles overcome by Robinson, from Jim Crow to changes in the infield, asked that Jack’s baseball performance alone be considered. “You must admit,” he concluded, “this is the Most Valuable Player in the National League.”

  To an almost uncanny degree for so talented a team, Brooklyn seemed to rise and fall according to Jack’s playing. So Shotton thought. Early in August, when a badly bruised left heel seemed bound to keep Jack out of the next game, Shotton insisted that the Dodgers needed him against the Phillies. They did: in the ninth inning, with a man on base and the game tied, Jack hit his fourteenth home run of the season to lift the Dodgers to a win, 7–5. His heel injury persisted, and his overall fatigue was clear; but he kept playing. “They couldn’t get me out of the lineup with a meat-axe,” he insisted.

  Late in August, the Dodgers lost six games out of eight but then righted themselves. On September 13, Look magazine hailed Robinson as “the Ball Player of the Year.” In a tight race to the wire for the batting title with Musial and Slaughter, he prevailed with an average of .342 to Musial’s .339 and Slaughter’s .336. Second to Musial in singles, Jack tied for second place in doubles and was second in triples. He led the league in stolen bases. In November, a twenty-four-member committee of the Baseball Writers Association designated him the MVP for 1949 in the National League. Securing twelve first-place votes, he was mentioned on every ballot; Musial and Slaughter finished second and third respectively. “Well, what do you know,” Jack piped modestly. “I ought to sleep well tonight. This is the nicest thing that could have happened to me.”

  The 1949 World Series was bad news for the Dodgers and Robinson himself, who had only three hits in a series won 4–1 by the Yankees. “What is there to say?” Jack asked in the Courier. “They beat us; in fact, they kicked heck out of us.”

  Then, he, Campanella, and Newcombe (who was declared Rookie of the Year in the National League by the Sporting News), joined by Larry Doby of the Indians, left on what was planned as a thirty-day barnstorming tour of the South. With the Jackie Robinson All-Stars playing against the Negro American League All-Stars, the tour drew well at first but ended prematurely, in part because three of the four major-league stars ceased to shine. Nervous about his arm, Newcombe declined to pitch; Doby, struck painfully on the elbow by a pitched ball, dropped out; and then Robinson himself withdrew from the lineup with what was called “a light case of the flu.” Whatever the underlying reasons, the promoters halted the tour.

  Jack had good reason to return to New York, where several new opportunities arising out of his MVP year awaited him. A New York City television station, WJZ-TV, signed him up to do two weekly sports shows. One, on Saturday afternoons, would aim at young people; the other, on Thursday nights, would feature Jack interviewing celebrities, especially from the sports world. He also agreed to host a daily radio sports show on the ABC radio network. In addition, there was the solid prospect of a Hollywood movie based on the biography of Jack written by Arthur Mann, in which Jack might play himself. “All this,” he told the press, “means that I need somebody to handle my business interests. I can’t do it myself. And I know it.”

  Most important of all, Rachel was pregnant, with their second child expected in January. Their home in St. Albans still needed work, including painting, much of which Jack wanted to do himself. Christmas 1949, celebrated by the Robinsons in a house of their very own for the first time, with Jack at the height of his career, Rachel awaiting the birth of their second child, and Jackie Junior happy and beloved, was a season of unusual joy and hope, abundance and the promise of greater prosperity to come. Then, on January 13, after a pregnancy free of the mysterious fevers that had plagued her in Montreal while she carried Jackie Junior, Rachel gave birth easily to their second child. Both Jack and Rachel had wanted a girl, and a girl the new baby was. They named her Sharon. The next morning, in front of the YMCA building on 135th Street, Jack handed out cigars and accepted congratulations and was the happiest man in the world.

  CHAPTER 10

  Free at Last

  1950–1952

  He’s the indispensable man. When he hits we win.

  When he doesn’t, we just don’t look the same.

  —Jake Pitler (1950)

  SHARON’S BIRTH IN JANUARY 1950 was only the happiest event of a season filled with honors and awards, large and small, from the black world and the white, for Jackie Robinson. In Harlem, the Uptown Chamber of Commerce hailed him for his contribution to race relations. The United States Maccabi Association, perhaps the major Jewish athletic group, awarded him its Good Sportsmanship trophy. Sport magazine featured Robinson, along with the golfer Sam Snead, the tennis player Pancho Gonzales, and the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, as among the “top performers” of 1949. The newspaper publisher Frank E. Gannett presented him with the gold medal of the George Washington Carver Memorial Institute, an honor previously accorded to Eleanor Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, and the movie producer Darryl F. Zanuck. “All America must applaud this award,” Gannett declared. “It goes to a real All-American.”

  In the limelight, Jack tried to maintain a sense of balance. In an autobiographical series in the Brooklyn Eagle, he stressed his dependence on religion, his faith in God, his nightly habit of getting down on his knees at bedtime. “It’s the best way to get close to God,” he quipped, “and a hard-hit ground ball.” Sunday games kept him from going to church, he complained; perhaps “a little chapel could be built at Ebbets Field, where the fellows of all religions could go and worship a little while.” Jack talked, too, about the end of his career a
s if it might be close. By September, he revealed, his bat weighed heavily in his hands and his legs were often numb; but the worst pressure was psychological. “The strain of the last three or four years,” he told the writer Dick Young, has “done something to me. Not that I have anything to worry about, but I’m jumpy and nervous all the time.”

  For all his success Jack felt unfulfilled; or his success stirred in him sharp feelings of guilt about the poor and the sick. His work with children at the YMCA, where he was now on the board of directors, was fine, but he wanted to do more. “This is too supervised for me,” he told Lester Rodney of the Daily Worker. “I want to see the kids who can’t even come into the Y. I want to try to help where it’s needed more.” He liked visiting the sick. Race seemed not to matter as he reached out; or perhaps it mattered that he reached out to whites as well as blacks, to set an example of interracial charity. Although Jack tried to avoid publicity on these occasions, his kindness to white children often made the news. At the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled in New York, he was photographed signing a ball for a fourteen-year-old Bronx patient, Carlo Accappicini, on Child Health Day in New York, for which Jack also raised money. When he (and other Dodgers) gave blood to help save the life of a four-year-old girl, Linda Pietrafesa, newspapers took note. Jack also went well out of his way, the press pointed out in admiration, to send a baseball signed by the team to a fourteen-year-old invalid, Johnny Nagelschmidt, of Cooperstown, New York.

  Robinson clearly felt the urge to take his new fame and make something political out of it, something that more directly addressed broader questions of social injustice. About this time, he became fascinated by the efforts of the Anti-Defamation League, the most influential wing of the main Jewish community organization, B’nai B’rith (“Sons of the Covenant”). According to the ADL leader Arnold Forster, Robinson “heard me speak at a civil rights dinner, phoned and asked to meet. Jackie asked searching questions about fighting anti-Semitism. Satisfied that we Jews were on to something effective, Jackie helped intensify our cooperative relationship with black civil rights groups, determined that they use our techniques. In his speeches about racism, it became his custom to quote me by name on ADL methods, adding that when blacks succeeded in creating a duplicate operation for themselves, they would at long last be on the road to racial equality. And he worked hard to make it happen.”

  Jack’s connection with the ADL was a natural outgrowth of the new circumstances of his life, of his move from California to New York. About half of Brooklyn’s population was Jewish; among the Dodger faithful, Jews were probably far more ready than any other major group, such as the Irish or the Italians, to identify with the fight against Jim Crow embodied by Robinson. Both Jack and Rachel found themselves developing personal ties to Jews. “That may be so,” Rachel would say years later, “but for us friendship was really a personal matter, as it should be. We made friends. For whatever reason, many happened to be Jewish. We didn’t think of them as Jewish, unless we were dealing with a specific organization. They were simply interesting people who wanted to know us, just as we wanted to know them.”

  Almost certainly, the Robinsons found Jews far more ready than other whites to accept them socially. In addition to their friendship with the Satlows in Flatbush, they also grew close to Bea and Andre Baruch, a Dodgers broadcaster who also hosted the popular radio show Lucky Strike Hit Parade. Later, in Harlem, Jack fell in so easily with Frank Schiffman, the owner of the Apollo Theater, and his son Bobbie, that for some years the Harlem landmark was almost his private uptown office. Almost all of Jack’s lawyers and financial counselors, as well as business partners, would be Jewish. Jack’s friendship with a prosperous employer like Meyer Robinson, the head of Manischewitz Wines and an avid Dodger fan, was vital to him. In Chicago, he visited regularly with Caroline and David Wallerstein, who controlled a group of theaters and had been instrumental in Jack’s 1948 vaudeville tour. Jennie Grossinger gave the Robinsons (and other top athletes) virtual carte blanche at Grossinger’s, her family’s popular resort in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where over a number of years Jack was a great favorite and Rachel and the children also loved to go to rest, play, eat, and socialize.

  Friendship with whites, no matter how easily developed, typically brought with it at least a small degree of tension. The shadow of race and racism, of white guilt and black and white doubt, fell over even the more intimate relationships. As blacks, the Robinsons had more freedom now than ever before, but the knowledge that in many instances the freedom derived mainly from Jack’s celebrity took away some of the pleasure. In restaurants such as Lindy’s in New York, where Jack was treated royally, the question that haunted him was how the same restaurant would treat an ordinary black. “One way we knew the answer to that,” Rachel said, “was by looking at how I was treated when I was not with Jack—not with Jackie Robinson. Sometimes I was treated well, but very often, until or unless it came out that I was Jackie Robinson’s wife, whites would be as rude to me as they were rude to other blacks. These things upset Jack pretty badly.”

  For both Jack and Rachel, as for many black couples, the worst part of Jim Crow was watching it begin to weigh, in one way or another, on their children. In November 1949, when Jackie Junior celebrated his third birthday at home in St. Albans, the published photograph of his little party, with ice cream and cake, created a stir in some circles; other than young David Campanella, all of the guests were white. One evening, as Rachel was putting him to bed after his bath, Jackie suddenly blurted out: “Mommy, my hands are still dirty.” Stunned, Rachel quietly explained to him that his hands and her own were the same color, and clean. On another occasion, Jackie embarrassed her in a store by asking loudly, “Mommy, why are you lighter than I am?” One day, as she watched in horror, she saw youthful racism in action on her own lawn, where a “jungle gym,” set up by Jack, had become a magnet for local kids. As Rachel watched, a little white girl who had been playing amicably with Jackie suddenly became cold to him when two white boys showed up. “Look,” Rachel thought, “there’s discrimination being practiced in our own yard!” When Jackie, in tears, came running to her, she was careful. “Why isn’t she playing nicely with you now?” she asked. “Because I’m different from her,” Jackie sobbed.

  With integration, many blacks had both greater freedom and further reason for self-doubt; but Jack Robinson was not one of these. In 1954, a troubled black boy named Jimmie living in a Fort Wayne, Indiana, orphanage, shocked one of his mentors, a white man, by declaring: “I wish I was white.” The man, who did not know Robinson personally, nevertheless asked him to help set the boy straight. In a letter that reached the newspapers, Robinson told Jimmie that while his desire to be white was “understandable for a boy your age,” Jack himself did not share it; “I am so proud to be Negro that I feel really good.” Jack’s sense of the meaning of his black skin derived mainly from his faith in God, not from admiration for the African past; whatever God does is right, although we may not know God’s plan. “I am proud because God put us here on earth,” he told Jimmie, “and gave us a color that is distinctive, and then put problems before us to see what would happen.” Blacks, despite these problems, had achieved much. “Because of some handicaps we are better off,” Jack argued; Jimmie must “look in the mirror at yourself and be proud of what God gave you. I, too, have felt the pains that you must feel, but I have never been ashamed of what God has given me.”

  JACK BELIEVED IN CHARITY, but he also wanted to capitalize on his fame; thus he jumped quickly at a number of commercial endorsements. In one issue of Ebony magazine, three advertisements featured him. One endorsed the Jackie Robinson Official Baseball Game (“Pitches Curves! Fast or Slow Balls! Hit Home Runs Just as Jackie Does with the Dodgers!”). Another endorsed Chesterfield cigarettes (although Jack still hated smoking). A third hawked a line of Jackie Robinson shorts, sportshirts, and T-shirts (“Boys and Girls … I am proud to have you wear them”). In Manhattan, Macy’s department
store offered a line of Jackie Robinson jackets and caps; elsewhere Jack endorsed a line of men’s slacks. Thus he was perhaps not altogether shocked in July when a Chicago man, Stanley Kuttner, sued him for $100,000 for allegedly violating an agreement about the use of Robinson’s name to sell clothing. In The Saturday Evening Post and Ebony, and on subway billboards, Jack endorsed Wheaties, the breakfast cereal.

  Searching for a financial advisor, Jack at last found one he liked in Martin Stone, a graduate of Columbia University and the Yale School of Law, and a pioneer of sorts in television. Tall, handsome, and urbane, Stone had helped to develop a number of popular television programs, notably the children’s classic The Howdy Doody Show. One day in 1949, at the urging of a friend, he had gone out to St. Albans to visit the Robinsons about a specific legal matter. “Jack was mentioned to me,” according to Stone, “by an agent who told me Jackie Robinson was so naive he would sign anything. After I met him, I agreed; I couldn’t believe that the man could be so naive! He trusted everybody. In those days, he really had little idea what he was getting into half the time, or the kind of people he was dealing with; some of them were real crooks. My job, once we decided to work together, was to look closely at every deal when it came in, and then advise Jack how to proceed—to accept, to reject, to modify, and so on. I liked him from the start, and I think he and Rachel liked me. After all, we were still working together and good friends practically up to the end.”