Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  In Meridian, Mississippi, the previous fall, Jack had listened in horror to the reaction of a crowd at a baseball game to the news that Rocky Marciano had just knocked out the aging Joe Louis in a prize fight. To Jack’s sorrow, many people there could feel no sympathy for the fallen former champion, once among the greatest heroes in America. Louis was washed up; he should face the fact and quit. “It made me stop and think,” Robinson said, “what they might say about me if I started to go on the down grade. Like a good entertainer, I want to leave the stage with the audience asking for more.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Dodging Blows, Fighting Back

  1952–1955

  What do you think of the booing? Why are they booing me?

  —Jackie Robinson (1953)

  DESPITE JACK’S GLOOMY talk about retiring, there was really no chance in the fall of 1952 that he would voluntarily step aside. Not only did he need his salary; he also knew that his dream of making an even larger impact on the world around him still depended in large part on baseball. He talked about quitting but remained, late in 1952, determined to carry on with the adventure launched in 1945 by Branch Rickey and himself.

  At the same time, that fall he branched out further into the business world, this time as a retailer of men’s clothing. On the early evening of December 5, in response to printed invitations, a small constellation of celebrities, including Sugar Ray Robinson, Roy Campanella, and the Hollywood character actor Gabby Hayes (a rabid Dodgers fan), gathered at 111 West 125th Street for the “Grand Opening” of the Jackie Robinson Store. Over the summer, Jack had signed an agreement to do business in Harlem with a Brooklyn businessman, Lou Oster, of Bedford Stores and Bedford Clothiers (of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn). Jack intended his store to take its place alongside the other major businesses on 125th Street, Harlem’s premier shopping and business strip: the Hotel Theresa, where virtually every important black visitor to New York stayed; Frank Schiffman’s Apollo Theater, the nonpareil center of black musical and comedy entertainment; and Blumstein’s department store, a retailing fixture in Harlem since at least the 1930s.

  Robinson’s name was on the business, but little of his own money was in it. Martin Stone had given only grudging approval to the plan. “I pointed out to Jack that he didn’t know anything about the retail business,” Stone said; “but he had made up his mind, and he was very excited about the prospect.” Fascinated by Harlem and 125th Street, where he was always welcome at Schiffman’s Apollo Theater, Robinson welcomed a chance to be a part of the black community there. The store also encouraged him to bring out from California his best friend, Jack Gordon. On his last visit to Los Angeles, Robinson had urged Gordon to think of moving east with his family. As the opening of the store drew near, Jack sent a letter to Gordon, air mail and special delivery, inviting him to move to New York to work at the Jackie Robinson Store—in effect, to be his eyes and ears there when Jack was away. “After the war, I had gone to tailoring school,” Gordon revealed, “so Jack figured I was the man for the job.… Nothing was working out in California, and Jack was Jack, so we came in 1952 and we never left.” The Harlem store was “a really fine shop. Our prices were lower than at the stores downtown, because our overhead was less; but nothing was cheap. The display windows were fantastic. The quality of the clothes was like Jack’s own outfits, conservative but sharp.”

  Deliberately, because of his ethics and his pride, Robinson chose not to enter Harlem’s business world selling cheap, inferior clothing at inflated prices to the poorest folk. He hoped his store would add to the quality of life in the community, not prey on it. But if his venture started promisingly, Jack soon faced certain realities about Harlem. Money was a grave problem, perhaps one more serious than he understood; attracting many buyers of quality merchandise would not be easy. Another factor, much harder to pin down, was also at work: would most blacks shop freely at a store owned, supposedly, by a black man, even if that man was Jackie Robinson? Sugar Ray Robinson warned Jack to expect the worst. The fighter’s Harlem bar was well patronized; but his wife’s lingerie shop next door, although well stocked, was not. Becoming aware of a degree of envy and suspicion he had not anticipated, Jack advised his partners not to put his name on garment labels. “Jack used to tell them,” Gordon said, “ ‘I don’t know whether it’s a good idea. You know, some of these people are not exactly in love with Jackie Robinson. They buy where they want to buy. They like thinking of themselves as sophisticated New Yorkers.’ ”

  Over the next six years, until he sold his share in 1958, the store made him hardly any money. “Whatever his deal was,” Rachel said, “he saw very little income from it. I don’t think Lou Oster himself was making very much, to begin with. But Jack made very little in return for what he put in—his time, lending his name and his contacts.” Nevertheless, in the weeks before training camp, and whenever he was free thereafter, Robinson spent a great deal of time at his store. He liked meeting and greeting his customers there; in fact, he himself thoroughly enjoyed shopping—not for himself so much as for Rachel and, to a lesser extent, his children, especially Sharon. Loving a deal, as one woman friend put it, “Jack was an ‘I can get it for you wholesale’ man.” (“He certainly was that,” Rachel confirmed. “I’ll never forget the day in St. Albans when a truck pulled up with an entire slaughtered cow Jack had bought from somebody in Chicago. The guys had a contract to bring it to the sidewalk and they wouldn’t go a step further. Brenda and I, about eight months pregnant, had to lug it into the house. We ate a lot of beef that winter.”)

  Although the store was hardly making him rich, Jack’s name was still a valuable entity, used to endorse a line of items from calendars and glassware to cocktail napkins and party favors. In addition, his real-estate partnership also seemed to be progressing nicely. About this time, he and his partner announced the acquisition of an eight-acre parcel of vacant land at the corner of Commonwealth and Story Avenues in the Bronx, on which they planned to erect what he was now calling the Jackie Robinson Apartments. The project, comprising eight buildings that would house 612 families, would serve mainly low-income tenants; but Jack was not coy about his financial interest in the project. “I’m no longer a young man,” he said. “I’m trying to save money for when my legs give out.”

  In the off-season, Jack found himself embroiled in a dispute about baseball and racial discrimination. Appearing on a popular television program, Youth Wants to Know, he was asked by a girl whether he thought that the Yankees, still an all-white team, were anti-Negro. Behind the question was a small cloud hovering over yet another successful Yankee year in 1952—the failure of the team to bring up Vic Power, a fine-hitting black first baseman at Kansas City in their farm system. Jack’s immediate answer was “Yes.” He was referring, he stressed, not to the players, who were “fine sportsmen and wonderful gentlemen,” but to the Yankee management: “There isn’t a single Negro on the team now and there are very few in the entire Yankee farm system.”

  At Yankee Stadium, George Weiss, the general manager, reacted with outrage. The Yankees would field a Negro when it found one “who can play good enough ball to win a place on the Yankees,” but would not hire a black “just for exploitation.” Among insiders, Weiss was well known for being far more solicitous of his team’s wealthy Westchester County fans than about abstract notions of fairness and democracy. Nevertheless, a number of writers gave Robinson a drubbing for the remark; even Wendell Smith in the Courier advised that “everyone should be very careful in these days and times about making such charges.” Ford Frick, the commissioner of baseball, telephoned Robinson to request an explanation. Sending Frick a transcript of the show, Robinson pointed out that he had been asked a question: “I merely said what I honestly felt. Whether it’s true I do not know, but that’s the way I felt.” According to Jack, Frick asked him “to avoid the issue in the future if I could do so and I said ‘certainly.’ But I also told him … I would give the same answer if I were ever asked the same questio
n again.”

  If Jack regretted anything about the incident, it was probably the reactive nature of his part in it. Eager to speak out on questions of racism and justice, but lacking a proper forum, he had found himself once again on the defensive, forced to contribute to the debate on terms set largely by others. Seeking to alter that pattern, that winter Robinson became editor of a monthly magazine aimed mainly at blacks, Our Sports. In April 1953 the first issue appeared. According to Roger Kahn, who wrote for the magazine, the short-lived Our Sports was an offshoot of Our World (which had published pictures of the Robinsons’ wedding in 1946). In May, the second number of Our Sports included articles by Joe Louis, Kahn (“What White Big Leaguers Really Think of Negro Players”), and Robinson himself (“My Feud with Leo Durocher”), ghostwritten by Kahn. In July, in the third number, Jack published his piece “The Branch Rickey They Don’t Write About.”

  The sensitive, well-read Kahn was one of his favorite writers; Milton Gross was another. In February, Sport magazine published Gross’s “Why They Boo Jackie Robinson,” perhaps the most provocative and complex essay written to date on the Dodger star. Jack himself had provided the title. Ridden harshly by Giants fans at the Polo Grounds in September after he refused to pay the fine imposed by Warren Giles, he had asked Gross almost plaintively: “What do you think of the booing? Why are they booing me?” Gross’s article, for which he interviewed both Jack and Rachel at their home, searched for answers to some loaded questions about Jack’s character and personality, as well as the apparent erosion of his popularity among whites: “Is Jackie overly aggressive? Is he getting too big for his pants? Is he a cry-baby, a pop-off taking advantage of his position? Does he go looking for trouble? Is he much too prone to feel he is being singled out for censure?… Have the last two years begun to break down the good will and respect he built in his last four years in baseball?”

  To Gross, Jack pleaded unselfishness in his actions, which were aimed at helping his team win. Of the fans he asked, “Do they think I do things deliberately to harm my popularity? I do them emotionally. I do them to win. I don’t do them for Jack. I do them for the team.” Giles’s censure had stirred up the fans unfairly: “I think the adverse criticism, implied or otherwise, from the president’s office had a lot to do with it.” As a player, he was being held to a different standard. Matters involving him were “always magnified,” he said, but “I do nothing that others on my club and on the other clubs do not do.” Racial intolerance, he insisted, was the cause. “If the public will analyze it, they will see that those who have become opposed to me resent my success deep down inside only because I am a Negro.” With no desire to be a martyr for black Americans, he still had a strong obligation to them. “I am not carrying the cross for the Negro people,” Jack argued, “but I do have a sense of responsibility. I don’t believe the people I’m trying to help would want me to walk away from trouble.”

  Perhaps the most fragile thread in this inquiry had to do with the relationship between the controversies and the health of his mind. If he was different from other players, he ventured, “maybe it’s because I like to win more than some of the others. Maybe I take defeat harder.” Why he was that way was another matter. Even less easily answered was the question about the extent to which his genuine ordeal both as a player and as a black man may have affected his mental stability. Unwittingly, Rachel raised the question in the article even as she defended him. “The very violence of Jack’s reaction[s],” she argued, “shows they’re spontaneous.” This was a good defense of spontaneity, but not of clarity of vision, or mental health. Rachel and Jack were aware of this distinction; but the last thing he wanted was to be immobilized by it, to become passive out of the fear that he could not see correctly, from persistent self-doubt. Robinson had taken it upon himself to carry forward his people’s struggle against injustice. At whatever cost to his happiness, he would continue to scream when he felt pain, lash back when unfairly attacked, shout the truth in the face of power.

  In America, with its tragic history of race relations, this amounted, in a bizarre way, to progress. “People,” Rachel told Gross, “are now recognizing the Negro as an individual. It’s an endorsement of our American way of life. It’s not as it should be yet, but it’s progressing.” Unfortunately, in 1953 few black celebrities were paying a higher price for this progress than Jackie Robinson.

  IN JANUARY, Jack and Buzzie Bavasi had agreed quickly on the terms of his new contract. “I’ve always been treated fairly by the Dodgers,” he told the press, “and I knew I wouldn’t have contract troubles this season.” His salary was thought to be again around $42,000—about the same as Reese’s, but probably still the highest on the club.

  He reached training camp with one major personal goal for the 1953 season. Over the previous two years, his batting average had dropped thirty points, down to .308; he was determined to reverse this trend. “I hit a couple of homers late last season and suddenly went homer-nuts,” he explained sheepishly; this year he would “forget the long ball and begin work at spraying my hits to all fields.” He felt good about the club: “I don’t see any team in the National League that compares with us in overall strength.”

  But even before the camp opened, trouble struck. On February 21, Charlie Dressen announced in Vero Beach that he would move the outstanding veteran Billy Cox from third base, where he was a benchmark player, and make him a utility fielder. (“That ain’t a third baseman,” Casey Stengel said about Cox. “That’s a fuckin’ acrobat.”) Hearing about his move first from a writer, Cox became upset. His dismay turned to bitterness with the brilliant performance in camp of Jim “Junior” Gilliam, a black Montreal player who had won the MVP award in the International League in 1952. An excellent fielder, Gilliam had also batted .301 as a switch hitter and driven in 112 runs. Dressen wanted Gilliam for the Dodgers, and at second base, Jack’s position. A better hitter than either Cox or Gilliam, Jack would move to third base. What was first mentioned to Cox as a springtime experiment now threatened to cost him his job. The fact that Dressen had not been frank with him disturbed Cox some; the fact that Gilliam was black may have rankled him. Although the club had come to accept Robinson and Campanella, the Dodgers were on the brink of fielding the first team in the majors with a black majority. (After what seemed like reluctance, they would do so in July 1954, with Robinson, Campanella, Gilliam, Sandy Amoros, and Newcombe.)

  In the New York Post, Gross’s story on the situation involving Cox, Dressen, Gilliam, and Robinson was ominously titled “Trouble on the Dodgers.” Although Jack hated to cater to racism, he knew that the matter had to be settled soon. “I know Cox is upset,” he admitted, “but I don’t think it’s anything personal.… I just hope he’s not angry at me, and from what I’ve heard from some of the other fellows, he’s not. Someone has moved him out of his position and he has a right to be upset. I don’t think it makes any difference to him whether that someone is white or Negro.” Conceding that he was less gifted as a fielder than either Cox at third or Gilliam at second, he offered to play any other position. (However, Jake Pitler ridiculed a reporter’s suggestion that Gilliam had run Jack off second base: “There isn’t a guy in baseball who can run Robinson off second base if he doesn’t want to go. He’s still the best second baseman in baseball.” Robinson had moved to help Gilliam, with whom he roomed for a while, and liked a great deal, and their club.) Meanwhile, Bavasi met quickly with the veterans to resolve the situation and preserve Dodger unity, even as Jack’s good friend and club ally Carl Erskine, who would win twenty games that year, assured writers that Brooklyn was just fine: “You couldn’t dream up a better relationship than that we have between the white and Negro members of our team.”

  The controversy had died down, with little residual damage; the Dodger tradition of racial harmony, forged since 1947 in the fires of controversy, met its latest test well. The outstanding playing of the black Dodgers (Newcombe was still in the Army) could not be denied, although Joe Black
, the stalwart Dodger reliever of 1952, fell into a slump from which he never fully recovered. But Gilliam, benched at one point for weak hitting, secured second base, and in the regular season Campanella would hit more home runs, 40, and drive in more runs, 142, than any other major-league catcher to date. Jack himself surprised with his versatility; that year, he fielded five different positions. From his accustomed second base, he made the transition to third smoothly; then, with Gil Hodges wallowing in a batting slump, Dressen moved Jack to first base, his 1947 spot. Next, on May 21, Jack ventured into left field and did so well that thereafter he alternated between left and third. Playing in left field was Jack’s idea. “Our outfield wasn’t going too good,” he said, “and I figured they could get along without me in the infield. It doesn’t make any difference to me where I play, so I figured I might as well be where I could do the team the most good.” Most likely, he hoped to ease the pressure on Billy Cox.

  Robinson’s shuttling confused voters for the All-Star Game. “How do you vote Robinson onto the team?” Arthur Daley puzzled. “Is he a third-baseman or is he a left-fielder? The voter has to be specific.” After Warren Giles ruled that Jack’s proper position, for All-Star purposes, was at third, he came in second in the voting behind the dazzling young home-run hitter Eddie Mathews of the Milwaukee Braves (that year, the Braves had left Boston for Milwaukee).

  Although Jack made few efforts to curb his tongue or his fighting spirit, he kept his temper ultimately in check. In July, for example, he and the Cardinals catcher Del Rice seemed ready to come to blows when Rice, irritated by Robinson’s griping with an umpire, demanded that Jack “get up there and hit.” The two men stood chest to chest, yelling at one another, until Eddie Stanky shoved them apart. Robinson had a gift for laughing off incidents of this sort, for apologizing if he thought he was in the wrong, for shaking hands and moving on—if sometimes to the next collision. Afterward, he praised Stanky for stepping in, and teased Rice. “I knew there wasn’t going to be any fight,” he claimed, “because Rice kept his mask on the whole time. He’s not going to fight with a mask on.”