Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Jack’s weak joke about his gray hair was meant to deflect the pain he felt at yet another sign of the ironies of racism in America. In 1956, perhaps the best example of this perversity was the appointment of Bobby Bragan by Branch Rickey (as Rickey stepped down as general manager of the Pirates) to be field manager of the club. In 1947, refusing to play with a black man, Bragan was traded by Rickey from the Dodgers. Also ironic was the fact that Bragan had become, apparently, an excellent coach and manager of black players. In an article, “Why Can’t I Manage in the Majors?” (as told to Milton Gross), Robinson probed possible answers: “Because I am a Negro? Because I am emotional? Because I can’t get along with people, no matter what the pigmentation of their skin? Because white players would resent me and would be reluctant to take orders from me? Because baseball isn’t ready now or never will be ready to accept a Negro as a manager at the major league level? Because I’m not qualified by experience or ability?” Looking back, he knocked down each theory. From a boy, he had played well with whites, many of whom had remained his friends; as a player, he had been loyal and obedient, with a fine sense of team solidarity. “My managers know that I gave them everything I had as a player,” he insisted. “I believe my players would give me everything they have if I were a manager. Maybe I wouldn’t be a good manager, but the reason would come from what was inside me, not outside me, and inside my players.”

  WITH THE WORLD SERIES OVER, Jack temporarily set aside thoughts of business and left with the Dodgers on a twenty-game tour of Japan. For him, as for many of the Dodgers, the trip represented a financial sacrifice; as a barnstormer, certainly, he could have made more than twice the money. Several players went unwillingly; however, to the relief of the State Department, which viewed his participation as important, Robinson never hesitated about going. This would not be the first tour of Japan by an American team after World War II, but its diplomatic and cultural importance was obvious. “Your own presence in Japan will make a contribution,” a government official had assured him, “the value of which cannot be estimated.” Besides, all the Dodger wives were invited, and Rachel was eager to make the trip. After her mother came from Los Angeles to stay with the children, Jack and Rachel left on the longest journey of their lives together.

  Columbus Day, October 12, found the team in Los Angeles. There, the Robinsons happily visited family and friends, and O’Malley happily took a helicopter ride. The helicopter was owned by the Sheriff’s Department of the County of Los Angeles, and his host on board was Kenneth Hahn, a member of the County Board of Supervisors. From on high, O’Malley looked down speculatively at various parcels of land where, with the cooperation of the Board of Supervisors, a major-league ball club might build a new park. This was a crucial step in O’Malley’s gestating plan to move the team west to California. Unknown to the players, Ebbets Field would be home for only one more year. Then the Brooklyn Dodgers would cease to exist. The club would be reborn, in California, as the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  In Japan, after a few easy days in Hawaii, the Dodgers traveled all over the country, including Osaka, the ancient imperial city of Kyoto, Nagasaki with its ruins from the atomic bomb dropped on it in World War II, and the industrial city of Nagoya in central Honshu. For both Jack and Rachel, the tour was a grand experience. While Jack was at the ballpark, Rachel spent much of her time in the company of O’Malley’s wife, Kay, a bright, engaging, cultivated woman who, like Rachel, liked museums and the theater. “Walter O’Malley had all sorts of Japanese friends,” Rachel recalled, “so our welcome everywhere was very warm.” But Jack was also probably the people’s favorite in Japan, and he responded in kind. “What was unusual about Jack in Japan,” Rachel said, “was that he tried new things eagerly, which was not always the case at home. There he was, dressing up in kimonos, trying gamely to eat all kinds of unfamiliar food. We had a lot of fun watching the geisha girls try to make him comfortable, because he literally could not sit down with his legs out, his leg muscles were so tight and large. But he tried; he was in high spirits most of the time. I think he saw the tour of Japan as a culmination of his Dodger career, especially after the World Series victory the year before. I think he knew the end was in sight.”

  On the baseball field, true to his fighting spirit, Robin-San became the first Dodger ejected by an umpire from a game in Japan (an American umpire, Jocko Conlan). Japanese baseball was then a decorous affair compared with its American counterpart, but the local fans understood what he had represented, including the samurai warrior spirit Robinson to some extent embodied in his career. But before Jack left Japan with the Dodgers, the United States ambassador, John M. Allison, sent him a special message of thanks for “what you have done while in this country.” Allison praised Jack’s “magnificent sportsmanship,” which had helped to strengthen the ties “between the people of Japan and the people of America.”

  Returning to the United States, Jack took to the links with pleasure, but was soon on the road as a speaker, mainly for the NCCJ. The most important address came in late November, when he acted as master of ceremonies at a $100-a-plate dinner organized by the regional NCCJ at the Palmer House in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley also spoke. But Jack was also about to make a major change in the focus of his volunteering. Without breaking with the NCCJ or the Harlem YMCA, he decided to pay far more attention to the NAACP. Across the South, the association was under serious pressure and in desperate need of funds. In Alabama that year, for example, after it refused to allow hostile local officials to examine its books, the NAACP was fined $100,000 and forbidden by court order to operate within the state. In many other places, membership in the association was a dangerous business. Jack decided that this was where he should direct his efforts. Late in the year, accordingly, he agreed to become national chairman of the annual Fight for Freedom Fund campaign of the NAACP and to make an extended tour in the winter in that capacity.

  The turning point for him probably was a notice he had received earlier in the year, in June, that the NAACP had decided to accord him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, given annually to a black American whose achievements had brought credit to the race. Robinson would be the forty-first person but the first athlete to win the medal, which in the past had gone mainly to artists, scientists, and civil rights leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, and Ralph Bunche. To Jack, it was welcome evidence that he had transcended athletics in the course of his long career as a sportsman, and made the kind of lasting impression on American society to which he had long aspired. On December 8, at a gala luncheon at the Hotel Roosevelt in Manhattan, before a gathering of prominent civil rights leaders and their supporters, Jack proudly accepted his medal. On hand were the former president of the NAACP, Arthur B. Spingarn, and Amy Einstein Spingarn, whose late husband, Joel E. Spingarn, also a past president, had funded the award. Jack was introduced by his friend the network television star Ed Sullivan, and presented with the award by Channing H. Tobias, the chairman of the board of the NAACP. According to its citation, the medal came “in recognition of his superb sportsmanship, his pioneer role in opening up a new field of endeavor for young Negroes, and his civic consciousness.”

  In accepting the medal, Robinson thanked various individuals, including his mother, his wife, and Branch Rickey; but also mindful of the harsh criticism he had been receiving, he seized the moment to justify the correctness of his fighting attitude over the years in facing injustice. “I am now quite convinced,” he declared, “that the way I have played and the way I have tried to conduct myself was the right way.” Many people had advised him “not to speak up every time I thought there was an injustice. I was often advised to look after the Robinson family and not to worry about other people.” Sometimes the “biting criticism” left him doubting himself. Moreover, “many times I have been told that I should just let things work themselves out without involving myself in them. If I did so, many honors and awards would come my way
.” But if he had lost some prizes, “I am pretty certain now that what I have tried to do was in keeping with the spirit which the Spingarn Medal represents.” The NAACP was “the tireless champion of the rights and well-being of the Negroes of America. It is even more than that, because its cause is the cause of democracy, which makes it the champion of all Americans who cherish the principles on which this country was founded.”

  Then, within a day or two of the medal ceremony, his life took an even more decisive turn. Martin Stone’s efforts to find the right job in business for Jack finally paid off. Around December 1, Jack received a telephone call from William H. Black, the president of a popular chain of coffee shops, Chock Full o’ Nuts, asking that Jack join him for lunch in Manhattan. Within a week of their meeting, Black decided to offer Jack the job of director of personnel for the entire operation. At first glance, the proposed job seemed far removed from Robinson’s interests and capabilities; but Black was convinced that he was the man for the position. Initially skeptical, Jack quickly became fascinated by the prospect of a position that would put him in charge of the welfare of more than a thousand people, most of them black.

  Black’s story was American to the core. An engineering graduate of Columbia University but with no job in the offing because of a recession, he had started out humbly around 1922, selling nuts at a stand under a staircase in a building at Forty-third Street and Broadway. Soon he had several small nut shops. Then, in 1931, with nuts suddenly a luxury in the Depression, Black converted several shops into “restaurants” specializing in a five-cent cup of coffee and a popular, five-cent nutted cheese sandwich made with whole-wheat raisin bread. By the 1950s, Chock Full o’ Nuts was a city institution, selling its own line of roasted coffee and baked goods but noted also because of Black’s humane rules of employment, which included generous annual holiday allowances, a day off with pay on each worker’s birthday, a substantial Christmas bonus, and health, life insurance, and retirement plans at no cost to the employees. Black had also made sure that he employed both blacks and whites.

  According to him, it was his idea to approach Robinson, whom he had never met, about coming to Chock Full o’ Nuts after a vacancy suddenly arose in personnel. “From what I had read about Jackie,” he said, “he was just the man for the job. I arranged to have lunch with him.” The lunch went well, he told the press; “I was convinced he is the man for us.” He then arranged for Robinson to make a day-long tour of the Chock Full o’ Nuts empire. As Black had hoped, Robinson began to see himself in the position. Black probably did not share with Jack one of the main reasons for his interest in him: the owner’s hope that Robinson would act as a buffer between his employees and the trade union movement, which Black feared as a businessman. According to Stone, who remembered the sequence of events differently, Black had mentioned to some friends of Stone “that he was having trouble with his employees over a trade union. He didn’t want his work force unionized. In the shops, most of the employees were black. I went to see Black in the hope that he would select Jack to take charge of personnel matters.”

  In any event, on December 10, Black and Stone (“just about the best friend I have,” Robinson declared happily the following month) met to negotiate terms. As vice-president in charge of personnel relations, Jack would be paid $30,000 a year along with a company car and stock or stock options. The initial agreement, commencing on March 4, 1957, would be for two years, at the end of which, if reappointed, Robinson would get a five-year contract—although, Black insisted, “I told Jackie that as far as I am concerned, this is a lifetime job.” Stone and Black agreed that Robinson, if he agreed to the terms, would come to Black’s office in Manhattan two days later, on December 12, to sign the contract.

  For Jack, this was not a tough decision to reach; he was eager to accept the offer. As for Rachel, she “didn’t try to influence me one way or the other,” he insisted the following month. “She wanted this to be my decision.”

  Jack then faced two prime, possibly conflicting, obligations. One was to tell the Dodgers he would not be coming back; the other was to share the news with the weekly magazine Look, so as to comply with an agreement he had reached with the magazine two years before, in connection with his three-part article there, to give Look exclusive rights to the story of his retirement. In return, Look would pay Jack a fee of $50,000 (in reality, a two-year sports consultantcy at $25,000 a year).

  Suppressing the story until Look could publish it guaranteed that Jack’s departure from baseball would be controversial; but neither Look nor Robinson could have anticipated the next turn of events. On December 11, the day before Jack was due in Manhattan to sign his contract with Black, a Dodger employee called to say that Buzzie Bavasi wanted to see him in Brooklyn at 11:00 a.m. the next day. Robinson, who was scheduled to be at the Look office at that time, promised to telephone Bavasi. The next morning, at the breakfast table, he told his children what he was about to do. Jackie Junior burst into tears, and David followed suit; only Sharon, knowing that Dad would be home more, beamed. Jack and Rachel then drove from Stamford to the Look office in Manhattan. Around three o’clock, Robinson finally reached Bavasi on the telephone. Bavasi, evidently not free to talk, offered to visit Jack at home later. When Robinson said he was entertaining that evening, Bavasi then agreed to telephone him again. Around four o’clock, Jack and Marty Stone proceeded to the Chock Full o’ Nuts headquarters at 425 Lexington Avenue. There, Bill Black greeted them warmly. While they were waiting to sign the contract, Bavasi tried to reach Robinson. According to Stone, “I told Jack, ‘Don’t you dare answer that telephone until we are done with this contract!’ ” Around five o’clock, as soon as Jack signed the document, Stone gave the all-clear: “Now you can call Bavasi.”

  Stone listened in as Robinson made the call. “Jack, I have news for you,” Bavasi said. “You’ve been traded to the New York Giants. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow. Congratulations!” In return for Robinson, Brooklyn would receive the left-handed relief pitcher Dick Littlefield, along with $35,000.

  Jack heard Bavasi’s message with a widening smile, because its timing seemed to confirm the wisdom of his decision to quit baseball. Still, the news rocked him, even as it soon rocked his family, his teammates, and legions of Dodger fans. The idea of their Jackie being traded was bad enough; the notion of him going to the archenemy, the Giants, was almost inconceivable. Even by baseball’s chilly standards of conduct in such matters, the trade seemed arctic. “We made the deal,” Bavasi would explain, “because we want to play one of our youngsters. As long as Jackie was on the club, the manager was going to play him. And you couldn’t blame him.” He and O’Malley had sent Robinson to the Giants because they felt “obligated to Jackie to trade him to a New York team.” After all, Jack had long made it clear that he would not play away from New York. (Thirty years later, a New York Times writer, Dave Anderson, would offer as a theory long held that O’Malley had traded Robinson to avoid taking him home to Los Angeles, where Jack had been a hero.)

  To some extent, Jack still had room to maneuver, even to change his mind. Although he had signed a contract with Chock Full o’ Nuts, Black made it clear that he would release Robinson if Jack wanted to return to baseball. Jack probably also had time to cancel his deal with Look, where the story would not appear before January 8. But he apparently never wavered. However, to maintain the appearance that joining the Giants was possible, even probable, and thus to give a heavier punch to the Look exclusive, he masked his intentions. When the Giants’ president, Horace Stoneham, telephoned Jack to express his delight with the trade, Robinson was gracious if also restrained: he would be delighted to play for the Giants, if he played for anyone. He also asked Stoneham to keep the news quiet for a while. That was impossible, Stoneham said. Too many people already knew.

  Accordingly, Jack acted as if he might be joining the Giants. “I’ll give the Giants everything I’ve got, just as I have the Dodgers,” he allegedly told one reporter. “I’ve
got no hard feelings against the Dodgers but I’m going to do everything I can to beat them next year.” Certainly he seemed to enjoy the knowledge that O’Malley and Bavasi, without knowing it, were now chasing their tails. “There was a kind of revenge in it for us,” Rachel admitted forty years later; “we felt that the top people had hurt us, and we were getting back a little at them.” When the questions came too close to the truth, Jack set out for California; the idea came from Look, which paid for the trip.

  Keeping up the charade, Jack was all humility in dealing with O’Malley, Bavasi, and Alston. In turn, their initial letters to him were gracious, even if their own main intention was to ease him off the premises quietly. On December 13, when Bavasi sent Robinson his “Official Release Notice,” he took pains to assure Jack that he had acted reluctantly. Praising Jack for often helping the team to scout and sign certain players, Bavasi hinted at a possible management role for him. Baseball was more than playing—“I think you know what I mean.” O’Malley, thanking Jack for his “courageous and fair and philosophical” response to the trade, also saw a possible “future intersection” of their paths. Alston, too, made sentimental noises. The press had exaggerated their differences; Alston had “always admired your fine competitive spirit and team play.”