Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Jackie’s experience was different. By 1960, his life was already pockmarked with setbacks in school and a stymied relationship with his father. Even to the most amateur of psychologists, the bane of Jackie’s life was obviously the shadow cast by the famous father whose name he carried. Not yet five months old, Jackie had been present in 1947 when his father first stepped out at Ebbets Field. As Sharon would put it later, “Jackie was thrown into the noble experiment alongside our parents, and because of his name, there was no hiding place.” To adoring fans, he was often more mascot than child; they showered him with so much intrusive attention that by three he was both exploiting and resenting it. A beautiful boy, whose large dark eyes set among long eyelashes and thick eyebrows added to his air of vulnerability, Jackie Junior drew people easily to serve him, and then became dependent on them. Sharon and David grew independent, but “Jackie was more dependent, pampered, and needy.”

  In some ways, the contrast between Jackie and Sharon was telling. Four years older than she, he was so afraid of the dark during one period that he would rouse her from sleep to turn on the light for him; she would drag a chair to the light switch to reach it, then go back to her own bed. Once, at a hotel swimming pool in Miami, in front of their parents and curious fellow guests, Jackie hung back timidly on a high diving board, then watched Sharon plunge recklessly into the water. Jackie had very good athletic ability, probably more than Sharon and David, who loved sports; but, she said, “we weren’t afraid of our athletic ability, we weren’t intimidated by it, as he was.” She and David shared a horse, Diamond, that they rode with abandon into the woods and the pond; Jackie kept his distance. At school, where Sharon was a solid, dutiful student, and David sharp, Jackie had trouble reading and keeping still. Sharon came to think that, “feeling inadequate” in the face of his father’s achievement, Jackie thought “that by acting out he could become the center of attention without meeting the demands of real achievement.”

  Entering Martha Hoyt in the fall of 1954, Jackie had done well at first. “I am really very proud of Jackie and I want you to tell him for me,” his father wrote Rachel happily from Florida. “It’s so rewarding seeing the great distance he has come and I hope he is on his way to go farther. The pride he has in his work is terribly important. I hope we can keep that in him.… I am very much in love with my family.” To Jackie himself, Jack sent a tender message touched by guilt. “I know you sometimes wonder about me,” Jack admitted, “and I hope you understand that I love you, Sharon and David very much. I know that if you wanted to, you could be one of the best students in the class and I hope you will try very hard. At times I may seem to get awfully angry at you but I hope you are never afraid of me. My love for my family is as big as anything and I am proud of the progress you have made.… I want you to come to me anytime as man to man and ask anything you want.… I am already very proud of you, will you make me more proud? Please try, Jackie.”

  He wanted to see his son do better. “I am right proud of my little family,” he assured Rachel another time, “and if all works well we are sure to be proud of the Robinsons. Jackie to me is as fine a boy as I have seen.” But Jackie, unlike Sharon (“my little sweetheart”) and David (“my little man”), almost always elicited implied criticism along with compliments. A notice about good grades “makes me know you are again working. I hope to hear of many more good reports.” As the end of baseball drew closer, Jack vowed to tighten the family bonds. “I know I haven’t given the children the attention I should have,” he confessed to Rachel. “I am sure I’ll be able to make it up to them without changing our course as far as discipline is concerned. I am sure you know how fortunate I feel in having such a family and I have no doubts about them growing into outstanding youngsters.”

  “The Jackie Junior I knew as a child,” Peter Simon said, “was sweet, loving, and very talented as an athlete. We went to camp together, including my first sleep-away, in Vermont. He was a genuinely nice, bright, caring child.” To Jack Gordon’s son, Bradley, who lived in Manhattan but spent almost all his vacations at the Robinson home and became Jackie’s best friend, Jackie was not quite the child his father saw. “I saw a different side of Jackie,” Bradley said. “He was very bright, very brave, a daredevil. Dealing with other kids, he had high self-esteem. But his self-esteem around his father was a lot lower; with his mother, it was higher. He wanted his father to be proud of him, but a lot of times Jackie was befuddled about how to approach him. Eventually he became fed up with being Jackie Robinson’s son. He didn’t resent it in the sense of hating his father. Jackie had all the respect and love for him in the world. But he just couldn’t find a way to have his identity and to have his father be proud of him, too.”

  If Jackie as a boy truly disappointed his father in one area, it was in athletics, especially baseball. But the trouble was not that his father wanted a star but that Jackie, clearly gifted, soon showed little desire to succeed. In 1957, his first year of retirement, Jack took pleasure in coaching the Stamford Lions Little League team, to which Jackie belonged. (As a local reporter watched in amazement, Jack showed his “remarkable memory” by “rattling off” the name of each team member as he hit the ball to him.) The next year, Jack reported on Jackie’s first game as a pitcher (he was left-handed), in which he gave up three runs in the first inning, then settled down, but lost 3–2. “It was exciting and Jackie took it well,” Jack wrote. “I am not at all satisfied with his hitting.… I hope to influence him to change but he is a bit stubborn.” A year later, in 1959, Jack was still pleased by his son’s efforts. “Jackie is developing fine,” he wrote to the Wallersteins in Chicago. “His ballplaying is coming a lot faster than I had expected.… He loves it and with his natural ability should go places. Of course this is a father looking at a son but we are proud of his play.” And at Christmas that year: “We have so much fun with the kids. Jackie will probably be an athlete, Sharon can’t wait to get married and David is always teased because he likes to play with puppets and the piano and not much on athletics. However, at seven who cares?”

  Despite all setbacks, Jack remained optimistic about Jackie; even a stay at summer camp, he hoped, might be a turning point in the boy’s life: “I have a hunch however it is going to do him a world of good.” But at some point, Jackie stopped trying. At Martha Hoyt, working under one teacher he loved, a Mrs. Carlucci, he did fine; with less skilled or less caring elders he sank again. At Dolan Junior High School, where he clashed with a strict principal, his record remained poor, and his troubles continued during his first year at Stamford High School, which he entered in the fall of 1960, just as his father became entangled in the Nixon campaign. Rachel withdrew temporarily from NYU to watch out for him. He had also lost interest in baseball. For a while he showed promise in football—“Jackie could really play some ball,” Bradley Gordon said. “He was a defensive end and a very good one.” Soon, however, he turned away from football also.

  Jack tried to put the best face on the situation. “Jackie is trying to find himself,” he wrote Caroline Wallerstein. “We think he is about ready to do so but we’ll just wait and see.” About this time, despite Robinson’s skepticism about psychiatry, Jackie underwent counseling at the hands of Dr. Kenneth Clark, who suggested that he should be sent to a special boarding school. After some reflection, Jack and Rachel agreed. “We hope sending him away to school will spur him on,” Jack wrote, as he sought to minimize his eldest child’s crisis. “Sharon and David get as much mileage out of their ability as they can,” he declared, “but Jackie is a bit on the lazy side.”

  AS SIT-INS AND other demonstrations began to sweep across the South, and hundreds of students found themselves in jail for defying Jim Crow laws, Robinson and Marian Logan founded the Student Emergency Fund early in 1960, with money solicited in letters sent to several hundred persons. Although the fund probably never exceeded $5,000, starting in 1960 they were able to send small sums of money as well as books, cigarettes, and candy to boost the morale o
f protesters in Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, and elsewhere in the South. In July, after watching a fund-raising program on television hosted by James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality and the folksinger Theodore Bikel, Logan and Robinson sent $500 as a gift. The sum of $1,000 went to a child development center headed by Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark and her husband, Dr. Kenneth Clark. In December, when they sent over $1,000 to an embattled New Orleans couple, Robinson and Logan admitted that while the money could not compensate “for the insults, embarrassments and economic reprisals you are suffering,” it was meant as “a gesture and more tangible proof of our admiration and respect.”

  Jack sought other ways to show his concern for the student movement. When the lawyer and civil rights leader Floyd McKissick invited him to address a citywide rally in Durham, North Carolina, where students had just launched a statewide “stand-in” of segregated theaters, Jack agreed to go at once. But his major effort that spring was as part of the continuing voter-registration drives by the NAACP in the South. In some places, blacks had been forced off the voter rolls recently; in other places, they had not voted since Reconstruction. On April 16, in Decatur, Georgia, he stirred a crowd at the Thankful Baptist Church on Atlanta Avenue in connection with a voter-registration drive organized in De Kalb County; the next day, more than one thousand persons heard him in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “We are going to get our share of this country—we are going to fight for it,” Robinson insisted to the crowd. “We must take it step by step.” Older blacks should rely on the spirit of the youngsters and support the effort of “these kids in their stand-ins and sit-ins.”

  At the same time, Jack’s relationship with the Kennedys improved a little. Although disappointed that no black was appointed to the cabinet, he was encouraged by other gestures by the White House. On February 9, clearly still doubtful, he sent the President a conflicted letter. Opening with praise for “your obviously fine start as our President,” it soon lapsed into a muddle of skepticism and defiance about civil rights: “We are going to use whatever voice we have to awaken our people.” Jack was starting to see the administration in a more positive light. A genuine turning point came in May; that month, a dramatic phase of the movement started when members of CORE embarked on a Freedom Ride by bus from Washington, D.C., to Mississippi in order to test new anti–Jim Crow laws and regulations put in place largely through the efforts of Robert Kennedy, now United States attorney general. At various stops, angry whites brutally beat riders and at least one federal official. On May 6, an outraged Robert Kennedy, standing tall in the lions’ den of the University of Georgia, pledged to enforce strictly all civil rights laws and regulations. Elated, Robinson rushed to congratulate him. “Your actions demonstrate your sincere desire to support the principles of your important office,” Jack declared. “I had grave doubts about your sincerity. In this case, I find it a pleasure to be proven wrong.”

  For Robinson, Robert Kennedy’s decision later that month to send six hundred U.S. marshals to protect the riders in Montgomery, Alabama, confirmed his new opinion of the attorney general. “You are doing a capital job, and we applaud you,” he wrote Kennedy in a second message. “Your department, under your dynamic leadership, shows that it means business.” In return, Kennedy politely invited Jack to “stop in to say hello” when next he was in the capital. But Robinson recoiled from a friend’s suggestion that he was turning Democratic. “Not so fast,” he admonished her. “I have not by any means ‘seen the light.’ I just feel that when anyone does the right thing it must be recognized.… President Kennedy has given moral leadership but runs when someone suggests he support legislative action.… I had grave doubts, some have been eliminated but until he takes a firm stand for legislative action one must wonder.”

  In the coming years, Jack’s admiration for Robert Kennedy would mainly grow. The element of passion in the attorney general, which verged at times on moral fanaticism, touched Robinson when it flared in the service of civil rights for blacks—about which the President himself, often ironical and aloof, seemed to be almost heartless. That summer, after Jack took a major role in a Freedom Awards rally in Brooklyn in which Robert Kennedy was among those honored, he defended this choice against critics affronted by Kennedy’s recent call for a “cooling off” in the Freedom Rides. Robinson, who also opposed any “cooling off” period, was sure the idea had come from someone else in the Administration, probably the President. “I am firm in my belief,” he wrote, “that, if the Attorney General is left alone to carry out his own will, we will see glowing history made by the Justice Department in the cause of real democracy.”

  A few days later, Jack felt quite comfortable taking part in a conference staged by the State Department to help bring racial diversity to the thirteen-thousand-member organization. In fact, several people he knew personally were now of some prominence at State. Chester Bowles was now under secretary of state; Carl Rowan (Jack’s biographer, whose Wait Till Next Year had appeared in 1960) was now a deputy assistant secretary for public affairs; and Franklin Williams of the NAACP was also drawn to State. Joining freely in discussions, Jack pronounced himself very impressed by the effort, as he told several people, including Harris Wofford, perhaps the main architect of John Kennedy’s civil rights policy and the man behind his telephone call to Coretta King. “Williams reports that Jackie is in high spirits about the Administration at present,” Wofford reported.

  No doubt Jack looked on a little wistfully as Rowan and Williams found dignified niches in Washington, as each became a sort of Jackie Robinson in his chosen area, but in an America significantly changed since 1947, when he was the one and only Jackie Robinson. Instead, he was on the outside. Nevertheless, Robinson was also far more interested in the civil rights movement than in the perquisites of high office. For him, every call for help was validation enough, as when late in July, Medgar Evers, the valiant NAACP leader in Jackson, Mississippi, invited him to address a mass meeting there in the fall. Disapproving of the hostile attitude of some in the NAACP to other civil rights groups, he was eager to work for both SCLC and CORE. Early in September, for example, he strongly endorsed CORE at an Interracial Action Institute it sponsored in Miami. At least once he sent out a letter on CORE stationery requesting donations to the group. “My children and your children,” he declared in Miami, “won’t have to fight the same battles we did—that’s why I support CORE.” The sit-ins had “helped to make America a better country for my children. I am impressed by the speed with which non-violent, direct action has achieved results all over the South.” Lunch counters had been integrated, “but more important is the new dignity and greater self respect which have come from the sit-ins.”

  BY THE END OF that summer, 1961, life at home was altered again when Rachel took up a full-time job in the Bronx. Late in May, at the age of thirty-nine, she was graduated from New York University with a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing. With pride and also curiosity, Jack had watched the last frantic weeks of her studying. “She gets her degree next week,” he wrote Caroline Wallerstein, “and for what seems to be months has kept her head in her books. Almost like being without a wife. Thank goodness she is about finished. Of course she goes into teaching, that may be just as bad. It’s good to see the joy she gets from her work. I can only hope she continues to enjoy it.”

  Almost immediately, she landed a position in the Bronx as a clinical nurse in the First Day Hospital, which served acutely ill psychiatric patients. This facility, connected to Jacobi Hospital, was staffed by residents of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Soon Rachel was head of psychiatric nursing at Albert Einstein. Now she was gone from home five days a week. On a typical morning, determined to maintain her former role at home, she rose to make breakfast and help the children prepare for school. (On the weekends, Jack made breakfast, with waffles and pancakes his specialties.) Around seven-fifteen, Rachel left home; shortly afterward, Jack pulled out in his gray Cadillac for his typically swift drive to Manhattan. Rache
l’s mother made sure that the children got off to school on time.

  Despite Rachel’s efforts, her job altered the old routine at home. Jack was glad to see her flourishing at work, but he also had trouble adjusting to the change. “Rae has been so busy lately,” he wrote the Wallersteins, “we haven’t been able to do many of the things we like doing but she is so wrapped up in her work she doesn’t mind at all.” Her professional zeal, insofar as he could judge it, both impressed and chastened him. “I don’t know when I have seen her any happier,” he went on. “I believe before she is finished there will be many changes in our system of nursing.”

  Both in those sour-sweet words and in the earlier reference to “almost like being without a wife,” Jack showed his lack of ease with the new order. But slowly he began to accept Rachel’s new life, and his own. In addition, there was another, far more serious source of concern at home. Jackie Junior continued to be a question mark, although Jack, ever hopeful, saw the bright side. Jackie was now at the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts, where the headmaster was said to be good with kids in trouble. In October, a visit to see Jackie in Stockbridge encouraged Rachel and Jack, who found the trip “very exciting,” as he wrote the Wallersteins. Jackie was “very happy there although he won’t admit it. Every one of his teachers feels he has great potential but his background may cause him trouble. Our only concern is how he tries. We see already a change in what is important. His sense of values has changed completely and even if he does not do well in his grades we believe the overall change is for the best.”