Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  THE NEW YEAR, 1962, started on two high notes. One was Jack’s selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The news broke late on January 23. With a shriek of joy, Rachel heard it before he did, when a Daily News reporter called. “I am so grateful,” Jack told the press. “I have had a lot of wonderful things happen to me in my life.… But to make the Hall of Fame on the first go-around, where do you put that on the list?” Quickly he placed telephone calls to Branch Rickey and to his mother, Mallie. Arriving at the Boston airport on January 25, on his way to the annual dinner of local baseball writers, Jack waited a half-hour for the plane bringing his fellow inductee and dinner guest Bob Feller to land. In 1945, Feller had predicted failure for Robinson. Now Jack held no grudge. “It is a pleasure,” he told Feller, “to go hand in hand into the Hall of Fame with you.” His own excitement was clear. “I’ve been up on Cloud Nine for about forty-eight hours,” he told reporters. “I hope I never come down.”

  Also that month, Jack became a columnist again. In the New York black weekly Amsterdam News, published by C. B. Powell, he started a column called first “Jackie Robinson Says,” then “Home Plate.” In his first column, he rehashed his parting quarrel in 1960 with the New York Post and reaffirmed his motive for writing. “We feel deeply indebted to the Negro masses for their loyalty,” he wrote. “That is why we have the compulsion to be vocal on issues about which we are deeply concerned.” On this job, Jack’s ghostwriter was Alfred Duckett, a former newsman who would work with Robinson in this capacity for the rest of Robinson’s life. (Jack continued to take pains to ensure that the column represented his ideas precisely. “We have been working together a long time,” he wrote in 1963 about Duckett, “and I am pleased to have a person who is able to capture my thoughts so well on paper!”)

  Printed on the editorial page, his column now paid only slight attention to sports. Politics and civil rights remained its heart. Picking up where his Post writing left off, Jack bore down again on the President. In his third column, Robinson praised Bobby Kennedy but criticized John Kennedy’s record. Bob Kennedy was “a champion scrapper and a man of very deep convictions,” Jack declared. “I like his personal approach. I like the statements he has made and appointments he has made. But I do not think our President is straight down the line on civil rights like Bob Kennedy is.” A week later, just after the President indicated he would delay making good on his campaign promise to issue an executive order outlawing discrimination in public housing, Robinson attacked him again. “I am now convinced that President Kennedy really doesn’t understand the Negro problem,” he declared. “I am afraid, too, that I am going to have to revise my opinion about his sincerity.”

  Kennedy’s failure to make civil rights a major feature of his 1962 State of the Union address, and the ongoing delay in the Senate confirmation of Robert Weaver as the first black cabinet member, further alienated Robinson. When Kennedy angrily confronted barons of the steel industry over the price of steel, Robinson countered with an open letter: “Mr. President, don’t you believe that the explosive situation in the South and the sneaky, covered up prejudice in the North are as damaging to the public interest, to democracy and to world peace as a $6 raise in steel prices?” Still later, as Kennedy hesitated to act on a proposal by Dr. King for an executive order banning all discrimination, in a kind of second Emancipation Proclamation, Robinson jeered at Kennedy. “We think the President is a fine man, like we said,” Jack wrote. “But an Abraham Lincoln he ain’t.” In August, Kennedy offended Robinson again. This time, he had declined to greet more than one hundred ministers who marched on the White House in support of Dr. King, who was in a jail in Albany, Georgia, as part of the massive civil rights action there by a united NAACP, CORE, and SCLC and its youthful offshoot, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. The President’s inaction, Robinson declared, was “an insult to the national Negro community.”

  Not surprisingly, President Kennedy rejected an invitation to serve as honorary chairman of Robinson’s Hall of Fame testimonial dinner in July in Manhattan. “It is not going to be possible for him to accept,” Kennedy’s black deputy press spokesman, Andrew Hatcher, informed the sponsors. In the end, Kennedy sent a telegram of praise to be read at the dinner; but by this time the Kennedy camp had probably given up any hope of ever winning Robinson over. The two sides were irreconcilable. The Kennedys never betrayed much interest in what Jack had achieved in baseball (perhaps too plebeian a game for Camelot); Robinson remained largely unimpressed by all the talk about the New Frontier. Not until December did Robinson find something complimentary to write about the President; and then, when Kennedy finally signed the executive order on housing, Jack was somewhat arch: “I have to say in all honesty that the President has shown courage and that it is heart-warming to note that he has finally kept his promise.”

  Throughout this year, 1962, the civil rights movement commanded Jack’s attention and loyalty, even as his standing as a celebrity was recharged mightily in January by his selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame. On February 9, he helped to kick off the annual NAACP fund-raising at a rally in Washington, D.C. Then, accompanied by Floyd Patterson, he headed further south to other venues. (Patterson’s eagerness to help the movement touched Jack. “I always get sort of choked up,” he confessed, “when I try to express the way I feel about him.”) Next, after a respite in Miami, where Jack again played in the annual black North-South golf tournament, they arrived on February 25 in Jackson, Mississippi. Joining them there were the former boxing champion Archie Moore and, from baseball, young Curt Flood of the St. Louis Cardinals; Jack’s old dream of drawing other top athletes or former top athletes into the struggle at last became a reality. (Facing the selfishness of some athletes, Jack once asked angrily: “Is there a medal anywhere which is worth a man’s dignity?”) In Jackson, more than four thousand persons, a record for an NAACP rally there, turned out to greet them. Elated by what he called “our advent in the cradle of segregation,” Archie Moore vowed to be a regular speaker for the NAACP.

  As his Hall of Fame induction in July approached, honors and awards showered down on Jack, as well as invitations to speak on radio and television and at gala dinners, graduation exercises, and the like. On May 6, an NAACP Freedom Day rally of more than twenty-five hundred persons in Raleigh, North Carolina, saluted him. Later that month, he flew to Los Angeles, where, on May 19, the Alumni Association of UCLA hailed him as its “Man of the Year” in a ceremony he called “one of the most touching days of my life.” Finally, on July 20, came one of the grand evenings of Robinson’s life, the testimonial dinner in his honor at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. That Dr. King had a central role in organizing the dinner touched Jack deeply. “Dr. Martin King is giving it at the Waldorf,” he wrote with obvious pride to a friend. Although the fact that all proceeds were to go to the SCLC rankled NAACP leaders, Robinson made no apology about his wish to aid King’s organization, or the pride he felt in being thus honored by its leader.

  Suddenly, a nasty controversy boiling over on 125th Street in Harlem threatened to ruin Robinson’s hour of glory. The trouble started when Lloyd Von Blaine, the owner of a neighborhood restaurant, Lloyd’s Steakhouse, at 217 West 125th Street, reacted sourly to the news that competition was coming to 125th Street. The new restaurant would be part of a nationwide chain of steakhouses owned by Sol Singer, and was scheduled to open at a site leased from the owner of the Apollo Theater, Frank Schiffman. With Singer’s steaks likely to sell for only $1.19, Lloyd’s saw a distinct threat to its existence. The fact that Singer and Schiffman were white and Jewish, and Blaine black, quickly became an issue in a community supersensitive to the mixture of Jim Crow and economic exploitation; many people remembered when blacks could not be hired as clerks on 125th Street. When Lewis H. Michaux, a local bookstore owner and the president of an unabashedly black nationalist group called the Harlem Consumers Committee, decided to picket the Apollo, Singer’s and Schiffman’s religion became an issue. After years as
a popular Harlem business leader, Schiffman now found himself taunted as, among other things, “the Merchant of Venice.” Some picketers chanted: “Jew go away—black man stay!”

  Except for the veteran labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who denounced the pickets as “inflammatory,” most black leaders were silent as the pressure mounted. After a meeting with Michaux arranged by Randolph, Schiffman agreed to release Singer from the lease if he wished to go. Singer then announced that he would sell his interest without profit to a black buyer; but no one stepped forward to buy. On July 14, Robinson entered the fight. In a sharply worded column, “Strange Happenings on West 125th St.,” he pointed out that Schiffman had advertised the disputed space for rent for months without success, and that Singer’s offer had not been accepted. Robinson took aim squarely at the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Michaux’s supporters. “Anti-Semitism is as rotten as anti-Negroism,” he argued. “It is a shame that, so far, none of the Negroes of Harlem have yet had the guts to say so in tones which could be heard throughout the city.” (He had thought of bidding on the new restaurant, he revealed, but “lost interest because the proposed store offers steaks only in the $1.19 category. We feel Harlem needs a restaurant where both the low-priced steaks and better steaks are offered.”)

  Michaux’s group quickly retaliated. It launched a “hate Jackie Robinson campaign,” as Jack himself put it. Telegrams protesting his column reached the Amsterdam News and the Chock Full o’ Nuts headquarters. On July 17, pickets sprouted outside the chain’s coffee shop at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. Dutifully, a worker recorded some of the signs. One declared: “Jackie is a classified so called Negro.” Another: “The Jackie of all trades and master of only one. His mouth is too big.” Some picketers chanted: “Old Black Joe—Jackie must go.” Uneasily, Robinson reported to Bill Black on the situation. “Is there anything you would want me to do about this?” he asked. “I am sure you know I personally will never retract my statement because, regardless of what these people threaten, I feel that they are wrong and someone should speak out against them.”

  If some people defended the protesters, support for Robinson was also strong. On behalf of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins sent a telegram backing him “one hundred percent”; blacks could not use “the slimy tool of anti-Semitism or indulge in racism.… We are lost if we adopt Klan methods in the name of exalting black people.” “It was beautiful,” Arnold Forster of the Anti-Defamation League declared about Jack’s column, “and I congratulate you.” Whitney Young, the new director of the National Urban League, denounced “all who mask bigotry under the false mantle of nationalism or the hooded robes of the Klansmen.” “Bigotry is intolerable,” Ralph Bunche wired Jack, “whether the bigots are white or black.” The progressive young pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Brooklyn, the Reverend George Lawrence, an old friend of the Robinsons’, alerted Black that he would ask the four thousand members of his congregation each to go to lunch at Chock Full o’ Nuts and to purchase two pounds of the firm’s coffee every time they needed it, to support Robinson’s “magnificent stand against anti-Semitism.”

  The controversy seemed about to escalate after pink-and-black handbills announced a “mass rally” sponsored by the Nation of Islam, aimed at the “moral elevation of our community.” Led by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam combined major elements of orthodox Islamic traditions with a dogmatic faith in the inherent evil of whites. Behind the rally was Elijah Muhammad’s Mosque No. 7, located on West 116th Street in Harlem. The event was to take place on July 21 on the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue—outside the Chock Full o’ Nuts restaurant. The main speakers, according to the handbill, would include both Lewis Michaux and the controversial leader of Mosque No. 7, Malcolm X.

  For a while the picketers continued to impede customers entering the restaurant. Then, following a heated debate between Jack and Michaux over the radio station WWRL, and an informal talk between Jack and Malcolm at another point, tempers began to cool. In a strange about-face that was evidence of the sometimes surreal nature of Harlem life, Michaux not only attended Jack’s testimonial dinner at the Waldorf Astoria but also sat at Schiffman’s table. Warmed by the praise heaped on Robinson, he soon declared himself forever one of Jack’s fans. In the end, Michaux denied that his group had voiced anti-Jewish chants, while Robinson upheld the right of the group to picket, as long as it expressed no race hatred. Michaux then called upon his followers to put away their signs. A few weeks later, he announced that his group, Blaine, and Singer had reached an agreement on all issues concerning the restaurant, which would open in the fall.

  To some ultranationalist blacks, however, Jackie Robinson was a traitor. Hostile letters reached the offices of the Amsterdam News. “You have banished yourself from the Black Race,” one informed him. “You are no longer one of us. You are a man without a race.… We can never destroy the white race with rattle snakes like you.” But such letters did not intimidate him. “Jack had been attacked so often for so long,” Rachel said, “that nothing they wrote could upset him. He shrugged the words off.” In fact, he faced accusations of being a white man’s Negro by offering columns in defense of white friends such as Pee Wee Reese, under fire in Louisville for allegedly owning a segregated bowling alley, and the television star Ed Sullivan, attacked by a young black dramatist for allegedly keeping serious black drama off his nationally popular weekly show. But he also defended blacks, including those in the Nation of Islam. On August 25, he published a column chastising the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, after Walter announced that he was thinking of launching “a very intensive investigation of a Negro group known as the Black Muslims.” Jack was indignant. What about an investigation of white supremacist groups, including the White Citizens Councils?

  In any event, unbowed by attacks on him because of the steakhouse episode, he moved to his testimonial dinner and his Hall of Fame induction confident that he had done the right thing in standing up to racial and religious hatred. The outpouring of respect and love at the dinner and the induction ceremony in Cooperstown, New York, healed whatever wound the episode had inflicted.

  EVEN IN THE DOG DAYS of August, Robinson remained busy. On August 16, he was the main speaker in Springfield, Massachusetts, at a dinner marking the hundredth birthday of Amos Alonzo Stagg, the “Grand Old Man” of football, so called because of his long career as a coach, including forty-seven years at the University of Chicago, and his many innovations in the sport.

  Some days later, he left home on an even more important task: a visit, at the request of Dr. King, to speak in Albany, Georgia, at the dangerous height of the concerted civil rights action there known as the Albany Movement. On the morning of August 26, Jack was at the Atlanta airport, en route to Albany, when he heard the news of the destruction by fire of two black churches near Albany that had been involved in voter registration. About two weeks before, another black church, the Shady Grove Baptist Church in Lee County, had also burned. Accompanied by Dr. King’s executive assistant, Wyatt Tee Walker (who had delivered King’s speech at Jack’s Hall of Fame dinner the previous month), he flew south to Albany. There, he delivered a rousing address to an overflow crowd. Then, with some trepidation (“There was fear in the voice of someone,” he said, “who thought it might not be wise to go”), he joined Walker and other figures in the Albany Movement who headed south in three cars to the small town of Sasser to view the still-smoldering ruins of the Mount Olive Baptist Church. There, its pastor, the Reverend F. S. Swaggot, wept openly as he walked with them about the grounds. “It really makes you want to cry deep down in your heart,” Jack told a reporter. When Walker insisted that something should be done in response, Robinson knew at once that the churches had to be rebuilt. To that end, he pledged one hundred dollars on the spot. Later that day, Dr. King telephoned to ask him to serve as national chairman of the rebuilding fund. Jack agreed to do so.

  “Jackie Robin
son had long been a hero to me,” Walker later recalled, “and it was like a dream come true to work with him. His presence in the South was very important to us. I have said a number of times that Jackie Robinson’s entrance into the big leagues did more for race relations than all the work of the so-called forces of Christ combined. We worried about his safety in Albany and later in Birmingham, and we had a small group of people, bodyguards really, to look out for him. He was brave—he had already proven his bravery, but he showed it again in the South at a very bad time in our history.”

  Returning home, Jack boldly launched the Church Fund to rebuild the Shady Grove, Mount Olive, and Mount Mary Baptist Churches. The fund netted $6,000 in its first hour, with Bill Black of Chock Full o’ Nuts giving $5,000 and C. B. Powell of the Amsterdam News donating $1,000. At Jack’s invitation, five hundred of his fellow employees pledged to donate a dollar a week for twenty weeks to raise an additional $10,000. Governor Rockefeller, a Baptist, contributed $10,000. Frank Schiffman gave $1,000 and stopped performances nightly at the Apollo Theater to take up a collection. Floyd Patterson agreed to turn over a share of his purse from his upcoming title fight with Sonny Liston. On radio and television and in the newspapers, Robinson appealed for checks from the public made out to King’s SCLC but mailed to him for conveyance to King. “Let’s rebuild these churches,” he urged. “Let’s do it ourselves.”