Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  To Jack’s disappointment, the Church Fund soon bogged down. Some blacks flatly refused to give anything. “It is sad to think,” he wrote in his column, “that any Negro would refuse to give even a coin to show how he feels about race-haters who burn down Negro churches which are trying to help the Negro to vote in the South. Thank God, those kind of people are in the minority, and the overwhelming majority of Negro people recognize their own responsibility.” Eventually, almost two years later, he was able to announce that he had collected $50,000 and that all three churches had been mostly rebuilt. He was glad that white Georgians had also helped. Donations came from the Atlanta Constitution Fund and various white church groups, including the Georgia Council of Churches, the United Citizens of Christ, and a Trappist monastery in Georgia that provided stained-glass windows free of charge to the new buildings.

  On September 24, he was back in the South, invited by King to address the sixth annual convention of the SCLC in Birmingham, Alabama. At the airport, police stopped an attempt to form a motorcade that would escort Robinson into town. Nevertheless, he delivered a stirring speech even as the focus of national attention to civil rights swung sharply to the University of Mississippi, where an Air Force veteran, James Meredith, was seeking to attend classes as the first black student at “Ole Miss.” (After rioting that left two dead and more than one hundred injured, a force of three thousand federal troops restored order.) In Birmingham, however, the SCLC convention took an important step. Emphasizing the role of Jim Crow in employment, SCLC leaders decided to open a new front, in addition to voter registration. Jack supported this expanded role for the SCLC even as leaders at the NAACP saw its own powers being usurped. To Robinson, the common goal was greater freedom for blacks. Two days later, back in New York, he gladly served as the central figure at a mammoth NAACP voter-registration rally at Metropolitan Baptist Church at 128th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.

  The fall of 1962 was dominated by important local elections, including races for the United States Senate and the governorship. To Jack’s satisfaction, the Republican Jacob Javits won easy reelection to the Senate. Governor Rockefeller’s task was harder, and Jack was active in his support. On August 29, Robinson was prominent in a reception honoring Rockefeller for “his continued and sustained interest in behalf of the Harlem community.” Jack also helped smooth the way in various campaign walks by Rockefeller in Harlem and Brooklyn; in October, he presented a Baptist layman award to the governor at Antioch Baptist Church in Brooklyn. However, in one election race Robinson stirred up antagonism from many other blacks. In the race for state attorney general, he openly opposed the Democratic Party candidate, Edward Dudley, who was seeking to become the first black to hold statewide office in New York. (Dudley was the president of the Borough of Manhattan; he was also the NAACP official who had corresponded with Robinson in 1944 about his court-martial.) But Robinson endorsed Dudley’s Republican opponent, Louis Lefkowitz. “Do you turn your back on a white candidate for re-election,” Jack asked, “who has built a reputation for being one of the most dedicated, militant and conscientious public servants in the nation and who has steadily batted 1,000 percent on the civil rights issue? Do you turn your back on him because he is a white man and you are a Negro who would like to see another Negro move up to a high office?” On Election Day, most black voters answered yes. They voted for Dudley—but Lefkowitz won.

  One other election of special concern to Robinson took place on the other side of the country. In California, where Jack had campaigned for him, Richard Nixon lost the race for the governorship. Bitter and exhausted, he then unloaded on the press and declared himself done with politics forever. But Robinson hurried to console him. “I hope that you will reconsider, Dick,” Jack wrote, “because it is the great men people attack. You are good for politics; good for America.… I urge you to remain active. There is so much to be done and there are too few qualified people to do the job now. Your loss would be an added blow to our efforts.”

  CHRISTMAS 1962 WAS AS usual a happy time in the Robinson home, a season of giving and celebration; but it was also overshadowed a little by Jack’s nervous expectation of surgery early in the new year. His left knee was the problem. For some time he had been playing tennis again, but finally had to give it up because of chronic pain from arthritis and a torn cartilage that needed repairing.

  On January 7, Jack underwent surgery at Mount Vernon Hospital in Westchester County near New York City. His doctors, Dr. Robert Rosen and Dr. Arthur Sadler, pronounced the operation successful. With his left leg in a cast from ankle to thigh, Jack was wheeled back to his fifth-floor room, where he expected to stay two or three days before returning home. But two weeks later he was still there. Complications set in: staphylococcal bacteria had infected his knee, which became almost unbearably painful, and spread poisonously into his blood system; the septicemia also threw his diabetes wildly out of control. Treated with massive doses of penicillin and insulin and fed intravenously, Robinson slipped in and out of consciousness. “One day, early in the morning, I came into his room as I did every day,” Rachel recalled, “and he did not know who I was. He was delirious, completely out of it. The poison was systemic, and it wasn’t clear right away that the antibiotics would work in time.”

  After a while he began to recover. Certainly the ordeal disturbed him. Lavished with attention by the hospital staff, he could only wonder what might have happened to him otherwise. “I was not afraid,” he wrote from the hospital, even as he joked nervously about not being quite ready to “steal home.” He was “deeply concerned” mainly about the effect on his wife and children “if I were taken away at this time. I like to believe that God has a lot of work left for me to do and wants to give me time to do it the best I possibly can.”

  Flowers, cards, and letters poured into the hospital, as well as a stream of visitors that included eighty-two-year-old Branch Rickey, who had almost stolen home a few times himself because of chronic heart problems. Chastened, Jack looked forward to returning to Stamford and the comfort of his home, with his family about him. Rachel’s daily visits had meant a lot to him, but the children, too, had been attentive. Lying in his hospital bed, he had been deeply moved by a Christmas gift they had given him and Rachel—a loving cup, engraved with the words “To the Best Parents” and, underneath, the children’s names. The cup, Jack told his readers, was worth more to him than all the trophies he ever received. “Like any other family, we have our problems,” he confessed. “Up until this Christmas, we haven’t been sure we were even on our way to solving some of our problems.” But things were better now; the cup symbolized the new unity of the Robinson family.

  Mainly, if not exclusively, Jack was referring to Jackie, who had failed again at boarding school. Refusing to honor the dress code and other rules and ignoring his schoolwork, he had also been involved in fights. The school asked him not to return. Back in Stamford, where he enrolled in Rippowam High School, he fell back into some of his old ways but also seemed to be trying hard to improve. That November, he turned sixteen. By Christmas, he seemed a much more contented person than in the past. To Jack, the loving cup was the final touch in what he was sure was Jackie’s emerging maturity.

  Jack’s first day back home was a pleasure. Hobbled by bandages on his left leg and supported by crutches, he could not move about much. But he could look through the window out onto the snowy ground strewn with granite boulders, and the pond he had come to love and the green willows his family had planted on the banks. Above all, he looked forward to his first dinner with his family since the first week of January. But near dinnertime, no one could find Jackie. Urgent telephone calls to his friends brought no news. “Then someone called us from the bank,” Rachel recalled. “Jackie had stopped by and withdrawn all of his money and stuffed it into a paper bag. Something didn’t seem right, and the bank thought that maybe we ought to know. Sooner or later we realized that Jackie had run away. Jack just crumbled. He started to cry. It was
the first time the family—Sharon and David, my mother, all of us—had seen him break down and cry. What he had just been through at the hospital had something to do with it, but he was deeply, deeply hurt.”

  Jackie and a fellow Rippowam High student, a white youngster whose family was also left in the dark, had taken off by bus for California. They ran out of money in Texas but somehow made it to California, where they expected to find jobs picking fruit—except that the fruit harvests were some months away. Finally, in frustration, Jackie called home from Los Angeles, where local police soon picked him up along with his companion. After about two weeks away, they returned home to Stamford.

  For Jack and his son, this was a turning point in their relationship, from which they would not recover for several years.

  FORCED NOW TO USE A CANE, his full head of hair gone gray, Jack was a sobering sight to old friends who recalled him in his athletic prime. For the first time in years, his traveling to raise money for the NAACP fell off; he was not up to taking long trips in cramped airplanes. Staying close to home, however, he did what he could to help. At the Harlem branch YMCA, he became a co-chairman of a drive to raise $137,000 to renovate the decaying main building on 135th Street and the boys’ department across the street.

  His column showed no loss of vigor. In March, Jack startled readers by an open letter blasting the most powerful and beloved elected official in Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church and a veteran congressman. To Robinson, Powell had long been a hero. A brilliant civil rights leader in Harlem during the Depression, Powell had entered Congress in 1945. There, his aggressive civil rights leadership, as well as his flamboyant personal style, had made him stand out; admired and even beloved by most blacks, he was also criticized by many whites. Scrutiny of Powell’s record only increased after 1960, when his seniority gave him the chairmanship of the important House Committee on Education and Labor, the first House chairmanship held by a black. By 1963, Powell was the center of controversy over charges of corruption and absenteeism from the House. His absenteeism was clear; having lost a libel suit in the amount of more than $200,000 brought against him by a Harlem woman, Powell now kept his distance from New York to avoid paying up. In 1963, when Robinson attacked him, Harlem had just answered the charges against Powell by reelecting him by a landslide.

  To this point, Jack had avoided any public criticism of Powell; in fact, at a recent appearance at Howard University, a student had berated him for not speaking out against Powell. But Jack had been provoked by a widely reported speech, “One Thousand Tomorrows,” delivered by Powell first at the Capital Press Club in Washington, then at a rally on 125th Street. Behind the speech was Powell’s anger at the major black civil rights organizations for failing to come to his defense. Much of the speech was familiar stuff—a call for black racial unity, an attack on the black middle class for evading their duty to the race, and resentment that liberal whites were offering mainly charity when blacks wanted a fair shake. Now, however, Powell came close to urging a boycott of the leading civil rights groups, because they included too many whites among their leaders. “We have got to have organizations where Negroes control the policy,” he told the crowd. “How many Negroes sit on the Board of Directors of the American Jewish Congress or the Italian societies?” Naming the NAACP, the National Urban League, SCLC, and CORE, he insisted now that “we must consider boycotting those organization we don’t control.”

  At the NAACP and the National Urban League, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young reacted with outrage. Robinson’s own reply was an open letter to “a friend in the wrong.” His tone was a mixture of regret and censure: “I write it because it is my sincere belief that you have set back the cause of the Negro, let your race down and failed miserably … as an important national leader of the Negro in this nation.” Defending the role of white veterans of the NAACP such as its president, Arthur Spingarn, and its life-membership chairman, Kivie Kaplan, he also attacked Powell’s benign views of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Powell knew that “the answer for the Negro is to be found, not in segregation or in separation, but by his insistence upon moving into his rightful place—the same place as that of any other American—within our society.” As for Powell’s personal troubles, it was “pretty obvious that you had placed yourself in a vulnerable position to be condemned by many people with many different motives.”

  The open letter enraged some blacks, and especially Malcolm’s supporters. One of them offered three messages: “To Jackie Robinson: ‘Shut your mouth, go away.’ To Adam Powell: ‘Welcome home brother, you’ve been gone too long.’ To Malcolm X: ‘I’d be lost without you.’ ” “We as black people,” another letter suggested, “must get rid of fellows like Jackie Robinson, who can be purchased by our number one enemy.” “I was one of your admirers, Jackie,” still another warned, “but you must remember that you are not on the ball field now. You are playing with the destinies and freedom of your people in America.” Although the response was intense, Jack would not budge. “If I have to give up my right to say exactly what I believe to earn popularity and admiration,” he declared, “you can keep the popularity and admiration.” He was “deeply proud” of his link to men like Black and Rickey. (In fact, in the middle of the controversy he published a column in praise of a veteran white civil rights lawyer, David Levinson, in Philadelphia.) As for Powell: “Adam was my friend and if he so chooses, he still is. Sometimes it takes a friend to say the things other people won’t say.”

  Jack’s antipathy to President Kennedy about civil rights helped to close the distance between himself and Powell, if only to some degree. When, in April, Powell broke a truce between himself and Kennedy over the issue of discrimination in public housing, Robinson praised Powell: “This kind of forthright action is exactly what we meant when we wrote that Adam could once again exert leadership if he so desired.” On July 8, the second speaker in a lecture series on the “Black Revolution” at Abyssinian Baptist Church was Jackie Robinson.

  In April, still leaning on his cane and eager for the tropic sun, Jack and Rachel flew to Venezuela as the guest of the Sheraton chain for the opening of one of its hotels there; they also attended the inauguration of Rómulo Betancourt as president of the country. This baseball-loving country, where Jack had played in 1945 as a barnstormer with a Negro leagues team, welcomed Jack as a hero, and he and Betancourt even shared a press conference. Rested, he returned to the United States prepared to resume his traveling for the civil rights movement. The center of attention was now, once again, Birmingham, Alabama, where that month Martin Luther King Jr. announced a campaign to breach its thick walls of segregation. Commanded by the infamous police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor, officers arrested over two thousand demonstrators and jailed more than one thousand; but the most harrowing stage of the action began on May 1, when King summoned black schoolchildren to join the desegregation campaign. Filmed images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on demonstrators, including women and children, sickened much of the nation and swept around the world.

  On May 7, after a briefing by Al Duckett and Noel Marder, a wealthy young white publisher from Yonkers committed to the movement, who had just returned from visiting King in Birmingham, Jack sent out a flood of telegrams announcing an emergency meeting at Sardi’s restaurant in Manhattan to discuss the crisis in Birmingham. He also dispatched an impassioned telegram to President Kennedy protesting the sluggish pace of civil rights progress and calling for federal support of the protesters. “The revolution that is taking place in this country,” Robinson insisted, “can not be squelched by police dogs or high power hoses.” A host of leaders and celebrities, from A. Philip Randolph, Arnold Forster, and Louis Lefkowitz to Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, and Juanita Poitier, turned out for what Jack described as the organizing meeting of a new support group, “Back Our Brothers,” of which Marder and Robinson were co-chairmen. The luncheon netted more than $8,000 for Dr. King, as well as a pledge to raise $20,000 more
at a dinner in June.

  With news cameras rolling, Jack also announced that, at King’s invitation, he would soon fly to Birmingham to join the protest. This news brought a flood of calls from friends eager to support the Birmingham effort. Ella Fitzgerald sent a check for $1,000. Floyd Patterson, training doggedly for his rematch with the new heavyweight boxing champion, Sonny Liston, telephoned to ask if he could accompany Jack. “I can’t stay in jail but three days,” he told Robinson, who hoped not to go to jail at all, “but I’ll go down and stay that long with you.” Never one to offer himself as a martyr, Robinson downplayed the courage involved in his decision. “I don’t like to be bitten by dogs,” he confessed, “because I’m a coward. I don’t like to go to jail either, because, as I say, I’m a coward. But we’ve got to show Martin Luther King that we are behind him.”

  On May 10, in Birmingham, Dr. King announced an agreement reached with the Senior Citizens Committee, a group of leading white businessmen, for desegregating the city. But euphoria about this victory was soon shattered. On May 13, at one o’clock in the morning, an urgent telephone call from Wyatt Tee Walker in Birmingham awakened Jack with the news that a bomb had shattered part of the black-owned Gaston Motel, which King used as his headquarters there. Walker needed to reach White House officials who might intervene to protect King from another assassination attempt. Jack was able to reach a presidential advisor and inform him of their concern. Later that day, Robinson, Patterson, and eleven others in their party left Newark Airport. That evening, just after 7 p.m., they reached Birmingham. There, Walker, whose wife had been clubbed savagely in her head with a rifle butt by a police officer, greeted them with a warning about new threats of violence against them in particular.