With a police escort, Robinson, Patterson, and their party drove to the Fifth Street Baptist Church, where Dr. King, his associate Ralph Abernathy, and other top leaders warmly greeted them. Inside, a capacity crowd of some two thousand persons were singing a movement anthem when the two celebrities made a dramatic entrance, Robinson gray-haired and leaning on his cane, Patterson young and vigorous but with a bandaged right hand from a training-camp accident. The assembly erupted in joy at the sight of two men so closely identified over the recent years as symbols of brave black manhood. In his speech, Robinson attacked President Kennedy for not sending troops into Birmingham and also excoriated the Alabama State Police and Bull Connor in particular for their response to protesters. Then he and Patterson went to Pilgrim Baptist Church, where hundreds of participants at a youth rally gave them another wildly enthusiastic reception. At the end of a long evening, after uneasily inspecting the bombed-out section, they went to bed at the Gaston Motel.
The next morning, Robinson and Patterson were joined by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the most prominent local protest leader and a veteran of many clashes with the police, who had been hospitalized after being struck by high-pressure hoses. Accompanied by the Reverend A. D. King (Martin’s brother), Robinson then returned to New York in time to take a major role in an NAACP rally on Seventh Avenue in Harlem to commemorate the ninth anniversary on May 17 of Brown v. Board of Education. If he was a hero to many for having visited Birmingham at this time, he was not a hero to all. The New York Daily News questioned the wisdom of the trip, as did the former star athlete Jesse Owens; they saw Robinson and other Northerners stirring up trouble rather than ending it. (In an exchange of messages, Robinson rebuked Owens.) Also critical of the Birmingham effort was Malcolm X: Robinson and Patterson had gone there at the behest of white liberals, to defuse black rage. Moreover, Malcolm argued, no self-respecting black man would send his children to be abused by police dogs and fire hoses, as the protestors had done.
The danger facing blacks protesting in the South was tragically underscored on June 12 when, near midnight, a gunman shot and killed thirty-seven-year-old Medgar Evers in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, as he returned from a civil rights meeting. At least twice, Evers had welcomed Robinson to Jackson in support of the NAACP. Robinson did not attend the funeral but sent an impassioned telegram to President Kennedy pleading for protection for Dr. King, who attended the event on June 15. If King were harmed, Robinson declared, “the restraint of many people all over this nation might burst its bonds and bring about a brutal bloody holocaust the like of which this country has not seen.” Ironically, the murder occurred only a few hours after another extraordinary moment, when the President finally threw his full support behind the movement. Pressed by King and other civil rights leaders to take a moral stand against Jim Crow in addition to signing legislation, President Kennedy had just delivered a television address, some of it improvised, of surpassing eloquence and insight. After hearing the address, Jack at once sent a telegram to the White House: “Thank you for emerging as the most forthright President we have ever had and for providing us with the inspired leadership that we so desperately needed. I am more proud than ever of my American heritage.”
A few days later, “Back Our Brothers” held its second event, a $100-a-plate fund-raising dinner in honor of the “Four Horsemen” of SCLC and the movement—Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Wyatt Tee Walker. Jack personally presented an award to Walker, Ed Sullivan to Dr. King. Then, on the last Sunday in June, in what would become an annual event, Jack and Rachel hosted an “Afternoon of Jazz” on the grounds of their home. The concert, which featured musicians such as Dave Brubeck, Cannonball Adderley, and Dizzy Gillespie, attracted about five hundred patrons and raised more than $15,000 for SCLC.
The concert for SCLC put a new strain on Jack’s tense ties to the NAACP, which was now often overshadowed in the news by SCLC and its aggressive student offshoot, SNCC. In July, in the Amsterdam News, Jack criticized Roy Wilkins for “casting disparaging remarks against other civil rights agencies.” At the same time, Robinson also sniped at Whitney Young of the National Urban League for a similar reason, after Young, like Wilkins on another occasion, ridiculed the crucial strategy of SCLC in Birmingham and elsewhere of filling the city jails in a direct challenge to Jim Crow. Jack saw no justification for Young’s comment when, as he put it, “the course of history and the shape of current events are being altered by young and old all over this nation who are making this kind of sacrifice.” He made it clear that he did not wish to deny Wilkins or Young, only to acknowledge King’s rare bravery and effectiveness. “I do not say this as a would-be leader,” he went on. “I do not think I have the ability and know that I do not have the inclination for leadership.… I say this as Robinson.”
Behind the new signs of disunity Jack saw, ironically, the effect of the murder of Medgar Evers, which by its savage boldness had made the rival leaders more antagonistic to one another—as if the confrontational style of SCLC and SNCC were ultimately to blame for the NAACP leader’s death. “Disunity,” Jack argued, “is no proper memorial to give to a courageous man who died in order that we might win freedom.” Robinson was even more appalled when supporters of the Nation of Islam pelted Dr. King with eggs when he arrived at Salem Methodist Church in Harlem to preach an evening sermon. Although Malcolm denied that his followers in the Nation were involved, Robinson ignored his denial. Conceding to Malcolm X’s organization the right to free speech, Jack insisted on its marginality among blacks despite its prominence in the white press (especially after the airing of a television program, The Hate That Hate Produced, about the Nation of Islam, by Mike Wallace). To Robinson, it was “very odd that the power structure in journalism, television and radio keeps promoting the Muslims.” Could it be, he asked, that pro-segregationist groups “outside the race” formed the basis of the Nation’s support? “Where do the Muslims get their money? Who finances them?”
In contrast, Jack was full of praise for “the magnificent role the organized white clergy of America has begun to play in the civil rights struggle.” He was moved to this paean after a visit a few weeks before to address the Fourth General Synod of the United Church of Christ, which he lauded for its decisive support of the movement. Unlike other major religious denominations that cowered on the sidelines despite the concern of individual members, the United Church of Christ had taken a bold collective stand. At the synod, it had adopted a credo that recognized the morality of racial integration, including intermarriage. Partly as a result of his successful speech here, Jack was elected in November to a three-year term, starting January 1, 1964, as president of United Church Men, which represented some ten million churchmen as one of the major departments of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States. The National Council, which united all major Protestant and Orthodox religions in America, had also come out in strong support of civil rights for blacks, including support of sit-ins and boycotts.
Conveniently for Robinson, the headquarters of the United Church Men was in Manhattan, in the Riverside Church complex.
ALL THESE ACTIVITIES, some highly publicized, were not without an effect on Jack’s main job, as a vice-president at Chock Full o’ Nuts. Although he still found much satisfaction in his work there, and although Bill Black still seemed fully behind him, changes were occurring that had undermined his place in the company. That summer, after a golfing vacation in Puerto Rico, where Jack served as honorary chairman of a golf tournament at the Dorado Hilton, he returned to New York to find his place at Chock Full o’ Nuts in jeopardy. As Jack knew well, his second contract (for five years) with the company would expire early in the next year, 1964.
For some time, the company had been vexed by problems involving worker efficiency and morale, on the one hand, and trade union organizing, on the other. Standards of service at the restaurants, where tipping was forbidden, were breaking down
even as the United Mine Workers sought to organize the workers. As the head of personnel, Robinson was in a crucial position concerning these matters, but increasingly his performance was found wanting. Although he did his job conscientiously, his efforts on behalf of civil rights and related matters probably were at the expense of Chock Full o’ Nuts. At least some of his colleagues wanted the company’s name and image separated more distinctly from his other activities; Robinson did not help matters by often using company stationery for civil rights and other political correspondence. In addition, instead of cracking down on delinquent workers, Jack’s instinct from the start was to defend them.
At some point, Robinson found himself assigned an assistant in the personnel office over whom he had little control. This assistant, a black man named Herb Samuel, who had trained as a fighter pilot during the war and attended Tuskegee Institute and Cornell University, had evidently been imposed on him although, as Jack put it to another executive, “we don’t see eye to eye and neither of us have much respect for the other”; Samuel was “to be my assistant whether I liked it or not.”
On July 13, while Jack was away from the office for about a month, the company fired six employees who had been involved, apparently, in some form of trade-union recruiting. Normally, Robinson, as the head of personnel, passed on all firings of nonsupervisory staff; but he found out about the dismissals only on his return. He then sent a sharply worded memorandum to Samuel. On August 13, in words at least as tough, Black reprimanded Jack for his message to Samuel, and for expecting the company to refrain from acting while he was away. Black and another executive had reviewed the firings: “Don’t you have any respect for our judgments?” Black’s tone shook Jack. The next day, in a reply, Robinson stuck to his position that as head of personnel he should be involved in all dismissals, but was careful not to offend Black. “I hope you will accept this as I write it. It has nothing to do with my personal high regard for you, but it certainly has a great deal to do with what I think of myself.” The next day, Jack drafted an even more conciliatory letter, although he continued to insist that his letter to Samuel was in order. Black had not hired Jack in 1957 as a figurehead; “I’m sure, today, that you wouldn’t want me and don’t want me to be a figurehead.”
As Jack mulled over his options, he was grateful for the huge, elevating distraction provided by the March on Washington, when a coalition of all the major civil rights groups and their supporters, black and white, descended on the capital in an unprecedented show of solidarity. To Jack, who attended the march with Rachel, Jackie, Sharon, and David, the day was an unparalleled triumph. Instead of the fights and rioting that some predicted, the mood was one of self-confidence and shared humanity. “I have never been so proud to be a Negro,” he wrote. “I have never been so proud to be an American.” The sight of thousands of blacks and whites marching together for a common cause stirred him: “One had to be deeply moved as [one] stood, watching Negroes and whites, marching hand in hand, singing songs of freedom,” he wrote. He was proud, too, of his family. Jack watched Rachel’s eyes moisten as, spellbound, she listened to Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” oration. He saw Jackie, who was usually bored by politics, join in the singing and handclapping and heard him talk of doing more for the movement. Hand in hand, he walked proudly with eleven-year-old David, explaining to him this or that facet of the struggle. A passing scare came when Sharon, overcome by the heat, fainted and had to be taken to a Red Cross station. The only lasting regret was watching “the decadent, ignorant philosophy” of three reactionary Southern senators as they offered on television their poisoned opinions of the day’s events.
Buoyed by the joyful spirit of the march, on September 9, with Marian Logan directing the effort, the Robinsons hosted their second “Afternoon of Jazz” of the year at their home in Stamford, this time in aid of both the SCLC and the NAACP. With both Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr. as honored guests, the response was even greater than before; more than thirteen hundred people heard the music of Horace Silver, Herbie Mann, Billy Taylor, and Joe Williams.
A week later, on the morning of September 16, joy turned to horror and sorrow when a bomb thrown into the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four girls at Sunday school and wounded twenty other persons. Behind the bombing Jack saw the evil hands of Bull Connor and Governor George Wallace. “God bless Dr. Martin Luther King,” he mused bitterly in his column. But if his child had been one of those killed, “I’m afraid he would have lost me as a potential disciple of his credo of non-violence.”
Meanwhile, his place at Chock Full o’ Nuts was crumbling. On September 7, Jimmy Booker, who published a column of inside political news and gossip in the Amsterdam News, offered this squib: “Friends say that Jackie Robinson is considering leaving the restaurant business and taking a job with Gov. Rockefeller.” Later that month, word came that the alleged job was as the next chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission (on which no blacks sat). On September 18, Robinson and the governor indeed met to discuss this move. Coincidentally, Jack and Rachel had rented a small unit in the brownstone owned by the Logans on West Eighty-eighth Street, so that he now had a residence in New York State. On October 5, Booker announced that the appointment would come within a few days. Again it failed to materialize.
The state job carried a salary of $20,475 a year, which would mean a severe cut in Jack’s pay. But he would soon need a position. Increasingly he stayed away from Chock Full o’ Nuts, even as the six dismissed workers, who ironically blamed Robinson for their situation, filed a formal complaint with the City Commission on Human Rights. Early in October, the National Labor Relations Board set a hearing for later in the month of a charge by the United Mine Workers concerning unfair labor practices. Within the company, Jack heard very little about this matter. Then, around eleven in the morning on October 29, someone asked him to come to the front office; the company and the union were about to sign their agreement. This was Robinson’s first notice that the union had won the war.
The next day, Robinson sent another executive, Sam Ostrove, a letter that spelled out his estrangement. In addition to the gnawing presence of Samuel was his loss of face in the trade-union struggle. While he had been complying with the unofficial company policy of discouraging the union, behind his back his company had been negotiating a change. The six employees had attacked Robinson although he had not been involved in their firing; now they were to be rehired without his consent. Robinson felt the loss of face keenly. His ability to be head of personnel was irreparably damaged, as he saw it. “People are saying,” he complained, “He not only can’t hire, but he has no voice.” He also faced up to the criticism that he was “away from the office frequently. This is without question, but it started only in the last few weeks. It should be obvious why this has happened.”
His crisis at work did not curb his fighting spirit. On the road, he made speeches for the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP, at the University of Pennsylvania, and in Detroit for the Trade Union Leadership Council. In his newspaper column, Robinson went on the offensive following an attack by Adam Clayton Powell and Malcolm X on Ralph Bunche, who had spoken scathingly of the Black Muslims. As a UN official, he pointed out, Bunche was supposed to be aloof from the internal affairs of the United States, but he had spoken out repeatedly in the South against Jim Crow. In contrast, Powell, “once a friend of mine,” had deserted blacks in the current civil rights crisis. “When we have heard from him,” Robinson wrote, “it has usually been in the form of some grandstand, publicity-conscious barrage of wild promises which the Congressman failed to keep.” Malcolm, “whose intelligence and articulateness I respect deeply,” was not much better: “Malcolm is very militant on Harlem street corners where militancy is not dangerous.” Neither man possessed “one twentieth of the integrity and leadership” of Bunche.
Powell rolled with these punches; but Malcolm, who had a gift for taunting, heaped scorn on Robinson as a toady of one
big white man after another: Rickey in his attack on Robeson in 1949, Nixon, Black, and now Rockefeller. “We hear,” he reminded Jack, “that you are about to be appointed Boxing Commissioner of New York State by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Does this have any bearing on your efforts to get Negroes into Rockefeller’s camp? Just who are you playing ball for today, good Friend?” Stung by the imputation of cowardice in Robinson’s letter, Malcolm spitefully imagined Robinson himself shot down, like Medgar Evers, at the hands of whites—the same white “friends” to whom he was now so obsequious. This kind of malice was beyond Robinson, who countered with another harsh letter to Malcolm. “Coming from you,” he told Malcolm, “an attack is a tribute.”
Now a barrage of letters hostile to Robinson added to the din. A Brooklyn man regretted the sad spectacle of black men attacking one another in public—“but then I do not consider Mr. Robinson a true black man. Rather he is a white mind covered by a black skin.” But on November 22, in the middle of this controversy, came the assassination of President Kennedy, which muted it. Within a few days, Malcolm was silenced further. On December 1, at a rally in Manhattan, he gave this reaction to the President’s death: “Chickens coming home to roost never made me sad. They always made me glad.” Repudiating the comment, Elijah Muhammad announced Malcolm’s suspension in telegrams sent to various news organizations.
Jack had just returned with Rachel from Pasadena, where a public park had been dedicated in his name, when the news about the assassination broke. “When the tragic news first hit,” he wrote in the Amsterdam News, “I gasped with disbelief that here in America in 1963, a President could be murdered simply because he was a man of courageous conviction.” Although “this was a man whom I often criticized,” Kennedy had “done more for the civil rights cause than any other President.” Remorseful about his constant criticism of the President on civil rights, he emphasized now that he had begun to admire him. One of Kennedy’s top aides had said to Robinson recently: “Jack, you are certainly in his corner now, aren’t you?”
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