The harshest counterattack came from William F. Buckley Jr., in an essay, “Robinson Strikes Out,” in the New York Post. “It is surely time,” Buckley argued, “to put an end to the mischievous national habit of taking seriously this pompous moralizer who whines his way through life as though all America were at Ebbets Field cheering him on against the big bad racist St. Louis Cardinals.” Robinson’s habit of describing himself as “first a black man, second an American, third a Republican” was itself racist. (And indeed, Robinson once would not have ordered things in this way; but he understood now, in the wake of the social turbulence of the preceding years, that for most Americans his skin color was more defining of his identity than his citizenship ever could be.)
“If that is racism, so be it,” he responded in the Amsterdam News. “I am proud to be black. I am also embattled because I am black; but for white Americans of the Buckley ilk, I am only one of millions of blacks who are tired of it!” On August 14, two weeks before the Democratic convention, he roused himself from rest to be present in Harlem for an official visit by Humphrey. At the offices of the Freedom National Bank, standing beside Humphrey, he announced that he was formally endorsing the Vice-President. But this choreographed visit did not go smoothly. On 125th Street, behind wooden barricades, most of about one thousand Harlem folk gave Humphrey a cheery welcome; but others turned on him and on Robinson. “Get him out of here!” one man shouted as Humphrey stepped grinning out of the bank. “Uncle Tom!” another yelled at Robinson.
Two weeks later, in Chicago, at one of the most tumultuous political conventions in American history, Humphrey was nominated for the presidency. But most Rockefeller supporters, including James Farmer, the former director of CORE, declined to follow Jack’s lead in supporting Humphrey; Senator Jacob Javits of New York called the decision “precipitate and to be deplored.” Robinson knew well that he was taking a fateful step. In handwritten drafts of a letter to Rockefeller, he pleaded with him for understanding. “This is perhaps the most difficult moment of my life,” Jack began, before amending the sentence to read “These are difficult times.” His two years as a special assistant had been “personally rewarding”; moreover, he had also seen “a possible breakthrough” in race relations because of the governor’s leadership. But the atmosphere of unity at the Republican convention had been achieved at the expense of blacks; he had to fight it. As for his job as a special assistant, “I would expect to return to my position with you when the campaign is over. I am aware however [of] the politics involved and can only ask if you were Black and searching for dignity could you do any different?”
But this time, Robinson had gone too far. As a top Republican leader, Rockefeller could hardly employ a lieutenant who campaigned for the opposition. Robinson was an exceptional figure, but reappointing him was probably out of the question. Over the next few years, Robinson continued to support Rockefeller; but he never again held a full-time position with the governor. Perhaps Jack would not have resigned if the job itself had been more rewarding. “Whatever it was at first, it was no longer rewarding,” Rachel insisted. “Jack had an office and a title but no power at all. Everything had to be referred to people higher up; Jack was simply a possible way to reach the governor, and more and more not a very clear or open way. He had enjoyed much more power at Chock Full o’ Nuts. I think he was ready to go.”
On January 22, 1969, following Nixon’s inaugural address, Robinson sent him a formal letter that made only scant reference to Jack’s earlier support. Accepting the election result, “we all pray that your years in Washington will be most successful.” Although blacks had not supported him, Nixon should set aside that fact and work for national unity. “For Mr. President, Black people cannot afford a racial conflict; White people cannot afford one. And it’s a fact that America cannot afford one. If we are to survive as a nation, we must do it together. Black people will work for one America if we are given hope. Without hope, the present feeling of despair will lead to worse problems.”
Victorious at last, Nixon ignored this missive. He also ignored a group of about thirty black leaders, including Robinson and Floyd McKissick, who showed up at the White House gates soon after the inauguration to request a meeting with him; the group was kept waiting for about half an hour, then turned away. Nixon still admired Robinson the former Brooklyn Dodger, but he was no longer interested in, or had need for, Robinson as a political player. In this regard, the previous autumn, Jack had suffered another major setback when the New York Amsterdam News quietly dropped his column. The loss of this forum, in addition to the severance of his formal ties to Rockefeller, made him truly a private citizen once again.
A few days later, on January 31, Jack celebrated his fiftieth birthday. “We had a nice party one afternoon,” Rachel recalled, “with lots of family and friends—my brother Chuck and his family, Lacy and Florence Covington, Willette Bailey of course, and the Kweskins, and the Logans with Chipper, their little son, and Marty Stone, Howard Cosell and his family, I think, and others. It was a beautiful day, very cold but clear and bright, with snow crusting on the ground and the pond iced over. We had a big fire going and a nice buffet and drinks for those who wanted them. Then the most amazing thing happened. Suddenly Jack turned away and opened the glass sliding doors that looked over the hillside. Before we knew it he was at the top of the slope and getting onto the kids’ toboggan. Then all of a sudden he was sliding down the slope, heading for the pond. We held our breath because he really couldn’t steer the bobsled, and there was a big bump at the edge of the lake, but he went over the bump beautifully and out onto the ice and then he just slid all the way across the pond to the foot of the trees on the other side, and he sat there in the bobsled, laughing his head off like a happy kid. We were shocked, he hadn’t been at all well. But it was wonderful to see him be so physical, to do something so daring, so reckless. He was very pleased with himself.”
MEANWHILE, SEA HOST SEEMED to be making some progress. However, in its ability to attract and sign black and Puerto Rican franchisees, the venture was struggling; by the middle of 1969, Harlem had only two restaurants. Once again Jack had proof, if he needed it, of the scarcity of money among black folks. To stimulate sales of franchises to minorities (and make some money for themselves) Jack and a small group of other businessmen, including his brother-in-law Chuck Williams, founded Jackie Robinson Associates. “We don’t want the company to own stores in the black and Puerto Rican areas,” Robinson said flatly. “We want blacks and Puerto Ricans to own these stores.” Seeking funds from various agencies, JRA then sought to funnel this money in the form of loans to prospective franchisees. Eventually, JRA struck a deal with the Interracial Council for Business Opportunity (ICBO), which was itself funded by the Ford Foundation, for this purpose. JRA, led by Robinson, then began to choose minority prospective franchisees for support.
Within Sea Host, however, Jack was not growing comfortable. A wall separated him from the principals, who were mainly Asian or Asian-American and seemed uninclined to share confidences with him. “All I know,” Rachel said, “is that Jack complained early that whenever anything important had to be decided, the Asian principals would draw apart—go into a closet, he said, which could not have been literally true—and come to a decision without consulting him. He really had little idea what was going on.” On at least one occasion, when Rachel went with Jack to visit a potential franchisee, she saw the consequences of this distancing. “There were questions Jack couldn’t answer,” she recalled. “He had been left out of the loop within the company. He found it very frustrating.” There were other problems. “Several of us wanted to be a part of franchising,” Jack’s friend Warren Jackson said, “and we even went to meet with Wah Chin, the head of Sea Host, at his posh office on Park Avenue—Jack was there, and other friends. But really none of us was ready or able to provide hands-on leadership, which is what you need in franchising. I mean, we just knew that we wouldn’t be in every day, kneading dough or mixin
g batter. We all went on to other things.”
The combination of his discomfort within Sea Host and his unhappiness with governmental attitudes to blacks made Robinson pessimistic about race relations. Although he was often hard on black leaders, as in calling on Harlem voters the previous fall to dump Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (who was reelected by the usual landslide), Jack was harder still on the inaction or indifference or malevolence of most urban, state, and federal authorities where blacks were concerned. “I’m afraid we are going to have a conflict such as this country has never seen,” he declared. “I think we’re just a rumor away from it, unless there is concrete action—not by the black community, but by the federal, state, and local governments. The black community has no confidence in the leadership of this country today.… The waiting period is over as far as the black community is concerned. They’re tired of waiting.”
This did not mean that Robinson now endorsed the more radical young black leaders. Openly he talked about his contempt for many of the new celebrity militants. “My daughter had a picture of Eldridge Cleaver in her room,” he told a reporter, “and I objected to it. She said, ‘But it’s my room.’ I said, ‘But it’s my house, and I want that picture down.’ I caught the devil from my sons. But we sat down and talked about it. You know, if a guy goes out and shoots and kills a policeman, in too many areas he’s a hero. Too many of our people don’t care whether or not a guy has committed a crime.” (The picture was actually one of Huey Newton.) On the other hand, he also loathed the symbols of the American right wing, especially those sponsored by support of the Vietnam War. That summer, Robinson flashed into the news when he launched an attack on the increasingly popular habit, pushed by Reader’s Digest and the Gulf Oil company, of displaying decals of the Stars and Stripes. He was still for the war, but the decal, he declared, was an ominous sign. “I wouldn’t fly the flag on the Fourth of July, or any other day,” he said. “When I see a car with a flag pasted on it, I figure the guy behind the wheel isn’t my friend.”
Nevertheless, Jack remained quietly loyal to the United States military effort. On August 21, 1969, he was the guest speaker at a luncheon in connection with the annual Command Chaplains’ Conference at Fort Meyer, Virginia. In his audience, in addition to the chaplains, were various other high-ranking members of the armed forces, including the Army chief of staff and Vietnam military leader William Westmoreland.
AWARE OF TIME RUNNING OUT, Jack pressed ahead with plans for another book on his life, this time an autobiography written with Alfred Duckett. At one point, publishers would have come to him; now he had to go to them. Accordingly, in June or July he found himself having a business lunch in New York with a young black woman who had just been appointed a senior editor at Random House and was eager to acquire good black authors. (Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was about to appear.) Encouraged by Charles Harris, another black senior editor, Toni Morrison had invited Jack, whom she had never met, to lunch to talk about the project. “We met at a bistro near Random House on the East Side,” she recalled. “He didn’t eat much. He explained that he had diabetes, he had to watch his diet. He was quiet at first, but it took him just a little while to decide that, yes, he was in smart company. Then he relaxed and became comfortable and informal. He seemed very intelligent and knowledgeable; he had sophisticated views of life, he was warm, funny, and forthcoming.” Morrison found herself enjoying the lunch more than she had expected.
“I already knew a great deal,” she said, “about the way many black men in that position often talked to black women who had a little power, which was to show the women that they really had none. Robinson was totally unlike that. He made no gestures to say, ‘I’m more important than you; you know, you have to accommodate me because I am a man; aren’t you really a secretary?’ He played none of the usual gender games. He respected me, felt comfortable with me. In hindsight, he was one of the few black men I had business dealings with in those days with whom I didn’t have to watch myself all the time.”
Later that afternoon, buoyed by their meeting, Morrison took Robinson in to meet her superiors, all white men, and make a pitch for the book. “By now I was very enthusiastic, I was ready to edit the book myself.” At first it was pleasant, Robinson sitting there among the men, trading stories about baseball. “I felt at a disadvantage,” Morrison said, “because I didn’t know baseball; but Robinson seemed such a fascinating person. He said that he wanted his book to be about more than baseball. He wanted it to be about the larger picture, about society and the times he had lived through. I knew what he meant, but I could also feel the interest ebbing from the room. The white men became cool, indifferent. They wanted something more exotic, something more voluptuous than he was prepared to offer. When he left, they complained that the book was going to be too political, too much social studies, it wouldn’t sell. They turned us down.”
To have his autobiography turned down by Random House was a rude slap—not least of all because in 1960 the company had eagerly published Carl Rowan’s biography of Jack, Wait Till Next Year. Nevertheless, the new book was soon placed with another publisher, Putnam, and Jack began work on it with Duckett.
With the New Year, 1970, Robinson had one unequivocal victory to celebrate. With its fifth anniversary in January, Freedom National Bank, where he was still chairman of the board, was firmly established as the most successful black-controlled bank in the United States. But at Sea Host, business was bad. On January 20, appearing in Washington, D.C., before the Senate Small Business Committee’s Subcommittee on Urban and Rural Development, which was investigating the franchising industry, Jack defended franchising as a partial solution to black economic problems. He blamed the Nixon administration for many of those problems. “The very poor relations between black America and the present Administration are causing a serious rift in this country,” he insisted. The Nixon efforts seemed to be aimed mainly at creating a few black millionaires, not helping the mass of blacks. Late in 1969, after United States Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans met with black business leaders, including Robinson and Bill Hudgins, at Freedom National Bank, Jack praised Stans’s efforts but also criticized his call for patience. “I don’t think anyone can ask us for patience,” he declared. “Black people have shown a tremendous amount of patience.”
He then made a bold move of his own, one that reflected both his continuing search for a business enterprise he could pass on to his family and his longtime belief in the premier role of housing as an issue in the black world. (Told once by a friend that schooling was the top need for any young black, Jack strongly disagreed: “Housing is the first thing. Unless he’s got a home he wants to come back to, it doesn’t matter what kind of school he goes to.”) After much discussion, Jack reached an agreement with three young but highly successful real estate men, Arthur Sutton, Mickey Weissman, and Richard Cohen, who put up $50,000 to launch the project, to form the Jackie Robinson Construction Corporation. Although all his partners were white, Jack’s aim was both profit for the principals and a long-term benefit to the black community through the construction of low- and middle-income housing (an emphasis new to Jack’s partners). Robinson’s hope, Sutton said, “was that it would be a truly interracial company dedicated to training contractors who had never worked on big projects.” In addition, “we had to keep the payroll money in the community we were working in.” “There is enough profit,” Jack himself insisted, “so that we can share it with the community we are building in.” The construction company would support the Robinson family for many years after Jack died.
Soon, he had settled into what became his main business office: the headquarters of the company at 560 Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. There, he had an able assistant, Merlyn White; a popular Harlem man-about-town, Kiah Sayles, served as his boon companion and gofer. A letter on his new company stationery to his good friend and golfing partner Andre Baruch, now living in Beverly Hills, Californ
ia, echoed Jack’s optimism: “As you can see we are in another business and it’s very exciting. For really the first time we have a potential that is great.… As things have not worked out in other ventures I am trying to hold down my enthusiasm. However, with each passing day things look better.”
In setting up the company and then helping it to develop, Jack depended a great deal on the efforts of a young lawyer who quickly became a close advisor and friend. He was Martin Edelman, educated at Princeton and Columbia Law School, who met Robinson not long after joining the law firm of Battle, Fowler, the counsel for Freedom National Bank. Sent uptown to a bank meeting for the first time, he had met Robinson. “It was January or February,” he recalled, “and the meeting was over. It was six-thirty, cold and dark. I went downstairs and was standing in front of the bank, on 125th Street, trying to decide whether to take a cab or the subway, when this enormous hand touched my shoulder from behind, and Jack said, ‘I bet you would like a ride.’ We talked all the way downtown. Because of bank business, we saw a fair amount of one another, and after meetings he would drive me home to Rye, on the way to Stamford. I wasn’t looking for a mentor; but I suppose I found one. We sort of ‘clicked.’ When the chance came for him to incorporate and go into construction, he asked me to be his lawyer. I agreed at once.”
Respecting Robinson, Edelman began to make a habit of calling him almost every weeknight around ten o’clock to go over the business of the day. He found Robinson not only grateful but also a spirited partner in their exchanges. “Both with the bank and with the corporation,” according to Edelman, “some people clearly imagined that Jack was a figurehead, that he was there for celebrity value only. It was not true at all. He had a very searching and determined intellect, a fine instinct for sensing that something was wrong, even if he couldn’t put his finger on it. He brought to his business, day in, day out, an incredible sense of determination, a sense of morality, and a value system that people he did business with felt was very special.”
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