Jackie Robinson
Page 67
Entering the Oakland dugout, Jack was warmly greeted by the A’s manager Dick Williams, who embraced and kissed him. The black pitcher Blue Moon Odom also reacted effusively to Jack’s presence. But to at least one observer, Odom was the only player, black or white, to show any particular interest in Robinson. “I was surprised by their indifference, especially the blacks,” Dick Young wrote. “There seems to be a feeling among the current black players that they owe Jackie nothing.”
Roger Kahn was with Jack at the game when a fan offered Robinson a baseball to autograph. “I’m sorry,” Jack said, “I can’t see it.” Jim Murray, a nationally syndicated columnist with whom Jack had feuded at various times, called out to him. “Who’s that?” Robinson asked. “Oh, Jim! I’m sorry I can’t see you any more.” But Jack was not looking for sympathy. “I’ve lost the sight in one eye,” he told Kahn, “but they think they can save the other. I’ve got nothing to complain about.”
His love of horse racing remained strong. “On Columbus Day,” Brenda Williams, Jack’s sister-in-law, said, “Jack called me and asked if I would go to Belmont to the racetrack with him. Chuck came along, and we had a good time, although Jack misplaced a bet one time, because of his bad eyesight, and he became embarrassed. But the people at the track were wonderful to him, as usual. Rachel joined us afterward for dinner in Manhasset. It was the last time we were all together.”
On October 23, Jack went into work at the office in Englewood Cliffs. Later that day, as he often did, he had his driver take him around to various wholesalers, where he collected a load of meat and some boxes of canned goods and other foodstuffs. Then they drove out to Brooklyn, where Jack left his donations at Lacy Covington’s Nazarene Baptist Church for distribution to the poor.
The next day, at 6:26 a.m., Rachel called the police, saying that Jack would need an ambulance. Two policemen arrived within a few minutes and administered oxygen to him. Shortly afterward, an ambulance arrived. At 7:10 that morning, on the way to the hospital, Robinson died. He was declared dead on arrival at Stamford Hospital.
On October 27, between 1 p.m. and 9 p.m., Robinson’s body lay in state at Duncan Brothers Funeral Home at 2303 Seventh Avenue in Harlem. On the two following days, viewing was at Riverside Church on Riverside Drive at 122nd Street, near Grant’s Tomb. With Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker’s help, the family prepared for the funeral. In lieu of flowers, contributions were to be sent to Daytop, Inc., in care of the Jackie Robinson Construction Corporation.
Tributes to Robinson poured in from the famous and the ordinary. President Nixon, who announced that he would not attend the funeral but would send an official delegation of some forty persons, lauded him. “His courage, his sense of brotherhood and his brilliance on the playing field,” Nixon declared, “brought a new human dimension not only to the game of baseball but to every area of American life where black and white people work side by side.” The civil rights leader Vernon Jordan hailed Robinson as “a trail-blazer for all black people and a great spokesman for justice.” Red Smith, the New York Times columnist, declared: “The word for Jackie Robinson is ‘unconquerable.’ … He would not be defeated. Not by the other team and not by life.” The old Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, offering some plain words, spoke another kind of truth: “He could beat you in a lot of ways.”
The funeral took place at noon on October 29, at Riverside Church. Some twenty-five hundred mourners heard the Reverend Jesse Jackson deliver the eulogy; Jackie Robinson had stolen home. Rockefeller was there, and Dick Gregory, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph; Peter O’Malley, Hank Greenberg, and Joe Louis, too. Campanella was in his wheelchair; Sargent Shriver, Bill Veeck, Larry Doby, Henry Aaron, and Vida Blue. Outside, hundreds of ordinary folk awaited the end of the service.
Six former athletes carried Jack’s coffin, silver-blue and draped with red roses, out of Riverside Church and into the waiting hearse. One, Bill Russell, was a Boston Celtic; but the others were old Brooklyn Dodgers: Newcombe, Black, Gilliam, Reese, and Branca. Then the funeral cortege, stretching several city blocks, rolled slowly across Manhattan toward Brooklyn and Jack’s final resting place, Cypress Hills Cemetery, where his son Jackie was also buried, only a few blocks from vanished Ebbets Field.
One mourner at the funeral was Jack and Rachel’s friend Robert Campbell, of Campbell’s Bookstore near UCLA. He had flown overnight to attend the funeral and would return that night to Los Angeles. “The service was excellent,” he would recall, “except it was so sad.” Heading downtown after the cortege had left, he shared a cab with someone who said he was from the National Urban League. “We talked all the way back about Jack and what a fine person he was. We were all glad that he didn’t suffer longer, but we were sorry he had to go so young.”
The day before, on October 28, in Pasadena, almost three hundred persons had gathered on the steps of City Hall to pay tribute to Robinson. A choir was on hand, from John Muir High School, as well as a trumpeter from the bugle corps at Pasadena City College. After the choir sang some songs a cappella, the trumpeter sounded taps.
Epilogue
1997
IMMEDIATELY AFTER JACK’S DEATH in 1972, Rachel resigned from her job at Yale University. For about two months she lived alone, at her insistence, in the house in Stamford. Then, finding it too painful to remain there with Jack gone, she moved to one of her two apartments on West 93rd Street in Manhattan. She lived there for about two years before returning home.
In the meantime, soon after Jack’s death, she became president of the Jackie Robinson Construction Corporation. Along with Mickey Weissman and Richard Cohen, as well as Joel Halpern, another young real estate developer, she renamed the company the Jackie Robinson Development Corporation. Over the next few years, JRDC was responsible for building some sixteen hundred units of housing. Later, she formed a successful real estate management and training corporation, of which she was also president.
In 1973, she formally registered the Jackie Robinson Foundation. The other founders were Martin Edelman, her brother Charles Williams, and Franklin Williams. Through the foundation, she hoped to assist students from poor and minority backgrounds to attend college by giving them tuition grants. In 1977, the foundation awarded its first scholarships. By 1997, it had awarded more than five hundred scholarships to students whose graduation rate of almost ninety-two percent is thought to be the highest of all organizations with a similar mission in the United States. In 1997, 142 Jackie Robinson Scholars were attending colleges and universities across the United States. (The foundation offices are at 3 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001.) Rachel resigned as chair of the board of directors late in 1996, but Sharon and David remain active directors.
In 1986, Rachel sold her house in Stamford and bought a sixty-acre farm located about two hours north of Manhattan, where she still resides. (About one year after the sale of the Stamford house to a popular young musician, it was resold to a developer who then destroyed it and erected a new house in its place.) In 1996, Rachel published an illustrated narrative, Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait.
In 1973, Sharon Robinson graduated from Howard University with a degree in nursing, then earned a master’s degree at Columbia University in midwifery. She practiced for about twelve years before joining the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH as one of its top officials. After five years, she returned to midwifery; at one time she held the rank of assistant professor in the School of Nursing at Yale University. In recent years she lived again in Stamford, and now owns a home in the neighboring town of Norwalk, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, Molver Fieffe. In 1996, she published Stealing Home: An Intimate Family Portrait by the Daughter of Jackie Robinson.
David Robinson, who did not return to Stanford University following his brother Jackie’s death, worked for some years in Harlem. Mainly through United Harlem Growth, a company he helped to form, he led efforts to rehabilitate decayed housing stock there in a “sweat equity” plan that helped local residents acquire pr
operty from the government in return for their labor. In the 1980s, he left the United States and emigrated to Tanzania. However, he returns regularly to the United States, and his mother has visited him at least once a year in Africa. In Tanzania, he first helped to form a fishing cooperative near Dar-es-Salaam, then moved deep into the interior, to Mbeya, where he acquired and cleared about one hundred acres of land for a farm. He now grows coffee and assists in a cooperative arrangement that exports coffee overseas, including to the United States.
In 1995, David’s daughter, Ayo Robinson, born in the United States but reared in Tanzania, enrolled as a first-year student at her father’s old prep school in Massachusetts, Mount Hermon, where she is still a student. Her older sister, Susan Thomas, works for the City of New York in the area of prisoner rehabilitation. Sharon’s only child, her son, Jesse Martin Simms, became a student at King and Low-Heywood Thomas School in Stamford. (The school occupies the former summer home of Richard and Andrea Simon, where the Robinsons had lived on first moving to Stamford in 1954.) An outstanding prep-school football player, Jesse committed himself late in 1996 to enrolling as a freshman the following year at UCLA. Sonya Pankey, Jackie’s daughter, has been for many years a member of the Ralph Lauren organization. Her own daughter, Sherita, Rachel’s only great-grandchild, works as a volunteer at the Jackie Robinson Foundation.
In 1997, Jack’s older brother Mack Robinson and his sister, Willa Mae Robinson Walker, until her death in June 1997, were still living in Pasadena. Mack, however, is severely incapacitated by a stroke suffered a few years ago. He lives at home with his wife of more than thirty years, Delano Robinson. Their daughter Kathy Robinson, who has worked hard to recover and preserve the Robinson family’s history, also lives in Pasadena.
In various ways since his death in 1972, the nation has officially honored the memory of Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson. On March 26, 1984, President Reagan gave him the nation’s highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. In 1996, in an even rarer honor, a bill approved by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Clinton authorized the minting of gold and silver coins of the realm to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Robinson’s entry into major-league baseball in 1947. And on April 15, 1997, came the announcement that his Brooklyn Dodgers number, 42, would be retired from major-league baseball for all time to come.
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
AMP Arthur Mann Papers, Library of Congress
BE Brooklyn Eagle
BRP Branch Rickey Papers, Library of Congress
CDB California Daily Bruin (UCLA)
I Never Jackie Robinson (as told to Alfred Duckett), I Never Had It Made (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1972)
JR Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson
JRP Jackie Robinson Papers, Jackie Robinson Foundation, New York City
LC Library of Congress
NAACPR National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records, Library of Congress
NYAN New York Amsterdam News
NYP New York Post
NYT New York Times
PJCC Pasadena Junior College Chronicle
PP Pasadena Post
PSN Pasadena Star-News
PC Pittsburgh Courier
Rachel Robinson, Interview Interviews with author, 1994–1997
RRP Rachel Robinson Papers, in her possession
SN Sporting News
WP Washington Post
PROLOGUE
1. I wanted to see everything!: Ron Gabriel to author, interview, Oct. 13, 1996.
2. supreme, a model athlete: New York Daily Mirror, Jan. 25, 1962.
3. What I remember: Ron Gabriel, interview.
4. I feel inadequate: New York Daily News, July 24, 1962.
5. I could not be here: SN, Aug. 4, 1962.
6. who was as a father: NYT, July 24, 1962.
7. are all here today: ibid.
8. I’m positive I won’t: Newsweek, Jan. 23, 1962.
9. If I had been white: ibid.
10. He has a talent: New York Daily News, Jan. 6, 1962.
11. The aggressive Robbie carried: NYT, Jan. 5, 1962.
12. Jackie, I know: Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 7, 1962.
13. a hero of the struggle: NYT, July 21, 1962.
14. There are days when: Richard Nixon to JR, Jan. 23, 1962, JRP.
15. He has demonstrated: John F. Kennedy to Chairman, JR Testimonial Dinner, July 18, 1962, JRP.
16. He has the right: Martin Luther King Jr., Address, Hall of Fame Testimonial Dinner, July 20, 1962, JRP.
17. You are the richest: “Brock” [L. I. Brockenbury?] to JR, July 25, 1962, JRP.
18. I’m a tremendously: JR, Address, Hall of Fame Testimonial Dinner, July 20, 1962, JRP.
19. I thanked Rickey: Ron Gabriel, interview.
20. Brooklyn N.L. 1947: Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, N.Y.
21. To see Robinson’s career: Roger Kahn, “Jackie Robinson: Man of the 25 Years,” Sport, December 1971, p. 86.
22. Again, Robinson was like: Ron Gabriel, interview.
CHAPTER 1
1. the Egypt of the Confederacy: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (A. C. McClurg, 1903), p. 122.
2. a period of broken: Harold Henry Spangle, The History of the Black Community of Thomas County, Georgia from 1827 to 1909 (Thomasville, Ga.: Thomas College Press, 1994), p. 25.
3. Although there were white: Spangle, p. 54.
4. the interesting fact: Cairo and Grady County (Board of Trade, Cairo, Ga., 1911–12), unpag.
5. We were living just: “Mrs. Robinson’s Notes,” misc. ms., n.d., JRP.
6. It’s true, my grandmother: Olin Faulk to author, interview, May 13, 1996.
7. You’re about the sassiest: “Mrs. Robinson’s Notes.”
8. a tall, rawboned man: William J. Vanlandingham to author, interview, May 12, 1996.
9. You might as well: “Mrs. Robinson’s Notes.”
10. If you want to get: ibid.
11. In those days: Charles Copeland to author, interview, May 13, 1996.
CHAPTER 2
1. the most beautiful sight: “Mrs. Robinson’s Notes,” misc. ms., n.d., JRP.
2. really very much a loner: Willa Mae Walker to author, interview, Feb. 10, 1995.
3. “Mattie” Robinson: Pasadena City Directory, 1921–1922, Pasadena Public Library, Pasadena, Cal.
4. the richest city: California: A Guide to the Golden State (Works Progress Administration of the State of California) (N.Y.: Hastings House, 1939), p. 247.
5. a civic pride running: Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (L.A., 1919), p. 143.
6. Sophisticated and wealthy: Ann Scheid, Pasadena: Crown of the Valley (Pasadena: Windsor Publications, 1986), p. 96.
7. the beginning of the transition: Earl L. Cartland, “A Study of the Negroes Living in Pasadena,” M.A. thesis, Whittier College, California (June 1948), p. 13. Pasadena Historical Society.
8. to come together and: California Eagle, Feb. 28, 1919.
9. You couldn’t live east: Ernie Cunningham to author, interview, Feb. 10, 1995.
10. a single policeman: California Eagle, Aug. 1, 1940.
11. The condition of affairs: California Eagle, Nov. 7, 1924.
12. We had apples: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
13. Sometimes there were only: I Never, pp. 16–17.
14. We went through a sort: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
15. The police were there: ibid.
16. My mother never lost: I Never, p. 18.
17. Nigger! Nigger!: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
18. My mother divided: ibid.
19. Mallie loved to sit: Rachel Robinson, interview.
20. We knew that we: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
21. I remember sitting: WP, Aug. 22, 1949.
22. God watches what you do: “Mrs. Robinson’s Notes.”
23. Prayer is belief: Arthur Mann, The Jackie Robinson Story (N.Y.: Gr
osset & Dunlap, 1951), p. 33.
24. I was Jack’s little mother: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
25. When I was eight: WP, Aug. 21, 1949.
26. but it was only: Sid Heard to author, interview, Sept. 10, 1995.
27. would get to school: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
28. always had a kind word: WP, Aug. 21, 1949.
29. a deep, embedded friendship: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
30. they put all of: Eleanor Peters Heard to author, Feb. 10, 1995.
31. Gardener: Transcript of grades, Washington Elementary School, Pasadena.
32. He was a special: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
33. We used to play: Sid Heard, interview.
34. When I was in: WP, Aug. 21, 1949.
35. a constant user: Unidentified clipping, n.d., JRP.
36. I used to be: Ray Bartlett to author, interview, Sept. 8, 1995.
37. I guess I was: WP, Aug. 24, 1949.
38. to tell the truth: ibid.
39. didn’t have the things: Van Wade to author, interview, Feb. 10, 1995.
40. because some of us: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
41. We didn’t know him: Mack Robinson, interview, c. 1985, JRP.
42. My father’s will and spirit: JR, ms., fragment, speeches, JRP.
43. I could only think: I Never, p. 16.
44. she wasn’t going to: Willa Mae Walker, interview.
45. somewhat sickly sometimes: WP, Aug. 21, 1949.
46. Edgar was mentally retarded: Ray Bartlett, interview.
47. There was always something: WP, Aug. 21, 1949.
48. tall and thin: ibid.
49. I remember going: ibid.
50. In many places they: PP, July 2, 1938.
51. When it was a cold: PSN, April 7, 1987.
52. I think he thought: PSN, April 7, 1987.
53. we was right there: Mack Robinson, interview, c. 1985, JRP.
54. I will take care: Jack Gordon to author, interview, Feb. 21, 1995.