by Jonathan Eig
Rickey loved baseball (as a catcher, he played four seasons in the majors, hitting a feeble .239). He also loved money, and wanted loads of it. But he didn’t want any overpaid players on his club, in part because he thought the men would be corrupted by their wealth. Rickey believed firmly that it was better to unload an aging player a year too soon than a year too late. When he arrived in Brooklyn and dealt the beloved Dolph Camilli to the hated Giants, it was indisputably the right move, but it infuriated fans, who hung Rickey in effigy from Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. “El Cheapo,” the columnist Jimmy Powers dubbed him, a nickname that infuriated Rickey, in no small part because it stuck. But so did “The Mahatma” and “The Deacon,” nicknames coined by the more affectionate sportswriters. Red Smith, no sycophant, called him “the finest man ever brought to the game of baseball” and said he would have made a giant of a Supreme Court justice. Whether Rickey’s motives were pure or not—and even the most astute reporters were taken by his razzmatazz—there was never any doubting his complexity. “A man of many facets—all turned on,” as they used to say in Brooklyn.
Long before integration became an issue, Rickey had already assured his reputation as one of baseball’s great innovators. While running the St. Louis Cardinals, he had created a system of minor-league farm clubs to supply his big-league team with young players. He amassed so much talent that the Cards dominated the National League for years, until the rest of the league caught on. Now he was after something bigger. And the careful notes he made—scribbled on whatever pieces of paper he had stuffed in his pockets, and preserved so that future generations might attest to his brilliance—show that he understood long before most of his peers that the first team to break baseball’s color line would win a huge advantage. His design was to sign the most talented black players available, pay the men as little as possible for as long as possible, to make the Dodgers winners, to increase ticket sales, to live up to his religious values, and to make baseball a more democratic game. In what order did he rank those priorities? He never said. He didn’t have to. He knew he was doing the right thing.
At the start of the 1945 season, when Robinson was starting his season with the Monarchs, Rickey announced that his scouts were looking for players for the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, a new team that would become part of a new Negro league called the United States League. Rickey told one writer there was “not a single Negro player in this country who could qualify for the National or American leagues.” But if one of the players in his new Negro league eventually developed the necessary skills, he would be open to promoting that player to the majors.
Rickey managed to offend everyone at the same time, but his plan was not so crazy as it sounded. With Ebbets Field empty half the summer and Brooklyn’s black population growing, a black team could have helped fill the ballpark when the white Dodgers were out of town. Even so, many people suspected that Rickey had no intention of creating a new black baseball league and no intention of bringing black men to the majors. They figured he was buying time, trying to keep the integrationists off his back.
By 1945, Rickey and his scouts had narrowed their attention to a handful of black ballplayers, including Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby, and Monte Irvin. The scouts applied their usual standards, looking for a man who could hit, run, and throw. Campanella, a slugging catcher, and Newcombe, a flame-throwing pitcher, both impressed Rickey’s men. Yet Campanella seemed to the scouts too easygoing, and Newcombe too immature. The more his scouts scoured the marketplace, the more they focused on Robinson. He had been to college and played alongside whites. He didn’t drink or smoke. He’d served in the military and taken a stand against Jim Crow during his military trial. The scouts recognized that the young ballplayer’s temper posed a threat, but if the boss wanted someone smart and tough, they said, Robinson was the man.
• • •
Robinson and Rickey met for the first time on August 28, 1945, in Rickey’s office on Montague Street in Brooklyn. On one wall hung portraits of Abraham Lincoln and Leo Durocher, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. On another wall hung a blackboard listing the names of every baseball player at every level of the team’s organization, every member of Rickey’s dominion. Goldfish swam in a lighted tank in a corner of the room. Rickey’s desk was probably cluttered. It almost always was. He kept a dictionary the size of a cinderblock nearby, as well as a somewhat more slender edition of Bartlett’s Quotations.
Robinson and Rickey stared at each other in silence. Fifteen seconds, thirty, a minute went by, and, still, neither man said a word. Rickey gazed out from his wire-rimmed glasses, his doughy face offering no hint of his mood. He wore a jacket and bowtie. He twirled an unlit cigar in his hand. Rickey had a high estimation of all his abilities, not the least his ability to judge a man’s character. Now, he peered at Robinson as if he were looking through the young man’s dark brown skin and into the depths of his soul, as if he could foretell his future. “He stared and stared,” recalled Clyde Sukeforth, the scout who had brought Robinson back from Chicago and sat in on the interview. Robinson stared back. Sukeforth waited to see which of these stubborn men would speak first.
Rickey finally broke the silence.
“Do you have a girl?” he asked.
Yes, Robinson said, he had a girlfriend. In fact, he had been engaged for more than a year, and his fiancée was pressuring him to set a wedding date. Rickey advised Robinson to get married.
Rickey loved to ask ballplayers the girl question, because he learned something about their character, and he liked employees who had families relying on them to work hard and behave responsibly. After the girl question, he usually turned the interview to baseball technique, asking pitchers how they gripped their curves, or asking first basemen about the best way to hold runners close to the bag. In Robinson’s case, though, he didn’t spend much time on baseball. By now, Robinson knew he hadn’t been summoned to talk about playing for the Brown Dodgers. He had figured out from the clues dropped by Sukeforth that a bigger opportunity was at hand. Rickey explained that he wanted to start Robinson in the minors, but with the hope that he would quickly receive a promotion to the major leagues.
Rickey and Robinson chatted, intensely at times, although they were interrupted more than once by telephone calls. Rickey could never keep his mind on one thing for long, even when the one thing was as important as this. Eventually, though, the Dodger president found himself fully engaged with Robinson, ready to test his mettle. He began to get emotional. He stood up from his chair and began shouting, firing a series of questions designed to measure the young man’s temper. “What will you do? What will you do when they call you a black son of a bitch? When they not only turn you down for a hotel room but also curse you out?” As he went on talking about supercilious waiters, rude railroad conductors, vicious base-runners, and beanball-hurling pitchers, he stood up and walked over to Robinson, who found Rickey’s speech so compelling that his hands were clenched now behind his back. Rickey stepped up to Robinson and pretended to throw a punch at his face. “What would you do?” he shouted.
Robinson calmed himself. That’s when he asked if Rickey wanted a man who was afraid to fight back, and Rickey responded by saying he wanted a man with the courage not to. That’s when these two faithful Methodists began discussing Christ. And that’s when Robinson said he would do it—for his fiancée, for Mr. Rickey, and for black people all over the country.
Thus was born one of baseball’s favorite legends. The story of the meeting between Rickey and Robinson has been told in countless media, passed down through the generations, shined up and smoothed over so that it has become one of America’s great fables. But in one important way, the accounts are often misleading. Rickey didn’t choose Robinson for his ability to turn the other cheek. Had Rickey wanted a pacifist, he might have selected any one of half a dozen men with milder constitutions than Jack Roosevelt Robinson’s.
Rickey wanted an angry black man. He wanted someone big enough and
strong enough to intimidate, and someone intelligent enough to understand the historic nature of his role. Perhaps he even wanted a dark-skinned man whose presence would be more strongly felt, more plainly obvious, although on this point Rickey was uncharacteristically silent. Clearly, the Dodger boss sought a man who would not just raise the issue of equal rights but would press it.
It is testament to Rickey’s sophistication and foresight that he chose a ballplayer who would become a symbol of strength rather than assimilation. It is testament to Robinson’s intelligence and ambition that he recognized the importance of turning the other cheek and yet found a way to do it without appearing the least bit weak. So long as he showed restraint when fans and players baited him, he could fight like hell on the ball field. No one could fault him for playing too hard.
Shortly after agreeing to a minor-league contract with Rickey, Robinson was asked to return a questionnaire to the American Baseball Bureau, a public relations group. He filled it out by hand:
Name: Jack Roosevelt Robinson
Nicknames: Jackie
Nationality: American Negro
Hobbies: Boys Club work
Ambition in Baseball: To open door for Negroes in Organized Ball.
Technically speaking, professional baseball had been integrated long before Robinson. The man most often credited with breaking the color barrier is John “Bud” Fowler, who learned to play baseball as a boy in Cooperstown, New York, and later hopped from one small-town team to another in the 1870s and 1880s, first in New Castle, Pennsylvania, later in Stillwater, Minnesota, and later still in Keokuk, Iowa, trying to make a living wherever the game he loved would take him. Fowler was a gifted hitter with great speed and a knack for self-promotion. Some opponents reacted so violently to Fowler’s presence that he sometimes wore wooden shin protectors to protect himself from slashing spikes. “If I had not been so black, I might have caught on as a Spaniard or something of that kind,” he wrote in 1895, as his opportunities began to fade. “My skin is against me.”
Other black ballplayers joined white teams after Fowler, but not many, and not for long. Brothers Moses and Weldy Walker played briefly in the majors in 1884 with Toledo of the American Association, which was one of the three recognized major leagues at the time. But the doors began to swing shut in 1887 when future Hall of Famer Cap Anson announced that he would not let his Chicago White Stockings take the field for an exhibition game against Newark if Newark’s star pitcher, a black man named George Stovey, was allowed to play. Stovey’s manager backed down, saying the pitcher was sick. Other managers soon followed Anson’s lead, no doubt fearing that black men would take jobs from white players. Before long, Newark dropped Stovey from its roster, and by the mid-1890s, the color line was clearly set. Black athletes began forming their own teams. By the turn of the century, if you wanted to be a big-leaguer, you needed more than talent. You needed white skin.
And so it remained over the course of the next half century. There were any number of black ballplayers talented enough to crash the party, from Oscar Charleston to Cool Papa Bell, but they didn’t have a chance. Whenever someone confronted Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner who presided over major-league baseball from 1920 to 1944, he noted calmly that no written rule excluded black men from America’s pastime. He was right, but he also knew that baseball needed no written rule. Black ballplayers weren’t fighting to get in, black fans weren’t complaining, owners of white teams showed no interest in challenging the status quo, and white fans either didn’t care or didn’t know what they were missing.
• • •
“He is not now major league stuff,” Rickey said of Robinson in 1945, so he sent him to the Montreal Royals in the International League, where he would be the first black minor-leaguer. Rickey’s intention was to give fans and players more time to get used to the idea of integration, and to give Robinson more time to polish his skills. And if problems arose, better to have them arise in Montreal than in Brooklyn.
A few months after his meeting with Rickey, Robinson carried a shoebox full of fried chicken and boiled eggs as he boarded his plane in Los Angeles, bound for spring training in Daytona Beach. He wore his best blue suit, a double-breasted number with wide lapels and baggy pants. His wife, Rachel, had on a dyed, three-quarter-length ermine coat (her “certificate of respectability,” she called it) and a carefully slanted hat, with an alligator-skin purse and matching shoes. The Robinsons had been married only eighteen days. They entertained an extravagant vision of their future as their plane took off for Florida. They were young and somewhat naive, but they believed they would look back on this trip as the start of the biggest and best thing they’d ever done, a defining moment of their lives. Only the powerful aroma emanating from the shoebox spoiled the mood. They were embarrassed to be toting the food, worried what their fellow passengers would think, and afraid a newspaper photographer might take a picture of them eating lunch from a shoebox like a couple of country bumpkins. But they’d been unable to refuse when Jackie’s mother had pressed it on them at the airport.
From Los Angeles, they flew to New Orleans, where they faced a delay before the next leg of their flight. The weather was fine, the cause of the delay unclear. They searched for a place to eat while they waited, but none of the restaurants in the New Orleans airport served black customers. Though they were told they could buy sandwiches and eat them outside, the Robinsons refused. Neither of them had spent much time in the South. Now, as they tore into the shoebox full of chicken, they realized why Jackie’s mother had insisted they take it.
After New Orleans, the plane stopped again, this time in Pensacola. The flight to Daytona Beach had been oversold, an airline worker informed them. The Robinsons and a Mexican man were told they would have to wait until the next day to fly. Rachel, glancing over at her husband, was pleased to see he was staying calm. He explained to the airline worker that he was on his way to a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and that it was important that he be there on time. The best the airline agent could do was offer a limousine to take them to a hotel.
Off they went, lugging a big suitcase wrapped with heavy cord, two duffels, and a big, black hat box. The only trouble was that the limo driver didn’t know of any black hotels in Pensacola, so he pulled up at a white one and asked a bellboy if he had any recommendations. The bellboy said he knew a Negro family that might have a room for rent. It was eleven at night when they reached the house, a tiny place with only one bedroom. The family offered to let the Robinsons have the bedroom, but Jackie and Rachel declined. They decided to head for the bus station instead.
Rattled and exhausted, the couple settled into the last row of reclining seats, one row from the very back, for the 360-mile haul to Jacksonville. From Jacksonville, a friend would drive them to the Dodgers’ spring-training facilities in Sanford, near Daytona Beach. A handful of white passengers sat up front as the bus rumbled out of Pensacola. Jackie dozed off, but Rachel couldn’t sleep, or not much anyway. She buried her face and cried. After a few stops, she noticed the bus driver standing over them. Silently, he motioned with his hand for them to move all the way to the back. The bus was largely empty, but the driver insisted that “back of the bus” meant the last row. They got up and moved.
They were still on the bus, still in the last row, when the gray-black sky revealed its first traces of orange. Dark-skinned men in work clothes began climbing aboard. The driver herded all of them to the back, as far as they could go. The Robinsons, still dressed in their finest attire, stood at times so that some of the men in their stained work clothes might sit. Fourteen hours later, they arrived in Jacksonville, where they looked around and spotted some of the signs that southerners saw all too often: “WE WASH WHITE FOLKS’ CLOTHES ONLY,” one of them read. For Rachel, never before exposed to such things, a “hot feeling close to sickness” rose within. But the signs were not as distressing as something else she’d seen on the trip. Jack was the strongest and proudest man she’d ever met, and
yet he’d been reduced to a position of helplessness at what should have been the greatest moment of his life. When the bus driver had waved his hand and signaled them to the back of the bus, her husband hadn’t said a word. Rachel wept, not for their misfortune but for their dignity. As she would write years later, “My man had become the white South’s ‘boy.’ ”
• • •
Robinson was two days late by the time he arrived in Sanford, where the Dodgers were practicing in a small park at the corner of South Mellonville and Celery avenues. Some two hundred baseball players fanned out across the grass, hitting fungoes, running sprints, and tossing baseballs. The Dodgers had chosen this remote spot to make things easier for Robinson as he tried to become the first black man in the twentieth century to play organized baseball in the United States. Rickey knew the nation would be watching. He knew dozens of reporters would dog Robinson’s every step. In the few months since the Dodgers had announced their intention to give the ballplayer a chance to break baseball’s color line, Robinson had quickly become one of the most famous black people in America, his name appearing in gossip columns almost as frequently as those of heavyweight champ Joe Louis and the singer and actress Lena Horne.
He carried nothing but his shoes and glove to the field. After slipping on a plain gray uniform with no team name across the front, he stepped onto the field and saw the army of white men out there, already engaged in drills. Robinson had to get through a curtain of reporters before he could join them.
