by Jonathan Eig
In the years ahead, the crackdown on communism and a growing strain of political conservatism would cool the civil rights movement in Harlem. But in 1947, as Robinson and the Dodgers prepared to play their first game at the Polo Grounds, Harlem remained thrillingly volatile. It was unclear if black Americans were on the brink of great gains or terrible troubles, but they were clearly on the brink. The community’s tensions went on display whenever the Giants played at the Polo Grounds. As thousands of white New Yorkers traveled to Harlem by Checker cab and train to see the games, scores of police officers—most of them white—kept careful watch to make sure fans got in and out of the neighborhood safely. Fights in the stands were common in the 1940s, particularly in New York, where ethnic groups that avoided each other on the streets wound up close together, and drunk, in the bleachers and grandstands. Dodger-Giant games were among the most contentious of all, dividing ethnic groups and even families. But there had never been big black crowds at Giants game, at least not that anyone could remember. Suddenly, with the arrival of Robinson, much of black Harlem began pulling for the Dodgers, as Langston Hughes noted in a poem called “Passing.”
On sunny summer Sunday afternoons in Harlem
when the air is one interminable ball game
and grandma cannot get her gospel hymns
from the Saints of God in Christ
on account of the Dodgers on the radio . . .
And while Frick considered himself an enlightened man, he worried about how Harlem’s new Dodger fans would express themselves. He wasn’t asking the Dodgers to set aside their experiment, merely to go slowly and avoid unnecessary risk. Before the game, Harlem’s Amsterdam News cautioned its black readers to behave. “There is no need to take the bottle to the stands,” its editorial pronounced. “Profanity is not necessary and the grandstands certainly are not picnic grounds. Don’t think that we want you to go to the park and sit like a mummy or portray a saint. We want you to have fun—all the fun there is—but in a clean, healthy manner. . . . It will be well to remember that we are on the spot just as Jackie. We cannot afford to let him down!!!”
Even Branch Rickey warned that Robinson’s fans were making his job more difficult. “Jackie’s greatest danger is social,” he pronounced, pounding on his desk as he spoke to reporters. “Why, he gets 5,000 invitations to attend all sorts of events and on top of that he scarcely has time to eat or change into his uniform. The boy is on the road to complete prostration. . . . There are too many well-wishers and too many seeking to exploit him. It would be best for all these people to let him alone.”
Dan Burley, a sports columnist for the Amsterdam News, was more worried about the action on the field than on the streets or in the grandstand. “Somewhere down the line,” he wrote, “it’s going to come, and by that I mean Jackie’s biggest moment when some opposing player calls him something we hate to be called and he’s either got to get down with it or lose prestige in the eyes of the fans and maybe his teammates. But that is where the issue will narrow down: Jackie isn’t supposed to punch anybody in the jaw for insulting him or intentionally roughing him. He’s got to be so set with the whole Dodger club that they will take charge of the situation themselves, waving Jackie to the sidelines while they swing their bats and boots. . . . That coming about will be the biggest hurdle for Jackie as a Dodger. Then he’ll belong and start being the sensation that destiny marked him out to be when he was a tot in Georgia.”
As excitement built among black fans for the Polo Grounds meeting, apprehension grew among some whites. Bob Cooke, a writer for the Herald Tribune, told a couple of his colleagues that before it was over the Robinson experiment would destroy the national pastime. Cooke supposedly believed an anthropologist’s theory that longer heel bones gave black people greater speed, and those heel bones, he argued, constituted an unfair advantage. “The Negroes have the legs,” he said, in a story told by the writer Roger Kahn. “It starts with Robinson but it doesn’t end with Robinson. Negroes are going to run the white people out of baseball. They’re going to take over our game.”
The crowds were in fact enormous at the Polo Grounds: 38,736 for the first game, which was on a Friday afternoon, when people with jobs couldn’t break away. If there were an unusual number of black fans in the crowd, none of the writers at the game mentioned it, although the Times did report that vendors on Eighth Avenue were doing a lively business selling “I’m For Jackie” lapel pins. Creole Pete Robertson, a Harlem resident, announced formation of the Jackie Robinson Booster Club, and said five hundred Harlemites had signed on for membership in the club’s first week. James Baldwin, a young black writer from New York who had just published his first big magazine piece, wrote: “Back in the thirties and forties, Joe Louis was the only hero that we ever had. When he won a fight, everybody in Harlem was up in heaven. On that April day the large contingent of blacks in the crowd of nearly 40,000 had another hero to be ‘up in heaven’ about, another hero to stand beside Joe Louis.”
• • •
It was a cool Friday afternoon, April 18, with temperatures creeping up toward sixty degrees at game time, not a cloud in the sky. Shotton sent Vic Lombardi to the mound. Lombardi was a little man with an array of mostly soft pitches, but against the Giants, he was huge, having won nine straight. Dave Koslo, a slender lefty, pitched for the Giants. In the top of the first, after Eddie Stanky tapped one back to the pitcher for an easy out, Robinson stepped to the plate and heard a sudden, thunderous roll of applause, like a crashing wave. He watched one Koslo pitch go by, a high, inside curve. On the next pitch, a high fastball, he swung, hitting it on a soft arc into the glove of center-fielder Lloyd Gearhart for the second out.
In the third inning, he came to the plate again, greeted by the clamoring crowd. By now the score was tied, 1–1. Koslo went into his windup, kicking his right leg high in the air and throwing high and inside for ball one. The next pitch was the same, high and inside, but not so high and not so far inside. Robinson swung and connected. The ball zipped on a long line drive and pinged against the upper-deck scoreboard in left field for a home run, his first. As Robinson trotted around the bases, toes turned inward, his fans stood and laughed and hollered and hugged one another, celebrating their good fortune as well as his.
Bob Cooke, seated in the press box behind home plate, meanwhile, took some sassing.
“That’s because their heels are longer,” cracked one of Cooke’s fellow scribes.
Robinson ran quickly around the bases, without smiling or tipping his cap. As he stepped on home plate with his right foot, Tommy Tatum, the next batter, reached out and shook his hand. A photographer captured the moment, a black man and a white man hand in hand on a baseball diamond on a glorious afternoon, and the picture ran on the back page of the Daily News the following day.
With two homers from Bobby Thomson, one from Johnny Mize, one from Bill Rigney, and another from Willard Marshall, the Giants went back on top, 6–2. But Robinson wasn’t finished giving thrills. Leading off the eighth, he fell behind in the count, no balls and two strikes, then swung at a high fastball, this one on the outer half of the plate, and hit a bloop fly to right field, where it landed in front of Marshall. As the outfielder collected the ball and looked up, he saw Robinson running around first and headed toward second. The routine play for the outfielder is to throw to second to keep the runner from advancing, but Marshall couldn’t tell yet if Robinson was going to second or back to first. When Robinson hit the brakes, Marshall thought he had a chance to catch him off first. It looked as if Robinson had overcommitted. But in his rush, Marshall threw wildly, and the ball sailed beyond the first baseman’s reach. Robinson scampered to second. Then he scored from there on Carl Furillo’s hit. It was the sort of play that would make Robinson famous, a reflection of his speed and daring, of his fearlessness. It wasn’t enough to win the game for the Dodgers, but it was something to see.
For the second game, on Saturday afternoon, 52,355 fans paid to get into the Pol
o Grounds, and another 736 servicemen were admitted at no charge, making this the biggest Saturday audience ever to attend a single game at the Polo Grounds. And this time there was no mistaking the strong turnout among Harlemites. Robinson, in turn, enjoyed the best performance of his young career, with two singles and a double in three at-bats. After he smacked a single off the leg of pitcher Monte Kennedy, Robinson waited until the end of the inning and asked the pitcher if he was okay. The Dodgers lost 4–3, but for many of Harlem’s black fans, it was an ideal outcome: Robinson had a great game and the home team got the win.
Afterward, Jackie and Rachel enjoyed a rare evening away from home and without Jack Jr., dining at Lawson Bowman’s Café in Harlem, where cameras flashed, guests approached for autographs, and the proprietor pulled up a chair.
• • •
By the end of his first week with the Dodgers, Robinson owned a .429 batting average and a locker all his own. The Dodger clubhouse was a rectangular concrete block, about forty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, tucked beneath the Ebbets Field grandstand. Each player had a gray metal locker, with a mat on the floor and a small stool in front. The team’s four biggest stars—Reese, Reiser, Walker, and Hugh Casey—had the biggest lockers at the center of the room, while the other lockers were lined up along the walls. Filtered light and the sound of traffic came in through windows high along Sullivan Place. Robinson was assigned the worst locker in the clubhouse, far back in the corner, next to the grouchy old equipment manager, Dan Comerford, as far out of sight as possible. His locker was near the clothes dryer, the toilets, and the showers. The manager’s office and training table were at the opposite end of the room.
Sitting on his wooden stool, Robinson would have stared across at the red Coca-Cola cooler, where cold bottles of Coke (ten cents each) were stored. Players were supposed to mark a chalkboard above the cooler every time they took a bottle so that the bat boy, Stan Strull, would know who owed how much. They were honest about it. To the right of Robinson, on the floor near the entrance to the trainer’s room, sat the money trunk. Each player would take his rings, watches, and wallets, slip them into bags, and put the bags in the money trunk, which would remain locked during the game.
By now Jackie felt confident enough about his spot on the team that he and Rachel had begun looking for an apartment in Brooklyn. When the Dodger front office pitched in to help in his search, reporters interpreted it as a sign that he would be sticking around, and several writers urged their readers to phone their newspaper offices with tips on available housing. With so many black families moving up from the South, and with so many soldiers returning from Europe, the competition for affordable apartments in black neighborhoods was intense. But a woman named Mabel C. Brown, who had an unused bedroom in her own Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, read about the Robinsons’ problem. She phoned the couple at the McAlpin Hotel and offered to rent them her empty space. Brown’s apartment was on MacDonough Street, between Ralph and Patchen avenues, in a neighborhood full of row houses, small groceries, tobacco shops, and corner churches. The two-bedroom unit was small—about one thousand square feet—and had only one bathroom. But Brown pointed out to the Robinsons that she was single and had no children, so there would not be much competition for the bathroom and kitchen. Without having seen the place or having met the woman with whom they’d be rooming, they decided to take it, a decision they would later regret.
• • •
On the day they moved in, Robinson gave an interview to Gilbert Jonas, a seventeen-year-old aspiring journalist from Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School. Gil’s sister was dating a man who knew Robinson from Montreal and had arranged the interview. When he was twelve, Gil had worked as a turnstile boy at Ebbets Field. The team would pay him fifty cents and let him watch the day’s game from a general admission seat. At about the same time, he took up photography so that he could get closer to some of his favorite athletes. By the time he was fifteen, the Brooklyn Eagle had begun purchasing his pictures. He also wrote letters to his favorite baseball players, asking for autographs. He’d received a handwritten reply from Ty Cobb and managed to arrange a meeting with Babe Ruth. He invented something he called “The National Sports Fan Club,” printed his own letterhead, and sent invitations to some of his favorite athletes to become honorary members. All they had to do was sign autographs on the index cards Gil conveniently enclosed. He sometimes sent dozens of cards at a time, without offering explanation, hoping to reap a bounty of signatures. There was no club, of course. It was strictly a ploy by Jonas to enhance his autograph collection, and it worked. He acquired thirteen Hank Greenbergs, thirty-four Marty Marions, sixteen George Cases, five Dolph Camillis, thirteen Bob Fellers, five Walter Johnsons, six Eddie Collinses, seven Leo Durochers, seven Casey Stengels, and sixteen Babe Ruths.
There were no black athletes in his collection, nor had he ever engaged in a conversation of any depth with a black person to that point in his life. “When my father had some money, he would get a cleaning lady for a couple of days,” he said. Lafayette High School had one black student in 1947, as best he could tell, and Gil didn’t know his name. He noticed that black people sometimes stepped into the gutter when they passed him on the street, but he didn’t think much of it.
He took two subways to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, walked to the Robinsons’ apartment at 526 MacDonough, and rang the buzzer. Robinson came out and sat with him on the stoop. Jonas was struck at once by the man’s size—wide shoulders, thick chest descending into a narrow waist. The ballplayer wore a long-sleeved V-neck sweater and pleated trousers. With his hair trimmed short on the sides and slightly longer on top, he appeared even taller than he was. His face was soft yet strongly masculine. He smiled easily and answered Gil’s questions patiently, never making the young man feel like anything less than a serious journalist.
“Would you prefer playing another infield position rather than first base?” Gil asked on behalf of readers of the Lafayette News.
“Most definitely,” Robinson said, smiling. “I’d rather play second base, but as long as I am benefiting the club at first, I’ll remain there.”
While they were talking, Rachel Robinson and Jack Jr. arrived by taxi from the McAlpin. Gil helped Robinson unload suitcases and crates from the taxi’s trunk and carry them into the first-floor apartment. Gil was a short, slender kid, the son of a garment manufacturer, Jewish, with a head full of dark curls that he combed up and back. He was a graceful athlete but too small to compete for a spot on the baseball team at Lafayette, which is why he hoped someday to become a sports journalist. His plan was to graduate early from high school and go to college as far from Brooklyn as he could.
He and Robinson spent about an hour talking that day. Not once did the subject of race or integration enter the conversation. Gil asked the same questions he would have asked had he been interviewing Duke Snider or Gil Hodges, a couple of other young players who were, coincidentally, sharing apartments with strangers that summer in Brooklyn. Gil asked about the competition for the National League pennant. He asked about Robinson’s days at UCLA. He asked about Jackie’s greatest thrill as an athlete. When he was done, he snapped a picture of the athlete standing on the sidewalk in front of his new apartment, left hand on his hip, a gentle smile creasing his face, eyes not quite on the camera.
Gil knew a little bit about the world. He knew that Jewish kids got beat up for walking in certain Irish neighborhoods. He knew that World War II had been fought in part over Aryan supremacy. But he had never thought about how black Americans were treated in America—not until soon after his interview with Robinson, anyway, when the Philadelphia Phillies came to Brooklyn to play the Dodgers on April 22.
The New York Post that morning carried a story saying Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers was off to such a fine start that he might soon supplant the popular Stanky at second base. If the Dodgers could find a power hitter to play first base—and Branch Rickey was said to be looking—then the
light-hitting Stanky might have to go. “All hands agree now that he [Robinson] can’t be kept off the ball club. He’s too sound and solid a player.” It was a generous conclusion, given that Robinson had only a few games under his belt. No one knew yet how he would respond to his first slump, to the first beanball, to the racist abuse that would be heaped by fans and players when the team traveled, to the physical demands of a long season.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, and a chilly one. The ballpark was quiet as Robinson stepped to the plate for his first look at old Dutch Leonard, the Phillies’ starting pitcher. There were a lot of empty seats and a lot of fans wearing gloves and mittens. But while the grandstand remained virtually silent as Robinson dug his cleats into the back of the batter’s box, a torrent of foul language, harsher than anything Robinson had heard in his professional baseball career, poured from the Phillies’ dugout. Robinson recalled a few snippets of the invective in the autobiography he wrote at the end of his rookie season:
“Hey, you black Nigger! Why don’t you go back where you came from?”
