Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography

by Long, Michael G.

  Before both were mentors to Jackie Robinson, both were disciples of

  John Wesley. Before Wesley’s epiphany on Aldersgate Street, he had

  traveled to Georgia in the American colonies as a missionary and left with a loathing for slavery.

  Baseball’s color line—like the color line in American society—had

  stood firm since the late 1800s. It was unlikely to be relaxed while Landis was commissioner. Like Rickey, Landis grew up in the rural

  Midwest, was self-educated, and had a keen interest in the law. Lan-

  dis was a federal judge before becoming commissioner after the 1919

  Black Sox scandal. Rickey and Landis also supported the party of Abraham Lincoln—the Republican Party. Landis opposed the rise of the

  Ku Klux Klan in his home state of Indiana.42 This did not, however,

  mean he supported racial equality in either society or in baseball. Landis’s attitudes on race represented those of most white Americans and the baseball establishment. As commissioner, he saw to it that no team signed black players.43

  Landis considered himself the absolute ruler of all things baseball, and few challenged his authority. Rickey was one who did. Landis did not hesitate to remind Rickey that he, and not Rickey, was commissioner. Landis believed Rickey’s control over so many minor-league

  teams was not in the best interests of baseball or its players. Rickey disagreed. He said that his farm system taught players the right methods of playing baseball and gave them moral training that made them better players and athletes. “Rickey genuinely saw himself as a great paternal-ist,” Lowenfish said, “who was providing a priceless opportunity for the eager, hungry, talented young player.”44

  As commissioner, Landis had the authority to do whatever he

  saw fit to protect the game. In May 1938, he ruled that the St. Louis organization, by owning multiple teams in a single league, and by

  operating teams in secret, was in violation of baseball’s best interests.

  He ordered the organization to release dozens of players.45 Rickey told St. Louis owner Sam Breadon to challenge Landis’s ruling in court, but

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  Breadon refused. This angered Rickey, and his relationship with the

  owner never recovered.

  During 1941, the United States prepared for what appeared to be the

  inevitability of American involvement in the war. Breadon knew that

  he would lose many of his best players to the armed forces, and fewer spectators would therefore patronize Sportsman’s Park. He needed to

  cut expenses. Breadon did not renew Rickey’s contract when it expired at the end of 1942.46 In his last season with the Cardinals, the team defeated the New York Yankees to win the World Series.

  Rickey served for nearly a quarter-century as president of the St.

  Louis Cardinals, and he apparently had the freedom to sign whomever

  he wanted and promote them to the big leagues. If seeing a sobbing

  Charlie Thomas had made such an impression on him, why did he

  not do something about the color line during his time with St. Louis?

  Rickey’s freedom, such as it was, stopped short of signing a black player for a team that played its games in a former slave state in a segregated stadium, Sportsman’s Park, owned by a man, Sam Breadon, whose

  attitudes on race matched those of most of the players on his payroll, the sportswriters who covered the team, the spectators who attended

  the games, and organized baseball itself.47

  It is impossible to know if Rickey would have signed black players

  in the 1920s or 1930s if he had a chance. There is some evidence that he was thinking about integration long before he signed Robinson. In 1939, Art Rust Jr., who would later write a book about racism in baseball, Get That Nigger Off the Field, was a black boy growing up near the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played their home games.

  When Rust and his friends tried to get players’ autographs after games, ballplayers often responded with racist slurs.48

  St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Enos Slaughter, who, several years

  later, viciously spiked Jackie Robinson, called Rust “a little nigger”

  when he asked for the ballplayer’s autograph. Rust remembered think-

  ing to himself, “With all those crackers, ain’t no way a black guy’s gonna play ball in the majors.” But Rust’s opinion softened because of a brief conversation he had with Rickey, who put his arm around him

  and told him blacks would one day be in the big leagues.49

  Lowenfish said that Rickey’s interest in integration did not

  suddenly come to him in the mid-1940s. “There was a genuine

  Wesleyan Methodist conscience at work,” he said. Rickey, according

  to Lowenfish, often said, “The Negro has never been really free in this

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  country. Legally free since the Civil War yes, but not politically or socially free, and never morally free.”50

  Shortly after the 1942 season ended, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed

  Rickey to be their vice president and general manager. Rickey likely knew that if there was any city where baseball could be integrated,

  it was probably New York City. It had three of the sixteen teams in

  the major leagues. New York also had a growing number of voices

  demanding the end of baseball’s color line. The Rev. Raymond Cam-

  pion, the white rector of the largely black St. Peter Claver’s Catholic Church in Brooklyn, said, “It is utterly wrong, unfair, un-American, un-Democratic, un-Christian to deny a Negro the opportunity to earn

  a decent living because of the dark shade of his skin.”51

  Rickey first raised the issue of signing black players during a meeting with George V. McLaughlin, president of the bank that owned the

  Brooklyn Dodgers, in early 1943. “I don’t see why not,” McLaughlin

  told Rickey, while also warning him to be aware of the consequences

  involved. If Rickey signed a black player, McLaughlin said, he could not do it to change society or the effort would fail. And, he added, the ballplayer could not be perceived as temperamental or uppity, or the effort would fail.52

  McLaughlin’s green light was more like a yellow light. Rickey,

  whom Lowenfish called “the cautious revolutionary,” moved slowly

  and secretly, telling few people about his plan. “As usual,” Lowenfish said, “the persuasive executive was able to enlist a wide variety of people in his important cause, making sure, however, that he kept secret his main motive: breaking the color line in the major leagues.”53 Rickey believed that what he was doing was both right and righteous, and that history would prove it so. “Rickey saw a chance to intervene in the

  moral history of the nation, as Lincoln had done,” Arnold Rampersad

  wrote. “Aware of the dangers, he moved cautiously. However, he also

  saw history on his side.”54

  Rickey contacted friends and associates who told him about black

  players in Latin America and in the Negro leagues.55 Rickey himself

  attended Negro league games, including its all-star game, the annual East-West Classic.56 Rickey told no one in baseball, not because he

  thought somebody else would integrate baseball before him, but

  because he did not want Landis or one of the owners maneuvering to

  stop him. Rickey believed he was the only baseball executive interested in signing blacks. If so, he could sign the top black players before the color line was broken.

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  Commissioner Landis’s death on November 25, 1944, removed one

  obstacle to Rickey’s strategy. Another obstacle disappeared on March 13, 1945, when the New York legislature approved the Ives-Quinn


  Act, which banned discrimination in hiring and created a commission

  to investigate complaints.

  Supporting these efforts were Communists and other social progres-

  sives who had been calling for blacks in baseball for nearly a decade.

  Like-minded politicians added their own voices. Politicians on the

  New York City Council passed resolutions calling on the city’s teams, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers, to sign blacks. Congressman Vito

  Marcantonio of New York introduced a resolution into Congress that

  authorized the Commerce Department to investigate racial discrimina-

  tion in Major League Baseball.

  Rickey paid particularly close attention to Ives-Quinn. When he

  read that Governor Thomas Dewey had signed it into law in March,

  he told his wife, “They can’t stop me now.”57 The law would go into

  effect in July. Rickey felt confident he now had both the moral and

  legal authority to sign black players, but, trusting his instincts and remembering what George McLaughlin had told him, he did not want

  to appear to be forcing the issue on baseball.

  Rickey then sought out those who could influence how fans would

  respond to blacks on the Brooklyn team. Shortly after the passage of Ives-Quinn, Rickey met Red Barber, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ radio

  announcer, for lunch at a restaurant in New York City. Rickey said

  that he was going to share a secret with the announcer that only a few other people knew. But before he did that, he told Barber the story

  about Charlie Thomas. “That was forty-one years ago,” Rickey said

  after finishing. “And for these forty-one years, I have heard that fine young man crying, ‘It’s my skin . . . If I could just pull it off . . . It’s my skin.’ ”58

  Rickey then told Barber why he wanted to talk to him: he wanted to

  end the color line in baseball and was looking for the right player to do so. “I don’t know who he is or where he is,” Rickey said to the stunned Barber, “but he is coming.”59

  When Barber, who had grown up in the city of Sanford in rural

  Florida, went home after the meeting, he told his wife he was going to quit because he had been taught from boyhood that whites and blacks

  were not equal and should not be treated as such. He did not think he could work for the Dodgers if they had a black player. Barber’s wife told him to not make a decision until the next day. Barber then prayed

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  about his decision. He remembered a sentence from the Book of Com-

  mon Prayer that says, “and hast opened the eyes of the mind to behold things invisible and unseen.”

  When Barber woke up the next morning, he told himself he was not

  a player on the Dodgers but the announcer. He decided he would not

  quit. He told himself he would describe what the black player, whoever he was, did on the field no differently than how he would describe the other players.60

  It was at this point that Rickey contacted sportswriter Wendell

  Smith and asked him to come to his office in Brooklyn. Rickey wanted to know more about Robinson and other talented black players. Initially, Rickey did not tell Smith why he was interested.61

  In early May, Rickey announced that he was interested in owning

  a team in a new black league, the United States League (USL). Rickey found himself criticized by major-league owners, who profited from

  renting their ballparks to teams in the established Negro leagues

  and, therefore, saw the Brooklyn executive as competition. Black

  sportswriters and team owners also ridiculed Rickey for acting as

  another “plantation overseer,” as Lee Lowenfish put it. The USL failed as a league but succeeded as a diversionary ploy, allowing Rickey and his scouts to observe black players without drawing attention to their motives.62 Rickey revealed his plan to integrate baseball only to those he felt had to know, and if he did tell someone, he insisted on a vow of secrecy, as he did with Barber and Robinson.

  New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was sympathetic to the cause.

  Two years earlier, he had created the Mayor’s Committee on Unity

  to study the causes of racial discrimination in the city. He formed

  this committee after police shot and killed a black soldier who had

  intervened in the arrest of a black woman in Harlem—a shooting that

  provoked hundreds of blacks, angry at their living conditions, to begin looting businesses owned by white, predominantly Jewish, merchants.63

  In 1945, La Guardia was under pressure from the political left to

  end baseball’s color line. La Guardia, who wanted to secure his record on civil rights, created the Mayor’s Committee to Integrate Baseball, which included a number of influential social progressives.64 The

  mayor asked Rickey to join and he accepted, although, as a political conservative, he was skeptical of the committee because it included so many Communists and social progressives.65

  Rickey then began meeting with the executive director of the

  Mayor’s Committee on Unity, Daniel Dodson, a New York University

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  sociologist. The two men bonded quickly. Dodson, like Rickey, had

  grown up poor. The two men also were both Methodists. Rickey trusted Dodson. Once Rickey determined that he was not a communist, he

  brought him into his confidence, revealing his intentions to sign black players.66

  In early October—less than two months after Rickey and Robin-

  son had secretly met in Rickey’s office on Montague Street—Dodson

  learned that La Guardia was going to announce the steps his office

  was taking toward integrating baseball. Rickey asked Dodson if the

  mayor could postpone his announcement. Rickey did not want it to

  appear that he was being pressured into signing black players. La Guardia agreed.

  Rickey took the time to arrange for the public introduction of Jackie Robinson, and on October 23, Robinson sat in a press conference in

  Montreal to announce that the city’s minor-league baseball team, the Royals, had signed him to a contract.

  It was a moment for history.

  Hector Racine, the team’s president, told sportswriters that blacks

  had earned their right to play baseball by fighting in World War II.

  When reporters asked Robinson how he felt, he described himself as “a guinea pig in baseball’s great experiment.” Robinson added, in a column in the Pittsburgh Courier: “I will not forget that I am representing a whole race of people who are pulling for me.”67

  Ludlow Werner, editor of the New York Age, wrote that many Americans were hoping he would fail. Robinson “would be haunted

  by the expectations of his race,” Werner said. “Unlike white players, he can never afford any off day or off night. His private life will be watched, too, because white America will judge the Negro race by

  everything he does. And Lord help him with his fellow Negroes if he

  should fail them.”68

  Racine said that Robinson was not guaranteed a spot on Montreal’s

  team. He would have to earn that spot like everyone else at spring training in Daytona Beach, Florida, deep in the Deep South. Black base-

  ball fan Jimmie Odoms, interviewed for the New York Herald Tribune, said that Robinson would have to face the ugliness that came his way, beginning at spring training in Florida. “This boy Robinson’s got to take it,” Odoms said. “I hate to think what he got to take. They’ll find plenty of ways to give it to him during spring training. And he’s got to take it. Otherwise, it don’t make no sense sending him.”69

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  Rickey hired a new ma
nager for Montreal, Clay Hopper, a

  Mississippian, who appeared to be a problematic choice, given the

  circumstances. When Rickey told Hopper, who had managed in the

  Brooklyn organization for a few years, that the Royals would have at least one black player, the manager told his boss that he did not think he could manage an integrated team. “Please don’t do this to me,” Hopper pleaded. “I’m white and I’ve lived in Mississippi all my life. If you’re going to do this, you’re going to force me to move my family out of

  Mississippi.”70

  Rickey told Hopper that if he wanted to manage the organization’s

  top minor-league team, he would have to accept Robinson. “You

  manage this fellow the way I want him managed, and you figure out

  the way I want him managed.” Rickey believed that if Hopper, with

  his Deep South beliefs, accepted Robinson, so too, perhaps, would the rest of the team.71

  Rickey found himself under immense pressure. He knew that every-

  thing he had done thus far was only preliminary work. The cigar-

  chomping executive, who rarely exercised, was nearing sixty-four, and once again pushing himself without regard to either his age or his history of working himself to collapse. He spent much of the second half of 1945 trying to buy 25 percent of the Brooklyn organization. This left him heavily in debt and physically exhausted. During the fall he began experiencing dizziness. One day he collapsed on a street in Brooklyn and rested briefly on a cot in a haberdasher’s shop. Once he felt better, he resumed his schedule without consulting a doctor.72

  In December, Rickey attended the annual meeting of major-league

  executives to discuss trades and rule changes. He suffered a serious dizzy spell and checked into a hospital. He then had another attack on the train back to New York. Rickey spent the next several weeks in a hospital bed recovering from Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear disorder that causes vertigo.73 Doctors warned him that he needed to live a more peaceful life or risk worsening the condition. Rickey, however, ignored the advice.74

  From his hospital bed, he worked hard to identify all the things that needed to be addressed before Robinson left for spring training. Rickey hired Wendell Smith to find accommodations for Robinson in Florida