Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography

by Long, Michael G.

  Robinson’s season in triple-A had been an unqualified success.

  Rickey had asked Robinson not merely to succeed on the field but to

  do so under conditions no ballplayer had ever faced, and he had.

  Wendell Smith knew that Robinson was in emotional, psychologi-

  cal, and physical pain. Robinson understood what was required of him and did it. As Smith wrote, “He had to say to himself, ‘Although I want to rise up and fight back and challenge my tormentors, I can’t. Even if I am right, someone will try to prove that I am wrong.’ ” Robinson knew

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  he was representing millions of blacks. “I am their representative and I can’t afford to let them down,” he said, according to Smith. “I’ll just have to stick it out and do the very best I can.”59

  If Robinson had not succeeded as he did during his year in

  Montreal, it is doubtful he would have started the 1947 season with

  Brooklyn. Without Montreal, there may never have been a Brooklyn

  for Robinson.

  “So Montreal became a crucible for Jackie,” George Mitrovich later

  wrote in a column in the Montreal Gazette, “to see if he could ‘turn the other cheek,’ as Rickey asked him to do in the spirit of Jesus—and evidence that character before Brooklyn.”60

  Six weeks after Robinson and the Montreal Royals completed their

  championship season, Rachel gave birth to a healthy Jackie Jr. on

  November 18.

  During the off-season, Robinson and Rickey looked ahead to the

  1947 season. Rickey believed that Robinson’s chances for success

  required that he play well, of course. But the Brooklyn executive also felt that the success of Robinson—and other black players who came

  after him—depended on how spectators responded to the ballplayer.

  “The only thing we had to fear was the ignorant whites in the South

  and the ignorant blacks in the North,” Rickey said.61

  There was not much Rickey could do to control bigots in cities

  like Baltimore and Louisville, but there was something he thought

  he could do to temper the emotions of black spectators. In February

  1947, a month before spring training, Rickey organized a meeting

  of thirty-three black religious and community leaders at the YMCA

  in Brooklyn to emphasize that black spectators had to restrain them-

  selves in both their applause for the ballplayer and their response to those bigots in the stadium who yelled abuse at him. If they fought

  force with force, Rickey said, it would jeopardize integration and vindicate the bigots who claimed that segregation was necessary to pre-

  vent race riots.62

  When spring training came in 1947, Rickey wanted to avoid the Jim

  Crow laws of the previous year in Florida. He moved his organization from Florida to Havana, Cuba, where there was no legal segregation.

  But Rickey, Robinson learned, decided to segregate his black players from his white players. There would be no private home for Robinson, as there was in Daytona Beach, however. Montreal’s four black

  players—Robinson, catcher Roy Campanella, and pitchers Don New-

  combe and Roy Partlow—were assigned a shabby downtown hotel for

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  blacks near Havana’s slum district.63 “It was a place,” Newcombe said,

  “only a cockroach could love.”64

  This was the first spring training for Campanella, Newcombe, and

  Partlow, and they had little choice but to accept the conditions. Robinson, however, was livid. He became angrier when he learned that

  Rickey was responsible. But he began to calm down when Rickey

  explained that he did not want the mixing of blacks and whites to provoke a racial incident that might jeopardize everything he was trying to do—when they were, as Rickey put it, “on the threshold of success.”65

  “I reluctantly accepted the explanation,” Robinson said.66

  The accommodations made Robinson sick, the anger made him

  sicker, and the greasy food in the filthy segregated restaurant made him even sicker. His stomach hurt so badly he had trouble bending over.67

  Robinson then learned that if he were going to make the Dodgers,

  it would not be at second base, where the team had the veteran Eddie Stanky. It would be at first base, where the Dodgers, like the Royals a year earlier, had no established player. Once again, Rickey told Clay Hopper to put Robinson at first, and Robinson worked hard at the position.68

  Rickey knew that if Robinson were to make the Brooklyn roster,

  he could not just be good enough to make the team. He had to be

  so good that nobody could doubt whether he belonged, especially his

  teammates, many of whom did not want a black man in the dugout

  with them. To do that, Rickey told the ballplayer to run with abandon in games against Brooklyn. “I want you to run wild,” Rickey told Robinson before one of the games with the Dodgers, “to steal the pants off them, to be the most conspicuous player on the field.”69

  There were no other major-league teams practicing in Cuba or

  anywhere else in the Caribbean. This meant that Montreal played a

  number of games against Brooklyn, as they had the previous year in

  Florida. Rickey told Robinson the games against Brooklyn were critical not only because he was playing against prospective teammates but also because he would be playing in front of New York City sportswriters.

  “The stories the newspapermen send back to Brooklyn and New York

  newspapers will help create demand on the part of the fans that you be brought up to the majors,” Rickey told him.70

  Robinson, once again, rose to the challenge and hit and fielded well, until the stomach pains forced him to sit out. Rickey had hoped that the Brooklyn team would see Robinson as a player who could make

  them better. But this did not happen—at least not immediately.

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  A number of Brooklyn players were concerned that Rickey would

  promote Robinson. A petition was reportedly circulated to keep Robinson off the team. When Rickey learned about the petition, he immediately told Brooklyn manager Leo Durocher, who woke up the team in the

  middle of the night and directed an obscenity-laced tirade at the players.

  “I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays!” Durocher said.71

  Durocher’s tirade ended the mutiny. Rickey met alone with the

  players who signed the petition and made it clear he would trade them before he would trade Robinson.

  Sportswriters, perhaps knowing about the dissension, questioned

  whether Rickey would sign Robinson for the Dodgers. Rickey

  remained noncommittal about whether Robinson would be with the

  Dodgers or Montreal when the season began. “Only Rickey knows

  and he ain’t talking,” Arthur Daley wrote in the New York Times.

  Rickey should not sign Robinson, Daley added, if he “wants to keep

  peace in his baseball family.”72

  Rickey, in keeping with his cautious nature, made no guarantees

  to Robinson or anyone else that the ballplayer would start the season with Brooklyn. Robinson, for his part, told reporters that if he were not good enough to play for Brooklyn, he would return to Montreal, where he had the support of his teammates and the team’s fans. “Last year I saw more democracy in Montreal than in any city I have ever been in,”

  Robinson said in the Pittsburgh Courier on March 22. “They inspired me and, along with the faith I had in God, who was on my side right

  from opening day of the season, I had a wonderful year.”73

  On April 5, Robinson acknowledged in th
e Pittsburgh Courier that he had read in newspapers that there would be trouble if he were promoted to the major leagues. He said he wanted to play for the Dodgers and wondered why the color of his skin should prevent him from doing that. He also admitted that he sometimes got tired of being the “guinea pig,” and that he wanted to walk away from baseball. But something,

  he said, urged him to continue.

  If he succeeded in the major leagues, Robinson said, then perhaps

  he could change how whites thought about whether blacks should be

  in the big leagues. If he could do that, he would make it easier for the next black who wanted to play baseball or who wanted to find a job,

  go to school, or live as he wanted, free of racial discrimination. “I want to prove that God alone has the right to judge a person,” he said, “and that He is the one who decides people’s fates.”74

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  Discussions about whether Robinson would be signed were

  temporarily put aside when baseball commissioner A. B. “Happy”

  Chandler suspended Durocher for, among other things, having an

  affair with a married woman, actress Laraine Day. The Catholic Youth Organization threatened to boycott baseball if something was not done to punish the Brooklyn manager for his moral failings.75 Rickey lost his manager, and Robinson lost one of his fiercest supporters.

  Nevertheless, on April 10, the day after Durocher’s suspension,

  Rickey released a statement that said the Dodgers had signed Robin-

  son. This solidified Robinson’s faith in Rickey. Robinson would be in the lineup for Brooklyn’s first game of the season on April 15. No black had played in the major leagues since the 1880s.

  Robinson was not naive enough to think that Rickey or his own

  ability would be enough for him to succeed. So much depended on

  fate or luck. “His religion had taught him that the line between confidence and Satanic pride is a fine one; and chance—a twisted ankle, a turned knee—might yet intervene to reassert the inscrutable ways of Providence,” Arnold Rampersad wrote. “The drama would unfold; he

  would be both spectator and the man at the plate; God would decide

  the outcome.”76

  Robinson believed God was on his side, and that the outcome would

  be divine.

  6

  “I Get Down on My Knees and Pray”

  Integrating Major League Baseball

  Jackie Robinson woke up early on the morning of April 15 in the small, cluttered hotel room in Manhattan he was sharing with Rachel and

  five-month-old Jackie Jr. until they found something more permanent.

  Diapers were drying on a shower rod, and baby bottles sat in the bathroom sink. Jackie looked at Rachel as he was leaving to go to Ebbets Field to break baseball’s color line.

  “Just in case you have trouble picking me out,” he quipped, “I’ll be wearing number forty-two.”1

  Robinson took the subway to Ebbets Field for the early afternoon

  game. Brooklyn pitcher Ralph Branca was in the clubhouse with one

  other player, Gene Hermanski, a reserve outfielder, when Robinson

  entered. Robinson knew that a petition had been circulated among

  Brooklyn players who did not want him to play on their team, but he

  did not know who had signed it and who had not. Branca sensed what

  Robinson was thinking, “Are these guys friends or foes?”

  Branca, who grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, often playing

  with blacks, had no objections to having Robinson as a teammate.

  Neither did the New Jersey-bred Hermanski. Each shook Robinson’s

  hand and wished him good luck. When other players entered the

  clubhouse, some welcomed Robinson, others did not. At one point,

  Branca looked over at Robinson, who was quietly sitting on a stool

  and staring into his locker. He knew there was a lot at stake for

  Robinson, and he wanted to say something to Jackie but did not.

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  The twenty-one-year-old Branca, who was beginning what would be

  his first full year in the major leagues, thought instead about his own circumstances. “Instead of saying a prayer for him,” he remembered, “I said one for me.”2

  Branca, who was not pitching that day, was sitting next to Robinson

  in the dugout moments before he took the field.

  “You know, Ralph,” he said, “this is a big day for me.”

  Branca understood what Robinson meant.

  “It wasn’t a big day just for him,” Branca wrote decades later, “but for all African-Americans.”3

  Robinson went hitless in his first game but reached base on an error in the seventh and scored the go-ahead run in Brooklyn’s 5–3 win.

  When Robinson was in his hotel room that evening, there was a

  knock on the door. Ward Morehouse, a drama critic for the New York Sun, asked for an interview. Robinson invited him in, and Morehouse asked what he thought of his first game.

  “I did all my thinking last night. Before I went to bed I thanked

  God for all that’s happened,” Robinson said, “and for the good fortune that’s come my way.”

  Robinson admitted that he felt a lot of pressure being the first black in the major leagues. But, he added, he liked challenges. He told Morehouse that he taught Sunday school in the Methodist church in Pasa-

  dena, and that he had always requested the rowdier boys for his class.

  Robinson then picked up his infant son, Jackie Jr., and continued: “I know that a lot of players, particularly the southern boys, won’t be able to change their feelings overnight on the matter of playing ball with a negro. I can understand that. I have encountered very little antagonism, however; I really expected a great deal more. I guess it’s all up to me.”4

  Robinson got his first major-league hit in the second game, which

  Brooklyn also won. After the second game at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn

  played their crosstown rival, the New York Giants, in a two-game series at the Polo Grounds, and then returned to Ebbets Field for three games against the Philadelphia Phillies.

  During an off day before the Phillies series, Jackie and Rachel moved into an apartment in Brooklyn. Gil Jonas, who was then a high school student in Brooklyn, interviewed Robinson that day for his school

  newspaper. Jonas, who was white, did not ask Robinson about racial

  discrimination. Jonas later recalled that he was aware that there were differences between races, religions, and nationalities, but that he had

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  not yet processed how these differences manifested themselves into

  racism and racial hatred.

  That changed on April 22 when Jonas went to see Robinson play dur-

  ing the first game in the series against the Phillies. The cold weather meant a smaller-than-expected crowd. The ballpark was relatively quiet when Robinson came up to bat for the first time. As Robinson dug into the batter’s box, the Philadelphia bench let loose a torrent of abuse “harsher than anything Robinson had heard in his professional baseball career,” Jonathan Eig wrote in Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season.5

  Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman, an Alabaman, was a former

  major-league outfielder who had been traded from the New York Yan-

  kees to the Washington Senators in the 1930s after making Nazi salutes at what he perceived to be Jewish fans at Yankee Stadium. Chapman

  directed a series of hate-filled, bigoted taunts against Robinson as soon he stepped into the batter’s box.

  “Hey, why don’t you go back to the cotton field where you belong?”

  “Hey, snowflake, which one of those white boys’ wives are you<
br />
  dating tonight?”

  “We don’t want you here, nigger!”6

  It continued every time Robinson came to bat that day.

  For a moment or so, Robinson wanted to ignore his promise to

  Rickey. “To hell with Mr. Rickey’s ‘noble experiment,’ ” he later said.

  “To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create. I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist. Then I could walk away from it all.”7

  But Robinson did not move from the batter’s box. He did not look

  at the Phillies dugout. He remembered his pact with Rickey and hon-

  ored it. By not responding, Robinson won over many of those in the

  crowd and perhaps many of his own teammates, some of whom did

  not want him on their team. Rickey later said that Chapman failed

  to produce his intended effect. “Chapman did more than anybody to

  unite the Dodgers,” Rickey said. “When he poured out that string of

  unconscionable abuse, he solidified and unified thirty men. . . . Chapman made Jackie a real member of the Dodgers.”8

  Jonas remembered hearing the obscenities from the Phillies dugout.

  “I didn’t know people could be that cruel,” he said. Jonas also said he saw things differently after that game. He observed how Robinson won over some of those white spectators who had screamed abominations

  at him. “I watched people who were hardhearted or antagonistic, and

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  they changed. It was palpable. It changed so completely, and it changed me over the course of the season.”9

  Jonas’s racial sensibilities were forever transformed by what he witnessed that day at Ebbets Field. He paid closer and closer attention to racial discrimination. As an adult, he became the chief fund-raiser for the NAACP and wrote Freedom’s Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle

  against Racism in America, 1909–1969.10

  If Robinson could inspire white boys like Gil Jonas, think of the

  impact he had on young blacks. Colin Powell, who became a four-star

  general in the US Army and secretary of state in the George W. Bush

  administration, was ten years old and living in the Bronx in 1947. He was a New York Giants fan but, like many of his friends, he rooted for Jackie Robinson, even though he played for the Giants’ hated rival,