Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography

by Long, Michael G.

  that the owner had questioned his integrity.

  Five days after Robinson had received the Spingarn award, O’Malley

  traded him to the Dodgers’ crosstown rival, the New York Giants.

  Brooklyn was stunned. So was Robinson. He took the trade as a vicious insult, and rather than betraying himself and his fans, he simply retired from the game he had transformed.

  part three

  Fighting for Freedom

  7

  “Hoeing with God”

  An Impatient Faith

  After Jackie Robinson retired from baseball in 1956, he became vice

  president and director of personnel at Chock full o’Nuts, a chain of coffee shops owned by white businessman William Black. The job

  offered Robinson financial security for the immediate future, and he appreciated his early relationship with Black so much that he described it as nothing less than the work of God. “It is the kind of relationship which developed, in my opinion, not by accident—but all as a part of the mysterious and miraculous way in which God works in the lives of people,” he stated.1 Black had a different sense about the origins of the relationship: “I hired Jackie because a majority of the people who work for me are colored—and I figured they would worship him.”2

  However divinely inspired Robinson thought it to be, the partner-

  ship fell apart by 1964. Robinson believed that Black and another

  colleague, Herb Samuel, had deliberately undermined his authority

  in personnel-related decisions. But Robinson was always grateful for Black’s willingness to let him spend so much of his time doing volunteer work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

  In his new role as national chairman of the NAACP’s Freedom

  Fund Campaign in 1956, Robinson traveled the country, speaking in

  numerous black churches—the vital center of black politics—to inspire 107

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  activism, raise money, and solicit members. It was a role he relished, and the NAACP audiences thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to be

  in the presence of one of their heroes.

  Robinson characterized his civil rights work as “hoeing with God,”

  using the gifts of God to grow goodness wherever it was needed. While a lot of people “expect God to do everything for them while they do

  nothing for themselves,” he said, earthly success requires people to commit themselves—their time, energy, and resources—to improving

  their own lives.

  Robinson used the following story to illustrate his spiritual conviction about the importance of human responsibility:

  I have a favorite story about a man who moved to a new farm on

  which the land was a horrible mess. He worked from dawn until

  night, tilling the soil and planting the crops. When harvest time

  came along, one of his neighbors passed by and noticed the mostly

  tilled soil, the rows of crops.

  “The Lord has certainly been good to you,” the neighbor said to

  the farmer.

  “Sure has,” the farmer answered. Then he added, “But you

  should have seen this before I started hoeing.”

  I’ve always believed that God will help us do anything we want

  to do which is decent and good. But I like to think he feels that we are doing a little of the hoeing.3

  For Robinson, hoeing meant much more than merely praying for

  civil rights. It also meant refusing to wait around for God, religious leaders, or anyone else, for that matter, to undertake the painfully slow process of converting the hearts of civil rights opponents.

  Robinson’s conviction about the urgent need for earthly justice set

  him at radical odds with those, such as President Dwight Eisenhower, who called on him and other activists to be patient in the face of racial injustice.

  Robinson first met Eisenhower in 1953, when he and the president

  attended the nationally televised fortieth-anniversary dinner for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in Washington, DC. Immediately after the president delivered the keynote address, he made a beeline to the table where Jackie and Rachel were sitting. Robinson, whose politics, like Branch Rickey’s, steered Republican, stood up

  proudly, and he and the president beamed as they shook hands before

  the national audience.

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  Two days later Robinson wrote Eisenhower a heartfelt letter.

  “My wife and I will always remember our experience that night,” he

  penned. “It is events like this that make certain our faith in democracy is justified.”4

  But Robinson’s faith in Eisenhower would plummet in subsequent

  years, mostly because of the president’s slow, quiet, and indirect approach to civil rights. Robinson grew especially disenchanted when Eisenhower remained silent following the January 30, 1956, bombing of the home

  of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama.

  Like millions of blacks, Robinson admired from afar the Montgom-

  ery bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks’s courageous refusal to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. “The more I read about the Montgomery situation, the more respect I have for the job they are doing,”

  he wrote in a letter to Rachel.5

  His respect for King in particular, the twenty-six-year-old pastor

  of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and the newly elected president of

  the Montgomery Improvement Association, only deepened after thugs

  bombed King’s house and the homes and churches of other civil rights activists in Montgomery.

  King was not at home at the time, but his wife, Coretta, was. She

  and a visitor were sitting in the front living room when a noise on the porch—she said it sounded like a brick landing with a thud—scared

  them so much they immediately started for the back room, where

  baby daughter Yolanda, only seven weeks old, was sleeping peacefully.

  As Coretta and her friend were rushing down the hallway, a bomb

  exploded in the front of the house, shattering four windows and causing considerable damage to the porch and the surrounding area. No

  one was physically harmed.

  King, who had been leading a mass meeting of local activists, arrived home about fifteen minutes later to find not only a damaged house and a scared spouse but also a growing crowd of armed and angry African

  Americans seemingly set on exacting revenge. Standing before the anxious and pulsating crowd, the young minister said, “We believe in law and order. Don’t get panicky. Don’t do anything panicky at all. Don’t get your weapons. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.

  Remember that is what God said. We are not advocating violence. We

  want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them. I did not start

  this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped

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  this movement will not stop. If I am stopped our work will not stop.

  For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.”6

  King’s God—the God revealed and known in Jesus of Nazareth,

  the Prince of Peace—was consistently nonviolent, even in violent situations, and always present with those who struggled and suffered for earthly justice.

  Jackie Robinson was moved, and Alfred Duckett, a mutual friend,

  arranged for Robinson to meet King shortly after the horrific bombing.

  “I had been extremely impressed by his calmness in the face of such

  terrible violence and threats to his family,�
� Jackie recalled. “Godliness, strength, courage, and patience in the face of overwhelming odds were his chief characteristics.”7

  The respect was certainly mutual. In later years, King often acknowledged that Robinson’s courageous and nonviolent leadership in shat-

  tering the color barrier in Major League Baseball, both while and after Robinson turned the other cheek in the early part of his career, played a major role in inspiring the new wave of civil rights activism, including his own.

  Heroes to each other, King and Robinson remained in touch after

  that initial meeting, and the civil rights leader invited Robinson to speak at a May 1956 rally marking the end of the campaign to rebuild the scorched churches of Montgomery. Busy with NAACP responsibilities, Robinson declined the invitation, but his reply exuded warmth and sympathy. “I have read with mounting concern of the attacks upon our churches in your city,” he wrote. “There is no cause more deserving of support than the campaign for funds to rebuild these structures.”8

  Less deserving of support was President Eisenhower. Not long after

  the Montgomery bombings, Robinson lobbied the administration for a

  presidential statement condemning racial violence. But none was forth-coming. Eisenhower, whose advisers included the Rev. Billy Graham,

  the famous white evangelist who often publicly called for a “go slow”

  approach on racial issues, was simply too reticent on civil rights issues to deliver one.

  In September 1957, Eisenhower advised patience when speaking

  to a group of Rhode Island Republicans about the school integration

  crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, and soon after he read the president’s comments, Robinson sat down and penned a letter in which he poured

  out his frustration. “It is easy for those who haven’t felt the evils of a society to urge [patience], but for us who as Americans have patiently

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  waited all these years for the rights supposedly guaranteed us under our Constitution, it is not an easy task,” Jackie wrote. “Nevertheless, we have done it.”9

  Increasingly impatient, Robinson demanded that Eisenhower use his

  executive powers to do more than condemn violence in general. “A mere statement that you don’t like violence is not enough,” he argued. “In my opinion, people the world over would hail you if you made a statement that would clearly put your office behind the efforts for civil rights.”10

  Eisenhower did more than that after Arkansas governor Orval Fau-

  bus withdrew the National Guard from Central High School in Little

  Rock, allowing a white mob to terrorize the African American students integrating the public school for the first time. Eisenhower finally acted, ordering the deployment of the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to Central High School.

  Two days later, Robinson sent Eisenhower a congratulatory note.

  “I should have known you would do the right thing at the crucial

  time,” he wrote. “May God continue giving you the wisdom to lead

  us in this struggle.”11

  Robinson was also largely pleased with the Eisenhower administra-

  tion’s leadership in the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act in the late fall. But shortly after the president signed the legislation, Robinson protested Attorney General William Rogers’s comment that the administration would not seek additional civil rights legislation in 1958.

  Four months later, in a keynote speech at the Summit Meeting of

  Negro Leaders in Washington, DC, the gap between Robinson and the

  administration widened all the more when Eisenhower declared that

  there were no “revolutionary cures” for the nation’s racial crises and suggested that civil rights activists exercise “patience and forbearance.”12

  But not all was frustrating. In retirement from baseball, Robinson

  spent more time with Rachel, Jackie Jr., Sharon, and David, and their Stamford, Connecticut, home became a favorite hangout for children

  in the area, with swimming and ice hockey games. Spring and summer

  vacations were spent on Montauk Island, and Rachel’s brother Chuck

  and his family would also head to the island for deep-sea fishing.

  The Robinsons also made sure to steep their children in North Stam-

  ford Congregational Church, just down the block from their home.

  “We hoped the lessons they heard in our local Congregational church

  reinforced our spiritual and ethical teachings,” Rachel recounted. “Our faith was just that as we had learned to make our way in the world by watching our parents and grandparents and the community at large

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  and by relying on ourselves, so our children would find observation and practice, not didactic discussion, the best teacher.”13

  Robinson publicly shared his own faith-based morality in 1958,

  when he served as a moderator of Talk Back, a television program produced by the Methodist Church and the National Council of Churches.

  Shown on WOR-TV in New York, Talk Back featured a dramatization about a moral problem, followed by a discussion analyzing the moral

  issue from various perspectives.

  In the episode moderated by Robinson, the dramatization focused

  on a plastics business and two main characters: a clerk whose frequent (and evidently faked) car problems suggest he has little stake in the company and a valuable office manager whose error results in the company losing its biggest client.

  Robinson invited the panelists to answer several questions: If

  someone needs to be fired, why not just go ahead and chop the useless clerk? Why not sacrifice the clerk for the greater good of the company?

  Isn’t the bottom line most important?

  Robinson, at the time directing personnel at Chock full o’Nuts,

  revealed his own bias when he said, “I happen to be with a firm. I

  know that we sometimes get into problems because I will not fire for one mistake. But I think you have to live with yourself. You must give a person opportunity.”14

  In the fall of 1958, Robinson, never one to shrink from offering

  opportunities, asked Eisenhower to meet with activists demonstrating in a march for school integration, an issue that the president was not especially interested in pushing.

  Jackie had first heard the idea for a march in a September meeting

  with A. Philip Randolph, the powerful black leader of the Brother-

  hood of Sleeping Car Porters and a visionary civil rights leader who had threatened to stage a massive march on Washington in 1941 if

  the federal government continued to prevent African Americans from

  securing jobs in the defense industry. President Roosevelt relented and issued an executive order that effectively opened up the munitions

  industry to blacks seeking employment.

  Randolph, angered by the school crisis in Little Rock, pitched the

  idea of another march on Washington, this time by youths protesting

  the ongoing segregation of public schools. Four years earlier, the

  Supreme Court had ruled against such segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, but the justices had refused to establish a deadline for desegregation. Consequently, many school districts across the country,

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  not merely in Little Rock, did little or nothing to desegregate their schools.

  With his activist faith in tow, Robinson expressed his vigorous

  support for the plan, and shortly afterward he became marshal of the march, although the planning details were carried out by Randolph’s

  mentee, Bayard Rustin, a brilliant tactician who would later master-

  mind the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Two

  weeks before the ev
ent, Rustin wrote to President Eisenhower, describing the purpose of the march and asking him to welcome some of the

  youth at the White House to talk with them about the importance of

  integrating public schools.

  The White House was silent. But the marchers were not, and on

  October 25, 1958, ten thousand excited young people, led by Jackie

  Robinson, Coretta Scott King, and Harry Belafonte, demonstrated

  for integrated schools by marching from Constitution Avenue to the

  Lincoln Memorial. Coretta gave an inspirational speech encouraging

  the young demonstrators to see the day as part of a worldwide march

  to freedom, and a racially integrated group of young people then

  presented a petition, a written statement about the march’s purpose, at the White House gate. But, to Robinson’s chagrin, a guard denied their request to meet with the president or any other White House official.

  Nevertheless, the march attracted positive national publicity for their efforts to integrate public schools, and Robinson was generally pleased with the day.

  Rustin organized another march to take place the following spring,

  and on April 18, 1959, approximately twenty-five thousand youths

  and activists, led once again by Jackie Robinson, took to the streets in Washington, many of them shouting, “Five, six, seven, eight, these United States must integrate!”15 President Eisenhower was out of town, but he sent the students a message saying that he would never be satisfied as long as racial segregation existed in the nation.

  Six days later, the New York Post proudly announced that Jackie had just signed a contract to write a nationally syndicated triweekly column. “I believe this is the first time that real national syndication has been attempted for a columnist who happens to be a Negro,” James Wechsler, the Post’s editor, stated.16

  Robinson was delighted with the opportunity, especially since the

  Post had agreed that he could write on any subject.

  One day after Wechsler announced Robinson’s hiring, a mob of

  whites kidnapped Mack Charles Parker from his cell in the Pearl River

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  County, Mississippi, courthouse, where he had been waiting for his

  trial on charges of raping a white woman. The mob shot Parker numer-