11. Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 25–26.
12. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 127.
13. Robinson and Duckett, I Never Had It Made, 30–34.
14. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 376.
15. Robinson and Duckett, I Never Had It Made, 32 .
16. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 143.
17. Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith.
18. See Chris Lamb, “Did Branch Rickey Sign Jackie Robinson to Right a 40-Year Wrong?,” Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal, June 2013, 5–18.
19. Jackie Robinson, “Trouble Ahead Needn’t Bother You,” in Faith Made Them Champions, ed. Norman Vincent Peale (Carmel, NY: Guideposts, 1954), 239.
20. Ibid.
21. “Branch Rickey Dies,” Columbus Dispatch, December 10, 1965, 2.
22. Chris Lamb, “Jackie Robinson: Faith in Himself—and in God,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2013.
179
180
notes
23. Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith.
24. Eric Metaxas was among those who criticized Helgeland for avoiding the issue of Robinson’s faith. See Eric Metaxas, “Jackie Robinson: A Man of Faith,”
USA Today, April 11, 2013.
chapter 1: “I Put My trust in God and Moved”
1. Jackie Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith, n.d., Jackie Robinson Papers, box 12, folder 11, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
2. Carl Rowan interviewed Mallie Robinson for Carl T. Rowan and Jackie Robinson, Wait Till Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson (New York: Random House, 1960), but he did not report most of the faith-related material that appears in our chapter.
3. Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith.
4. Ibid.
5. Rowan’s interview is the source for this chapter’s depiction of Mallie’s time on the Sasser farm and her decision to leave.
6. Carl T. Rowan with Jackie Robinson, Wait Till Next Year: The Story of Jackie Robinson (New York: Random House, 1960), 20.
7. Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith.
8. Ibid.
9. Arthur D. Morse, “Jackie Wouldn’t Have Gotten to First Base,” Better Homes and Gardens, May 1950, 226.
10. Ibid.
11. Rowan, notes on Mallie Robinson interview.
12. Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997), 24.
13. Rowan, notes on Mallie Robinson interview.
14. Ibid.
15. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 24.
16. Rowan, Wait Till Next Year, 24.
17. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 26.
18. Jackie Robinson (as told to Ed Reid), “Robinson Never Forgets Mother’s Advice,” Washington Post, August 23, 1949.
19. Ibid.
20. Morse, “Jackie Wouldn’t Have,” 226.
21. Rowan, notes on Mallie Robinson interview.
22. Ibid.
23. Robinson, “Never Forgets Mother’s Advice.”
24. Rowan, notes on Mallie Robinson interview.
notes
181
chapter 2: “to seek to Help others”
1. Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997), 52.
2. Ibid.
3. Karl E. Downs, “Timid Negro Students!,” The Crisis, June 1936, 171.
4. Jackie Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith, n.d., Jackie Robinson Papers, box 12, folder 11, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
5. Ibid.
6. Karl E. Downs, “Did My Church Forsake Me? A Negro Methodist Asks a Question,” Zion’s Herald, March 9, 1938, 308. This article is the source for the chapter’s narrative of Downs’s rejection at the hotel and his response.
7. “Made Good,” Time, March 21, 1938, 61.
8. William N. Jones, “Day By Day,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 9, 1938.
9. Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith.
10. “NAACP to Hear Carl Downs,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 12, 1938.
11. Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith. This manuscript is the source for the following part of chap. 2, to the sentence, “We had a lot of long talks which affected me deeply.”
12. Jackie Robinson and Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It Made (Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1995), 20.
13. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 53.
14. Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith.
15. Ruby Berkley Goodwin, It’s Good to Be Black (Garden City, NY: Double-day, 1953), 10.
16. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 65.
17. Ibid., 66.
18. Gary Libman, “Rachel Robinson’s Homecoming: She Recalls a Legend and Her Days in L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1987.
19. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 77.
20. Libman, “Rachel Robinson’s Homecoming.”
21. “Interview with Rachel Robinson,” Scholastic, n.d., www.scholastic.com
/teachers/article/interview-rachel-robinson#top.
22. Libman, “Rachel Robinson’s Homecoming.”
23. “Interview with Rachel Robinson,” Scholastic.
24. Robinson and Duckett, I Never Had It Made, 22.
25. Ibid., 23.
26. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 78–79.
27. Ibid., 79.
28. Robinson and Duckett, I Never Had It Made, 23.
182
notes
chapter 3: “you are a child of God”
1. Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997), 82.
2. Jackie Robinson and Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It Made (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995), 11.
3. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 82.
4. Ibid., 84.
5. Robinson and Duckett, I Never Had It Made, 12; Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 84–85.
6. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 86–88.
7. Robinson and Duckett, I Never Had It Made, 12.
8. Rachel Robinson with Lee Daniels, Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 27.
9. Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 168–69.
10. Patrick Washburn, The African-American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 2006), 144–47.
11. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 170.
12. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 96.
13. Walter White, “White Supremacy in World War II,” in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Citadel, 1974), 4:80.
14. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 176.
15. John Vernon, “Jim Crow, Meet Lieutenant Robinson: A 1944 Court
Martial,” Prologue 40, no. 1 (Spring 2008), www.archives.gov/publications
/prologue/2008/spring/robinson.html.
16. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 95.
17. Ibid., 97.
18. Vernon, “Jim Crow, Meet Lieutenant Robinson.”
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 100.
22. Vernon, “Jim Crow, Meet Lieutenant Robinson.”
23. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 104–5, 109. Rampersad, 104–18, is the source for the part of chap. 3 that runs from this note to the sentence that ends,
“his junior year at UCLA, when he hit .097.”
24. See Brian Carroll, When to Stop the Cheering? The Black Press, the Black Community, and the Integration of Professional Baseball (New York: Routledge, 2007).
25. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 249–53.
26. Ibid., 260–61.
27. Ibid., 263.
28. Ibid., 264–66.
notes
183
29. Wendell Smith, Wendell Smith Papers, Baseball Hall of Fame,
Coope
rstown, NY.
30. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 263.
31. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 116–17.
32. Robinson and Duckett, I Never Had It Made, 24.
33. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 118.
34. Ibid.
35. Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 63.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 41.
38. Smith, WSP.
39. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 124, 125.
chapter 4: “I Have kept My Promise”
1. Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 17.
2. Ibid., 15–16.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 17.
5. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 30, 1930.
6. E-mail correspondence with Lee Lowenfish, July 10, 2016.
7. Bill Horlacher, “The Man Who Integrated Baseball,” Moody, July–August 1987, 18.
8. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 16.
9. Ibid., 14–15.
10. Ibid., 19.
11. A. S. “Doc” Young, “The Black Athlete in the Golden Age of Sports: Branch Rickey Launched Negroes to Stardom with Signing of Jackie Robinson,”
Ebony, November 1968, 156.
12. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 21–22.
13. Murray Polner, Branch Rickey: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 7.
14. Carl T. Rowan with Jackie Robinson, Wait Till Next Year (New York: Random House, 1960), 105–6.
15. Miami Herald, October 24, 1945. Quoted in Chris Lamb, “Did Branch Rickey Sign Jackie Robinson to Right a 40-Year Wrong?,” Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal 6 (2013): 5.
16. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 24.
17. Miami Herald, October 24, 1945. Quoted in Lamb, “40-Year Wrong?,” 2.
18. Mark Harris, “Branch Rickey Keeps His 40-Year Promise to a Negro Dentist,” Negro Digest, September 1947, 4–7.
184
notes
19. Arthur Mann, “The Life of Branch Rickey, Part 1,” Look, August 20, 1957, 79. Quoted in Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 23.
20. David Lipman, Mr. Baseball: The Story of Branch Rickey (New York: G. P.
Putnam and Sons, 1966), 10.
21. Young, “Black Athlete in the Golden Age,” 154.
22. Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 121–22.
23. Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 52.
24. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 24; and “Says Rickey Hit Jim Crow During Life at College,” Cleveland Post Call, August 9, 1947.
25. Harris, “Promise to a Negro Dentist,” 4.
26. Tim Cohane, “A Branch Grows in Brooklyn,” Look, March 19, 1946.
27. Ibid.
28. Fredrick Faber, “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,” 1862.
29. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 26–27.
30. Ibid., 36.
31. Ibid., 29.
32. Winthrop G. Martin, Brooklyn and Queens YMCA, to Branch Rickey,
letter, November 6, 1942, Branch Rickey Papers (hereafter cited as BRP), box 68, file 8, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
33. Branch Rickey to Paul Hayward, YMCA, Fort Worth, Texas, telegram, January 11, 1947, BRP, box 68, file 8.
34. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 30. Lowenfish, 30–59, is the source for the part of chap. 4 that describes the rest of Rickey’s playing career and his time outside baseball until the St. Louis Browns asked him to be their business manager.
35. Wesley H. Hager to Branch Rickey, letter, October 22, 1952, BRP, box 59, folder 11.
36. Horlacher, “Man Who Integrated Baseball,” 16.
37. Frederick Lieb, “Games Loses Beacon of Progress,” Sporting News, December 25, 1965.
38. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 280.
39. Jackie Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith, n.d., Jackie Robinson Papers, box 12, folder 11, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
40. Ibid.
41. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 289.
42. David Pietrusza, Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications, 1998), 411.
43. Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 13–14.
44. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 280.
45. Pietrusza, Judge and Jury, 365.
46. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 309.
notes
185
47. Lamb, “40-Year Wrong?,” 8–9.
48. Art Rust Jr., Get that Nigger Off the Field (New York: Delacorte, 1976), 6.
49. Ibid.
50. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 354.
51. Amsterdam News, December 26, 1942. Quoted in Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 223.
52. Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey: American in Action (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 212–13; Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, 56; Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 326.
53. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 349.
54. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 122.
55. Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, 56–57.
56. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 225.
57. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 359.
58. Red Barber, 1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984), 49–50.
59. Ibid., 52, 63.
60. Ibid., 63–64.
61. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 271.
62. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 368.
63. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 232.
64. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 377; Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 273.
65. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 274.
66. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 378.
67. Chris Lamb, Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 43, 48.
68. Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 291.
69. New York Herald Tribune, October 25, 1945. Quoted in Lamb, Conspiracy of Silence, 295.
70. Rowan, Wait Till Next Year, 39.
71. Lamb, Blackout, 66.
72. Lipman, Mr. Baseball, 142.
73. Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 386.
74. Mann, Branch Rickey: American, 230–32.
75. Branch Rickey to Wendell Smith, letter, January 8, 1946, Wendell Smith Papers, Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY.
76. Ibid.
77. Lamb, Blackout, 63–65.
78. Ibid., 75–76.
79. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 133.
80. Rachel Robinson with Lee Daniels, Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 40.
81. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 133.
82. Rachel Robinson, Intimate Portrait, 43.
186
notes
chapter 5: “God Has Been Good to us today”
1. Chris Lamb, Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 5.
2. Gilbert King, “The Most Dangerous Place to Be Black,” Pacific Standard, August 7, 2013, www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/the-most-dangerous-place
-to-be-black-64206.
3. Chicago Defender, February 23, 1946. Quoted in Lamb, Blackout, 61.
4. Carl T. Rowan with Jackie Robinson, Wait Till Next Year (New York: Random House, 1960), 131.
5. Rachel Robinson with Lee Daniels, Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 46.
6. Rowan, Wait Till Next Year, 132.
7. Rachel Robinson, Intimate Portrait, 46.
8. Rowan, Wait Till Next Year, 133.
9. Ibid. See Chicago Defender, February 23, 1946. Quoted in Lamb, Blackout, 13.
10. Lamb, Blackout, 13, 14.
11. Ibid., 15, 16.
12. Jackie Robinson and Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It M
ade (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995 ), 42.
13. Lamb, Blackout, 90.
14. Telephone interview with Billy Rowe, March 10, 1993. See Lamb, Blackout, 19.
15. Lamb, Blackout, 16, 18, 19.
16. Ibid., 83.
17. Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997), 142.
18. Lamb, Blackout, 88.
19. Ibid., 88, 89.
20. Rowan, Wait Till Next Year, 94.
21. Lamb, Blackout, 95.
22. Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 392.
23. Arthur Mann, Jackie Robinson Story (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1950), 142.
24. Lamb, Blackout, 67.
25. Robinson and Duckett, I Never Had It Made, 45.
26. Pittsburgh Courier, April 20, 1946. Quoted in Lamb, Blackout, 164.
27. Rachel Robinson, “I Live with a Hero,” McCall’s, March 1951.
28. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 144.
29. Ibid.
30. Ed Charles, information presentation (Daytona Beach, FL, 1996). Quoted in Lamb, Blackout, 93.
notes
187
31. Lamb, Blackout, 103, 104, 105.
32. Jackie Robinson, untitled manuscript on faith, n.d., Jackie Robinson Papers, box 12, folder 11, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
33. Lamb, Blackout, 103.
34. Ibid., 103, 104, 105.
35. Jackie Robinson and Wendell Smith, My Own Story (New York: Greenberg, 1948), 78.
36. Ibid., 79.
37. Lamb, Blackout, 154–55.
38. Ibid., 166.
39. Ibid., 171, 172.
40. Wendell Smith, “It Was a Great Day in Jersey,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1946.
41. Ibid.
42. William G. Nunn, “American Way Triumphs in Robinson ‘ Experiment,’ ”
Pittsburgh Courier, April 27, 1946.
43. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 153.
44. Patrick Sauer, “The Year of Jackie Robinson’s Mutual Love Affair with Montreal,” Smithsonian, March 5, 2016, www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=
/history/year-jackie-robinsons-mutual-love-affair-montreal-180954878/.
45. John Wilson, Jackie Robinson and the American Dilemma (New York: Longman, 2010), 73.
46. Ibid., 73.
47. Sean Kirst, “Jackie Robinson in Syracuse: For Opening Day, Honoring Deep Ties and One Essential Moment,” Syracuse.com, April 10, 2013, www
.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2013/04/jackie_robinson_in_syracuse_on.html.
48. Lester B. Granger, “Manhattan and Beyond,” New York Amsterdam News, June 8, 1946.
49. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson, 154.
Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography Page 25
