Rickey decided the time had come. “Leo,” he said to Durocher, “go to the press and tell them that if Robinson becomes the Dodger first baseman, Brooklyn will have an excellent chance at winning the pennant. I had thought the players, once they saw how good he was, would want him on the team. Since this has not transpired, I think we should do something to light a fire under them.” Durocher agreed, but he was never able to carry out this plan.
On April 9, Commissioner Happy Chandler suspended Leo Durocher for one year for “conduct unbecoming to baseball.” The Durocher suspension came as a result of a number of headlined incidents. The fiery manager had thrown a wet towel in an umpire’s face, slugged a fan, lent his Manhattan apartment to actor George Raft, who was rumored to have connections to the underworld, and suffered embarrassment when a “crooked crap game” that was allegedly played in his living room made front-page news after a bust. His January 21, 1947, marriage to divorced actress Laraine Day resulted in still further adverse publicity and the withdrawal of support for the Dodger Knothole Gang by the Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization.
The suspension left New York City’s baseball community in shock. While the reason for the punitive action against the colorful “Leo the Lip” was never clearly specified, there were many who speculated that it was part of a move aimed at depriving Jackie Robinson of a bodyguard. Durocher, additionally, was silenced. He could not agitate the press, as planned, to urge that Jackie Robinson become a Brooklyn Dodger.
The suspension of Leo Durocher became the most sensational sports story of the year—for exactly one day. On April 10, as the sixth inning got underway at Ebbets Field, a Rickey assistant sauntered into the press box and began to distribute a news release. “Brooklyn announces the purchase of the contract of Jack Roosevelt Robinson from Montreal. . . . He will report immediately. Signed, Branch Rickey.” The tens of thousands who had signed petitions urging the Dodgers to take this action were delighted. The thousands who wore “I’m for Jackie” buttons were delighted. And Robinson was delighted and ready. “Now I can relax,” he told a reporter. “I have a few days before the season opens and I’ll be ready then. The time element in making good won’t be a factor anymore.”
The final decision to sign major-league baseball’s first black player was made at a secret meeting at Branch Rickey’s Forest Hills, Queens, home just hours after Durocher was suspended. Rickey had received unanimous support for the decision from his coaches.
The next day, two signatures were affixed to a Uniform Player’s Contract of the National League of Professional Ball Clubs dated April 11, 1947: Jack Roosevelt Robinson of 1588 W. 36th Pl., Los Angeles, California, and Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc. Four days later, it became official with the additional signature of Ford Frick, president of the National League.
Chapter Eight
Number 42
With a blue number 42 on the back of his white Brooklyn Dodger home uniform, Jackie Robinson took his place at first base on April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field. It was two years less a day since he had tried out at Fenway Park. It was thirty-two years to the day since Jack Johnson had become the first black heavyweight champion of the world.
Many of the 26,623 at that tiny ballpark on that chilly spring day were not even baseball fans but had come out to see “the one” who would break the sport’s age-old color line. Rachel Robinson was there with the infant Jackie Jr.; Clyde Sukeforth, who had first seen Jackie Robinson in Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1945, was there as interim manager of the Dodgers. Many in the crowd wore ‘’I’m for Jackie” buttons and badges and screamed each time the black pioneer came to bat or touched the ball.
He grounded out to short his first time up. It was a very close play and probably could have been called either way. Umpire AI Barlick called Robinson out. A scowl on his face, Robinson stepped toward the umpire, ready to protest. Then he backed off and returned to the Dodger dugout. Argument, Rickey had told him, might win a battle, but restraint would win the war. He was retired on a fly ball to left field in his second at-bat. He grounded into a rally-killing double play in his final appearance at the plate. “We had spoken on the phone a few days before,” remembers Willa Mae Walker, “and he said he was doing it for his people. I listened to that game, and I was sitting down and shaking all the time.” The Dodgers won the game, 5-3, nipping Johnny Sain and the Boston Braves. For Robinson, it was a muted performance, but the first of his 1,382 major-league games was now in the record books—and he had broken the color line forever. “I was nervous on my first day in my first game at Ebbets Field,” Robinson told reporters later, “but nothing has bothered me since.”
Duke Snider recalls that first game, too. “I never played with or against Jackie until spring training that year in Havana,” Snider remembers. “While he was with Montreal, I wasn’t even put on the Dodger roster until the latter part of spring training. All the attention that day was directed toward Jackie, and rightfully so, since he was the first black man in the major leagues. He played first base and did a fine job.”
Lee Scott, then a reporter for the Brooklyn Times, remembers the scene at the start in the Dodger clubhouse at Ebbets Field. “Jackie had a spot on the right side, a little two-by-four. It was not as large as the other lockers of the regulars on the Dodgers. He was really almost all by himself on the other side of the clubhouse. I guess it was because we had a few guys from the Deep South and Rickey wanted to keep them apart.”
Scott still remembers how reserved Robinson was at the start. “He never said a word. The only fellows who spoke to him in real conversations were Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges, and they became good friends. Jackie would go out and take practice and go into his little cubicle when the game was over and get dressed. He wouldn’t say a word, and then he’d go about his business.”
Robinson’s behavior reflected a lesson in desegregation Dodson had described to Rickey. “At registration time the dean of the law school at the University of Maryland called Walter White, head of the NAACP,” Dodson explains. “The school was being ordered by the government to admit black students. The dean sought advice as to how this might be most smoothly accomplished.
“‘How shall we admit this student to his class, Walter?’ the dean asked. ‘How shall we deal with it? Should we make an announcement that the law requires it?’
“‘Do nothing,’ responded White. ‘Just have the student come early and sit in the middle of the room toward the front. Don’t make it seem that the student has been forced on the white students. . . . Let him wait until they make their advances to him.’
“On the first day of classes, no one spoke to the black student. The next day one of the students greeted him. At the end of the semester the student had been elected president of the class. Mr. Rickey was very impressed with this story. And he decided to have Jackie keep a stance apart from the other players on the Dodgers and allow them to make their own adjustment to him.”
Adjustment was a part of daily life for the tightly bound Robinson family—Jackie, Rachel, and Jackie Jr.
“It was postwar,” Rachel Robinson remembers. “We couldn’t get any housing. We were strangers in the city. We didn’t have much money. We could afford only one room in the Hotel McAlpin in Manhattan.” Diapers hung in the bathroom; the baby’s things were pushed under the bed when reporters came clamoring for interviews.
“I was worried about Jackie Jr. He had caught a cold on opening day. We weren’t even dressed for it. What I thought was a winter coat in California was nothing in New York. I just had a little spring topper. I was worried about Jack. I knew he still had to win a place on the team . . . :md in baseball you have to beat someone else out to win a place on the. team.”
Jack and Rachel could not even go out and eat meals together. “In the back of the McAlpin,” Rachel Robinson explains, “there was a cafeteria on a side street. One of us would mind the baby, and the other would go out and eat. I didn’t use sitters. I didn’t want t
o leave my baby with anyone. It was very much like going to work with your husband. I held on to Jack; he held on to me.”
On April 18, 1947, at the Polo Grounds, in the shadow of the largest black community in the country, Jackie Robinson smashed his first major-league home run as the Dodgers defeated the Giants, 10-4. Writer James Baldwin had once noted, “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 forty thousand had another hero to be “up in heaven” about, another hero to stand beside Joe Louis.
“The one thing that concerned Jack,” Rachel Robinson recalls, “was the possibility of an overenthusiastic black response. We saw it more in the South than we saw it in Brooklyn, but every time he came up to bat early on, even if he hit a pop-up, there would be a tremendous response. His concern was that this overresponse might lead to fights in the ballpark. But it didn’t happen.”
Part of the reason that it didn’t happen was the work done in the community. Rickey had planned well. “In the churches,” Goode remembers, “in the professional organizations, the word was passed along. If you hear the word ‘nigger,’ if you hear the word ‘darkie,’ ignore it. This message went from city to city wherever Jackie played. We all knew if Jackie made good, the door would be opened.
“Those of my generation and the one just behind us had witnessed the great black ballplayers. You sat at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh in the twenties and the thirties and watched the Homestead Grays play the Kansas City Monarchs or the Baltimore Black Sox when the Pittsburgh Pirates were out of town. There were ten to twenty thousand in the stands. We saw 1-0, 2-1 games, skilled players. I saw Satchel Paige walk three men on purpose. He said to his first baseman, ‘You sit there,’ the guy at second base, ‘You sit there,’ the guy at third, ‘You sit there.’ I saw this. I didn’t read it in a book. And then he struck out the next three guys.
“In 1938 I saw Josh Gibson hit a ball over the Barney Dreyfuss Memorial and over the center-field fence, which was marked at that point four hundred and ten feet; the ball went twenty feet above the wall into the trees in Schenley Park. It had to have been hit seven hundred feet if it was a foot.
“There weren’t that many blacks going to major-league games. Who wanted to sit there and see eighteen white players when you knew when Saturday came along and the Pirates were out of town, you’d be able to sit there and see eighteen black players who were better than most of the white ones?”
Now with one of their own on the scene, blacks were coming out in large numbers to watch the Dodgers play ball. And those who didn’t come out, or who couldn’t come out, listened on the radio to the southern accents of Red Barber. One of those who listened was an elderly black woman. She was not a baseball fan, but she was a Jackie Robinson fan. Hearing that her idol had stolen a base annoyed her. “I knew they would accuse that boy of something wrong, of stealing, just ‘cause he’s colored,” she told a friend. “But I know Jackie’s a fine boy and wouldn’t steal anything.”
But he did steal—he stole the hearts of a generation who marveled at his burden and his bravado, who respected his dignity and his daring. For blacks and whites, Jackie Robinson represented a model for survival, of self-assurance in a crisis. “Anybody who says I can’t make it doesn’t know what I’ve gone through and what I’m prepared to go through to stay up in the major leagues,” he once told a reporter.
In an early-season series between the Dodgers and Phillies at Ebbets Field, Robinson was put to a severe test. Before the series, Philadelphia owner Bob Carpenter allegedly phoned Branch Rickey and suggested that it might be best for all concerned if Robinson were kept on the bench. Carpenter said that with a black man in the lineup there was the real possibility that the Phillies would refuse to compete against the Dodgers.
After listening patiently to Carpenter, Rickey replied in measured tones: “It’s all right with us whatever you do. You have to take the responsibility for your actions. We will not make a moral decision for you. If you do not choose to play, we will win all three games by forfeit.”
The Phillies played, but some of them played dirty. “Hey, nigger, why don’t you go pickin’ cotton?” “Hey, snowflake, which one of the white boys’ wives you shackin’ up with tonight?” “Hey, coon, do you always smell so bad?” “Hey, darkie, you shouldn’t be here in the big leagues—they need you back home to clean out the latrines.” These were just a few of ‘the racial slurs screamed out from the Phillies dugout, led by Alabama-born manager Ben Chapman. Inning after inning, the abuse, the vulgarity, and the invectiv kept building. Robinson was later to admit that that first game of the Philadelphia series brought him closer to the breaking point than any other day in his life.
The abuse continued in the second game of the series. “I didn’t see too many bad things,” Lee Scott remembers, “but I saw enough to make me sick and upset. They would lift up their arms and make believe they were smelling and that there was a stink. They yelled about black cats being Jackie’s relatives.”
When Robinson joined the Dodgers, Eddie Stanky said to him: “I don’t like you, but we’ll play together and get along because you’re my teammate.” After remaining silent for two games, Stanky came to Robinson’s defense.
“You’re all a bunch of cowards,” Stanky shouted at the Philadelphia bench. “What kind of men are you anyway? You’re all yellow! Why the hell don’t you pick on someone who can fight back! You know Robinson can’t fight back—knock it off and just play ball!”
Stanky’s challenge slightly reduced the racial vitriol, but one Philadelphia player yelled out, “If that black-lipped nigger was a white boy, he’d a been sent to Newport News a long time ago.” Of all the taunts, Robinson was to admit the “Newport News” one affected him the most because of its aspersion on his playing ability.
Despite. the venom, Rickey was elated when the series concluded. “The Chapman incident,” he said, “did more than anything to make the other Dodgers speak up in Robinson’s behalf. When Chapman and the others poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and unified thirty men, not one of whom was willing to see someone kick around a man who had his hands tied behind his back. Chapman created in Robinson’s behalf a thing called sympathy, the most unifying word in the world. That word has a Greek origin—it means ‘to suffer.’ To say ‘I sympathize with you’ means ‘I suffer with you.’ That is what Chapman did. He caused men like Stanky to suffer with Robinson, and he made this Negro a real member of the Dodgers.”
The racist behavior was reported in various newspapers. The black press gave it extensive coverage, anxious to make its leaders aware of what had taken place. In a particularly critical column that appeared in the New York Mirror, sports editor Dan Parker said: “Ben Chapman, who during his career with the New York Yankees was frequently involved in unpleasant incidents with fans who charged him with shouting anti-Semitic remarks at them from the ball field, seems to be up to his old trick of stirring up racial trouble. During the recent series between the Phils and the Dodgers, Chapman . . . poured a stream of abuse at Jackie Robinson. Jackie, with admirable restraint, ignored the guttersnipe language coming from the Phils’ dugout, thus stamping himself as the only gentleman among those involved in the incident.”
Later on, to defuse the controversy that came as a result of the press coverage of the incident, Rickey prevailed upon Jackie to pose shaking hands with Chapman. “It will be good for the game of baseball,” Rickey said. Robinson posed with Chapman but refused to shake hands. “It was one of my most painful moments ever,” Robinson later admitted. “Deep in my heart, I couldn’t forgive Chapman and the Phillies for what they did.”
The first 1947 meeting between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Dodgers was scheduled for May 6. Stanley Woodward reported on May 9 in the New York Herald Tribune that a proposed strike by the Cardinals against Robinson’s presence in the Brooklyn lin
eup had been scuttled. Woodward said that Ford Frick, National League president, had taken a strong stand. When Dr. Dodson had originally discussed bringing blacks into major-league baseball with Frick, the league president had not been enthusiastic, but now, less than two years later, he informed the Cardinals, “If you do this, you will be suspended from the league. You will find that the friends that you think you have in the press box will not support you, that you will be outcasts. I do not care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will enounter not care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America, and one citizen has as much right to play as another. The National League will go down the line with Robinson, whatever the consequence. You will find that if you go through with your intention that you have been guilty of complete madness.”
Red Schoendienst, one of the last great players signed by Rickey to a St. Louis contract, denies to this day any knowledge of a strike threat. “I have been asked that question by a lot of people,” he says. “I was there, but I don’t know anything about it. Nobody said anything. We went out and we played. There was no reason for the Cardinals to go out on strike. The media just looked for a good story and picked the St. Louis Cardinals because we were the furthest south of any team at that time. The facts are that nothing was said with the Cardinals about going on strike.”
The first physical threat came in a Brooklyn-St. Louis game. Harry “the Cat” Brecheen, a fine-fielding hurler, was on the mound for the Cardinals. With one out in the sixth inning, Robinson topped a bounding ball between the mound and first base. Brecheen pounced off the mound and fielded the ball in a direct line with first base. Instead of executing the routine play of flipping the ball to Stan Musial for the putout, Brecheen circled back and over to the baseline. With both fists extended, Brecheen positioned his body in a half-crouch, awaiting Robinson, who was speeding down the line. Robinson slowed and allowed himself to be tagged. “You’d better play your position as you should,” Robinson snapped. “If you ever do that again, I’ll send you right on the seat of your pants.”
Rickey and Robinson Page 14
