Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

  Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

  Across the decades, more than one cross-burning Klansman would cheerfully and savagely have strung Branch Rickey from a tree.

  Baseball swept into the American South during the 19th century and subsequently prejudices from the American South swept into baseball. Some historians claim to have found evidence that black slaves had begun playing ball as far back as the 1830s. But the records, if any survive at all, are skimpy. A few oral recollections exist, but no written accounts. Other researchers suggest that during the Civil War, Union soldiers between battles spread the game throughout southern red-clay fields and rural hollows. Whatever, it was after the Civil War, during the bitter Reconstruction period, that baseball boomed into the national sport. With that boom came baseball’s hostility toward blacks.

  As far as I can learn, the first formal statement of racism in baseball appeared just five years after the Emancipation Proclamation. “On the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three,” Abraham Lincoln wrote, “all persons held as slaves within any State . . . shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” When General Robert E. Lee signed terms of surrender in a private home at Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865, the death of legal American slavery became assured. But bigotry has had a vastly longer shelf life.

  In 1868 the National Association of Base Ball Players publicly announced a ban on “any club including one or more colored persons.” Although a “national association of players” sounds like a union, actually it was a federation of club owners, a primitive major league.

  Over the late 1860s and 1870s baseball evolved from an amateur activity, a club sport conducted broadly along the lines of English cricket, toward becoming predominantly professional. When the National Association splintered into competing organizations in 1871, professional teams no longer were restricted by the 1868 racist rule and for a short while—in 1878 and again in 1884—African Americans played in the major leagues. But abruptly, they were excluded in 1885. No written decree, much less a public statement, came to light back then, nor has any since. But black faces vanished, first from the major leagues and then, over about 15 more years, from the minor leagues as well. By the end of the 1898 season, when the minor leagues were finally and totally closed to blacks, the triumph of baseball bigotry became complete.

  In 1884 two Negro brothers, catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker and outfielder Welday Wilberforce Walker, played part of a season for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the then major American Association. They are generally accepted as the first blacks in the major leagues. The Walkers came from an upper-middle-class background in Mount Pleasant, Ohio, the sons of Dr. Moses W. Walker, the first African American physician in Mount Pleasant. Fleet Walker, a man of keen intelligence, enrolled in Oberlin College in 1878 and played on the college’s first varsity baseball team in 1881. He transferred to the University of Michigan law school the following fall and played varsity ball for Michigan in 1882. With the Toledo Blue Stockings two years later, Fleet Walker batted .263 in 42 games. His brother, Welday, played in five games and hit .222.

  The numbers do not suggest great skills, but Hugh Fullerton, one of the ablest early baseball writers, offered a telling story. It came from Anthony John “Count” Mullane, a native of Cork, Ireland, who settled in the Midwest and became an early pitching wonder. Mullane was ambidextrous. He threw equally hard from either side and never used a glove. How, then, did he contend with line drives bashed through the box? Quite simply, as Count Mullane put it, “I got the hell out of the way.”

  Mullane signed with Toledo for 1884 and that season pitched 65 complete games. He won 35. “Toledo had a colored man [Fleet Walker] who was declared by many to be the greatest catcher of his time,” Fullerton wrote in the New York World, “but Tony Mullane did not like being the battery partner of a Negro.”

  “I had it in for him,” Tony admitted years later. “He was the best catcher I ever worked with, but I disliked having a Negro catcher and whenever I had to pitch to him I used to pitch anything I wanted without looking at his signals. One day he signaled me for a curve and I shot a fastball at him. He caught it and walked down to me.

  “‘Mr. Mullane,’ he said. ‘I’ll catch you without signals, but I won’t catch you if you are going to cross me when I do give you a signal.’

  “And all the rest of the season he caught me, and caught anything I pitched without knowing what was coming.”

  Toledo finished eighth in a 12-team league. Neither Walker was re-signed. Mullane kept pitching in the majors for another 10 years. He won 284 games and lived out most of his days in Chicago, working as a policeman. The ambidextrous cop, Count Tony Mullane, died at the age of 85 in 1944, the year before Jackie Robinson signed his first organized baseball contract in Branch Rickey’s office above Montague Street in Brooklyn.

  As I mentioned, no baseball blacklist was publicly announced in 1875. Blacklists seldom are proclaimed formally. Most often they are the stuff of backroom conspiracies. But within a few seasons such stars as Adrian “Cap” Anson, first baseman and later manager of the early Chicago Cubs, was telling anyone who cared to listen that he would never step on a field with a Negro as a teammate or even as a rival.

  Anson drove that point home on July 14, 1887, when his Chicago club was scheduled to play an exhibition against the Newark Giants, a minor-league squad from the International League, which included two black players (Fleet Walker and George Stovey). Anson refused to let the game start until both black men exited the field. He would not countenance allowing either to play or even sit on the bench. Anson was a great star—he had batted .371 the previous season—and the Newark officials yielded without a protest. Soon thereafter, all the owners in the Triple A International League voted secretly to refuse future contracts to black players. Christy Mathewson quotes John McGraw as not wanting his New York Giants to mix with “a bunch of coffee-colored Cubans” even in spring exhibitions. I had probably better add in this dismaying chronicle that neither McGraw nor Anson hailed from the South. McGraw was born in the central New York State village of Truxton, Anson came from Marshalltown, Iowa. Like baseball, America south and north was something less than a temple of enlightenment in those days. Indeed, the Baseball Hall of Fame inducted both Anson and McGraw into its chambers in 1939. For many decades officials at the Hall prattled about the personal character of inductees, all the while closing their eyes to—and even endorsing—racial prejudice. (Of late, Hall officials, now frantic to be politically correct, have been overcompensating.)

  After the major leagues banned Fleet Walker, he caught minor-league ball and semi-pro, struggling to make a living. Then one night outside a Syracuse bar called the Crouse Saloon, at the corner of Monroe and Orange streets, he got into a dispute with six whites. As they assaulted him, Walker reached for a knife and stabbed an ex-convict named Patrick “Curly” Murray in the groin. Walker then fled for dear life. Murray died in a Syracuse hospital.

  Police arrested Walker and charged him with second-degree (unpremeditated) murder. After a tumultuous trial in Syracuse, he was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. Walker quit baseball and became a supporter of a movement generally called black nationalism. In 1908 Walker published a 47-page pamphlet entitled Our Home Colony: A Treatise on the Past, Present and Future of the Negro Race in America. Here Walker recommended that African Americans migrate back to Africa. “The only practical and permanent solution of the present and future race troubles in the United States is entire separation by emigration of the Negro from America.” Fleet Walker warned, “The Negro race will be [seen by whites as] a menace and the source of discontent as long as it remains in large numbers in the United States. The time is growing very near when the whites of the United States must either settle this problem by deportation, or else be willing to accept a reign of terror such as the world has never seen in a civilized country.”
>
  Mostly forgotten, Walker died on May 11, 1924, in Cleveland at the age of 67, when Jackie Robinson was 5 years old. There is no evidence to suggest that either Robinson or Branch Rickey knew the full story of a gifted American named Moses Fleetwood Walker. It is nothing less than a tragedy.

  In signing Robinson, Rickey was moving against currents of tradition and proceeding under a battery of dangers. At the time of the signing it seemed possible that baseball’s ruling powers would invalidate the Robinson contract and expel Rickey from the baseball business. “My grandfather knew the risks,” says Branch B. Rickey, currently the president of the Pacific Coast League. “He had spoken at a meeting of club directors, 15 men besides himself, and every one said with iron resolve first that Negroes had no place in the national pastime and second that anyone who tried to bring in Negroes should be disbarred.” Disbarring Rickey would have turned a lifetime career, decades of hard and often inspired work, into a handful of dust.

  A few, such as George Weiss, functioning as general manager of the New York Yankees, argued that their sentiments were purely a matter of business. Black ballplayers would attract black fans, “offending our [affluent, white] box-seat customers from Westchester. They don’t want to sit with Negroes and they’ll stop coming to our games at the Stadium. To bring in Negroes is to court financial ruin.” Others said that blacks already had their own leagues and that was how “the good Lord and the US Constitution meant for things to be.” Indeed, on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court had held by a vote of eight to one—in an infamous case called Plessy v. Ferguson—that racially separate facilities, if equal, did not violate the constitution. Thus, segregating blacks to their own leagues in no way compromised equality. After 1896, segregation reigned with the blessing of the Supreme Court’s purblind vision. One recalls George Orwell’s sardonic theme that “All men are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

  Fully 58 years passed before the Court got around to recognizing that separate facilities, if they existed at all, were not likely to be “equal.” On May 17, 1954, seven years after Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren unanimously held that black children had a right to attend—and integrate—all public schools. The new doctrine stated simply that segregated facilities were “inherently unequal.” Theoretically at least, integration became the law of the land.

  One summer night in 1952, while the Dodgers were defeating the Philadelphia Phillies, Benny Weinrig, the press box attendant at Ebbets Field, approached behind my station in the box and said in a soft, anxious tone, “Mr. O’Malley wants to see you.” Walter O’Malley, who had wrested control of the Dodgers from Rickey following the 1950 season, presided from a private box suspended from the front of the upper deck directly behind home plate. A splendid seat, this was a level below the chirping portable typewriters of the working press who labored in a box suspended from the roof. A private bar and kitchen served both facilities so that neither the sportswriters nor O’Malley and his guests had to subsist during games on the bottled Schaefer beer and the Stahl-Meyer hot dogs that bellowing vendors hawked.

  (Before O’Malley’s Dodger days, Walter had been chairman of the board of trustees at Froebel Academy when I was a wafer-thin running back there. That old school tie probably is why O’Malley made himself so accessible to me. Buzzie Bavasi, the late Dodger general manager, told me long afterward, “Walter never let any other writer get close.”)

  An expansive and political man, O’Malley enjoyed entertaining dignitaries with gourmet food and fine whiskey in his prized private seats above home plate. One year Douglas MacArthur attended 13 Dodger games as O’Malley’s guest, always guarded from the press and public by a sturdy, haughty aide, Major General Charles Willoughby, born Karl Weidenback in Imperial Germany. (According to a Dodger publicist, Irving Rudd, the Dodgers lost all of the games MacArthur attended.)

  As I cleared a catwalk and entered O’Malley’s box, he called my name heartily and said, “There’s someone here I want you to meet.” His guest was distinguished looking, bespectacled and white-haired. It was Earl Warren of California, stopping by for a ballgame on a trip home from a sightseeing tour of Europe. Warren ran for vice president under Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. They lost. Now, while still a prominent Republican politician, Warren was, as they say in the theater, between engagements.

  I sat beside Warren, who had a drink, not his first, in hand. He said that while vacationing in Europe he found the international edition of the Herald Tribune, the so-called Paris Herald, “a perfectly splendid newspaper.” I asked if I might mention his visit to Brooklyn in the New York Herald Tribune.

  “That’s a Republican paper, is it not?” Warren said.

  “When last I checked, sir.”

  “Then assuredly you can mention my name and, you can add that I’m certainly enjoying this ballgame and Mr. O’Malley’s Brooklyn hospitality.”

  Below us, on the green and brown and chalk geometry of the playing field, all the players were white men, except for one. Jackie Robinson had singled and he was now leading off first base, a threat to steal and a greater threat to shatter the composure of the Phillies’ starting pitcher, the redoubtable Robin Roberts. The Dodger home uniforms were a vivid, almost luminescent white. Robinson’s skin was very dark. “Uncompromising ebony,” I once called it. So there under Earl Warren’s gaze at Ebbets Field, 62 years ago, the fact of color, white and black, made a mighty statement.

  Robinson’s movements at first base were dramatic and unique. He balanced on the balls of his feet, crouching a bit, arms extended and making feints toward second base. He was always in motion, toward second or back to the safety of first or simply bobbing up and down. I have never seen anything quite like Jackie Robinson taking a lead. Neither had Earl Warren. While we talked lightly and amiably, Warren’s eyes never left Robinson. Sometimes Warren sipped, but his eyes stayed on Jack. When at length Robinson stole second, the excitement of the moment brought Warren to his feet and wonder glazed his face. I like to think that the excitement Robinson generated, and the image of a gallant black, alone in white men’s country, worked within Earl Warren two years later when he led the Supreme Court to its monumental verdict on school integration. Warren ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, but first he had seen Robinson v. Philadelphia Phillies. The one fed the other, in a classic example—probably the classic example—of baseball as a force in American life, quite beyond the base paths.

  So many theories surround Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson that figuratively it takes a bulldozer to drive through the fluff and approach reality. I will here deal only with the leading propositions.

  Rickey acted out of venality. He knew Robinson would become a fabulous drawing card. Largely false, at least as regards Rickey’s primary motivation. In fact Robinson did become the greatest drawing card in baseball. Typically when the Dodgers played in Cincinnati during the late 1940s and early 1950s, black fans from as far away as Mobile, Alabama, chartered buses and journeyed to Crosley Field, roughly a 1,400- mile round trip. “I did not wholly anticipate that sort of occurrence,” Rickey told me, “but when it developed, I certainly did not object.” Visiting teams back then retained 25 percent of the gate receipts.

  Robinson’s effect on Dodger home attendance is more elusive. The all-white Dodgers of 1946 drew 1,796,824 paying customers to Ebbets Field. The integrated Dodgers of 1947 drew 1,807,525. The difference, roughly 11,000 tickets, is not significant. What these numbers say mostly is that Brooklyn, with its bandbox home field, was one hell of a baseball town.

  Rickey saw the Negro Leagues as a prebuilt farm system, from which he could sign outstanding ballplayers at minimal expense. True to an extent. As I have noted, Rickey never paid Negro League owners for the athletes he signed, and we find here, in the midst of the noble work of integration, more evidence of Rickey’s disconcerting cupidity. In time the late Effa Manley, who ran the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League,
denounced Rickey as a “pirate.” Mrs. Manley, who was white, tried to improve the condition of players throughout the league. She advocated better scheduling, higher pay and improved accommodations. Her athletes traveled in an air-conditioned Flxible Clipper bus. A gifted businessperson and a diligent worker in the civil rights movement, Manley was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, the first woman so honored. (Rickey had been elected in 1967, more than a generation earlier.)

  Rickey acted out of a lofty moral sense, fulfilling an unwritten contract that he believed existed between baseball and America, black and white. Largely true. “Baseball should lead by example,” he said once, “because it is a quasi-public institution . . . and, particularly in Brooklyn, I am not so sure about the quasi.”

  In considering all of Rickey’s voluminous papers, stored in 131 boxes at the Library of Congress, I found no evidence that he systematically studied patterns of American racism. Rickey was constantly dictating memos, often to himself, on ballplayers, pennant races and characters that crossed his ken. But I found no memos on racism. By the time he enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan in 1900, as an 18-year-old scholar–athlete, he had developed a personal loathing for bigotry. The Rickey family, in Scioto County, a sweep of rolling land in southern Ohio reaching to within 30 miles of the Kentucky border, were devout Methodists. John Wesley, who founded the Methodist Church in 1874, called slavery “a complicated villainy.” At least one early American Methodist bishop was excommunicated for keeping a slave. The issue of slavery eventually caused a schism in the American Methodist church, but the Rickey family remained staunchly in the abolitionist wing. The mainstream Methodist church similarly was opposed to alcohol, maintaining that abstinence is “a faithful witness to God’s liberating and redeeming love for persons.” Rickey’s opposition to drinking came naturally out of his family and religious background. So too did his feeling on that complicated villainy, American racism.