by Roger Kahn
Rickey had no intention of sharing his grand design, but many have faulted MacPhail’s “stalling tactics” and depict him as an unyielding foe of integration. We talked for a few days at Larry’s Maryland farm in 1952 and he presented quite a different picture. “Some things have to move fast,” he told me. “In this instance I thought they had to move slowly.
“The Negro Leagues were just chaotic. Uncertain schedules. Rough conditions for the players. Few if any contracts and some owners who were just one step ahead of the law. Numbers racket hoodlums ran teams. If I know anything about baseball, it is that you can’t have gambling people running ball clubs.
“My approach was that the majors should pitch in and stabilize the Negro Leagues. That would take a few years, but when it happened organized baseball could systematically begin buying the contracts of the better Negro League players and assigning them to the high minors or even, in a few cases, to the majors.”
“But in Brooklyn, Larry,” I said, “you were an opponent of gradualism. You defied the ban on radio broadcasts and summarily brought in Red Barber. You installed lights at Ebbets Field and suddenly we had night games. When you moved, you moved fast.”
“Integration is totally different,” MacPhail said. “You also have to consider your fans. When you hire Negro players you’ll attract Negro fans and you know as well as I that there are bad elements in Harlem. Drug dealers. Tough guys carrying booze and packing knives or even guns. How are you going to police them in your ballparks?”
“With cops,” I said.
“It isn’t that simple,” MacPhail said. “You have two cultures here that clash, and those clashes could lead to riots in the ballparks. Figure it out. The white fans get scared and stay home. Attendance collapses. That way lays financial ruin.”
Whatever, the Major League Committee on Baseball Integration disappeared.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
RICKEY SAID THAT SCOUTING black ballplayers cost the Dodgers $30,000. Since the leading Dodger scouts, Sukeforth, George Sisler and Tom Greenwade, began appearing regularly at Negro League games, Rickey needed a cover story to explain their presence. All three were well known in the two worlds of baseball, white and black. With Rickey’s customary craft he spread the word that he wanted to organize a new Negro league, more reputable than the ones already existing, and he was organizing his linchpin team, the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. My Herald Tribune colleague, the gifted Al Laney, who had been covering the Brooklyn White Dodgers, said Rickey’s story made sense. “We knew the Yankees were making money, perhaps as much as $100,000 a season, renting the stadium for Negro League games. But the Dodgers were getting nothing, because there was a rickety old field called Dexter Park, out near the border of Brooklyn and Queens, which was home to a semi-pro outfit called the Bushwicks. When the Negro teams wanted a Brooklyn crowd, they usually played the Bushwicks in Dexter Park, which could hold about 20,000 fans. Rickey’s third Negro league would move the Negro games to Ebbets Field and bring him a nice rental income. Or so we thought. We knew Rickey liked income of any sort.”
Sam Lacy said Jackie Robinson was not the best Negro League player in 1945. “Not the best,” Lacy repeated, “but the most suitable.” Buzzie Bavasi told me, “The Negro League player with the most talent was Don Newcombe. But Mr. Rickey wouldn’t sign him to be the first because Newcombe was 19 years old. He felt that Newk was too young to face the pressure we knew was coming.” Such comments created a general underestimation of Robinson’s pure athletic ability.
As a senior at UCLA Robinson led the football team in rushing, total offense and scoring. He was fast and strong and shifty. California sportswriters called him Lightning Jack. Playing basketball—he was a power forward and a strong rebounder—Robinson led the southern division of the Pacific Coast Conference in scoring during his junior and senior years. Basketball cut into the track season, but without much practice Robinson made a running broad jump of 25 feet and became the 1940 NCAA champion. Longer leaps are not uncommon today, but training and equipment, such as track shoes, are much improved. In 1940 the four-minute mile was still regarded as an impossible dream.
Playing shortstop for the Bruins in the spring of 1940, Robinson batted only .097. That is a puzzler, and I brought it up directly with Robinson in his North Stamford home one social evening in 1970. His late son, Jack Jr., had joined us. “Yeah, Dad,” young Jack said, as a bit of familial rivalry flared. “How come you couldn’t even hit a hundred?” Robinson bristled, but only briefly. “I was dog tired,” he said. “Playing and practicing all the sports I did without a break just wore me out.”
Rickey reviewed Robinson’s records at UCLA. He had assistants discreetly investigate the family. Robinson’s father, Jerry, sired five children and disappeared during the Spanish flu epidemic shortly after Jackie was born in Cairo, Georgia, on January 31, 1919. “Disappeared” is a gentle word. Jerry Robinson abandoned his wife and children in Georgia and moved to Florida with another man’s wife. He never saw his family again. “My mother was not the most sophisticated woman,” Robinson said, “but now that she was on her own she had the sense to get out of Georgia as quickly as she could.” In Georgia the Robinsons were sharecroppers, farming acres on a plantation owned by a white racist named Jim Sasser. “My mother said we ate what we grew,” Robinson said, “and we never got much meat. When Sasser had hogs slaughtered the ham and bacon went to the white people. Negroes only got entrails, like the liver or the intestines that people called ‘chitterlings.’”
When Jerry Robinson fled, Sasser turned on Mallie. As Jackie told me the story, Sasser said Mallie should have warned him that Jerry was planning to leave “so I could get the sheriff to stop him.” Sasser didn’t like losing a farmhand.
“The sheriff?” Mallie said. “Slavery’s over, Mr. Sasser. A man can go where he pleases.”
Sasser said, “You’re too damn uppity for your own good.” (In a later time some said the same about Mallie’s most famous son.)
Mallie Robinson scratched together fare and moved with her brood to Pasadena, where she heard she could find work as a domestic. “We went by train,” Mallie said years afterward. “We were riding out of Georgia to a new life so I called it the Freedom Train.” From Pasadena she wrote in wonder and happiness to one of her former teachers back in Georgia, “Tell my girl friends that to get here I crossed a river so wide you couldn’t see from one side to the other, climbed mountains so tall the tops were hidden in the clouds—and the Freedom Train was so long that on the sharpest curves you could lean out of the last car and light a cigarette by the fire of the engine.”
Athletics ran in the family. Jackie’s older brother Matthew, called Mack, won a silver medal in the 1936 Olympic Games held, as I’ve mentioned, in the Nazi capital, Berlin. Competing in the finals of the 200-meter dash, Mack finished four-tenths of a second behind Jesse Owens. Both broke the prior Olympic record. The genial German host, Adolf Hitler, refused to shake the hand of either black man, and his propaganda lackey, Josef Goebbels, issued a statement condemning America’s use of “black auxiliaries.”
Mack graduated from the University of Oregon in 1941, but he had a hard time finding an appropriate job. For many years this college graduate with an Olympic silver medal worked as a garbage collector in Pasadena, stabbing litter and filth with a spiked stick and pushing a stinking garbage barrel on wheels.
Although Jackie’s boyhood was fatherless and hard, he remembered only two episodes of California bigotry that upset him. When he was small, a white girl living across the street greeted him with a nasty chant:
Soda cracker’s good to eat.
Nigger’s only good to beat.
On his mother’s orders, Jack did not respond.
Blacks were forbidden to use the Pasadena municipal pool, so one very hot day Robinson and some of his black friends went wading in the city reservoir. Someone called the police. Soon a sheriff and some deputies appeared, guns drawn. “Looka there,” the sheriff shouted. “N
iggers in my drinking water.”
The boys, 16 in all, were hauled off to a police station and crammed into one sweltering room. Just before sunset the sheriff, again with his pistol drawn, opened the door and dismissed them with a single word, “Git!”
For a time Robinson ran with a group called the Pepper Street Gang, but, he went to pains to tell me, it was not violent like gangs of later years. “Some of us stole fruit off street wagons,” he said, “or we hid in bushes at a golf club and stole balls after long drives landed on the green. Nothing to brag about, but that was about as bad as it got. I ran with the gang for a time, but more and more sports were taking over my life.”
Others say the Pepper Street Gang was rougher than Robinson admitted. “Jack got himself arrested lots of times,” said Ray Bartlett, a high school classmate and friend. “The sheriff even got to know him by his first name.” But no one disputes that sports were drawing Robinson away from the uncertain life of a street kid.
Leo Durocher said of himself when the Chicago Cubs hired him to manage in 1965, “I’ll tell you one thing. They ain’t getting no maiden.” After a sometimes-contentious youth, Robinson left college during World War II to accept a commission as a cavalry lieutenant. A few months later he was court-martialed for refusing a captain’s order to move to the rear of an Army bus. He was acquitted. Still, with the Pepper Street Gang and an Army court-martial in his background, the Robinson Rickey signed was—in Durocher English—“no maiden neither.”
To Robinson the most remarkable aspect of the signing was not his own background, but Rickey’s age. “When he offered me a contract,” Jack said, “he was 65 years old. Isn’t that when most people are retiring?”
Records from the old Negro Leagues tend to be uncertain. You can read that Robinson, as shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945, hit .433. Or he hit .382. Or whatever. But by all accounts he was a punishing batter, a sure-handed infielder and a superb base runner. There was some question about his arm. Could he move to his right at shortstop, pluck a grounder, then fire a long throw to first the way all the great big-league shortstops do? That question was bothering Clyde Sukeforth when he traveled to Chicago to watch a brace of Negro League games.
In 1953, after Jackie and I started the magazine called Our Sports, he asked me to help him with a column he was preparing, “The Branch Rickey They Don’t Write About.” With the column in front of me now, I can repeat, for the first time since their initial publication, Robinson’s exact words of 60 years ago.
In Chicago, summer of 1945, someone said, “There’s a man outside the clubhouse who wants to see you.”
I went over to see “the man.”
“My name’s Clyde Sukeforth,” he said. “I’m with the Brooklyn Dodgers. How are you feeling?”
“Pretty well, thanks. My arm’s a little sore from a fall on the base paths, but I’m okay.”
“I’ve been watching you for a while. Would you mind going out to the infield and throwing a few from short to first?”
“I don’t think I can. My arm is so sore I can’t play.”
“Never mind then,” Sukeforth said.
Then he asked me something I’ll never forget. “Can you come to New York with me to see Branch Rickey, the Dodger president?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure.”
I was thinking much more than that one word. I was thinking that this might be a gag, a cruel gag. I didn’t dare think of becoming a Dodger. Hundreds of other things entered my mind, and I was still thinking when we got off the train in New York.
“How did you travel?” I said.
“Pullman. Not bad. But Clyde took the lower berth and made me take the upper.”
The first meeting between Robinson and Rickey, on August 28, has become the stuff of both legend and fairy tales. In 1953 Robinson lay back on a bed in his room at the Hotel Schenley in Pittsburgh and while he talked I took notes, using my Smith-Corona portable typewriter. What follows is verbatim.
The first time I saw Branch Rickey he was setting up a smokescreen with his cigar. Behind the smoke was a face revealing sincerity.
“Do you think you are capable enough to play baseball in the major leagues?” Mr. Rickey began.
“I don’t know. I’ve only played professional baseball for one year. I don’t know how the Negro Leagues stack up against the minors, let alone the majors.”
Mr. Rickey did not wait to deliver his punch line. “I am willing to offer you a contract in organized baseball. Are you willing to sign it?”
Now I was the one who did not hesitate.
“Certainly,” I said.
Then Mr. Rickey began to speak. He spoke of barriers to be broken and how to break them. He spoke of bigotry and hate and how to fight them. He spoke of great things to be done and how to do them.
He spoke of himself and how his own family had advised him against signing a Negro because at his age the bitterness he’d have to face might make him sick, or even kill him.
He spoke of my future in baseball and of the taunts and insults that would be hurled in my face and the dusters that would be hurled at my head.
He spoke of others who would wait for me to slip so they could say that Branch Rickey had been wrong and that baseball was no place for Negroes.
All this he hurled at me like thunder. And then he asked me if I still wanted to sign.
“Certainly,” I said again.
The small hotel room near Forbes Field in Pittsburgh had become electric with emotion. “What a story, Jack,” I said.
That was as far as Robinson would go or could go on that particular day. With time came embellishments from Jack, from Sukeforth and from Rickey himself, never one to shy from center stage in a dramatic situation. Supposedly in that first meeting Rickey went to great lengths to impersonate bigots. He took off his jacket and swung his arms and pretended to be a rival base runner assaulting Robinson. “Take that, you nigger bastard,” Rickey claims he shouted.
Robinson was shocked but kept his poise. Now Rickey became a hotel clerk refusing Jackie a room, a white waiter declining to serve him a meal, a white railroad conductor barring his way to his assigned berth in a Pullman car. “We don’t allow no nigger boys in there!”
Robinson said that though the outbursts did indeed shock him, he also felt stirred. “As I kept listening, I knew I had to do this thing for myself and for my race and then I began to feel I had to do it for this spellbinder I had just met, Branch Rickey.”
Suddenly Rickey produced a book. He was always a great one for books. This was a 1923 bestseller called The Life of Christ, a novelization of parts of the New Testament, written by an erratic Florentine named Giovanni Papini. (Other bestsellers that year were H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt.) Rickey indicated a passage from Papini and directed Robinson to read.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil. But whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
These words are, of course, a cornerstone of Christian belief.
Robinson reading Papini on nonviolence is a story that has been told several times, always with deference and approval, even reverence, and often with cross-references to the nonviolence of that other Mahatma, Mohandas Gandhi. But every source I have found neglects a profoundly disturbing fact. Giovanni Papini, the author Rickey chose to cite at this extraordinary moment, was a bigoted Fascist.
To quote from one biography: “In 1937, Papini published his History of Italian Literature, which he dedicated to Benito Mussolini: ‘Il Duce, friend of poetry and of the poets.’ Subsequently the Fascist government awarded him top positions in academia. Papini supported Mussolini’s racial discrimination laws of 1938, which among other things prohibited marriage between Jews and Christian
s.”
Mussolini’s views on blacks were yet more vicious. He sent his modern armies into Ethiopia, an independent black African nation, in October 1935, and completed a colonialist conquest the following May. In the course of the war Mussolini violated international law by using mustard gas against the Ethiopian forces. Mussolini’s invaders killed roughly 275,000 black Africans. Having seen the face of fascism up close, the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, spoke before the League of Nations in Geneva. “If it is us today, tomorrow it will be you.” Haunting words, but the leaders of the League, hurtling toward World War II, did not respond.
When the Fascist regime crumbled in 1943, Papini retreated behind the walls of a Franciscan convent. Although never prosecuted as a war criminal, he was thoroughly discredited by the subsequent non-Fascist Italian regime.
Did Rickey’s small-town Christian zealotry blind him to Papini’s fascism? Was Rickey unaware of Mussolini’s war crimes against blacks? Or did he simply not care, believing in his zealotry that Jesus’s message trumped all other considerations? I never got a chance to bring up these questions with him. My belief is that his zealotry was blinding.
As for Robinson, in later years he attended university seminars on dictatorships and racism, but in 1945 he had never heard of Papini. When Alan Paton, author of the great antiapartheid novel Cry, the Beloved Country, visited Ebbets Field in 1953, Robinson had never heard of him, either. The old four-letter varsity star was still developing intellectually. How would he have reacted if he knew Rickey was feeding him words composed by a man who believed that it was acceptable for a mechanized white European army to bomb and shoot and gas black Africans? The Jackie Robinson I remember would have walked out. But he did not know and he did not walk out. Instead, the meeting lasted three hours, Rickey constantly emphasizing the need to turn the other cheek. At one point Robinson said, “Are you looking for someone who doesn’t have the courage to fight back?”
