Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  Rachel found the honeymoon with the handsome groom “decidedly disappointing.” First the newlyweds drove to San Jose to live in a home owned by one of Rachel’s aunts. “I had something less than a great time there,” she told me. “Some of Jack’s cronies showed up and reminded him that the Harlem Globetrotters were in town. We spent two nights watching them. Then some of Jack’s other friends invited us to join them in Oakland. What do you know? The Globetrotters now were coming to Oakland. So we went to see more basketball again. We had some delightful honeymoons in later years, but the first one . . . well we just goofed and bungled our way through.”

  Rickey meanwhile wrote to one of his deputies, Bob Finch, “It might be well for you very quietly to find out about [the Robinsons’ Florida] living accommodations. I don’t believe I would take it up with white folks to begin with. No use to stir around them unnecessarily. It seems that the first approach would be to some leading colored citizen who could be trusted with an inquiry.”

  Rickey assumed, as most Northerners would have assumed, that the Robinsons’ journey from California to Florida would be uneventful. “But,” Robinson told me, “it turned out to be a passage through hell.”

  The Dodgers made reservations on American Airlines from Los Angeles to Daytona Beach with a change of planes scheduled in New Orleans. Rachel packed a shoebox full of chicken and hard-boiled eggs and the couple boarded a night flight that arrived in New Orleans at seven in the morning. Their airliner to Florida was scheduled to depart at 11:00. An American Airlines clerk promptly told them that the 11 o’clock was fully booked, but he would try to get something for them later. “That’s when we found out that there was no place anywhere in the New Orleans airport for a Negro to take a rest or buy a meal,” Robinson told me. “No waiting rooms for Negroes. Nor any chairs. A black cabbie directed us to a Negro hotel that turned out to be dirty and dreadful. We telephoned American several times and finally an airline employee said there would be space on a one-stopper to Daytona Beach, with a layover in Pensacola.

  “When we got to Pensacola, American Airlines kicked us off the plane. They said something about weight. With all the fuel, the plane would be too heavy with us aboard. We got off. A few minutes later two white men took our seats. I said pretty loudly, ‘I’m never going to fly American Airlines again.’

  “Nobody gave a damn.”

  The Robinsons found a bus terminal and finished their nightmare journey on a cramped and rattly bus, jammed into an overcrowded back row. Their food had run out. They were tired, harassed and hungry. At length Rachel, a strong, proud woman, began to cry. “I couldn’t help it. I cried as quietly as I could. I was trying not to upset Jack.”

  As the Robinsons began settling in with a black family in a two-story house at 612 South Sanford Avenue, Rickey suddenly ordered the entire Royals squad moved to Daytona Beach. He had heard—he never specified from whom—that local men in Sanford, many of them members of the Ku Klux Klan, were planning a midnight march on the house where the Robinsons were staying. At the very least they intended to burn a cross on the front lawn.

  According to reliable histories, a mob of white men in 1946 shot and killed two young African American couples near Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, 60 miles east of Atlanta. This murder of four young sharecroppers, one a World War II veteran, shocked most of the nation, but went unpunished. It was a key factor in President Harry Truman’s decision to push civil rights legislation. But for decades a thick cotton curtain—white Southern senators—blocked the way.

  I later asked Rickey directly if he thought that in 1946 a mob of night riders in Sanford, Florida, Celery City, USA, might have lynched Jackie and Rachel Robinson. Rickey took in the question carefully and paused before he responded. “From reports that reached me,” he said, slowly, “that was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.”

  Although Daytona Beach was relatively safe, Robinson’s problems with violent Floridians persisted. When the Royals traveled 20 miles to DeLand for a game against Indianapolis, Robinson singled in the first inning, stole second and slid home on another single. As he was dusting himself off, a local policeman burst onto the playing field and said, “Get off the field right now, or I’m putting you in jail.”

  Robinson told me his first reaction was to laugh. “Ridiculous,” he said. “I thought the cop was just ridiculous.” But the crowd in the stands rose to its feet. The Indianapolis players on the field stood stock-still. Clay Hopper, the Montreal manager, said to the policeman, “What’s wrong?”

  The cop responded with a speech. “We ain’t having niggers mix with white boys in this town. You can’t change our way of livin’. Niggers and whites, they can’t sit together and they can’t play together and you know damn well they can’t get married together.”

  Hopper had no answer.

  “Tell your nigger to git,” the policeman said. He put one hand on his Colt .45. Robinson left silently. He spent the next few hours sitting alone on the team bus. DeLand city officials ordered the next Montreal–Indianapolis game canceled because “the ballpark lights are out of order.” The canceled game was scheduled for an afternoon.

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  ROBERT CLAY HOPPER, A NATIVE of Porterville, Mississippi, a longtime successful minor-league manager, was undergoing a crisis of his own. When he heard Robinson had signed with Montreal he sought out Rickey. “Please don’t do this to me, Mr. Rickey,” Hopper said. “I’m a white man, been living in Mississippi all my life. I got a fine plantation there. If you do this to me, Mr. Rickey, you’re gonna force me to move out of Mississippi.”

  “Clay,” Rickey said, “this is the greatest opportunity of your life. We’re giving the colored boy a fighting chance to show what he can do. We aren’t moving him into your home. We’re just giving him an opportunity on the ball field. Managing him, winning with him can turn out to be a great accomplishment for you. I believe you are up to it, Clay. Indeed I do.”

  Hopper nodded. He liked being a manager. A few days later Robinson was playing second base in an intersquad game, with a runner on first. Someone smoked a low drive into the hole between first and second. Robinson hurled himself through the air and stabbed the ball on one fierce hop. Then, on his knees, he whirled and threw out the runner at second base.

  “What a play!” Rickey said to Hopper in the dugout. “There’s coordination and agility and adventure all at once. Clay, no other human being in the world could have made that play!”

  Hopper scratched his jaw. “Mr. Rickey,” he said, “do you really think a nigger is a human being?” At that point Clay Hopper quite suddenly began to weep.

  Rickey said his first response was rage. “But then I saw that this Mississippi-born man, ignorant as he had remained, was sincere. His tears told me this: Regarding a Negro as subhuman was part of his heritage. Here was a man who had practically nursed racial prejudice from his mother’s breast. So I decided to ignore the comment.

  “About a month later, after he had gotten to know Robinson, Hopper sought me out and told me, ‘Mr. Rickey, those words I said in Florida about Robinson not being human. Mr. Rickey, sir, right here and now I want to apologize.’”

  Telling me about Hopper, Rickey said, “His remarkable adjustment certainly bears out Professor Tannenbaum’s theory about physical proximity destroying prejudice. And that’s not theory. That’s a fact.”

  One Royals game against the Jersey City Giants in Jacksonville was canceled. A municipal law there forbade blacks and whites from competing against each other.

  “It was just one grueling spring,” Robinson told me. “The scouts reported that I did not have a big-league shortstop’s arm. I began putting everything I had into every throw. Inside a week, I had a very sore arm. My wife applied cold compresses. Didn’t help. I went to a local doctor. He applied hot compresses. Didn’t help either. I played as best I could through all that pain. On top of which I simply was not hitting. Pressure? Maybe. Whatever. I specialized in
pop flies to shortstop.

  “It was Mr. Rickey who kept me going. He pretty much deserted the Dodger camp to cheer me on with the Royals. He’d get a seat near first base and shout to me over and over again, ‘Be daring. Run it out. Take a bigger lead. Worry that pitcher into a sweat. Adventure! Adventure!’

  “A white newspaperman, I forget his name, wrote in one of the Florida papers: ‘It’s do-gooders like Rickey who hurt the Negro. They try to force inferior Negroes on whites and everybody loses. Take this guy Robinson. If he was white the Royals would long ago have booted him out of camp.’

  “‘Try not to be perturbed, Jack,’ Mr. Rickey said. ‘We have scouted you most carefully. We know you’re going to make a great success.’

  “I did my best to tune out the hate. Mr. Rickey’s words kept me going.

  “What a spring.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

  LIBERATION DAY, THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 1946, broke cool with a dusting of snow and then turned sunny in Jersey City, New Jersey, less than half an hour distant from the towers of New York. By game time the sky had cleared and the temperature had reached the 60s.

  Jersey City then was the private preserve and cash machine of one Frank Hague, a Democratic Party leader universally known as “Boss” Hague. He was mayor of Jersey City from 1917 to 1947 and on a salary of $8,500 a year he managed to amass a personal fortune of $10 million. Hague’s desk, which survives to this day, included a specially designed lap drawer that could be pushed outward toward a visitor. This allowed Hague’s guests to deliver—quite literally under the table—envelopes bulging with cash.

  Boss Hague was a solid baseball fan and each year he closed his city’s schools for the opening game of the Jersey City Giants in the Class Triple A International League. That was a sound franchise; future New York Giant stars who played for Jersey City on the way to the major leagues included Whitey Lockman and Bobby Thomson. Boss Hague also required all city employees to buy tickets for the opener. A sellout, he felt, was a demonstration of municipal pride. The Jersey Giants sold 51,872 tickets for Jackie Robinson’s debut game. Roosevelt Stadium, the team’s art deco ballpark, seated only 25,000 people. On Robinson’s first day fans crouched in the aisles, sat on the fences and hung from girders. The best figure for the boisterous, cramped assemblage on hand remains vague: “in excess of 25,000.”

  Doug Kennedy, a wartime PT boat commander turned peacetime sportswriter, covered the game for the Herald Tribune, which ran his story under an imposing eight-column banner headline that began: “Robinson Leads Montreal.”

  “Jackie Roosevelt Robinson,” Kennedy wrote, “first Negro to sign in modern organized baseball, making his debut in the sixty-third season of International League competition, completely stole the show and the hearts of more than 25,000 fans as he led Montreal to a 14-to-1 conquest of Jersey City.

  “After the game in Haguetown it took Robinson fully five minutes to reach the dressing room as he was mobbed trying to leave the field by fans of assorted ages, sizes and colors.”

  Jackie used to say to me, “I never had it made.” But on that one day, April 18, 1946, he surely did. He had it made because on that golden afternoon in spring he took an overwhelming challenge and—with bat and glove and legs—he made a triumph.

  He would always remember that day. “The crowd,” he said, “and the marching band and the jugglers on the field and the bunting flying everywhere. When I stood, we all stood, for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ I knew it was really happening. Integration. That gave me a lump in my throat. I thought, I honestly thought, This is a day of destiny.”

  Hopper gathered the Royals into a semicircle. “All right, boys. Let’s get off to a flying start. The game you lose on the first day of the season hurts just as much as the game you lose in the pennant stretch drive. So let’s go out there and win this one and pile up such a big lead that nobody can catch us. You know the lineup. Breard at shortstop. Robinson at second base. . . . ” “And then,” Robinson told me, “I finally knew that it was real. Some said that this project was a phony attempt to please Negroes, I wasn’t really a ballplayer, just window dressing. The hell with that. Right then in Jersey City I knew I was within reach of the dream of every boy who ever went to a sandlot carrying a ball glove. The major leagues.”

  Leading off for Montreal, Stan Breard bounced out. Robinson stepped in. His palms were wet. The count went full. Then he hit a weak grounder to shortstop and Jaime Almendro, a white Puerto Rican, threw him out by four steps. Robinson said when he went back to the dugout he felt more relief than disappointment.

  Montreal put runners on first and second with nobody out before Robinson came to bat in the third inning. This was a bunt situation and word was out that Robinson was an excellent bunter. A sacrifice here would advance the runners to scoring position with nobody out. Robinson looked at Clay Hopper who was coaching third. Hopper flashed three signals and then, with a downward swipe of his right hand, wiped them out. Robinson was free to swing.

  Warren Sandell, pitching for the Jersey Giants, suspected a bunt and kept his first pitch high, a high fastball, that soon went higher and faster. Robinson swung hard and lined the pitch about 350 feet into the left-field stands for a three-run homer. “A brilliant personal triumph,” wrote Joe Sheehan in the New York Times.

  When Robinson reached home plate, the on-deck hitter, George “Shotgun” Shuba, stood waiting with a wide smile and his right hand outstretched. Several photographers caught the instant of the handshake. “A great moment for me,” Shuba says, “for Jackie, for baseball and for the country.” A large framed photograph of that handshake today graces a wall of the Shuba home in Youngstown, Ohio. Shuba adds, “I call it ‘the handshake of the century.’”

  Robinson said that the homer “burst the dam between me and my teammates. Northerners, Southerners both let me know they appreciated the way I had come through. I began really to believe one of Mr. Rickey’s predictions: Color won’t matter if the black man is a winner.”

  As I mentioned, the Royals went on and defeated Jersey City, 14 to 1. Perhaps the only positive note for the junior Giants was the batting of their young center fielder, who would later play a dramatic role in baseball history. Bobby Thomson went 2 for 4.

  Robinson proceeded from his splendid beginning to a season of great success amid great stress. When the Royals moved on to play in Baltimore, Rachel Robinson found herself seated among foul-mouthed white spectators. “More than once,” she says, “I heard my husband called a nigger son of a bitch.” After that she seldom traveled with the team. Ball clubs generally discourage wives from making trips. Simplistically, but reasonably accurately, the hometown belongs to the wives. The road belongs to the sometimes merry, sometimes sorry band of women called camp followers.

  Jimmy Powers of the Daily News had written that “Robinson will never hit.” At Montreal in 1946 Robinson won the International League batting championship. He batted .349. “Never” seldom has had a shorter life. Robinson also stole 40 bases and led the league in runs scored. One Eddie Robinson, a powerful left-hand-hitting first baseman from Texas who hit 34 home runs for the then Triple A Baltimore Orioles, was voted most valuable player, despite committing 24 errors. Jackie Robinson was named rookie of the year.

  Had Rickey summoned Robinson to Brooklyn during the 1946 season, and had Jack converted one lost game into a victory—a wholly reasonable expectation—the Dodgers would have won the 1946 pennant. Rickey maintained that bringing up Robinson “would have been unfair to the fans of Montreal.” But what about the fans of Brooklyn who were coming to Ebbets Field in unprecedented numbers and underwriting the entire Rickey operation with their dollar bills and quarters? Rickey had no answer to that question, or none that he cared to utter. Actually, I suspect, Rickey was not yet emotionally ready for the great and challenging task, integrating the major leagues. Although his hesitation can be justified on psychological and sociological grounds, it probably cost the Dodgers a pennant.

  The
population of Montreal in 1946 was less than 2 percent black. There were no black neighborhoods as such and the Robinsons felt apprehensive about apartment hunting. The Royals front office supplied leads—ball clubs customarily do that for their players—and full of trepidation, Rachel knocked at the door of a private home that included a modest duplex apartment. The landlady opened the door, smiled and invited the Robinsons in for a cup of tea.

  “The apartment was lovely,” Rachel says. “Clean and sunny.” The landlady spoke French and the Robinsons did not. A bilingual neighbor appeared and communicated good news. The landlady would be happy to rent to the Robinsons. Further she would leave them her utensils, linens, towels, dishes and flatware.

  Rachel felt overjoyed. She said quietly to Jack, “How can a few miles, a mere border, make that much difference in people?” Before long Jack became a celebrity in his new neighborhood. Children greeted Rachel at the general store and helped her carry home packages. She kept a bowl of fresh fruit on her kitchen table inside a screen door. Youngsters poked their noses against the screen waiting to be offered pieces of fruit. Rachel says, “It didn’t take these French-speaking kids long to learn to ask in English for the fruit that was their favorite.

  “Jack and I both fell in love with Montreal. Where the housing situation in Florida had been simply a nightmare, up in Montreal it was a delight.”

  In February 2011, the United States government unveiled a plaque at 8232 de Gaspé Avenue, where the Robinsons lived in Montreal. “On behalf of the president of the United States and on behalf of the American people,” said David Jacobson, ambassador to Canada, “I want to thank the people of Montreal not only for what you did for the Robinsons and all baseball, but for what you did for the great American journey from Jim Crow to Barack Obama.”