Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Anchored in the black world but with strong ties to the white, Jack and Rachel moved with apparent ease as they lived out the misty dream of true racial integration in America in the 1950s. Nevertheless, they were almost always aware of those aspects of their lives that were perhaps illusory, of the extent to which racism often remained a reality despite signs of progress. Perplexed at times about how best to proceed, they also knew that their three children were among a few young blacks venturing into new social and psychological territory in America for which no one was fully prepared. Jack and Rachel could be firm, but they tried above all to protect their children from the various indignities, especially of racism, that they themselves had suffered growing up in California. Perhaps they went too far. “Unable to shield my brothers and me from the outside pressures,” their daughter would write later, as a grown woman, “my parents’ tendency was to overprotect and overindulge. At home, voices were rarely raised, spankings not used for punishment, and cursing considered inappropriate.”

  To broaden their children’s experience beyond the overwhelmingly white Stamford world, their parents joined Jack and Jill, perhaps the premier black middle-class club for young people. But such a connection could go only so far in preparing the children for the world. The Robinsons’ choice of a church exemplified the problem. Not far from the Robinson home was the North Stamford Congregational Church, serenely white in its austere New England elegance. Worshiping there seemed the natural thing to do; but while they were made to feel welcome, they also denied themselves certain valuable connections by being there. “Perhaps we should have sought out a black church,” Rachel reflected some years later, “so the children would have had more black friends. But Jack’s schedule as a ballplayer, with doubleheaders on Sunday, had drawn us away from churchgoing. Besides, I’ve always hated being preached at, and preaching was everything in most of the black churches. It was easier to join my neighbors and go to the church on the corner, as it were. It also seemed the right thing to do.”

  LESS THAN A MONTH after his retirement, Robinson’s thoughts began to swing decisively away from baseball. “Don’t get me wrong,” he assured a gathering that month, “baseball has been wonderful to me and I owe everything to it.” Nevertheless, in 1957 he would attend only two major-league baseball games; in 1958 and 1959, he would attend none, although he watched some contests on television. The disappointing way he had left the game had a great deal to do with this distance, but Robinson tried to offer a more positive perspective. “Baseball was just a part of my life,” he explained. “Thank God that I didn’t allow a sport or a business or any part of my life to dominate me completely.… I felt I had my time in athletics and that was it.”

  Instead, on January 20, accompanied by Franklin H. Williams, the secretary-counsel of the West Coast branch of the NAACP, he left New York for Baltimore and the start of a cross-country tour for the NAACP’s Fight for Freedom Fund. Jack left New York on a happy note: Bill Black of Chock Full o’ Nuts had sent him off with a check for $10,000 as a donation to the cause. At a press conference in Manhattan, Jack proudly presented the money to Arthur B. Spingarn, the president of the NAACP.

  At this point, Jack knew little about the NAACP beyond its reputation as the top organization fighting for civil rights. Conceived in 1909 by three white liberals shocked by the lynching of a black man in Springfield, Illinois, the burial place of Abraham Lincoln, the NAACP had grown steadily because of its vigorous challenges to Jim Crow laws, its network of local and regional branches, and, especially in its first two decades, the crusading journalism of W. E. B. Du Bois, who edited its monthly journal, the Crisis, between 1910 and 1934. With its financial support always tenuous, and its leadership chronically nervous about being perceived as radical socialist, the NAACP by the mid-1940s had become a conservative group, apart from civil rights. However, the continuing challenges of its lawyers, in addition to the brutal reaction to these challenges by many white communities in the South especially, had kept it over the years the premier force for social justice for black Americans.

  In 1953, caught up in increasingly costly legal battles, and with annual dues its main source of income, the NAACP had launched a ten-year program, the Fight for Freedom Fund, to raise one million dollars each year for a legal campaign to end segregation by January 1, 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1956, the fund had collected $800,000. Assuming the chairmanship, Robinson was aware of this shortfall and determined not to repeat it; in a meeting with NAACP leaders, he had sought out precisely this kind of challenge. Asked at first simply to lend his name to the fund, “I said sure, that would be easy, but isn’t there something concrete I can do?” When someone suggested a tour, Jack agreed at once. The NAACP now counted about 350,000 members and about 1,500 branches. Jack was determined to increase that number dramatically, and also to stimulate the sale of life memberships in the association, each of which brought in $500.

  In fact, during his first year as chairman, membership in the NAACP would decline for the first time since 1944 (although Jack sold a record number of life memberships). He was not the cause. Many Southern states, including Texas, Arkansas, Georgia, Virginia, and Tennessee, took stern measures, especially the passage of prohibitive laws, aimed at destroying the association. Officials were arrested and some went to jail for offenses such as refusing to turn over records, including membership lists, to local authorities. That year, 1957, the NAACP found itself embroiled in at least two dozen separate cases involving its right to exist. Ironically, the Montgomery bus boycott, despite the assistance of the NAACP, led to yet another challenge to its future. Out of this turmoil came Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which sought to coordinate the efforts of nonviolent protest groups working for civil rights and racial integration. In some respects, the SCLC complemented the NAACP; in other ways, especially in fund raising, it became its direct competitor, not only for funds but also for the hearts and minds of black Americans and the growing number of their liberal white allies.

  Despite his show of confidence and his experience speaking for the NCCJ, Jack could not have been sure that he was ready for the far more demanding task of raising funds for the NAACP. In turn, the NAACP had no firm idea how this celebrity, known for his aggressiveness as a player, would respond to the mundane demands of the tour. (Indeed, as the tour started, the current issue of the popular black weekly magazine Jet asked on its cover: “Does Jackie Robinson Talk Too Much?”) Accordingly, the association had paired Robinson with Williams, one of its most able administrators, with the two men meeting for the first time on the eve of the tour. Elegant, articulate, and shrewd, Williams (later the United States ambassador to Ghana under President Johnson) would serve as Robinson’s tutor, in case he needed and would accept one.

  Fears about Jack soon proved unjustified. In Baltimore, an overflowing crowd gave him a rousing welcome in the main auditorium of the Sharp Street Memorial Methodist Church, even as hundreds more listened downstairs over loudspeakers. (Baltimore was now the only city where black major-league players faced Jim Crow in hotel accommodations.) Over the following days, which were packed with press conferences, informal meetings, and appearances at schools and churches in addition to the main fund-raising presentation, Robinson and Williams traveled to a variety of cities, including Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis, San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles. In some places the weather was poor and hampered their progress; in other places, weak local leadership achieved the same result. Still, the duo pressed on, taking their message from audience to audience, with Robinson proving both a star attraction and a brilliant spokesman for the NAACP. Now and then, they were joined by prominent local figures; in Pittsburgh, Branch Rickey astonished his audience by declaring that blacks must use every means short of violence to achieve their freedom. Most often, however, Robinson, aided by Williams, carried the show.

  In one city, Robinson so dominated a church assembly that “they
rose waving bills singing ‘Jackie is our leader we shall not be moved,’ ” as Williams reported to NAACP headquarters. The core of Jack’s appeal was the interplay between his baseball celebrity and his humble sense of duty to the cause. Delivering a prepared speech in “a low and well modulated voice,” but also improvising, he used simple language to appeal to his audience but did not hesitate to show the passion he felt for civil rights and the NAACP. “I feel the NAACP and I believe in it,” he insisted, “and I only hope I can get this feeling over to you.” Freely he admitted that this was a new stage of his life. “There was a time when I erred in being complacent,” he confessed. “I was tempted to take advantages I had received for granted. Then I realized my responsibility to my race and to my country.” In Cleveland, where Rabbi Rudolph M. Rosenthal of the Temple on the Heights gave the invocation, Jack poignantly emphasized the fact that his efforts were not for himself but for the future. “It’s too late for us now to reap the benefits,” he conceded; “it’s not too late for our children.”

  Most immediately, he was making this sacrifice in order to aid black people living under Jim Crow down south. “We can’t let these people down.… Let’s all get out and vote and support the NAACP.” But the struggle was also for everyone, black and white, in the United States. “If I thought the NAACP was working only for Negro-Americans and not for the good of the country,” he said, “I wouldn’t be making this tour.” “White people need to support the NAACP as strongly as do Negroes,” he declared, “because it means as much to them as to colored people”; he also took pains to praise “the contributions of the Spingarns and other white persons to the NAACP cause.” The civil rights struggle had global significance. “In the present world crisis,” he said, “the colored peoples of the world have their eyes on America to see how Negroes are treated here.” Would Negroes do what was needed to win the fight? Again and again Jack told about an incident on the Dodgers’ tour of Japan, when an American umpire started a game in Osaka in the rain (“It was a dark, a dreary, a rainy day”) and then called it after six innings when the rain kept falling. But the crowd of forty thousand refused to leave their seats. Eventually, the umpires and the teams gave in, and play resumed. To Robinson, it had been an amazing display of collective willpower, of effective silent protest. “We in the NAACP can achieve the same thing,” he insisted, “if we have unity and determination.”

  The high point of the tour probably came on January 27 in Oakland, California, when almost ten thousand persons filled the Oakland Auditorium as the regional NAACP launched its annual membership drive and Jack gave one of the most inspired speeches of the tour. Here, as elsewhere, there were light if profitable moments, when Williams gleefully sold off kisses from Jack, which many women in the audience snapped up; but here, too, Jack shamed his listeners with the sad fact—“a disgrace”—that out of a black national population of 17 million, the NAACP boasted only 350,000 members even as it fought to give “first-class citizenship” to all. Nothing was more important than full citizenship rights. The auditorium shook with the loudest, most sustained burst of applause when Robinson ended his speech by declaring: “If I had to choose between baseball’s Hall of Fame and first-class citizenship I would say first-class citizenship to all of my people.”

  In Los Angeles, his welcome home brought out some of the top city leaders. For the County Board of Supervisors, Kenneth Hahn, who had escorted Walter O’Malley on his helicopter ride over Los Angeles the previous year, presented Jack with a scroll hailing him as “a living legend in the field of sports, one whose career has blazed the way toward better understanding between people, whose unique abilities as an athlete have commanded the respect and admiration of people the world over.” At a testimonial luncheon on January 28, Wilbur Johns, Jack’s former basketball coach and now the UCLA athletic director, was one of two co-chairmen, and the guest list included the mayor, various supervisors, including Jack’s boyhood friend Warren Dorn, Charlie Dressen, now the manager of the Washington Senators, and Kenny Washington, as well as several members of Jack’s family, including his mother, Mallie. (In a speech, Dressen called Jack the “smartest man in baseball” and offered him a job as a scout for the Senators.)

  Jack’s poise surprised some of his old friends. To Sam Maltin, a reporter and longtime friend, “When Jackie spoke, it was not a matter of a few fumbling, half-apologetic phrases to the effect that, Shucks, you do me too much honor. It was a full-bodied speech, warm with remembrances of his youth in this area, singing out names of people who had helped him along the rocky road … and then business-like in its devotion to his primary duty.” Robinson also gave a glimpse of the resentment he still harbored against Pasadena, where he had first met Jim Crow. Would he, someone asked, return to live there? “Has Pasadena changed since I left it?” Jack asked in reply. “In Atlanta, I know what I can do. In Pasadena, I didn’t know.”

  Robinson was “extremely easy” to work with, Franklin Williams reported to Roy Wilkins at the NAACP headquarters in New York, and found no request or assignment “burdensome.” Coachable as always, Jack sought and used advice at every point. Williams had prepared a series of cards outlining ideas for Jack’s speeches; Robinson not only read the cards but also sought suggestions on ways to improve his lecture. The inconveniences of travel and a tough schedule did not affect his spirit. According to Williams, summing up the tour, “From every standpoint, it was extremely successful.”

  If Williams had any criticism of Robinson, it was that “Jackie is completely frank—almost to the point of naivete.” Specifically, in discussions with him, it was “imperative” to make “extremely clear” which matters “are confidential and which are for publication.” Williams was struck, too, by Robinson’s degree of certainty as a worker for the association; he was “extremely confident” that the main problem keeping black Americans from rallying to the side of the NAACP was, “as he puts it, our inability to get our story told.” In other words, Robinson was to some extent an idealist and an enthusiast with a possibly unrealistic grasp of the multiple problems facing the organization.

  This was a shrewd judgment. Whether there was room for a person as idealistic and passionate as Robinson in an organization like the NAACP, which was hidebound in many of its ways, remained to be seen. The tour, however, only intensified Jack’s desire to help the association. He now proposed two fund-raising ideas for which he would work. One was for a $100-a-plate dinner in New York; the association had never attempted anything so grand. The other called for a committee of artists and entertainers, including athletes, in support of the NAACP. For Jack, whose presence would sell tickets and attract other celebrities, these proposals were only a token of his zeal to offer something tangible to the civil rights struggle.

  Returning to New York, Jack was soon on the road again for the NAACP, with trips to Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, and Atlanta before the beginning of March; for much of the year, he would travel almost every weekend on its behalf. His visit to Boston on February 1 showed his drawing power and zeal. He appeared at functions sponsored by the NAACP, the NCCJ, and the Massachusetts Jewish War Veterans organization. He spoke at a breakfast gathering attended by the mayor, greeted several hundred cheering members of the Boy Scouts and other boys’ clubs, visited eagerly with Ted Williams (“a fine person”) at a sportsmen’s show, and then spoke again for the NAACP at a church. In March, Jack appeared before four thousand persons in Memphis, Tennessee, and before three thousand more in Richmond, Virginia. As a speaker, he was the first choice of many NAACP branches. If he could not come, according to the New Britain, Connecticut, branch, then Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Thurgood Marshall would do.

  By late June, at the 48th Annual NAACP Convention in Detroit, he spoke as a man transformed. “I sometimes find it hard to remember,” he said, “what my life was like just a brief year ago.” In those days, “the big thing in it was the National League pennant, with all its problems of team, and strategy, and injuries and the tough competi
tion that go into big league baseball.” Now he was concerned with more important matters.

  These matters included his health. About this time, Jack discovered that he, like his brothers Edgar and Mack, was suffering from diabetes. Jack Gordon recalled that Robinson had been at the clothing store on 125th Street when he left for a physical examination by a doctor in midtown Manhattan. “He left in high spirits,” Gordon recalled, “but when he came back a couple of hours later, he was very quiet. He said that the doctor had told him that for someone who had played sports for so long and didn’t smoke or drink, he had never seen a body so badly deteriorated. Jack found out that he had diabetes. It was very, very sad.”

  In 1957, despite intense research, diabetes was a mysterious, often devastating disease that affected about two percent of the American population. As Jack was doubtless told, at its core is the inadequate production or utilization of insulin by the body. Insulin controls the amount of sugar in the blood system but somehow also affects protein and fat metabolism in addition to carbohydrates such as sugar. Diabetes seemed to lead in some way to early arteriosclerosis, with the increased danger of heart attacks and strokes. Unlike “normal” arteriosclerosis, this version typically affected smaller arteries, especially those in the nerves, skin, kidney, and eyes; blindness was a distinct eventuality, although many diabetics escaped it. Many diabetics also had trouble fighting bacteria in general. It remained now for Robinson to find out, over time, how his own case of the disease would proceed. Even with insulin, Jack had to know, the life expectancy of a diabetic around this time was less than two-thirds of that of a nondiabetic.