Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  His first task was to learn to inject himself. “He practiced for a few days on a tomato, sticking in the needle and squeezing,” Rachel remembered. “Then he started on himself. Pretty soon, it had become routine. But his diabetes was a huge shock to us all.” He also had to abandon some of his eating habits. “Jack used to put away a pint of ice cream at one sitting,” according to Rachel. “That stopped, along with the pies and cake.” His weight soon dropped by about twenty pounds, in part because of the restrictions on his diet, in part because of diuretic drugs and the diabetes itself.

  A year later, Jack was as comfortable with his regimen of injections as might be expected. “Taking the insulin has become pretty much of a habit,” he wrote his Chicago friends David and Caroline Wallerstein, “and I don’t really mind it at all. I am just thankful it wasn’t any more serious.”

  ON MONDAY, MARCH 3, Jack drove from his home to Manhattan on the first day of his new career as a company vice-president. At 425 Lexington Avenue, with some trepidation as he entered a hitherto alien world, he took possession of his office and tried to settle into his job as principal personnel officer of the Chock Full o’ Nuts corporation.

  A month later, a visiting journalist found no trace of his storied baseball career on display, no indication that the new vice-president had been a star athlete. Eventually Jack’s desk sported one memento from sports, a bronzed, size-13 football shoe from his glory years at UCLA. (Still later, in 1960, he would also display a small mahogany piece about the Emancipation, in the shape of a hand—Abe Lincoln’s—clutching a scroll; this was a gift from Dick and Pat Nixon.) Quickly Jack was able to recite the precise location of each of the twenty-seven company restaurants, most of which he had visited in his quest to meet as many employees as possible. He had also toured a coffee-roasting plant in Brooklyn and a bakery in Harrison, New Jersey, that were crucial to the operation, which would gross $25 million in the coming year. He loved his work. “From the start to the end,” Rachel said, “Jack devoted all the time he needed to do it well. At the end of every day we knew what had gone on in this office and that, at this shop or that. The details that bored other people seemed to energize him. He was very happy there.”

  On the job, Jack tried hard to set an amiable tone; he offered himself as a friend, a colleague, a teammate. A sign on his desk read “Mr. Jack R. Robinson Vice President,” but he did not stand on ceremony. “The name Jackie has been part of me all my life,” he said to a reporter, “and most people call me Jackie. Sometimes the employees call me Mr. Robinson, but if they call me Jackie, I don’t mind. They like to kid with me, and I enjoy kidding them back.” From years of playing team sports he knew the importance of helping employees to see themselves not as isolated individuals in a hierarchy but as a fluid group with common goals. “This is a team operation,” he insisted. “To gain the confidence of employees, you must be willing to discuss their problems openly with them. Then, when you’re looking for their cooperation, you find it working for you.”

  Clearly, he saw himself as an advocate for the employees. In June, he contacted a friend at the White House to seek help for a worker who wanted to bring his two sons, born out of wedlock, up from Jamaica. “He is one of our good men,” Robinson wrote, “and I would like to help him if possible.” At least once, Jack went to court to testify for an employee. In a case involving a coffee roaster who had slashed a man with a knife (the other fellow had a pitchfork, Jack pointed out), Judge Benjamin Gassman Jr. imposed a six-month sentence but then suspended it. Jack’s presence was obviously a factor in the decision. “Your having left the Dodgers,” Judge Gassman admonished him, “is the reason they’re in last place now.”

  Robinson’s desire to be liked also made him vulnerable. From the start, the worst part of the job was the fact that he had the last word on the dismissal of employees. A fierce competitor, he was known to teammates and friends as a soft touch (like his mother) for individuals in distress, for panhandlers, for the appealing poor. “The day when I had the worst butterflies in my stomach, far more than I ever had with the Dodgers, was the day I had to fire an employee,” he told a reporter. “I felt like the governor who sends a man to the electric chair even though he believes that the verdict of the jury and the judge’s sentence were just.” But he soon found out, to his chagrin, that some workers were liars. “They looked right at you,” Jack told a friend about many of the employees, “looked you right in the eye, and told you these things, and it wasn’t true at all.”

  Another complicating factor on the job was race. Race had helped to land him the job, and race helped and hampered him on it. He came to believe that many black workers expected too much of him, especially when their work habits were questioned, but also that some white employees resented his authority. Bill Black did not help matters when he revealed that “I hired Jackie because a majority of the people who work for me are colored—and I figured they would worship him.” The threat of unionization also persisted, with Robinson seeing himself as an obvious target. “They are going to attempt to discredit me in some way,” he wrote a friend about the unions, “because they feel if they can intimidate me they will have a chance of getting into our shops. I feel pretty well set up defensively so I am not worried.” After losing a vote about unionization overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, some workers filed a complaint that Robinson had warned certain black employees that a trade union would cost him his job, and had said that “the white employees were jealous of my position in the company.” Robinson denied both allegations and the NLRB exonerated him.

  Percy Sutton, a major Harlem political and business leader, and a lifetime union member who was once a radical socialist, would insist that Robinson was not antiunion. “Jackie Robinson wasn’t antiunion. He was hired to represent his company, just as the union leader represents his union. One of the things Jackie had to do was negotiate with the union. He did that. He wasn’t against the unions.”

  Such setbacks did not lessen his love of the job. “I feel fine in my new setup,” he wrote to a friend, “and am looking forward to a long relationship with this company. I have certainly seen a great deal of difference in working with a man like Bill Black and his company than a Bavasi and the Dodgers. Frankly there’s as much difference in character as day and night and I am proud to be away from baseball and the insecurity that goes with it.” More than a year later he was still pleased, if more realistic. “My job is developing,” he wrote, “but it really is a long hard struggle each day. I have a good idea about the company and personnel is interesting. Some of the things I run into make interesting work. It seems something different happens every day.… It will be nice if this develops into a lifetime job.… The help is pleased, I am not certain about Black.”

  If he was unsure about Black, possibly it was because Jack could not quite believe his luck in finding an employer so willing, whatever his reasons, to allow him the freedom he craved to speak out on civil rights. This generosity was even more important because Jack also knew that, as a black man, he was lucky to have the job at all. Black himself, a quiet man who saw himself as something of a maverick, heard protests about Robinson’s activities even before he reported his first day. To one complainant he offered a stern rejoinder about Robinson: Black would not interfere with “his right to think and speak his mind.” In the face of many other protests in the coming years, Black would maintain this position.

  The importance of Robinson’s efforts on behalf of the NAACP was emphasized the month of his first tour when, following the victory by the boycotters led by Martin Luther King Jr., bombs exploded in four black churches in Montgomery, as well as at the homes of two ministers, one black, the other white, who had supported the protest. Almost as disturbing was the ensuing silence of President Eisenhower—“our great President in the White House,” Jack called him, without a trace of irony. Eisenhower’s silence puzzled Jack, so certain was he of the President’s decency. “Knowing President Eisenhower as I do,” he decla
red in Los Angeles, “I am confident he will protest against the bombing in the South. Our struggle for civil rights is … the struggle of all Americans. We are losing prestige because of things like the bombings of churches and Negro homes in the South.” Only slowly did it dawn on Jack that politics could overwhelm individual decency in Ike’s case. “I have the greatest respect for President Eisenhower,” Robinson insisted in Boston, “but he must step into the breach in this situation and show everyone that the U.S. government will not condone these bombings.” The church bombings were particularly ominous because “the Negroes are being hit in the one place where they have felt safe.”

  These appeals by Jack were a token of his growing concern with the political aspect of the struggle, the extent to which elected officials, especially those at the highest levels, were responding to what he saw as their obligations. He seemed drawn not so much to the Republican Party as, at first, to the party’s men in the White House, with his personal experience of Eisenhower and Nixon, the Vice-President, shaping his opinions. He had never forgotten Eisenhower’s remarkable gesture of respect at the B’nai B’rith dinner in November 1953, when the President had crossed a room to shake his hand. Similarly, with Nixon, he had been charmed by their first meeting, which took place in the lobby of a Chicago hotel during the Republican National Convention of 1952, when the Dodgers were also in town. Nixon was in the lobby, chatting with Harrison McCall, another party loyalist, when McCall asked him if he wanted to meet Jackie Robinson. McCall had noticed Robinson talking in a corner to Paul Williams, a delegate from California.

  Introduced to Robinson, Nixon completely dazzled the ballplayer. Not only did they have a southern California boyhood in common, with Nixon a graduate of Whittier College, a frequent opponent in sports of Pasadena Junior College; congratulating Jack on hitting a home run that day, Nixon also recalled, in astonishing detail, a football game in which Jack had played for UCLA against the University of Oregon, probably in the fall of 1939 (because their annual game was played that year in Los Angeles). To Jack’s delight, Nixon asked about a particularly intricate play that Jack had helped to execute that day, and which Jack himself remembered clearly and took pleasure in explaining to an apparently enraptured Nixon. “I said to Nixon as we walked away,” McCall wrote, “that, while Robinson had undoubtedly met a lot of notables during his career, nevertheless I was sure there was one person he would never forget.”

  Jack’s eventual support of Nixon in 1960 would seem to prove the astuteness of this judgment. For some time after Jack started working with the NAACP, a quotation from Nixon on race and America’s international reputation would be a feature of many of his speeches. But flattery was not the only basis of Nixon’s appeal to Robinson, who had been lavished with praise since his boyhood. He viewed Nixon not only as a champion of civil rights who might lead the country to a new high ground of tolerance but also as a potential friend. The meaning of Nixon’s notorious smearing of opponents, notably Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1948 race for the U.S. Senate, and his resolute support for the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy to the bitter end, had little adverse impact on Robinson. For one thing, Robinson was himself a fervent anticommunist. “Our country is engaged in a titanic struggle with a resourceful and powerful enemy,” he insisted in 1957. “This conflict has not yet reached the shooting stage. It is now largely a struggle for men’s minds.” In the battle for the darker millions of the world, American segregationists “provide grist for the Soviet propaganda mill.” Robinson’s anticommunism was as heartfelt in 1957 as it had been in 1949, when he spoke out against Robeson. It also reflected official NAACP policy, which barred Communists from its membership. In 1958, the 49th Annual Convention would kill efforts to change the association’s policy in this regard.

  Although it is possible that he voted for the liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952, in 1956 Jack was a solid supporter of the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket, and taken with the Republican Party especially after, in August, the Democratic Party Convention rejected a report on civil rights championed by Senator Herbert H. Lehman of New York, to whom Jack dispatched a vivid telegram of support. In contrast, Robinson was heartened by Eisenhower’s championing of the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1957. At first, Eisenhower resisted a key provision that would allow the Department of Justice to file suit on behalf of blacks denied the right to vote, but he shifted his position in the middle of the 1956 campaign. The move won him Jack’s endorsement, which the White House made clear it valued. On October 4, the only black appointee of any consequence in the executive branch, E. Frederic Morrow, who had visited the Robinsons in Stamford several times and was a champion of Vice-President Nixon in particular, wrote to assure Jack that the White House was in the Dodgers’ camp in the World Series. The Dodgers lost, but Eisenhower did not, to Jack’s obvious satisfaction. In January, Maxwell M. Rabb, the secretary to the cabinet, thanked him for his “very fine letter” about the President and civil rights.

  Recognizing now the lukewarm nature of Eisenhower’s approach to civil rights, Jack took comfort in statements attributed to Nixon and emanating from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, where Nixon was on official business. Speaking out against Communist charges about the prevalence of racism in the United States, Nixon had made (according to a report in the Herald Tribune) a ringing endorsement of integration: “We shall never be satisfied with the progress we have been making in recent years until the problem is solved and equal opportunity becomes a reality for all Americans.” This was precisely the kind of firm statement Robinson had been awaiting from the White House. Congratulating Nixon on the forthrightness of his pronouncement, Jack emphasized how important it was that the Vice-President had made this declaration about race and civil rights “in the heart of Africa.” Hereafter, Robinson would fold this quotation from Nixon into most of his speeches on civil rights.

  In turn, Nixon responded to Robinson’s praise with warm words of his own. He had received several messages of commendation for his statements in Africa, but “none which meant more to me.” It was a privilege, Nixon wrote, “to be working along with someone like yourself” for the goal of equal opportunity for all Americans. He hoped Robinson would continue to support him: “Your expressions of approval will be a constant source of strength and encouragement to me.” In April, Jack was encouraged again about the administration when he read a speech delivered by Sherman Adams, a special assistant to the President, at a dinner in New York to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the American Jewish Committee. Robinson wrote to tell Adams, formerly the governor of New Hampshire, how encouraged he was “to know our national leadership is sensitive to and concerned about the remaining vestiges of discrimination here at home.”

  Seeking a larger political role involving civil rights, Jack saw his communications with the White House—almost perfunctory in reality, although he was genuinely admired—as evidence that he was succeeding. In April, his confidence was boosted when he was invited to appear on the respected political interview program Meet the Press, to be questioned by four reporters including Lawrence E. Spivak of NBC, who later congratulated Jack on having done “a superb job.” Certainly Jack had taken his appearance seriously. In preparation, he had written Maxwell Rabb asking for a briefing at the White House. Almost certainly, this meeting never took place. However, a month later, Rabb welcomed Jack to the White House on a visit to Washington, then surprised him by taking him in to meet Eisenhower. The President had given him “another big thrill,” Jack wrote in thanks. Because of his talk with Rabb, Jack went on, “I have a much better understanding of your thinking in the field of race relations.”

  In turn, Eisenhower expressed his thanks in a letter that was gracious and yet unconsciously coded with two ideas that would soon disturb Robinson and other civil rights leaders. Thanking Jack for “your approval of our efforts to achieve equality of opportunity,” the President went on: “It is our hope that we can continue to foster a moral climate within which the forces
of informed good will operate effectively in an atmosphere of democracy.” The first of the two ideas was contained in the phrase “equality of opportunity,” which marked with some precision the limits of Eisenhower’s commitment to racial change. “Equality of opportunity” was a goal far more limited than the comprehensive integration that inspired Robinson, King, and most liberal supporters, black and white, of the civil rights movement. The other idea, obscured by the President’s notoriously awkward syntax, was his emphasis on fostering “a moral climate” that would ease social change. Unmentioned here were factors such as vigorous executive leadership, strong new legislation, and the tough enforcement of laws, which Robinson thought necessary in the face of Jim Crow.

  As the Republican-inspired civil rights package moved through the Senate, Robinson watched closely as Southern Democrats, in particular, tried to block it. Normally, the legislation would have gone to the Judiciary Committee, headed by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who fully intended to bury it there. Efforts to bypass the Judiciary Committee were opposed by several Democrats, including two senators who thereafter would find it hard to win Robinson’s support: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The President, too, dismayed Robinson. As opponents targeted Title III of the bill, which gave the Justice Department the right to sue on behalf of civil rights, Eisenhower’s support weakened. At a press conference early in July, after Senator Richard Russell of Georgia publicly questioned the President’s understanding of the bill, Eisenhower played into the hands of the Southerners by conceding that there were indeed “certain phrases I didn’t understand.”