Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Money, and Hollywood, were on Jack’s mind again in signing a contract for a biography to be written by Carl T. Rowan, a veteran writer with the Minneapolis Tribune (later, he was ambassador to Finland and director of the United States Information Agency). Even more exciting for Jack was the rumor that Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte were eager to pick up the film rights. (In some ways, Poitier was the Jackie Robinson of Hollywood—the first man to be allowed consistently to play leading African-American roles with dignity in an integrated setting. That winter, as Poitier prepared to start his latest movie, he and his wife, Juanita, vacationed with the Robinsons in Mexico.) Above all, Jack saw the biography as a chance to show the world the brightest aspect of his story: not his triumph in baseball, but what he and Rachel, together, had been able to achieve in the face of adversity.

  When Rachel seemed touchy about revealing private details, Jack urged openness. “I don’t expect we should go into every aspect of our life,” he reasoned in a letter to her, “but the things that we have accomplished together should be told to everyone. At least to me what your love has meant should be an incentive for others. Sharing this is something I like to do because there are few people that have done as much or gone through as much and still maintain the love we have.” Properly written, the book could “do a lot of good. We have the story sweetheart if we aren’t afraid to tell it.”

  EVEN AS HE LOYALLY served the NAACP, Robinson became increasingly bothered both by its conservatism and by its uneven support in the black world. Convinced that its conservatism bred apathy and even disdain, he looked at the timidity of many people under Jim Crow and placed some of the blame squarely on the NAACP leadership. In several places, he noticed how local blacks became excited by his bolder moves, as when he stood up to conservative white journalists in Jackson, Mississippi, or, in Denver, challenged the civil rights record of the governor of Colorado; and yet these same blacks, on their own, were fearful. He did not overstate his own militancy. In West Virginia, where he accepted a plaque honoring his efforts, Jack refused to strut. “As a Negro,” he said, “I don’t think I should be honored for going out and fighting for the rights we [should] have had many years ago.” Much of the blame lay with educated blacks who turned their backs on the less fortunate. “Too many of our professional men,” he went on, “achieve a certain amount of success and then forget the trials of their childhood.”

  Finally, gently at first, he began to criticize the NAACP and Roy Wilkins himself. In July, Jack boldly told a press conference before a meeting of the board of directors in Cleveland that he would “love to see a more aggressive stand by the NAACP” on civil rights. In the South, not without good reason, blacks were too scared to protest; but “in the North, what reason does a colored person have for not associating with the NAACP?” He cited a failure “as far as our leadership is concerned. I believe they have not done enough to gain the confidence of the little man in the street. The average person is waiting to see the leaders take an aggressive stand.” Shortly afterward, he openly attacked Wilkins for suggesting that a seven-year delay in completing school integration in Prince Edward County, Virginia, apparently approved by a federal judge, “could be regarded as reasonable.” “It is a tremendously unfortunate statement which will hurt the organization,” Jack commented. “I was upset and angry when I read it.” When Wilkins, who had been misled by a reporter’s telephoned account of the judge’s ruling, reversed himself, Jack did not let go. For the NAACP head to have agreed to any delay was “most unfortunate.” Citing the struggle in Little Rock, Jack offered that “the leadership of the NAACP cannot allow the so-called little man down on the firing lines to feel he is being let down this way.”

  Although Wilkins could not afford to tangle publicly with Robinson on this issue, he resented Jack’s public criticism, which smacked of self-righteousness once the NAACP leader had reversed himself. In September, Robinson antagonized Wilkins again. When A. Philip Randolph, the revered leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and now a vice-president of the AFL-CIO trade union organization, called a meeting to discuss more aggressive moves against Jim Crow, Jack readily attended—but as an individual, not on behalf of the NAACP. At the meeting (where attendees worried over the fate of Dr. King, who was locked up in a Montgomery, Alabama, jail after city police violently arrested him), Jack threw his support behind Randolph’s idea to stage a youth march the following month in Washington, D.C., to protest the brutality suffered by black children seeking integrated education in the South.

  From the start, Robinson was perceived as point man for the march; he was designated its “marshal.” Again, his presence helped to ensure a wide cross-section of support from groups as well as individuals for what was called the Youth March for Integrated Schools. Set at first at one thousand, the number of prospective marchers quickly multiplied. “3,000 to March on D.C.,” the Amsterdam News proclaimed; “Jackie Robinson Will Lead Way.” Included were representatives of the Protestant Council of Churches and the Jewish Labor Committee, as well as individuals such as the activist Stanley Levinson, who would be a major force in Dr. King’s civil rights efforts, and Father John LaFarge, editor of the Catholic journal America. However, the NAACP was not officially among its number.

  On the afternoon of October 25, joined by Rachel and Jackie Junior, as well as by several other prominent leaders and personalities such as Harry and Julie Belafonte and Coretta Scott King, Jack led about ten thousand students, black and white, on a march down Constitution Avenue to the Lincoln Memorial in the capital. The organizers had hoped to have some students present a statement to the President at the White House, but Eisenhower and his advisors would not countenance it. Although the march might embarrass the administration, Jack had insisted that it was nonpartisan and definitely not a radical initiative, as some White House officials complained. Thus, Eisenhower’s refusal angered him. “I have never been a Democrat in my life,” he rashly told a reporter two weeks later, “—until October 25.”

  Wilkins and other leaders of the NAACP also had reservations about the march. In November, the president of the New York branch of the NAACP, Russell P. Crawford, undoubtedly spoke for more people than himself when he accused the organizers of diverting vital financial support from the NAACP with their venture into symbolism. In his column in the Amsterdam News, Crawford suggested archly of the event that its biggest beneficiary was probably the bus companies paid to drive the marchers to Washington. Incensed, Jack responded that such criticism “is causing groups to lose interest in the NAACP.” Crawford published the text of a letter to him from Robinson but also his own reply, which indicated at least one underlying source of friction. Calling Robinson “the soul of sincerity,” he urged him nevertheless to “discontinue the practice of attacking your teammates publicly as you did Mr. Wilkins because he made a perfectly human error.”

  Despite this friction, Jack was still ready to serve the Fight for Freedom Fund as master of ceremonies at yet another big dinner (honoring John H. Johnson of Ebony magazine and Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, whose hiring of Marian Anderson to sing in Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera in 1955 had made her the Jackie Robinson of American opera). Two weeks later, however, Jack was peeved again when he addressed the Rhode Island Committee on Discrimination in Housing in Providence. With growing concern, he watched as the audience, at least half of them black, sat torpidly through the presentations. “You didn’t seem interested,” he scolded the gathering. “One of the things that’s wrong with the Negro today is that they are so willing to sit back and let other people pick up the ball and run with it.… I think it’s time for us to start pushing. This is the only way people respect you.”

  Seeking ways to make his own voice more influential, he finally landed the radio program he had been seeking for some time without success because of the lack of a sponsor. Starting early in January 1959, on Sundays at 6:30 p.m., listeners to WRCA in New York City could hear a half-hour intervie
w program, “The Jackie Robinson Show.” Making the program possible, when other sponsors shied away, was Philip Liebmann of Liebmann Breweries of Brooklyn, makers of Rheingold Beer, reputedly the best-selling beer in the region. Liebmann and Rheingold Beer had led the way in sponsoring blacks on television, notably in the case of the landmark Nat King Cole Show, and in using blacks both to endorse products and as talent in commercial messages. Setting aside his scruples about alcohol, Jack gladly accepted this sponsorship. His guest list featured political figures such as former governor and senator Herbert Lehman of New York, Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, Mayor Robert Wagner of New York City, and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Without success, Jack even tried to attract the President and the Vice-President. Eisenhower was to read the Gettysburg Address—“all listeners would be thrilled by such a reading”—from his farm near the battlefield.

  For Jack, the program was a perfect gift at an auspicious time. On January 31 that year, he celebrated his fortieth birthday.

  WITHIN A FEW DAYS, he had more to celebrate. At Chock Full o’ Nuts, where his two-year agreement was about to expire, Bill Black let Jack know that his contract would be renewed, for five years. Black continued to show solid support for his most controversial employee; in effect, the corporation was subsidizing Jack’s civil rights work, but Black dismissed criticism on this score. “If anyone wants to boycott ‘Chock’ because I hired Jackie Robinson,” he declared, “I recommend Martinson’s coffee. It’s just as good. As for our restaurants, there are Nedick’s, Bickford’s and Horn and Hardart in our price range. Try them. You may even like them better than ours.”

  More secure now, Jack used his job as a base for other activities, including another, larger Youth March for Integrated Schools. Early in April, he and Daisy Bates, the NAACP leader in Little Rock, addressed a spirited farewell rally at Friendship Baptist Church in Harlem. A week later, on Saturday, April 18, more than 130 buses left New York City for the capital, where over thirty thousand marchers, blacks and whites together, proceeded through the streets of the capital to the sound of drums and the singing of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” At the Washington Monument, to honor his crucial role in the event, leaders presented Jack with a scroll before a gathering that included celebrities such as Poitier, Belafonte, and Tom Mboya, the charming twenty-eight-year-old Kenyan labor leader, who seemed to personify the rich promise of the new Africa. The mood of this march, in contrast to the first, was far more upbeat; with A. Philip Randolph promising to lead marches again and again to Washington until the administration showed a proper concern for the issues involved, the White House itself was now more respectful. Although the President still hid out, a few aides met with march leaders to discuss its goals.

  His strength sapped by diabetes, Jack nevertheless found it hard to resist appeals for help. He cut back in one place: he resigned his unpaid position on the Connecticut State Prison Parole Board. “I felt I wasn’t being fair to the state,” he explained, “and the state wasn’t being fair to us.” But he again denied rumors that he was clearing the deck to run for public office. “I’m going to have to stop doing a few other things,” he explained, “because I just don’t have the time.” However, he found time for other activities: his radio program; helping to plan yet another Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, D.C.; fund-raising for the NAACP and the Harlem branch YMCA; organizing a major testimonial dinner for his friend Floyd Patterson after the traumatic loss of his heavyweight crown to Ingemar Johansson of Sweden; helping to launch Project Airlift Africa to bring African students to the United States; organizing another group, Athletes for Juvenile Decency, which sought to use well-known sports figures to fight juvenile crime and drug use; and testifying in Washington before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

  Respect for Robinson, especially among blacks, remained high. When he gave a splendid speech at the Polo Grounds (now deserted by the baseball Giants) to bring to a close the 50th Annual Convention of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins praised him for having done “a superb job of inspiring and instructing” the many delegates in attendance.

  In April of that year, 1959, seeking an even more powerful forum for expressing his views than that offered by his radio program, Robinson became a columnist with the New York Post. One of the oldest newspapers in America (reputedly founded by Alexander Hamilton) and one of the most popular in New York, the Post identified with liberal causes. On April 24, James A. Wechsler, its editor, announcing Jack’s appointment, informed readers that although the column, called simply “Jackie Robinson,” would appear in the sports section (three times a week), Robinson would write freely “on any subject that he feels strongly about.” The column would make history. With the Post offering it to other newspapers across the nation, this would mark the first time, in Wechsler’s words, “that real national syndication has been attempted for a columnist who happens to be a Negro.” Aiding him as a ghostwriter on the column was the talented young black playwright William Branch.

  In his first column, on April 28, Jack promised to be bold in expressing his views, and to make the most of this unprecedented opportunity for a black voice. “For better or worse,” he declared, “I’ve always thought it more important to take an intelligent and forthright stand on worthwhile questions than to worry about what some people might think.” He would comment on sports but, he added, “I’ll also express myself on the ticklish subject of politics.” While he could not speak for all Negroes, he relished the chance “for one of us to speak to so wide an audience concerning just what we feel and think.” In addition, “although I am no authority on international affairs,” he would write on events in Cuba, Africa, Israel, Tibet—wherever events took place that he found of significance to his concerns.

  On the whole, his column lived up to this prescription. It struck a balance between sports and other subjects but kept its author’s sensitivity to racism and civil rights at the fore. Over the first year, baseball was the subject of the largest number of columns on any single subject. Jack also wrote several pieces on boxing; occasionally only, he wrote on football, basketball, golf, and tennis. But sport was perhaps the least inspired aspect of the column, which sparkled mainly when Robinson made civil rights, or some other aspect of the fight for social justice, his focus. Now and then, as in taking on the Professional Golfers Association for its explicit “Caucasians Only” membership policy, sports and civil rights were coupled. In fact, Jack’s columns attacking the PGA and the local Metropolitan Golfers Association, which abided by the PGA’s Jim Crow rule, were a factor in the PGA’s decision to grant membership to Charlie Sifford. Near the end of March 1960, Sifford became the Jackie Robinson of golf.

  On the whole, Jack tried to express his views on a wide range of interrelated topics: politics in Harlem, juvenile delinquency, housing and school discrimination in New York and elsewhere, migrant workers, trade unions, and personalities who caught Robinson’s fancy, including Belafonte and Poitier, the intelligent, socially conscious broadcaster and former attorney Howard Cosell, and the singer and actress Diahann Carroll. Modestly, Jack probed international affairs. He wrote a few columns on Africa, including South Africa and Southwest Africa, Liberia, and the Congo. After an erroneous report that Fidel Castro had invited him to dinner in Havana, Jack (“somewhat peeved by this report”) sent Castro a letter urging him to build on the residue of American goodwill toward his revolution and act more responsibly. Castro should “stop now to see where he is going rather than continue to plunge along blindly. Passion and zeal are fine qualities. But a dose of foresight is a pretty good commodity to have along with them.”

  His real interest was America, and civil rights. In taut language, his second column described an incident that had occurred six days before, in Poplarville, Mississippi, when “a quiet, hooded, well-drilled group of men entered an unguarded jailhouse in southern Mississippi. And when they left, they took with them a screaming, beaten, bloody, human being.” Jack’s fo
cus was the contrast between the terrible fate of the prisoner, Mack Charles Parker, a young black man who had been accused of raping a white woman, and the folly of those people who opposed civil rights legislation as being punitive of the South. In particular, Robinson criticized the delaying tactics of the governor of Mississippi, who claimed to oppose lynching but resisted laws to prevent it. “I can’t really express my deep outrage,” Jack wrote, “about this terrible incident.… The lynching of Mack Parker is but the end result of all the shouts of defiance by Southern legislatures, all the open incitement to disobey the law by Southern governors, and all the weak-kneed ‘gradualism’ of those entrusted with enforcing and protecting civil rights.”

  (Parker’s body soon surfaced in the nearby Pearl River. The FBI, after investigating the lynching and deciding that it violated no federal law, turned over its findings, including the identities of the lynchers, to local authorities. But a grand jury of whites refused even to hear evidence against these men.)

  On May 8, Robinson took an even bolder step in his column. Looking ahead to the elections the following year, 1960, he announced that his column would soon venture into the arena of politics. In 1959, this was a nervy step for a black man, a former professional athlete, publishing a column in the sports section of a newspaper. Nevertheless, Jack moved with some confidence, and his basic idea from the start was to sway voters. In 1947, he noted, players opposed to him had come around to his side because winning games meant more money; politics now “is somewhat similar to that situation—except that instead of money, it’s votes.” As 1960 approached, “all the politicians who have kept their distance since the last campaign are out in force now—each with a big smile, a warm handshake and a hatful of promises.” He would try to find out the truth about each man.