No two black figures disturbed him more than the boxer Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) and his mentor, Malcolm X. “I thought he would be good for boxing,” Jack said sorrowfully of Ali, whom he still called Clay. “I never in my life suspected he would hold these extreme views.” While he defended Clay’s right to be a Muslim, he opposed the Muslims “because they advocate the separation of the races.” The spectacle of Malcolm X capturing the mind of the handsome, charming young boxer oppressed Robinson, who found Malcolm’s appeal a mystery. “Malcolm has big audiences,” he pointed out to reporters, “but no constructive program. He has big words, but no records of deeds in civil rights. He is terribly militant on soapboxes, on streetcorners of Negro ghettoes. Yet, he has not faced Southern police dogs in Birmingham … nor gone to jail for freedom.” Writing about the possibility of a “deliberate and evil design in the schizophrenic policy of the white press,” he attacked newspapers that seemed to glamorize “on their front pages the very persons they condemn in their editorials.” A report in the New York Journal-American that Malcolm was now poised to lead the civil rights movement angered Robinson, who dubbed him “the fair-haired boy of the white press.”
Jack was also growing despondent about many young blacks, although he continued his youth work. In July, for example, he was the guest of honor at the annual Youth Banquet held at the NAACP national convention. But he feared the forces that were making even heinous crimes routine, and often in the name of politics. “I wish I could have a heart-to-heart, man-to-man talk with some of the youngsters who, by their blindly reckless acts, are endangering the freedom struggle,” he wrote in the Amsterdam News. “I do not believe there is an organized hate movement among the Negro people.… I do know that there are resentments and despairs and fears and frustrations which drive some of these youngsters to lash out and seek revenge. But I would say to them, man to man, that you don’t win like this.”
Meanwhile, he continued to urge tougher stands on civil rights by organizations like the NAACP. In February, just after he was honored by the NCCJ at its annual Brotherhood Banquet, he went to Florida for the NAACP. There, posing the question “Is the Negro Ready?” he tried to shake up the members of local branches in towns like Tampa, St. Petersburg, Ocala, and Clearwater, where Jim Crow was still strong. Jack’s message was that militancy and race pride must be welded to a strong sense of morality; to be ready, he stressed, blacks need not be docile. The basic rights “which belong to each white infant born into this nation should and must belong to every black infant,” he said. “These rights are no gift to be patronizingly doled out by some benefactor if we ‘behave ourselves.’ ” In Frankfort, Kentucky, when he joined Dr. King and addressed a rally of ten thousand persons marching in support of a bill to end Jim Crow in public accommodations, Robinson sounded one of his constant refrains, that no Negro would have it made until “the last Negro in the Deep South has it made.”
The violence unleashed by the civil rights movement flared again in June in Neshoba County, Mississippi, when three civil rights workers disappeared after local police let them go after arresting and jailing them for allegedly speeding. James Chaney, twenty-one, of Meridian, was a black CORE staff worker at the Freedom Center there. Andrew Goodman, twenty and white, was a student volunteer from New York on the same project. Michael Schwerner, twenty-four and also white, was a graduate of the New York School of Social Work who had organized the Meridian Center for CORE. Eventually, the FBI recovered their battered bodies. Together, the three young men wove together contrasting threads of race, religion, class, money, and education that left many observers, including Jack, heartbroken at their fate. To him, the three slain young men were “classic prototypes of the new breed of valiant American youth which has been carrying on the struggle.” In addition, Goodman’s parents, Robert and Carolyn Goodman, were friends of Marian Logan’s. In August, Jack announced that he would chair the Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner Planning Drive, to raise $250,000 to build a new community center in Meridian in their memory. To this end, he and Rachel hosted another jazz concert at their home in Stamford. The concert raised $20,000 for the cause.
Violence in the South spread to the North. A new, aggressive spirit, part militant, part cynical and fatalistic, swept the northern cities in the summer of 1964. In July, after the shooting of a fifteen-year-old Harlem boy, James Powell, in the white Yorkville section of Manhattan by an off-duty police officer, Harlem erupted into nights of violence that saw blacks hurling “Molotov cocktails” against white businesses; one person died and several hundred were arrested in the worst riot there since 1943. A few days later, blacks in Brooklyn also struck; the era of the “long, hot summer” had begun. That year saw disturbances in several other cities in the Northeast, including Rochester, New York; Jersey City and Paterson in New Jersey; and Philadelphia. In the Chicago suburb of Dixmoor, armed blacks defiantly battled state troopers. Confusion began to claim the once resolute civil rights movement. While the NAACP, the National Urban League, and SCLC held fast to old values, other groups such as CORE and SNCC became militant. Robinson found himself somewhere in between. Finding himself in San Francisco when Harlem exploded, he at first lamented the “tragic coincidence” of black civil disturbances with the Goldwater nomination; soon, however, after telephone calls to friends in New York, he was pointing to the “Gestapo” tactics used by the police in repressing protest.
Early in the new year, 1965, violence claimed another black victim, Malcolm X himself, gunned down by Nation of Islam supporters on February 21 at the Audubon Ballroom in upper Manhattan. Malcolm’s death shocked Robinson but elicited no eulogy from him. He was not among the more than thirty thousand persons who filed past the coffin, in which, swathed in white linen robes and with its head turned devotionally toward Mecca, Malcolm’s body lay. But Robinson and Malcolm X were linked figures. It was left to the actor Ossie Davis, eulogizing Malcolm at his funeral, to invoke the crucial terms that would make those links visible. Malcolm was “a Black Shining Prince who did not hesitate to die because he loved us so,” Davis declared; he “was our manhood, our living black manhood.… Harlem had no braver, more gallant champion than this Afro-American who lies before us now—unconquered still.”
Jack had claimed not to understand Malcolm’s appeal; but with Malcolm’s death an era had passed, in which the definition of black manhood epitomized by Robinson in 1947 had given way to a new interpretation, one epitomized by Malcolm—or the idealized memory of Malcolm—even as Malcolm’s model of black manhood itself rested on the precedent of Robinson. In 1947, black and handsome, athletically gifted but also cool and astute in his play, stoically enduring insult and injury, Robinson had revolutionized the image of the black man in America. He had supplanted the immensely popular image projected during World War II by Joe Louis, that of the physically powerful but uneducated, perhaps even weak-witted, black man uplifted by humility and patriotism—a modern, African-American version of the noble savage. But history was not static. The revolution Robinson had helped to set in motion now demanded a new image. Gone was the ideal of patient suffering; gone, too, was the underlying ideal of an integrated America in which justice would prevail for all. The new black man cared little for stoicism, and less for integration. Instead, power was the great goal; and justice seemed to demand an element of retribution, or revenge.
On one thing Robinson and Malcolm agreed: they, too, would be superseded. Two years after Malcolm’s death, Robinson would invoke his memory in looking into the future. “Jackie,” Robinson quoted Malcolm as saying, “in days to come, your son and my son will not be willing to settle for things we are willing to settle for.”
AS A WOULD-BE ENTREPRENEUR, Jack liked to quote the words of Malcolm X, of all people, to the effect that he was interested in integrating lunch counters only because he wanted to own the cup he drank from, and the counter on which his coffee rested, and the building in which the business was housed. In business, Robinson, too, was seeking not a simpl
e “job integration,” as he put it, but an entrance into commerce “from the standpoint of becoming a producer, a manufacturer, a developer and creator of business, a provider of jobs.” “For too long,” he insisted, “the Negro has been only the consumer.”
In 1964, Jack’s most ambitious project was the development of a bank located in Harlem, and owned mainly by blacks, to serve the community there. This project was first the dream of Dunbar McLaurin, a Harlem businessman with a good knowledge of finance, who knew that the name Jackie Robinson would open many doors otherwise closed to him. Slowly Jack came around to accepting the challenge. The need for such a bank was real. In 1963, black Americans had a commanding stake in only thirteen banks and thirty-four federally insured savings and loan associations nationally. The assets of the average black bank came to just under $6 million; the national average was over $25 million. In Harlem, Carver Federal Savings and Loan Association was flourishing, but full-service banking was provided only by branches of banks with centers outside the community. Historically, banking and Jim Crow went hand in hand. “When it came to mortgages to buy homes,” Jack would write, or “business loans to enable blacks to become entrepreneurs, blacks were discriminated against. Yet they faithfully and religiously deposited their savings in white banks.”
In 1963, Robinson and McLaurin, working closely with one of the black community’s most honored lawyers, Samuel Pierce, a Cornell University graduate and former judge and now an associate in the midtown law firm of Battle, Fowler, Stokes and Kheel, began to move in earnest. Putting together an organizing committee, they included three whites: Frank Schiffman of the Apollo Theater; Jack Blumstein of Blumstein’s department store, another fixture on 125th Street; and Irving B. Altman, a retired banker slated to be the chief administrative officer. The committee also included Herbert Evans of the Housing and Redevelopment Board of the City of New York, who would supply expertise about housing and mortgages, and Alvin C. Hudgins, whose father, William Hudgins, was chairman of the board of Carver Federal Savings and Loan and a close friend of Jack’s. Later, three other members would be added: William Hudgins himself; Lloyd Dickens, a New York State assemblyman; and Rose Morgan, whose nationally organized Rose-Meta System of Beauty had made her perhaps the best-known woman entrepreneur in Harlem.
With Robinson and McLaurin as co-chairs of the committee, the project moved ahead smoothly in 1963. A site was found: offices on 125th Street about to be vacated by another bank, which was relocating. In September, James Saxon, the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal authority who regulated most banks in the nation, gave approval to Jack’s group to proceed with their plans. Robinson was now designated chairman of the board. In that capacity, he oversaw the offering of sixty thousand shares of common stock for sale at twenty-five dollars a share. By agreement, this offering was aimed at the larger Harlem community; to encourage democracy, each individual could buy a total of only one thousand shares and the committee itself would own only twenty percent of the offering. Robinson’s offering letter appealed frankly to Harlem’s pride; the new bank would be “a community enterprise which will in every way belong to the people it is to serve.”
To Jack’s surprise and disappointment, selling stock proved a tough task in Harlem, where money was scarce and many people were wary of ambitious ventures. Worse, a clash of personalities soon threatened to abort the project. Dunbar McLaurin, who was expected to serve as president, had begun to act in ways that Robinson found dictatorial and self-serving. Proclaiming his “proprietorial” interest in the enterprise and scorning questions about his expenses, McLaurin demanded the loyalty of any organizer who hoped to serve as a director. When Jack offered to withdraw from the project, “I had hardly got my words out of my mouth,” he later wrote, “when McLaurin produced resignation papers for me, already drawn up, indicating my withdrawal from the organizing committee and the proposed board of the bank.” But other organizers prevailed on Robinson not to resign. The matter was then referred to Saxon, the Comptroller of the Currency. In December, after a meeting in Washington, Saxon ruled against McLaurin on every major point; in fact, the project could not proceed with him as president.
Having briefly appeared to accept this ruling, McLaurin then challenged it. Withholding important documents in his possession, he also exploited the primal fears of black Harlem concerning white power and black subservience. According to an affidavit filed by Samuel Pierce in federal court, McLaurin “issued press releases to Negro newspapers stating that white people had taken over the Bank. He made statements in the Harlem community to the effect that the three white members of the Organizing Committee had been allowed to take control of the Bank, which was untrue.” The three whites on the committee, Pierce asserted, were not dominating the proceedings. “The only real struggle was the one Mr. McLaurin created between himself and the other Organizers.”
Despite these setbacks, and benefiting from two ninety-day extensions from the Comptroller, the sale of stock went on. About six hundred investors had bought shares, but about one-third of the offering remained unsold when seven members of the committee, including Robinson, stepped in to purchase the remaining shares at a cost of about $500,000. At least on paper, the bank project had reached its goal of capitalization at $1.5 million. On March 10, 1964, the Comptroller declared Freedom National Bank of New York a corporate entity. But the internal struggle was not over. Two days later, leading a dozen disruptive supporters into a meeting attended by three of the organizers (Jack was not present), McLaurin proceeded to “appoint” his supporters to the board, which then “elected” him president. While confusion reigned, someone changed the locks on the main office door.
The next day, the original committee met and expelled McLaurin. But he was not done fighting. Now, the committee had to weather a lawsuit filed against it in the United States District Court for Southern New York aimed at restraining its activities. However, on April 15, stockholders met and elected ten directors of Freedom National Bank. Bill Hudgins was now president of the bank; Robinson was confirmed as chairman of the board.
Confidently, Jack announced that the new bank would open “on schedule, probably June 1.” In fact, it would not open for business until noon on December 18. As the operation settled in, a stream of curious visitors, including many of its now twelve hundred stockholders and its hundred-member advisory board, quickly deposited about $400,000. Three weeks later, on January 4, 1965, Freedom National Bank was officially dedicated when Alex Quaison-Sackey, the first African president of the United Nations General Assembly, cut a gold ribbon across the doorway of its offices at 275 West 125th Street. Among a flood of telegrams of congratulations was one from Vice-President-elect Hubert H. Humphrey to “my good friend, Jackie Robinson.” Humphrey hailed the bank as “a symbol of the advances” of black Americans.
For an elated Robinson, this bank was merely a start. “In my humble opinion,” he declared, “Freedom National is not just another local bank. It is symbolic of the determination of the Negro to become an integral part of the mainstream of our American economy.” If Freedom National succeeded, other banks would rise elsewhere—“banks which are color blind and banks which have as resources, not only their reserve funds, but also the support of the masses of the Negro people.” And with Bill Hudgins working tirelessly to promote it, the bank flourished. Aided by cash deposits from a variety of individuals and organizations—from Martin Luther King Jr., who deposited his Nobel Prize check there, to labor unions, state and city bodies, and the Ford Foundation—its assets jumped to $2 million by mid-March, $5 million by May, and almost $10 million on its first anniversary in 1966. Five years after opening, it was the top black bank in the nation even as Robinson appealed publicly “for more cash to aid the growing need for rehabilitation of the black community.”
As chairman of the board, Jack was no figurehead. “I have been getting myself a real business education,” he wrote privately just as the bank opened. “The years I had with ‘Chock’ se
em to have stood me in good stead. I am pretty much able to hold my own in our meetings. I still need some help on parliamentary procedure but I’ll overcome that.” He now pressed forward with more confidence into other business ventures. One of these was housing. After almost a decade as a front man here, Robinson had little to show for his pains; but he had renewed his efforts. In 1963, he finally had a measure of success, in a joint venture with his friend Floyd Patterson. In May, at a press conference at Mama Leone’s restaurant in Manhattan, the men announced the founding of a company to build low-income housing in integrated communities. Already their company held title to about 130 acres of land upstate, near the town of Wurtsboro in Sullivan County; with about $250,000 already invested, the first group of homes was now being built. “We believe,” Jack declared, “that the building of homes in integrated communities can be profitable for the community, for the buyer, for our country and for one another. We intend to prove this.”
Robinson was right about the need for such housing. In October, when the first five model homes were opened to the public, visitors overran the site. But for reasons that are unclear, this project soon lost its luster; the Robinson-Patterson venture into housing quietly folded. Jack began to look overseas, and especially in the Caribbean, for sites. Over the following years, on visits to Puerto Rico and Jamaica, he would hold talks with local officials about building low-income housing there. Puerto Rico quickly proved impossible to crack; in 1963, Governor Luis Muñoz Marín respectfully turned down as far too expensive Jack’s proposals to build some units there. In Jamaica, where he had the ear of Hugh Shearer, who later became prime minister, Robinson and his partners made some progress; but this project, too, went nowhere.
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