Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Another major venture, but one that ended more painfully for Jack, was into the field of life insurance. Around 1963, about fifty black-owned insurance companies existed nationally; for the most part, however, blacks were served by white insurance companies that had little interest in the long-term goals of the community. As with Freedom National Bank, Robinson hoped both to make money and to provide blacks with an economic lift. In 1964, along with Arthur Logan and Sam Pierce (who that year became the first black director of the powerful Prudential Life Insurance Company of Boston), he set about securing a charter for a life insurance company. On November 17, 1964, the state insurance department approved a charter for the Gibraltar Life Insurance Company.

  The following June, Jack and his partners, who now included whites, filed a stock-offering plan for Gibraltar, as required, with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. The offering was of six hundred thousand shares at five dollars a share; following the sale, the company would open for business on July 1. But, as with the bank, selling stock proved to be a problem. In December, after a renewed effort, the Amsterdam News reported that Robinson was “readying the sale of stock for his new insurance company next month.” But this second attempt also flopped.

  Then, in June 1966, a squib in the same newspaper announced that Robinson had “an offer to merge his life insurance company with an already existing white company.” Earlier, at least four white companies had offered a merger. The winning company was a sensation: Hamilton Life Insurance Company, barely seven years old but with reported sales of about half a billion dollars. Behind Hamilton was the dynamic figure of young Philip J. Goldberg, who now presented Jack with a rare opportunity. In the proposed merger, Goldberg would name Robinson co-chairman of Hamilton, allow him to appoint three new directors, and give him enviable stock options. “I am deeply impressed,” Jack told his readers, “by the talent, dedication and sincerity of Philip Goldberg.” At a press conference, the two men pledged to join forces not only to build the company into a billion-dollar firm but also to “pay just as much attention to the Negro market as we are to the white market.”

  Jack then took a step he was to regret. He sank $25,000 of his own money, which he could ill afford, into the purchase of stock in Hamilton Life; at some point he and Rachel’s brother Chuck Williams acquired 14,000 shares. Jack would see little of this money again. Within a year, the news broke that Hamilton Life was in deep financial trouble, $800,000 in debt. On February 2, 1968, the Securities and Exchange Commission suspended over-the-counter trading in Hamilton stock. The next month, the state superintendent of insurance barred it from writing new policies. Jack’s son David would recall the bitterness he felt as a youth at the loss of his parents’ money, which he blamed on one man at Hamilton Life. “I could never understand how this man could have taken our money. We knew where he lived, on the East Side, we knew the building and I would go by it, and it was all I could do not to kick the door in and demand it back.”

  On February 2, 1965, not long after Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration, Jack and Rachel attended a dinner at the White House for Vice-President Humphrey, House Speaker John McCormack, and Chief Justice Earl Warren. For Rachel, the highlight of the evening was probably a whirl around the floor with Johnson, who danced only three times before withdrawing for the evening. Although Jack still had misgivings about Johnson, he also believed that now, unlike in 1961, he had a genuine friend in the White House in Humphrey. A few days later, Humphrey assured Jack that the President had asked him to make certain that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination in employment and public accommodations, and gave the Justice Department means to enforce the law, was “fully implemented.”

  Soon, events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, vividly caught on television, tested Johnson’s nerve. In Selma, on March 7, a force of state troopers and deputies, using tear gas, whips, and clubs, crushed a march led by Dr. King and John Lewis of SNCC in protest against the killing of a civil rights worker and the jailing of hundreds of demonstrators taking part in a voter-registration drive. Dispatching a furious telegram to the President demanding “immediate action” in Selma, Robinson warned that “one more day of savage treatment by legalized hatchet men could lead to open warfare by aroused Negroes. America cannot afford this in 1965.” But by the time the White House acknowledged receipt of this message, Johnson had taken a historic step. Summoning a joint session of Congress, he proposed a civil rights bill that would end all impediments to voter registration based on race. The United States, he insisted, “must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” He then closed his speech by invoking the most sacred slogan of the civil rights movement, “We shall overcome.”

  Especially after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, Robinson came to see Johnson as a true ally of the civil rights movement; but he and the President never became friends. Clifford Alexander, a black White House aide and later secretary of the army, put Robinson’s 1964 dalliance with the Democrats in perspective in 1965: “While it is true that Jackie Robinson supported the President with his right hand, he was doing everything with his left hand to defeat a variety of Democratic senatorial and congressional candidates across the country.” To the Democrats, as indeed to many Republican loyalists, Robinson was a loose cannon, a force the party could not count on, and perhaps even a showboat. Following another stern missive to Johnson from Robinson about race relations, Alexander dismissed it by suggesting that it was probably “one of his grandstand political plays.” Humphrey was more careful with his celebrated black ally. After receiving yet another tart note from Jack, Humphrey replied soothingly. “A true friend is one who speaks the truth,” he wrote patiently, “and I always look upon Jackie Robinson as a true friend.”

  Elsewhere, it was clear in 1965 that, probably because of his key role in Freedom National Bank, some people now looked on Robinson with new respect as a spokesman on topics such as poverty, urban development, and youth problems. He was the keynote speaker at a conference on young people called by the office of the governor of Illinois; he spoke in Tucson, Arizona, to the National Conference on Poverty in the Southwest; in Philadelphia, he was the cheerleader at a gathering of an organization established by a visionary local black minister, Leon Sullivan, who would later be influential in shaping American business practices in South Africa. Sullivan’s hope was to teach various skills to inner-city blacks as a way of lifting the quality of their lives. To Sullivan’s group, Robinson was the epitome of success: a black man who had conquered the worlds of baseball and business.

  In March, Jack crowned what seemed to be his new prosperity after Chock Full o’ Nuts by returning to baseball, albeit only as a television commentator. At a news conference at Toots Shor’s restaurant, a noted sports hangout, Roone Arledge of ABC-TV Sports announced that he had hired Jack for twenty-seven weekly baseball games for the network’s East schedule (Leo Durocher would handle the West), starting April 17. Just after playing in the annual black North-South golf tournament in Miami, Jack traveled to Clearwater, Florida, to begin practicing for his on-air stints. Robinson, hurt at being shut out of organized baseball, had claimed to have lost interest in the game. But his love had returned. “Jack didn’t go to the ballpark,” Rachel said, “but he watched baseball on television and absolutely loved it. He would get up and talk to the hitters and the fielders and the pitchers and he argued with the managers and he hooted and yelled and had a good old time usually.” In fact, the previous fall, watching a thrilling Los Angeles Dodgers game, Robinson’s heart had beat so quickly that he had to turn the set off for relief. He was grateful for his chance with ABC. “If it hadn’t been for sports, I doubt I would have accomplished much in life,” he told a reporter. “Maybe God would have given me some other ability, I don’t know. I do know what athletics have meant to me. It’s nice to be able to repay debts, and I have paid mine, but it’s good to be back in sports.”

  Almost certainly, Jack also nee
ded the money from ABC, which amounted to $13,500, or $500 per game.

  His renewed interest in baseball had resulted in two books. One was Breakthrough to the Big Leagues, aimed at a younger audience. The more provocative volume had come the previous year, 1964: Baseball Has Done It, which the New York Times called “one of the year’s most significant and interesting collections of autobiographical sketches.” This book emphasized the effects of desegregation on baseball, with chapters by a variety of players, black and white, including Jim Gilliam, Billy Bruton, Bobby Bragan, and Alvin Dark. Jack was moved by the testimony of a once hostile white player like Bragan, who had opposed him in 1947 but now was a champion of integration in the game. He also expressed “my delight at the uncompromising stand” taken by Roy Campanella; once wary of protest, Campy was now ready, in Jack’s words, to “hit hard at the immoral and unjust practices” of Jim Crow.

  By this time, too, Jack had tried to make peace with Walter O’Malley. In 1962, in the evening before the Hall of Fame ceremony in Cooperstown, he was having dinner at the Otesaga Hotel with his family when Kay O’Malley, Walter’s wife, came in with their son, Peter. Jack had gone over at once to talk to her. Although they had chatted about various matters, Jack wrote O’Malley a few days later, “I really wanted to talk with her about you and I.” The idea that “I was entering the Hall of Fame and I did not have any real ties with the game” had made him sad. Who was to blame for the souring of their relationship? “Being stubborn, and believing that it all stemmed from my relationship with Mr. Rickey, I made no attempt to find the cause.” Now Jack wanted to talk things out with O’Malley. “Of course, there is the possibility that we are at an impasse, and nothing can be done. I feel, however, I must make this attempt to let you know I sincerely regret we have not tried to find the cause for this breach.” A few days later, in Los Angeles, Robinson called O’Malley’s office to see if they could meet.

  It proved impossible. In his memoir, Off the Record, Buzzie Bavasi would write that O’Malley had taken Jack’s departure in 1956 “as a personal affront” and “an embarrassment” to the Dodgers: “You don’t do things like that to O’Malley. I don’t think he and Jackie ever spoke to each other again.” But some years later Peter O’Malley would say: “I think my dad, like all of us, had extraordinary respect for Jackie, what he had accomplished as a man and what he accomplished for our team, and how he had helped our team win. In all our conversations at home about Jackie and Rachel, I never sensed anything other than that respect and admiration.” In any event, Robinson had no regrets about his attempt to heal the wound opened with his refusal to be traded to the Giants.

  AS JACK PRESSED AHEAD in business, he was proud of the fact that Rachel, too, was advancing. In 1965, she became director of nursing at the state mental health center in New Haven as well as an assistant professor at the Yale University School of Nursing there. Associated with colleagues renowned in the field of psychiatry and psychology, she found much satisfaction in her work. She also knew that her chances of further advancement were limited because of her family commitments, especially her obligations to Jack. “It was something I accepted,” she said. “He and I reached an agreement and I stuck by it. Jack needed me at home and I had to be there. The children needed me, too.”

  Jackie certainly needed her. He was now barely speaking to his father. “Jack felt completely baffled and helpless in the face of Jackie’s growing aloofness,” Rachel later wrote. “He had worked earnestly at being a good man and father, a man his son could be proud of, and he was tormented by Jackie’s plight.” Then, one day in March 1964, she ran into Jackie on a street in downtown Stamford. “With an air of confidence that I hadn’t seen in him for a long time,” she wrote, “he told me he was headed for the army recruitment office and said he had a lot of learning to do and needed discipline as well.” About four months past his seventeenth birthday, he was going to enlist. “In a panic, I tried to talk him out of it,” Rachel recalled, “but then I went with him to the recruiting office. The men there were very good at talking about the chances for education in the Army, how he would be able to learn and so on. We believed them.”

  On March 30, 1964, Jackie enlisted in the Army. For basic training, he was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas—where his father had trained under Jim Crow during World War II. Jackie’s departure saddened Jack; but he, too, believed that the Army could teach his son a great deal. At Christmas, when Jackie returned home on leave, he seemed a much more mature young man. “Jackie has grown a great deal,” his father informed friends. “He seems to be developing into a real man and I am certain his Army stint will be a blessing. He is a real handsome boy.” Still, Robinson could not help noticing, disapprovingly, that “his entire vacation has been used at parties. He still needs to develop but we are proud of the achievements he has made.”

  When Jackie returned to the Army, life at home was quieter, less stressful. On the brink of fifteen that Christmas, Sharon was still a delight to her father. “Sharon is everyone’s girl,” he wrote his friends, “wherever she goes she makes a real impression. She is a beautiful girl, looking and acting more like Rachel every day.” Doing well in high school, careful in her friendships, and steering clear of trouble, she seemed as solid and promising as Jackie Junior was shaky and a question mark. What was true of Sharon also seemed to apply to David, who at thirteen was an excellent student-athlete at the elite New Canaan Country Day School, able to handle with apparent ease many of the privileges and challenges that had upset his brother. “David keeps amazing us,” Jack wrote. “He learned football fast and seems to be potentially good. He learns quick and is one of the hardest workers I have seen. It’s something how he has adjusted to his school and in spite of being over his head in some areas holds his own with the best.”

  Then, late in June 1965, Jackie Junior was suddenly out of the country. He had been shipped to the jungles of Southeast Asia in the first massive escalation of the war in Vietnam. The swiftness of the move stunned his parents. At that time, as with most Americans, neither one opposed the American presence in Vietnam for purely political reasons; for some time, indeed, Jack would defend the war, when pressed, on anticommunist grounds. But their prime concern was their son’s life. The thought of Jackie, a grown man in some ways, still a boy in others, thrust suddenly into deadly combat thousands of miles from home was heart-wrenching to them both. In response to the American escalation, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese had shown themselves to be a formidable enemy. From Hubert Humphrey and his wife, Muriel, as from other friends, came letters of sympathy; the Humphreys were “praying for the safety of your son in Vietnam.”

  IN JULY, JUST AFTER Jackie arrived in Vietnam, Jack and Rachel vacationed in Jamaica. Robinson returned home to pleasant duties—his television work for ABC-TV Sports, but also to flattering appearances such as one at Antioch Baptist Church on July 22, when he was honored at a “Night of Champions” service; or, drawing toward the end of his three-year appointment as head of United Church Men of the National Council of Churches in Christ, as a major speaker at a gathering in New York City of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish leaders. But such events did little to still Jack’s growing sense of disquiet about the way his life was going, and about the country as a whole. Increasingly, the civil rights struggle and explosions in the cities of the North offered younger blacks and whites an ominous counterpoint to the bugle call of patriotism. In August, the Los Angeles suburb of Watts, well known to Jack and Rachel, was shattered by one of the most violent riots in the history of the United States. Thirty-four persons died, more than a thousand were injured, some four thousand arrested, and almost a thousand businesses either destroyed or severely damaged. Lesser explosions followed in several other cities, including Chicago and Philadelphia.

  Speaking for the NAACP, Roy Wilkins expressed his dismay at the futility and self-abuse of this urban rioting. The “most tragic picture” on television, he declared, was that of several Negro children trying to pry open
“a cash register that had already been looted”; the “most frightening” riot cry was that “this is the Negro Revolution!” Riots, Wilkins insisted, “benefit no people, help no cause.” Jack shared Wilkins’s sentiments but he also felt a more restless desire to empathize with the poor and the young. In October, returning to Los Angeles, he went to Watts to view the still-graphic remains of the riot. The sight of gutted businesses and the stories of inhumanity cast a pall over the main reason for his visit: to be honored at homecoming ceremonies at Pasadena City College, formerly Pasadena Junior College, where several of the records he had set between 1937 and 1939 were still standing, including his national junior-college long-jump record of 25 feet 6½ inches. Sitting in an open car beside the homecoming queen, Jack rode around Horrell Field to the applause of spectators, then later delivered the keynote address at a banquet in the main student dining hall.

  In November, nominated by UCLA, he received an honor that even more directly acknowledged the success he had made of his life since then. At the tenth annual Silver Anniversary All-America Awards presented by Sports Illustrated, Robinson was one of twenty-five former college football stars saluted twenty-five years after their senior season for their effective blending of athletics and education. At a nostalgic gathering of the former stars, nobody could wonder for long which one among them had put his college career to the most enduring use. And yet these honors hardly soothed Jack’s growing anxieties about his present life: his declining health, the fragility of his business ventures, his fears about Jackie and about young blacks in general, the deepening national crisis in civil rights and race relations, and his own lack of a sharply defined role in helping to solve these problems.