Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Although there was more than an element of truth in his criticism of Wilkins, Robinson managed only a sputtering response to this counterattack. “I am so sorry you cannot accept honest criticism,” he wrote Wilkins. “I saw for years, first hand, what was going on and it is obvious things have not changed. I don’t intend to remain silent when I see things I believe to be wrong. I have to laugh when you talk about down-to-earth wisdom. When I speak it’s because I know what I am doing. I am sorry the truth hurts so much. I don’t really have to answer to you for what I have done and I certainly will not apologize.… I don’t intend to get into a further hassle with you. Whenever I feel criticism of you, the N.A.A.C.P. or any other organization is justified—expect it.” Five days later, he wrote Wilkins again. “I am not proud of the progress we have made and cannot see why you should be. The Association needs new blood. It needs young men with new ideas and a mind of their own. Unfortunately I don’t think this is true of the present Board.”

  Jack continued to work with the NAACP and other major civil rights groups, but also continued to have serious reservations about their leaders. In 1967, as word spread that Dr. King might run for the presidency on an anti–Vietnam War ticket, Robinson turned his attention to him. On April 8, Robinson made his first, gentle criticism of King, “an idol of mine” but a voice now largely silent about civil rights. Carefully Jack laid out his objection: “It happens that I do not agree with Dr. King in his stand on Vietnam.” America was crying out for leadership on civil rights: “Let us hear from Dr. King on the DOMESTIC crisis.” When King did not reply at once, Robinson raised his voice. “Confused” by King’s record, he called on “Martin” to end his unilateral criticism of United States policy in Vietnam: “Aren’t you being unfair when you place all of the burden of blame upon America and none upon the Communist forces we are fighting?” King should not demand that the United States stop bombing North Vietnam without also insisting that the North Vietnamese cease their own attacks. “Why is it, Martin, that you seem to ignore the blood which is upon their hands and to speak only of the ‘guilt’ of the United States?”

  But as much as he supported Johnson’s Vietnam policy (and lauded his domestic moves, as in that year nominating Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court), Robinson did not want to break with Dr. King. Thus he was utterly relieved late one night when the telephone rang and King was on the line, ready to have a long talk and defend his efforts in the antiwar movement. Robinson’s sense of relief was almost palpable when, in his next column, he bowed to King as “still my leader—a man to whose defense I would come at any time he might need me. This is a personal commitment and a public pledge.” Despite their differences about Vietnam, Jack made clear, he revered King: “If ever a man was placed on this earth by divine force to help solve the doubts and ease the hurts and dispel the fears of mortal man, I believe that man is Dr. King.”

  BETWEEN BLACK POWER and the antiwar movement, the summer of 1967 was a season of turmoil. As a special assistant to the governor, Jack found himself trying to chill one overheated situation after another across the state. Rockefeller understood Jack’s importance in the trenches, as when in June he helped to resolve a “potentially explosive situation,” as Rockefeller called it, in Rochester; or in Buffalo, where Jack roamed the hot streets speaking to people and preaching calm after days of unrest in which more than two hundred youths went to jail. Jack was a shield again when he and the governor attended an acrimonious meeting on racism in the state civil service; or again when, at a “town meeting” in Harlem, the local firebrand Charles Kenyatta, head of a group called the Mau Mau Society, fulminated before Rockefeller against the sinister control of crime and drugs in the ghetto by “the men behind you.”

  Faced by demagogues, Robinson would not back down. In his column, he attacked black leaders who “chickened out” in the face of trouble “for fear of criticism and attack from that noisy minority which seeks to inflame, to urge burning and hate.” A certain statement sent out by Roy Wilkins was fine, but “it should have nailed down issues and called names. It should have identified H. Rap Brown [who had replaced Stokely Carmichael as the leader of SNCC] for what he is—a sensationalist, dangerous, irresponsible agitator who has a talent for getting fires ignited and getting himself safely out of the way.” Brown and Carmichael did not intimidate Robinson. “Stokely Carmichael’s version of Black Power,” Jack declared on television, “can only get us more [George] Wallaces elected to office.” Despite “the frustrations that our young people have had over the years,” street violence served no useful purpose. Black Power should mean “the wise use of our dollar, the wise use of our political strength.… But if we are talking about getting in the streets, resorting to violence, creating disturbances, this cannot help anything.” And yet, asked if he believed with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. that an “obscene distinction” existed between justice for blacks and whites in America, he replied: “There’s no question about it. I agree with him 1,000%.”

  Nevertheless, that November, 1967, Jack called on the unregenerate Powell to resign his seat. In major cities that month, including Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, blacks won office as mayors; Powell was out of step with black progress. And yet Jack’s position also seemed to some people out of step with reality in its linkage to the political fortunes of Rockefeller. This connection offered Jack a measure of authority, as when, in Albany late in November, he addressed a state Conference on Critical Health Problems; or in December, when he and Rachel filled in for Nelson and Happy to host a function at the governor’s mansion. Fundamentally, however, Robinson was in a dependent position. In the superheated political and racial climate of 1967 he had to endure accusations that he was an Uncle Tom.

  Early in 1967, at a gathering of black Republicans in Albany, Jack had fended off unspoken charges that their activity was somehow shameful and compromised. “We will not be traitors to principle,” he insisted. “We will not sell out for personal advantage or gain. We will not become the creatures of either great white fathers or black uncle toms.” But by year’s end he had to deal with two separate public charges by younger blacks that he had indeed become an Uncle Tom. Robinson stood his ground: “I feel perfectly secure in saying that I have not been an Uncle Tom to him and happy to say that the Governor neither wants me as an Uncle Tom nor believes I could become one.”

  Not for the first time in his life, but now from a source he had never expected, Jack had also become the target of much hate mail—and even death threats. Authorities had just uncovered an alleged black nationalist plot to kill Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young. Again Robinson refused to yield. “I don’t seek to be anyone’s martyr or hero,” he pleaded, “but telling it like I think it is—that’s the only way I know how to be me.” Accustomed to attacks, he would not bow to these threats. “I am human,” he wrote. “I like public approval as well as anyone else. But, if I have to be misunderstood and misrepresented because I follow my convictions and speak my mind, then so be it.… In the long run, I’m the guy I have to live with. And if I ever become untrue to myself and to the black people from which I came, I wouldn’t like myself very much.”

  But the new year, 1968, would only further test his courage and resolve. It would be a year largely of death and disappointment, as he and his family, and the nation itself, endured a series of blows for which no one, including Robinson, was well prepared.

  CHAPTER 16

  Rounding Third

  1968–1971

  I can’t imagine what else can happen to us this year.

  —Jackie Robinson (1968)

  FOR ROBINSON, 1968 OPENED on a promising note. A new business venture offered an opportunity to succeed where other schemes had stagnated or failed. On January 4, Sea Host Incorporated, a subsidiary of Proteus Foods & Industries, both of Manhattan, hired him to help launch its main project: the sale of franchises for “fast food” restaurants specializing in fish and other seafood. Jack’s main role would be to publicize the project. I
n addition to seeking out and encouraging potential franchisees, he would secure as much publicity as possible on radio, television, and other media for Sea Host. In return, he would be paid $10,000 a year, $500 for each franchise sold “through your personal contacts,” as well as stock options and a tiny fraction of the gross sales of each franchise in the operation. Finally, if he wanted to take part in the 1968 presidential elections, he was guaranteed a “sabbatical” without pay.

  For Jack, this job represented a hope not only for himself but also for cash-starved blacks eager for a chance to break into business on their own. If in 1968 franchising was still in its relative infancy in the United States, it accounted nevertheless for about ten percent of the gross national product, with almost $90 billion in total sales. With Sea Host, a would-be franchisee needed only about $16,000 to go into business—$2,500 for capitalization costs, $10,000 for the franchise fee, plus an additional sum for equipment and miscellaneous expenses. The franchisee then had a chance to earn between an estimated $10,000 and $18,000 a year in profit. “Our aim is to help people help themselves,” Robinson declared. “With the company’s training program and support, almost anyone prepared to work for his income can become a successful Sea Host franchisee.”

  Robinson offered a rosy picture, but in almost every way this job was a step down for him. His pay was about a quarter of his last Chock Full o’ Nuts salary. Between him and the president of Sea Host, Wah F. Chin, there was little of the mixture of idealism and practicality that had sparked Jack’s relationship with William Black. Formerly, Jack was the head of personnel; with Sea Host, he was more or less a front man, a “shill” for the product. An internal memorandum laid out the company’s hopes in this respect. In general, the opening of franchises would be trumpeted as something far more significant, “particularly for ghetto or ethnic areas.” In particular, Robinson’s work with black investors would bring highly favorable publicity.

  The “utilization” of Robinson’s prestige in the black community was needed because by 1968, the franchising industry was already plagued by accusations of fraud and deception at the expense of gullible or powerless franchisees. In fronting for a corporation that sought to attract black investors, Robinson was placing his own reputation on the line. “I think the masses of black people know,” he declared more than a year later, “that Jack Robinson is not going to sell them out for anything.… I have the feeling that the black community, while they don’t always agree with me, at least know I’m not going to sell them out.”

  JACK’S NEW BUSINESS did not prevent him from giving his time generously, as always, to help others. On January 26, in Los Angeles, he addressed a fund-raising dinner to help endow a professorship in memory of Karl Everette Downs, his former pastor and guide in Pasadena and employer at Samuel Huston College in Texas in 1945; at the dinner, Jack presented the fund with a check for $5,000, a gift from Nelson Rockefeller. In February, still loyal to the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Jack served as national chairman of its Brotherhood Week. He also spoke out on certain issues of the day. In a short letter to the New York Times, he praised the paper for its editorial sympathetic to the singer Eartha Kitt, who was under fire for noisily disrupting a White House luncheon with a protest against the Vietnam War. He joined the national debate about whether or not black athletes should boycott the Olympic Games later that year. While the boycott struck him as unwise, “I do support the individuals who decided to make the sacrifice by giving up their chance to win an Olympic Medal. I respect their courage.” As spokesman for a large group of current and former athletes, he pressed the conservative American Olympic Committee to vote not to readmit the Union of South Africa (barred from the 1964 games) to the Olympics because of its commitment to apartheid. Many Americans, he knew, resented mixing sports and politics; but they should try to “understand the reasons and frustrations behind these protests, and the causes involved, and not just react unfavorably to the mere fact of protest.” He went further. Today’s young athletes, he told the writer Robert Lipsyte, insisted on being heard. “It was different in my day; perhaps we lacked courage.”

  On March 4, Robinson was absorbed in work at his Rockefeller office on West Fifty-fifth Street when a newspaper reporter reached him on the telephone. Did Robinson have any comment? Comment on what? On the news that the police in Stamford had arrested his son Jackie and charged him with possession of marijuana and heroin, as well as a .22-caliber revolver. Early in the morning, narcotics officers had broken up a drug sale in front of the Allison-Scott Hotel in downtown Stamford. Shots were fired both by the police and by Jackie, who fled the scene but was apprehended not far away, on South Street. He was now in the Stamford jail, held on $5,000 bail.

  Since returning to the United States, Jackie had been a mysterious, troubling figure to his parents, adrift and aimless in Colorado, where he was honorably discharged by the Army in 1966, or at home in Stamford, unable to remain in a regular job, a shadowy presence in and out of their house. From Colorado Springs one day, a policeman had called to alert them that Jackie might be heading for trouble; when police stopped his car one day for a traffic offense, they had found inside it drug paraphernalia, which Jackie said belonged to a young woman riding with him. Late one night, a local judge in Stamford had called Jack and Rachel to warn them that the police were about to arrest Jackie. Nevertheless, the charge of possession of heroin came as a shock; the idea that his elder son might be a dope addict, or a dope pusher, or both, stunned Jack. Jackie’s sister, Sharon, would recall first hearing the news on her car radio in Stamford: “I felt hot. Sick. I wanted to scream at someone. Cry out. Blame the faceless-thankless voice on the radio. Smash the dashboard. Crawl into a hole.”

  With their local attorney and friend Sydney Kweskin, Jack and Rachel, accompanied by Sharon, went to the gloomy red-brick prison building to post Jackie’s bail. (David was away at a boarding school, Mount Hermon, in Massachusetts.) On the telephone, Rachel had already arranged for Jackie to be accepted at Yale–New Haven Hospital, where she worked, for detoxification and psychiatric evaluation. Outside the station, reporters peppered Jack with questions and snapped photographs. Roger Kahn, gathering material for The Boys of Summer, saw “a bent gray man, answering questions in a whisper, and drawing shallow breaths, because a longer breath might feed a sob.”

  “Sir, are you going to stick by your son?”

  “We will, but we’ll have to take the consequences.”

  “Were you aware he had certain problems, Mr. Robinson?”

  “He quit high school. He joined the Army. He fought in Vietnam and he was wounded. I’ve had more effect on other people’s kids than on my own.”

  “How do you feel about that, sir?”

  “I couldn’t have had an important effect on anybody’s child, if this happened to my own.” After answering another question “at length, as if in relief, as if in penance,” Jack continued to speak to the reporters but pressed through their ranks with Rachel and Sharon.

  Downstairs they found Jackie slumped in a cell. Rachel and Sharon broke down in tears; Jack was more stoical.

  “Are you all right, son?” he asked, as Rachel reached through the bars to take Jackie’s hand. Eventually Jack posted bail and, with Jackie in tow, left the prison for New Haven. There, Jackie entered the hospital for an extended period of observation and treatment.

  On April 7, Jackie’s case was heard before Judge George DiCenzo. No doubt because Jackie was a first offender, and a veteran, and perhaps also because he was Jackie Robinson’s son, he was given a choice of jail or entering a strict rehabilitation program. Judge DiCenzo ordered that charges against Robinson be delayed for two years, during which time Jackie was to undergo treatment and rehabilitation under state supervision. Two court-appointed psychiatrists, Dr. Herbert Kleber and Dr. Robert Willis—both colleagues of Rachel’s at Yale—testified that for about six months before his arrest, Jackie Junior had been addicted to heroin.

  At the time of
Jackie’s arrest, Jack informed reporters that his son had started smoking marijuana in Vietnam; this was Jackie’s story to him. Gradually the truth came out. Two years later, Jackie would come clean before a United States Senate subcommittee about his drug abuse, which had started in earnest under the abnormal pressures of Vietnam, then accelerated in the United States. “In Colorado I started getting involved with a lot of the camp followers,” Jackie admitted. “These are people that are prostitutes, gamblers, thieves, drug users and pushers that kind of follow Army towns.” In Colorado, he used mainly marijuana, pills, and cough syrup on a daily basis; then, back in the New York area, “I started using cocaine, heroin, occasionally LSD” and amphetamines; “I was using all types of drugs at this point.” He fell also “into about every type of crime that you could get into in order to support my habit at this point.” He would steal from other soldiers, or sell marijuana; “I was breaking into houses and after a while I was selling heroin and cocaine.” He now carried guns routinely, as in Vietnam: “I think it was something I got obsessed with over there and fit very well into the image of what I thought was a man … the image of being tough and fighting and this whole thing being what manhood was all about.”