Jackie Robinson (49 page)

Not once in his twelve years in professional baseball would Robinson strike another player with his fist. Still, his reputation for violence grew, even as other players crossed the line but kept their reputations largely untouched. For example, Jack seldom went as far as the congenial Campanella went once that year. After being knocked down by two tight pitches from Lew Burdette of the Braves, who then allegedly called him a “
black nigger bastard,” Campanella advanced on the pitcher brandishing his bat before umpires and other players intervened. (Robinson claimed that Burdette called him, too, a “black bastard.”) Nor did Jack ever go as far as his teammate
Carl Furillo went on Sunday, September 6, in a game against the Giants. Infuriated at being hit by the pitcher Ruben Gomez, Furillo headed for the Giants’ dugout to do battle with Durocher, the Giants’ manager, the author of the injury, in Furillo’s mind. Knocking Durocher over, Furillo seized his bald head in a viselike grip, then started to strangle him (even as umpire Babe Pinelli advised, “Kill him, Carl, kill him”). At worst, the incident added to Furillo’s reputation as a hot-tempered knucklehead. Had Robinson done the same thing—wrestled a manager to the ground and punched him in the head—his career would probably have been in jeopardy.

Virtually all other players were seen as individuals; somehow, Robinson was always a symbol, both an individual human being and also a figment of America’s guilty, shame-filled imagination. He was an exception even among the black players, whose conduct in facing the white world, during this first, tightly watched decade of racial integration, ranged mainly from congeniality, on the one hand, to rank obsequiousness, on the other. Only Jackie Robinson insisted, day in and day out, on challenging America on the matter of race and justice.

Not everyone criticized him. Many writers regretted the possibility of his retirement. (In August, when a knee injury benched him for several games, he talked of having “
another two or three years to go as a full-time player.”) Even a reporter who urged him to give up also saluted him: “
He still compensates for his loss of speed with tremendous competitive spirit, lightning reflexes and a profound instinct for being at the right place at the right time.” In the New York
Post,
Jimmy Cannon hailed Robinson in a lyrical tribute that stressed his uncanny indispensability to his team. Jack was not as prolific as Ralph Kiner, or a greater hitter than Ted Williams, or as “
serenely dependable” as Stan Musial, or possessed of DiMaggio’s “languid grace. But you can do more things than any ball player of your time.… You had more ways to beat the other people than any man in your time.”

Blessed with outstanding hitting and a balanced pitching corps of Erskine, Meyer, Loes, Labine, and Roe, Brooklyn cruised in 1953 to its
most impressive pennant victory ever. Topping both leagues, the Dodgers clouted 202 homers; Snider and Campanella hit 41 and 40 respectively. Five Dodgers, including Robinson, hit above .300, with Furillo leading the majors with .344 and Snider not far behind with .336. On September 12, Brooklyn clinched the pennant by 13 games; they had more wins that season, 105, than any other Dodger team before them. Robinson, too, enjoyed an excellent year. Playing in 136 games, he succeeded in lifting his average from .308 in 1952 to .329 in 1953, with 12 home runs, 17 stolen bases, and 95 runs batted in. Except for his MVP season in 1949, this was his most productive year driving in runs.

For Robinson, as for many of the Dodgers, the World Series offered a challenge he faced with an almost bizarre mixture of confidence and resignation. “
If we don’t win it this time,” he declared, “we’ll never win it. We have the ball club this year, the kind of team it takes to beat the Yankees. We have the power, the kind of hitters who can belt the ball out of the park at any time, on any pitch.” Brooklyn had all that, certainly; but the Yankees won the series in six games. Yankee power asserted itself in the fifth game, when Mickey Mantle hit a grand slam; and his pal Billy Martin sealed the series victory for the second straight year when he drove home the winning run in the ninth inning of the last game.

In November, joining Carl Hubbell, Stan Musial, and Rogers Hornsby as the only other two-time winners in league history, Roy Campanella won the 1953 MVP award (Gilliam was Rookie of the Year). In the voting for MVP, despite his good year, Jack received only 19 votes to Campy’s 297, and he also failed to make the 1953 all-star team chosen by the baseball writers. In the Pittsburgh
Courier,
a gossip columnist took two shots at Robinson. For the second year in a row, he noted, Jackie Junior’s birthday party on November 18 was an event “
in which the juvenile guests were overwhelmingly members of the majority.” Also, “
the grapevine claims that a certain Negro star was more than a little agitated because Campanella won the MVP award a second time.”

Another unsettling change hit the Dodgers. On October 14, Charlie Dressen, insisting on a two-year contract after three successful years as manager, was forced out by Walter O’Malley, who would not budge from a one-year deal. Dressen’s departure sickened Robinson, who thereafter passed up few opportunities to proclaim Dressen the most intelligent and quick-witted skipper he had ever known. (However, the one-year contract would become a Dodger tradition, even as over the following forty-two years, ironically, the team employed only two managers.) Later that month, the popular Dodgers announcer Red Barber also left Brooklyn, to join the Yankees’ broadcasting team. More talk was heard of a possible
trade involving Robinson. This time, Jack allowed that he would accept a trade, provided that he could stay in New York. “
If I am traded outside New York,” he said, “I will quit baseball. All my business interests are in New York City and I have too much at stake to leave them.”

D
ESPITE HIS EXPRESS
wish never to barnstorm again, the World Series was barely over when Jack set off on yet another month-long tour promoted by Ted Worner. This time, Jack’s team broke daring new ground by including three white players. Hodges of the Dodgers and Branca, formerly of the Dodgers and now with the Detroit Tigers, both signed up with Jack, as did second baseman Bobby Young of the newly formed Baltimore Orioles. (Willie Mays, on furlough from the Army, also played in one game for Robinson.) An average of about three thousand fans turned out for the first fifteen games, but twice that number were on hand in Memphis, Tennessee, when Jack found himself the center of an embarrassing dispute. There, as in Birmingham, Alabama, after city officials made clear their opposition to interracial play, his white players sat out the game. Soon, critics accused Robinson of caving in to Jim Crow, which he denied. “
I had nothing to do with it,” he asserted, “and I certainly didn’t bench anyone.” He was only the field skipper, he pointed out, not the manager of the team; the white players had stayed away on their own, so as not to disrupt the tour.

Later, in New York, speaking at the Harlem YMCA, Robinson was somewhat more forthcoming and accepted some responsibility for the decision. Conceding that he “
may have been wrong,” he explained that he had acted as he did “because I thought it was right.” In benching the players, or condoning the decision to bench them, he had heeded the advice of blacks and whites alike. In Birmingham, many people were afraid that one candidate running for sheriff, Eugene “Bull” Connor, a race-baiter who would later play a major role in the civil rights movement, would exploit the issue to win the election (Connor was defeated). Clearly rethinking his actions, Jack promised to take another interracial team into the South—and give the entire proceeds to local charities. (Later that year, the ban on interracial play was rescinded in Birmingham.)

Fleeing the South and its benighted ways, Jack returned to the North in time to experience on the evening of November 23 what he freely called “
one of the great thrills of my life,” when he and Rachel attended a dinner in Washington, D.C., to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The guest of honor was President Eisenhower, whose speech (noteworthy because it included his first clear criticism, albeit implied, of Senator Joseph McCarthy) was carried live by
the four major television networks. In addition to many senators and other prominent politicians, a bevy of Broadway, movie, and television stars— including Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Ethel Merman, Helen Hayes, and Eddie Fisher—lent further glamour to the occasion. For Jack, however, the most memorable moment came following the President’s speech, when several of the stars walked up to the dais to shake Eisenhower’s hand. Jack himself was supposed to join them but was somehow delayed; when he stood up, the President was already returning to his own seat. But when he saw Jack rise, the President turned around and, with all eyes trained on him, strode between the tables to offer his outstretched hand to a stunned Robinson.

“
To think the President of the United States would come halfway across a room just to shake my hand!” Jack told a reporter. Two days later, he was still elated when he wrote to assure Eisenhower that for all the “
great privilege” of dining with the President, “it was equally great for me to experience the warmth and sincerity of your handshake in the midst of such an illustrious group of Americans.” Such events “make us certain our faith in democracy is indeed justified.” The previous year, at a hotel in Chicago during the Republican National Convention, Jack had also met Richard M. Nixon, soon to be elected Vice-President, and had been impressed not only by his warmth but also by his evident admiration for Robinson, who had grown up not far from Whittier, Nixon’s hometown. The Republican national leadership suddenly seemed far more attractive to a man who, on his Army induction statement in 1942, had declared his family to be inveterate Democrats.

Late in 1953, Jack’s interest in party politics was still limited, but his interest in civil rights was starting to grow. Accordingly, in January 1954 he accepted the chairmanship of the Commission on Community Organizations of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Exactly how Robinson became involved in the NCCJ is not clear; but in the era before the bloodiest years of the civil rights movement in the South, the NCCJ offered an engaging profile to many Americans interested in working for religious and racial harmony. Founded in 1928, its first major program defended Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic, and the Roman Catholic Church against defamatory attacks sparked by Smith’s run for the presidency that year. In 1934, the NCCJ started Brotherhood Week (usually held in February), which became so prestigious an event that the President usually served as its honorary chair. During the war, despite the global conflict, the NCCJ kept its basic goals in sight; afterward, in 1950, it launched a World Brotherhood organization. By 1954, the NCCJ had established a network of about sixty offices across the United States. That year, recruiting Jackie
Robinson to its ranks was a major coup as the conference sought to adapt to an emerging redefinition of brotherhood, one that would emphasize racial justice in the age of desegregation.

In February, accompanied by Louis A. Radelet, an NCCJ official, Jack left New York on an extended lecture tour of a number of towns and cities from Pittsburgh in the East to Los Angeles in the West. For Jack, the tour offered a chance to speak to thousands of people, especially youngsters, about the importance of not only racial tolerance but also religion, education, and family life—his core beliefs. For his listeners, most of whom were white, he probably offered a heady mixture of novelty, glamour, and old-fashioned moral values articulated simply but with evident sincerity. “
Education must begin in the home and church and then in the public institutions,” Jack told his listeners, as he hammered away at the tragic rise of juvenile delinquency. Young people must practice self-discipline and learn a balanced approach to victory and defeat in sport as in life. “Americans have to learn to lose as well as win,” he declared. “It is of utmost importance to learn the values of winning and losing and acquire the virtue of sportsmanship.”

Tolerance, he preached, was crucial both to the nation and to each individual human being. “
Brotherhood is a big word for a big idea,” Jack wrote some time later in an editorial in an NCCJ magazine aimed at the young. “You should be learning to be a good human being and a good American. They’re one and the same thing, really. You become a better human being by being a better American.… Begin by respecting the other person. Treat him fairly.… If you look down on him, you hurt yourself as much as you hurt him.… The Big Game is being played every minute of every day of our lives.… It requires teamwork, and the first step is for all of us to be the best person we can be.”

Nothing he said was profound, but to many listeners Jack’s visit was memorable. To one of his hosts, Robinson’s “
dedication to good human relations, his sincerity of purpose, and his charming and inspiring personality have contributed more to the spirit of brotherhood in Pittsburgh than anything which has happened in a long time.” In Tulsa, where Jack also spoke to high-school students, a local official insisted that “
I never witnessed more rapt attention to a speaker in a meeting.” A Los Angeles leader, praising Robinson’s “
modesty and deep sincerity,” noted the fact that “he is making a most significant contribution to the unity so essential to the survival of our democratic heritage.”

Speaking for the NCCJ gave Robinson a sense of satisfaction matched by little that happened at the ballpark. It also exposed the hollowness of his position as a vice-president and director of community services at NBC.
Despite a showy office in Rockefeller Center, he was accomplishing little. This was disappointing. The year before, 1953, he had drafted a letter proposing that the network make it possible for him to retire from baseball at the end of the season. Sometimes the network appeared to value him. “
Jackie isn’t just a ball player,” the NBC general manager, Ted Cott, had declared in 1953. “He’s a big draw, both as a person and as a symbol … and one of our best door-openers.” And in December, just before Jack resigned, General David Sarnoff, the head of NBC, defended Robinson after someone complained about an article in
Jet
magazine where Jack appeared to criticize the network. Sarnoff pointed out that Robinson had in fact defended the company and its record in race relations. Robinson would resign, he had told the press, if he ever found NBC deficient in this way.