Jackie Robinson (73 page)

Inside the convention, he did his best to make his presence felt. He helped bring together most of the black delegates and alternates in
meetings to plan strategy in the face of the wholesale defeat of Scranton’s liberal amendments and Goldwater’s sweep of entire state delegations, such as that of Ohio. Out of this group would come the National Negro Republican Assembly, which sought to advance black interests within the party. In San Francisco, Robinson was “
undoubtedly the leading light and spirit,” according to one reporter, “in a relentless fight for the party and the principles he believes in.” But for Jack, the highlight of the convention was Rockefeller’s doggedly noble performance in addressing the convention, when a torrent of boos, taunts, and jeers by Goldwater supporters all but drowned out his speech. Finding himself behind the Alabama delegation, Robinson became such a vocal one-man cheering section that he almost got into a fist fight with another delegate after someone allegedly threw a lighted cigarette or some sort of corrosive on the jacket of a Rockefeller supporter. For Jack, Rockefeller’s courage would remain vivid. Two years later, he would write that it had been “
a classic and splendid sight to observe this man standing tall in a hostile atmosphere, fighting with all the vigor and eloquence at his command.”

Goldwater won nomination on the first ballot. In his acceptance speech, he offered his dictum that “
extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” These words further alarmed his opponents, including Robinson. Thus when, after the convention, Goldwater reached out to him, Robinson was not receptive. On July 25, he sent Jack a letter that was half conciliatory, half a rebuke. Robinson had attacked him “
rather viciously on several occasions” publicly without seeking to ascertain in person the senator’s views. Now Goldwater “would deem it a great pleasure,” he assured Jack, “to sit down and break bread with you sometime” and explain his positions.

But if Goldwater expected a friendly response to this letter, which he made clear would soon be public, he did not get it. In a reply that Jack also made public, he offered a long, scathing list of questions that Goldwater might answer in the private meeting he proposed. These included queries about his opposition in the Senate to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his silence on certain brutal crimes against civil rights workers that summer, his ties to the John Birch Society, and the treatment of Rockefeller at the convention. No rapprochement was possible between the two men. “
Is it unity you seek or uniformity,” Jack asked rhetorically, “compromise or conformity, cooperation or complaisance?”

For Jack, his duty was now clear. Acting once again as an apparent renegade in party politics, he swung his support to Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota in the Democratic Party. He did so even though he understood that Johnson would be nominated for the presidency. Humphrey’s vigorous
efforts throughout the spring to move the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had earned for him Robinson’s continuing support, which in turn moved Humphrey: “
Your understanding and support mean a great deal to me.” When, after the San Francisco convention, Humphrey wrote Robinson to lament that it was “
truly a great national tragedy” to see extremists capture the Republican Party, Jack volunteered to campaign on behalf of the Johnson-Humphrey ticket.

Jack did not understand how any right-thinking American could support Goldwater, and his severity on this matter embraced even Rockefeller. On October 7, after the governor set aside the memory of his humiliation at the Cow Palace and came out for Goldwater, Jack rebuked him in a stinging letter. “
You know and I know,” he wrote, “that a Goldwater victory would result in violence and bloodshed. His candidacy reeks with prejudice and bigotry.… It seems to me that to support him is to reject the ideals and principles for which the Rockefeller name has always stood. Your doing so is one of the most disappointing things that has ever happened to me.” Robinson became national chairman of the Republicans for Johnson Committee.

In November, Johnson and Humphrey crushed Goldwater and his running mate, William E. Miller. But to Jack’s disappointment, Robert Kennedy, despite Jack’s vigorous support of the incumbent, Kenneth Keating, a liberal Republican, won election to the Senate from New York. It was “
inconceivable to this writer,” Robinson had written, “that New Yorkers will be so blinded by the Kennedy glamour that they will forget the splendid job” done over the years by Keating. In fact, blacks and whites alike rushed to support Kennedy. Robinson continued to hope for a revival of inclusiveness and compassion among the Republicans, and to believe that the African-American future depended on having a black presence on both sides of the party divide. “
We must have a two-party system,” he insisted. “The Negro needs to be able to occupy a bargaining position.” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “
A split ballot can mean a united nation.”

E
ARLY IN 1964
, Robinson was also haunted by the fear that the March on Washington and the killing of Evers and Kennedy, among others, had been a terrible watershed in the nation’s history. Growing gloomy about America, soon he was talking about a white backlash in response to “
the Negro Revolution of the summer, fall and winter of 1963.” But he also saw a new bitterness among young blacks. “
I am no race leader, no social scientist,” he admitted to a reporter, “and claim no special wisdom as a spokesman or analyst. Yet, every dire development which I had envisioned … is coming to pass.” In large part, he was alluding to an epidemic of crime in the black
communities, including violent crimes against whites fueled by racial rage. Lamenting “
the atmosphere of hate which seems to be spreading throughout the land,” he traced much of it to Kennedy’s death, which had demoralized the nation. “We were a saddened people, shaken up by the naked exposure of hatred”; yet now there was “more disunity among Americans today than ever before.”

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.”

A
S 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 simple “
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.”