Rickey and Robinson (13 page)

The New York Yankees’ 1945 season opener at Yankee Stadium was picketed. “If we can pay, why can’t we play?” black demonstrators shouted.

“I have no hesitancy in saying that the Yankees have no intention of signing Negro players under contract or reservation to Negro clubs,” Yankee president Larry MacPhail responded. “The solution of this problem in professional baseball must be compatible with long-established business and property rights. It is unfortunate that groups of professional political and social drumbeaters are conducting pressure campaigns in an attempt to force major-league clubs to sign Negro players.”

The appointment of A. B. “Happy” Chandler as commissioner of baseball following the death of Judge Landis in 1945 cheered advocates of integration. Chandler publicly presented a different point of view from Landis’s. His reaction to the picketing, the letter writing, and the articles in newspapers urging that blacks be allowed to play majorleague baseball was candid. ‘’I’m for the Four Freedoms,” said Chandler. “If a black boy can make it in Okinawa and Guadalcanal, hell, he can make it in baseball. . . . I don’t believe in barring Negroes from baseball just because they are Negroes.”

At this point, Dr. Dan Dodson turned the Committee on Unity’s attention to integrating major-league baseball. He began by getting in touch with Rickey and MacPhail to explore the possibilities. MacPhail responded immediately.

“We got together at the Squibb Building on Fifth Avenue,” Dodson recalls. “MacPhail laid me out in lavender. ‘You damn professional do-gooders know nothing about baseball. You’re just trying to stir up trouble.’ He said that Negroes weren’t interested in baseball. ‘They don’t play on their sandlots. They don’t play on their college campuses, and none of them would qualify to play in organized baseball. Satchel Paige would have made it, but he’s over the hill now.’ MacPhail argued that baseball was a business. ‘I rented my ballparks to colored clubs this year, and the rental money is the profit I am able to pay my stockholders.’ MacPhail said he didn’t propose disturbing the Negro clubs by hiring one of their numbers; this would rob the black leagues and make it impossible for them to operate. He also said he wouldn’t jeopardize his rental income or the Negro Leagues’ investment until some way could be worked out that wouldn’t hurt the Negro Leagues if the major leagues took an occasional player. But MacPhail had no suggestion as to how this could be done.”

It was two or three weeks after Dodson sent his letter to Rickey that a meeting between them took place. Rickey apologized for the lag between his receiving the letter and their meeting at 215 Montague Street. He had made a considerable investigation of Dodson’s background and of the Mayor’s Committee on Unity. Rickey spent the first thirty minutes or so of the meeting quizzing the professor while chewing on his cigar.

“Now, Dan,” Rickey said, “I have decided that I can trust you. I am satisfied that you are not going to cause any trouble. I am sure that we will be able to work together quite well on the cause. I am going to call you Dan because we are going to be working together for a long time. I am from the Midwest and you are from the Southwest. I understand people from out that way. We also share Methodism as a faith. We should be able to get along very well.” Rickey went into a long story about his religious views and how he felt about baseball. “I once made a promise to my mother to never go to a Sunday baseball game. I have never broken that promise. Dan, I do not break any of my promises.”

At this point, Dodson recalls, Rickey got up and opened a louvered arrangement on the side of the wall. Intricate charts detailed the entire Brooklyn Dodger organizational structure. All the farm clubs were identified-their location, their makeup, the names of all the personnel on them.

“This is the system we now have, Dan, but it will be changing. I will get to that, but first I want to tell you about an incident that has haunted me throughout my life, one that prompted a promise I made to myself.

“When I was a football coach at a midwestern college, I took my team to play in a nearby town. They would not allow a Negro player on my team to have a room at the hotel. I finally persuaded them to let him stay in my room on a cot.

“The player sat on the side of my bed and cried and pulled at one hand with the other and said, ‘God, Mr. Rickey! If I could only change the color of my skin.’

“Dan,” Rickey said, “this made such an impression on me that I decided that if I ever had the opportunity I was going to do something for the Negro race. I have never forgotten it. I thought of it often when I was in St. Louis and they made the Negroes sit in separate sections of the park. I couldn’t do anything about that. I resolved when I came here that the time had arrived to do something.

“Now I am ready!” At this point, Dodson recalls, Rickey became excited, and his voice boomed. “I am ready. I have gone way out on a limb. I have taken a great deal of abuse. They have pilloried me in the press and in the Negro community. They do not know that I created the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers as a subterfuge, to mask my true intentions—to scout Negro players without tipping my hand.

“I have spent more than five thousand dollars scouting players. I feel now I have spotted the player who is most likely to succeed. I am not sure he is the best of the players, Dan, but he is the best hope for doing the whole job.

“The player I have in mind is named Jackie Robinson. He is college-educated. He is intelligent. He is playing in the Negro Leagues right now.”

His evangelistic fervor nearly spent, Rickey sat down behind his desk and lit a fresh cigar. Dodson was stunned. He had come to the meeting hoping to reach first base. He found instead that Rickey was already rounding third and heading home. The first person outside of Rickey’s inner circle to know of the secret plan to integrate baseball, Dodson vowed his support and any assistance he could offer.

“Mr. Rickey said there was a great deal of work to be done,” Dodson remembers. “He asked for my help in getting material on Negroes in other sports. He wanted to know whom he could turn to for guidance in the Negro community and the community at large. He asked if we could get this Committee [the End Jim Crow in Baseball Committee, which Rickey was convin·ced was Communistinspired] out of the way until he had a chance to do something. When, he wondered, should the signing of the contract be announced? What did we know about how integration is accomplished? What experience was there?”

There were to be many meetings between the professor and the baseball executive in the months ahead. They were to become allies and then friends.

“I was so sure of Mr. Rickey and his honesty that I was willing to do all he asked,” Dr. Dodson said. The two Methodists meeting in downtown Brooklyn in the final months of World War II forged that day a union of trust and dedication.

Chapter Seven

The Signing

Mrs. Effa Manley, owner of the Newark Eagles, organized a Negro All-Star team to play a five-game exhibition series against a club of white major-leaguers in October 1945. She recruited Roy Campanella to be the catcher for the Negro All-Stars. Four games were played in Brooklyn; one took place in Newark, New Jersey. After the game in Newark, Charlie Dressen, manager of the white team, approached Campanella. “To tell the truth,” recalls Campanella, “I had no idea who Charlie was.” Dressen asked Campanella if he would like to meet with Branch Rickey. “I remember I had to spend quite a time with Charlie to find out how to get to Mr. Rickey in Brooklyn,” notes Campanella, but he eventually found his way through the New York City subway system to 215 Montague Street.

The meeting was different from the one Rickey had had in August with Jackie Robinson. “Mr. Rickey sat behind his desk and didn’t do any talking for about four or five minutes,” Campanella recalls. “He just looked me over from behind those horn-rimmed glasses.”

Finally Rickey told Campanella that he had assigned Oscar Robertson, a former Negro Leagues first baseman, to look into the black catcher’s life. “He had a black book,” says Campanella, “and it was about four inches thick. It was in front of him on the desk. And he kept reading out of it. He knew everything about my family. He was interested in the fact that I had a black mother and a white father, that I went to an integrated school.”

Rickey put down the black book and began a long speech; Campanella remembers thinking, “If I could catch like he could talk, I would have been a genius, for that Mr. Rickey knew how to catch from behind a desk.”

“I’ve investigated dozens of players in the Negro Leagues,” Rickey began. “I’ve tried to learn as much as I could about their personal habits, their family life, their social activities, their early childhood, their friends, their schooling. I have attempted to learn for myself all I could about them. I have rejected a number of possibilities who I am sure have the ability because they are lacking in other requisites. It’s either character, habits, or what have you.

“You’re different, Roy. Your record is good . . . no arrests, no trouble, a good family, a hard worker, a fellow who has the ability to get along with people.” At this point, the Dodger executive paused. He lit a match and put the flame up against his half-smoked cigar, making the end glow a dull orange.

“What do you weigh, Campy?”

“Two fifteen to two twenty.”

“Judas Priest!” Rickey shouted. “You can’t weigh that much and play ball!”

“All I know is that I’ve been doing it every day for years and it’s worked out fine.”

Rickey knew how well it had worked out. A couple of months before he had sent Clyde Sukeforth to scout Newark Eagles pitcher Don Newcombe. Sukeforth was impressed by Newcombe but also impressed with the catcher on the opposing team, Roy Campanella of the Baltimore Elite Giants. A week after Sukeforth’s scouting expedition, Rickey and his wife went to Jersey City. They watched Campanella catch both ends of a doubleheader. Rickey agreed with Sukeforth’s high opinion of Campanella.

“Everything is fine,” Rickey continued. “The one thing that puzzles me is your age. I have your age noted in this book,” Rickey gestured down to the black book. “You sure this is your right age?”

“Sure, it’s my right age. I’m twenty-three. Iwas born November nineteenth, 1921. I’ll be twenty-four next month.” Campanella was a bit annoyed.

“You look older.”

“Mr. Rickey, I’ve been playing ball for a long time.”

Rickey removed the cigar from between his fingers and placed it in a large ashtray on his desk. “I was a catcher, Campy, you know. You’re a catcher. I think that’s why we’ll always be able to get along. I have had to ask you some of these questions. They were important. Now Iam going to ask you the most important one: Vlould you like to play for me?”

Campanella knew about Rickey’s sponsorship of the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers and thought that he was being offered a position with that team.

“I’m doing all right where Iam, Mr. Rickey. I’ve been working for the same man for nine years. I like the man. I am one of the highest-paid players in the colored leagues. I make three thousand dollars a year and another two thousand from winter ball. I’m not interested, Mr. Rickey, in changing what I’m doing.”

“All right,” Rickey said calmly. “I understand, Roy. I want you to make me a promise. You promise me that you won’t sign a contract with anyone else unless you talk to me.”

Campanella had no trouble agreeing to the suggestion. “I don’t sign contracts, Mr. Rickey. I just play ball.”

Rickey stood up from behind the leather swivel chair and came out from behind the desk. He extended his hand. Campanella could feel the gnarled fingers and Rickey felt Campanella’s rough and bruised catcher’s hand. “111 be in touch with you,” were Rickey’s final words. Campanella was anxious to leave to get something to eat and to be out in the fresh air to clear his head of all the words.

Campanella returned to the Woodside Hotel in Harlem, where he was staying along with other Negro ballplayers who were enjoying a brief vacation in New York City before going to Venezuela for the winter baseball season. He settled down to a game of poker. One of the players was Jackie Robinson, the shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs whom Campy had played against twice during the summer of 1945.

“We got to playing cards and talking,” Campy remembers. “And Jackie told me, ‘Roy, Mr. Rickey is signing up colored boys.’ I had heard that kind of talk all the time from one player or another. They all had those kinds of pipe dreams. I told him, ‘Jackie, I don’t believe that kind of talk anymore.’

“Then Jackie told me that he had been signed up to play for Montreal and that the announcement was going to be made very soon. He told me not to tell anyone. ‘They’ll hear about it themselves,’ he said, and he had a big smile, a real big smile on his face when he said those words.”

On October 23, 1945, the announcement was made that Jackie Robinson had signed a contract to play for the Montreal Royals in the International League. The signing was the most dramatic and controversial sports story of he

When the news came over the radio at the Woodside Hotel in Harlem, there was loud cheering.

“I hope he makes it,” said Sam Jethroe, who had been with Robinson at the Fenway Park tryout, “because if he does, I know I can.”

“I’m afraid Jackie’s in for a whole lot of trouble,” warned fabled Buck Leonard, a longtime Negro Leagues star.

Roy Campanella was distressed. “I felt bad. Not that Jackie had signed, it didn’t matter to me who was number one. I felt bad that I had said no to Mr. Rickey. But he had said he would get in touch with me, so I decided to go to Venezuela and play ball and wait to hear from him.”

Rickey heard from a lot of the owners. “When he finally decided to sign Jackie,” Mal Goode reports, “men like Connie Mack in Philadelphia, Griffith in Washington, McKinney, who owned the Pirates, and Breadon in St. Louis were calling him. ‘Branch, you’re gonna kill baseball bringing that nigger into baseball now,’ they said.

“’You run your ball club, and I1l run mine,’ Rickey told them.”

The October signing was carefully plan ed. desegregation that I passed on to Mr. Rickey,” explained Professor Dodson, “was that it succeeds best when management at the top takes a firm stand. I suggested that the contract with Robinson be signed before other players negotiated contracts for the spring, so that it would be clear that if they signed with the Dodgers for the coming year, they in all likelihood would be playing with black players in the future. I suggested to Mr. Rickey that he stand firm on this and not equivocate.”

There had also been a question about where Robinson should play. Rickey personally decided on Montreal. “It is the best place,” Rickey told Dodson, who recalls the twinkle in Rickey’s eyes as he spoke of the city. “It has a heavy French influence, and their attitudes toward colored people are not what they are in the States, It also has the advantage that he would be playing in the eastern part of the United States most of the time, and the International League cities for the most part are urban places without the southern rural influence. Finally, the best press coverage would come out of Montreal.”

Rickey told reporters, “My job is to build a baseball team. I have spent three years and twenty-five thousand dollars searching for Robinson. When I go after baseball players, sitting on the bench they all look as alike to me as doorbells. I never notice the color of their skins. I never meant to be a crusader, and I hope I won’t be regarded as one. My purpose is to be fair to all people. My one selfish objective is to win ballgames.”

A veteran player of many years in the Negro Leagues took a more cynical view: “That Branch Rickey was not just doing a little black boy a favor. He had more to offer to those sixteen prejudiced owners than just one black boy: He had those hundreds of thousands of Negro fans.”

Minor-league baseball commissioner William Bramham also questioned the purity of Rickey’s motives. “Father Divine [the flamboyant black evangelical minister] will have to look to his laurels,” said Bramham, “for we can expect a Rickey Temple to be in the course of construction in Harlem soon. . . . Whenever I hear a white man, whether he be from the North, South, East, or West, protesting what a friend he is to the Negro race, right then I know the Negro needs a bodyguard. It is those of the carpetbagger stripe of the white race, under the guise of helping but in truth using the Negro for their own selfish interests, who retard the race.”

Hall of Farner Monte Irvin was a star for the Newark Black Eagles then. His New Jersey scholastic sports feats had mirrored Robinson’s accomplishments in California. “I was delighted,” the soft-spoken Irvin notes, “but there was a certain amount of jealousy. I knew it would give us all a chance to possibly make it, but there was a certain amount of envy that he had been picked. There were real stars in the Negro Leagues—Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Roy Campanella. Those guys were proven stars. But they said Branch wanted a guy with talent and a college education, able to express himself with the press and in other situations. Jackie was perfect for all this. And we knew that if he made it there was a chance for the door to swing really open for all the black athletes not only in baseball, but for all the other professional sports. And it happened just that way. We were truly for him one hundred percent, but there was also a certain amount of jealousy.”

Pee Wee Reese was aboard a ship returning to the United States from Guam. “I was told that a black had signed to play for Brooklyn,” recalls Reese, “although I’d have to say that the word that was used was not ‘black.’ Like most Americans who were white, I didn’t know what a black athlete was like. I just assumed they weren’t good enough for the big leagues. I had heard the talk, you know, that if you threw at them, they backed down.”

Reese then learned that the new man played shortstop. “Dammit, I thought,” Reese recalled. “There are nine positions on the field and this guy has got to be a shortstop like me. I began to wonder what the people in Louisville would think about me playing with a colored boy. Then I thought, the hell with anyone who didn’t like it—he deserved a chance just like anybody else.”

Willa Mae Walker, three years and eight months older than her brother Jackie, remembers the reaction of the family. “We were all very happy,” she says, “but we were frightened, too, because we knew there had never been any blacks in organized baseball.”

Satchel Paige, the longtime pitching star who had toiled all those many years in the Negro Leagues for the Kansas City Monarchs, thought the Dodgers had signed the right man. “Jack’s the number-one professional player. They couldn’t have picked a better man,” said the man who was now too old to be number one.

Paige was a prime example of how a black star made his living before the possibility of a major-league career. Estimated to have pitched thirty-three years, winning more than two thousand games, Paige traveled all over the world to play baseball. By car, by bus—some say even by horse—wherever there was a game, there was Satch. His nickname came from the fact that most of those years he lived out of a suitcase, or satchel. Breaking into the majors at an age when most players have since retired, Paige had a long career there. “Even though I got old, my arm stayed nineteen,” claimed the Hall of Fame pitcher.

Many disagreed with Paige that Robinson was a good choice. Bob Feller, who had played against Robinson when a white All-Star team competed against the Monarchs, said, “He won’t make it. That guy’s got football shoulders. He’s all tied up in the neck.”

A week after Robinson’s signing,
The Sporting News
attacked those who opposed him on racial grounds, calling them “un-American.” Then the most powerful baseball newspaper in the United States proceeded to evaluate the black pioneer’s chances: “Robinson, at twenty-six, is reported to possess baseball abilities, which, were he white, would make him eligible for a trial with, let us say, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Class B farm at Newport News, if he were six years younger. . . . The war is over. Hundreds of fine players are rushing out of the service and back into the roster of organized baseball. Robinson conceivably will discover that as a twenty-sixyear-old shortstop just off the sandlots, the waters of competition in the International League will flow far over his head.”

Walter O’Malley explained why Robinson’s age was so important. “We wanted a fellow who was a little older than the average athlete, because we knew that what he would face would require maturity. It got down to two men, Jackie and Roy Campanella. Branch wanted Jackie because he knew Jackie had absolutely fierce pride and determination.”

Rickey’s motivations for signing Robinson have always been questioned. How much came from a moral conviction that the color bar must go, and how much came from a desire to make money and field a winning team? Monte Irvin suggests that what Rickey did is far more important than why he did it. “Regardless of the motives,” Irvin observes, “Rickey had the conviction to pursue it and to follow through.”