Rickey & Robinson (7 page)

Briefly to summarize—later we will see him in more detail—I here cite a passage from
The Boys of Summer
:

Robinson could hit and bunt and steal and run. He had intimidating skills, and he burned with a dark fire. He wanted passionately to win. He charged at ballgames. He calculated his rivals’ weaknesses and measured his own strengths and knew—as only a few have ever known—the precise move to make at precisely the moment of maximum effect. His bunts, his steals, and his fake bunts and fake steals humiliated a legion of visiting players. He bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him more strong. If one can be certain of anything in baseball, it is that we shall not look upon his like again.

Once Tim McCarver tried, with reasonable amiability, to sandbag me during a television interview. “You said in one place that Jackie Robinson was the greatest player you ever saw. Somewhere else it was Willie Mays. Which is it?”

Mays had the greatest raw ability of anyone in my time. Speed, power, defense, throwing arm. Probably, although one can’t be sure of this, even greater skills than Joe DiMaggio. But Robinson was the most
exciting
player. No episode in baseball was as rousing as Jackie Robinson caught in a rundown, sprinting, stopping, sprinting, dodging, sprinting and finally breaking free. Of course there was mighty symbolism in the play. Quoting from a Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” But symbolism (and music) aside, it was wonderful baseball.

During Robinson’s playing years, spring training concluded with a cavalcade of exhibition games. Two teams traveled together for 10 days or so in private Pullman cars and shuttled from place to place in the southern states, moving northward and giving thousands their only chance to see major-league baseball firsthand. The Giants, who trained in Phoenix, moved out with the Indians, who trained in Tucson. I journeyed with them when they spent six days traversing Texas. Two Pullman berths became your apartment, the lower for sleeping, the upper for storage. Personally I prefer seven rooms, river view.

The Dodgers, based in Vero Beach, matched with the Braves, who started in Bradenton. The primary purpose of these little odysseys was not to condition the ballplayers. They had already grunted and strained their way into shape among orange groves or desert sands. The purpose, as with all road shows, was to harvest cash. Everywhere, Robinson was the prime gate attraction. As a late sportswriter, the talented Wendell Smith, wrote:

Jackie’s nimble
,

Jackie’s quick
.

Jackie’s making the turnstiles click
.

Apartheid ruled the American South well into the 1950s. The famous Supreme Court decision demanding integration of public schools did not come until 1954. Three years later Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas defied the Court and ordered National Guard soldiers, armed with rifles, to stop African American students from attending Little Rock Central High. Apartheid was persistent, like a plague, and it still was raging when Robinson retired from baseball in 1956. But his career smoked out the bigots almost everywhere they lurked and then revealed America’s homegrown racism in a blazing, inextinguishable light.

The Brooklyn where I grew up was hardly free from bigotry. Much of the hatred was channeled into sewer anti-Semitism promoted by pseudo-religious Roman Catholic groups such as the Christian Front. Some priests preached about Jewish plots to dominate the world. (Perhaps they should have been talking about Hitler.) Others maintained that communism was an international Jewish conspiracy.

A teammate on the Froebel football team, “Fats” Scott, once snapped at me, “You’re a dirty Jew.” I ignored Fats, but I did not ignore Donald Kennedy, the team captain, who started to laugh. “Then you’re a dirty Presbyterian,” I said. Kennedy stopped laughing and we grappled.

A passerby once snapped at me and a friend as we shot marbles on a sidewalk, “You’re Jews, huh? Wanna own the world, huh!” At the time, we were nine years old.

Many Catholic clerics looked back in anger at the crucifixion. “All right, already,” one exasperated Jew is said to have cried out to a threatening mob of Christian Fronters. “We did kill Christ. All right, already. But wouldn’t he have been dead by now anyhow?”

Jews were visible, accounting for a significant portion of the total Brooklyn population of two million. Contending with the ambient anti-Semitism gave many Jewish people a feeling of identity with other victims of discrimination, including blacks. Brooklyn Jews rooted for
Jackie Robinson to succeed as passionately as Alabama Klansmen rooted for him to fail. In turn, Robinson became a ferocious foe of anti-Semitism. When I once sneered at a Dodger utility player as “the dumbest Jew I’ve ever met,” Robinson laced into me for 10 minutes.

In long-ago Brooklyn you seldom saw blacks. A cleaning woman and a postman were the only blacks I encountered as a child. During my four years at Erasmus Hall I attended class with only one black student. That was second-year Latin and the black youngster, totally isolated, performed poorly. From the towers of the Ivy League down to street corners and gutters, the North exuded a bigotry of its own. But Southern racism was a thing apart.

Public water fountains throughout the South, gathering places for children on hot summer days, were marked “White” and “Colored.” So were toilet facilities. No leading Southern hotel or restaurant accepted blacks. A black man couldn’t even buy a beer at a working-class bar. In refined Southern social circles the term nigger was shunned, but neither did you hear the then acceptable word Negro. Southern ladies and gentlemen referred to blacks as “nigras,” pronounced NEE-gras. Nowhere, except at a Klan meeting or a lynching, was Southern bigotry more evident than at the ballparks.

During Robinson’s 10 major-league springs the Dodgers played in a wide variety of Southern ballparks. To cite a few, the spring cavalcade brought them to Hartwell Field in Mobile, Pelican Stadium in New Orleans, Ponce de Leon Park in Atlanta, Sulphur Dell in Nashville and LaGrave Field in Fort Worth. These parks varied in size and appearance. The one constant was segregation. Good seats were available only to whites. This rule was enforced not merely by ushers, but was also supported by state troopers carrying pistols.

When the Dodgers and Braves came to Pelican Stadium one April day in 1953, the sections reserved for whites did not sell out. The black stands were overflowing. Gathering notes, I was standing on the field with Robinson, who was playing catch with Reese when
the Louisiana troopers made a decision. They opened up a few corridors of empty white seats to black fans. The blacks swarmed in, then burst into cheers for the white troopers.

Robinson stopped playing catch. “You stupid bastards,” he shouted. “Don’t cheer those fucking cops. They’re only giving you what’s rightly yours.” He continued shouting until Reese said in his gentle way, “Jack. Did you come out here to warm up or make a speech?”

At Hartwell Field no seats were available for black fans. Attendants strung rope in center field and the blacks who wanted to see the Dodgers play the Braves had to see it standing behind rope. Of course this changed the dimensions of the playing field and distorted the game. Any ball hit into the outfield crowd, but not over the fence, became a ground-rule double.

The cynosure of neighboring eyes was Jackie Robinson. He fouled a pitch. Strike one. The white fans cheered. A curve bounced. Ball one. Now, from behind the ropes, came a cheer from the blacks. The high-decibel competitive cheering persisted and grew louder. I had found a seat in the press box, which was supported by slim poles and had walls of glass. I thought suddenly,
When the race riot starts and the poles get knocked down, how many reporters will be killed by shards of glass?
Nor was I alone in anxiety. George “Shotgun” Shuba, who was playing left field, said he began considering how, when the riot began, he could climb the wall behind him to escape.

There was no riot, just another uncomfortable afternoon of racism. Then we all boarded an (integrated) dining car to eat shrimp cocktail and steaks before moving to our berths or into the (integrated) club car for cards or reading or chatter. But the next day, when we debarked in Montgomery, the racism surrounded all of us again, as strong and virulent as ever. I think a good description of life with the Dodgers in the South back then is contained in the current psychological term “bipolar.” We had a pleasant integrated existence in the train. Then as soon as we stepped off—raw apartheid.

But beyond our shuttling through what the crusading sports editor Stanley Woodward called “the Hookworm Belt,” something beautiful was happening. Like it or not the racists saw—they had to see—that right there before their eyes on the ball fields blacks and whites were working together and usually, since the Dodgers won most of the time, working together in triumph.

“And even beyond that,” Rickey said, proudly, “in the daily papers. A box score tells you who made hits and who scored runs. It does not tell you anything about a man’s religion nor does it even suggest the color of his skin.”

Anyway, each and every April I was glad to get the hell out of Dixie.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

AS I HAVE MENTIONED before, and may well mention again, Rickey traced his integration decision clear back to 1903, when the manager of the Oliver Hotel in South Bend tried to bar Charles Thomas from lodging for a night. To a devout Christian believer such as Rickey, the incident resonated with the Bible story of the first Christmas in Bethlehem. Once again, there was no room at the inn. The episode was fundamental to Rickey’s emotional development and to his long-held determination to bring blacks into the major leagues. When finally he acted, when finally he was free to act, no fewer than 43 seasons later, he found himself ambushed at a secretive baseball meeting held in Cleveland on April 26, 1945. That is another story now clamoring to be told. But to understand the forces that were at play on that contentious afternoon, one first needs to remember that Rickey was a lawyer long before he established himself as a premium baseball man. He did not move to integrate the game until he determined that the law was on his side. Even so, if Rickey read T. S. Eliot—I am not certain that he did—he would have agreed that April is the cruelest month,
although not simply because it mixes memory and desire. Rickey’s April of ’45 mixed ostracism, anger and bigotry.

Again, as with the fans at Ebbets Field, we encounter that special closeness between Jews and blacks, for baseball integration proceeded from the passion of a white Methodist Republican (Rickey), the foresight of a conservative Episcopalian governor (Thomas E. Dewey) and a Jewish counterstrike at anti-Semitism.

For a significant part of the 20th century organized medicine—the American Medical Association and the governing bodies at medical schools—sharply limited the number of Jews allowed into the lucrative business of doctoring. One reason was coldly economic. The WASPs at the top did not want to share the shekels—so to speak—with Jews. Another was irrationally emotional. Do we want to have leering Jews examining our naked Christian ladies?

The situation was particularly dramatic in New York City, where thousands of outstanding Jewish science students were routinely denied admission to medical schools, notably the ones affiliated with the Ivy bastions, Columbia and Cornell. As in Brooklyn, Jews made up a significant percentage of the voters in the city at large, and that was the wedge that various Jewish groups, led by the famous reform rabbi Stephen Wise, used to persuade the state legislature to hold hearings in 1944.

These proved to be a disaster for the Establishment bigots. One dean at Cornell Medical School said that of course a Jewish quota was in effect. No matter how many qualified Jews applied, no more than 5 percent of a freshman class “could be followers of the Hebrew religion.” The dean defended the quota with such stubborn arrogance that some listening to his words heard echoes of Hitlerism. Out of that came the drafting of the so-called Ives-Quinn law, which made job discrimination on the basis of race or religion a crime in New York State. (No mention of age or sex discrimination appeared. Those would have to wait for another time.) Soon journalists and others
were calling this new law, remarkable in its day, FEP, for Fair Employment Practices.

Governor Dewey signed the FEP bill on March 12, 1945, using 22 pens during a crowded ceremony at the Red Room of the state capitol in Albany. The right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler furiously attacked the new law as “pernicious heresy against the ancient privilege of human beings to hate.” But the Federal Council of [Protestant] Churches; the American Jewish Congress; the Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, Richard J. Cushing; and Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP figuratively cheered.

A prominent black news photographer, the late Alfredo “Chick” Solomon, covered the 22-pen signing and drove 150 miles at high (and probably illegal) speed from the state capitol to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where quite coincidentally officials of the Negro National League were holding a routine meeting. Chick Solomon was exultant. He brought copies of the new law with him. “Listen everybody,” he said, “the law is on our side now, doesn’t mean we’re gonna make Christians out of the bastards who run the major leagues. But at least there’s nothing now that can stop a black ballplayer from going up and demanding a tryout.”

Solomon’s view of the power of the law proved optimistic. Change did not come in a rush. (It was not until 10 years later, for example, that the New York Yankees employed their first black major leaguer, the redoubtable catcher Elston Howard. (I have not known a finer gentleman in the game.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT the 1945 baseball meeting at which Rickey was excoriated from his grandson, Branch B. Rickey, then president of the Pacific Coast League and himself a man of considerable eloquence. On the night of September 23, 1997, in the sedate college town of
Princeton, New Jersey, Arnold Rampersad, then Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature and African-American Studies, organized a campus evening called “Remembering Branch Rickey.” Rampersad, who was born in the island state of Trinidad and Tobago, had written a well-received biography of the poet Langston Hughes and then a life of Jackie Robinson, authorized and to some extent controlled by Rachel Robinson, Jack’s strong-willed widow. As Jacqueline Kennedy earlier demonstrated, the influence of a willful widow on the posthumous biography of a hero husband exemplifies the term “mixed blessing.”