The Victory Season Page 8

  Rickey made his feelings clear to Harold Parrott, telling him, “Son, the greatest untapped resource of raw material in the history of our game is the black race. The Negro will make us winners for years to come. And for that I will happily bear being a bleeding heart, and a do-gooder, and all that humanitarian rot.”

  The original plan was to sign several Negro Leaguers at once and make the announcement in Look. But New York politics threatened to subsume Rickey before he could make his news public. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and city councilman Ben Davis were proposing to make integrating baseball part of their election campaigns, so Rickey stole a march, ordering his top scout Clyde Sukeforth to bring him forthwith the name of the best-prepared black player for this daring venture.

  Sukeforth returned with the name Jackie Robinson on his lips, and within weeks, Rickey decided to sign Robinson to a minor league contract with the Dodgers’ top farm team, the Montreal Royals of the triple-A International League. Robinson’s Negro League team, the Kansas City Monarchs, wasn’t consulted or compensated.

  From a purely baseball perspective, there were several far more qualified candidates to break the color line than Jackie Roosevelt Robinson. Jack had been a four-sport letterman at UCLA, perhaps the best all-around athlete since Jim Thorpe, despite a childhood bout with rickets. He led the Pacific Coast Conference in scoring twice on the hardwood; averaged more than eleven yards per carry as a football halfback; won the NCAA long jump title; won the conference golf championship; and even made the semis of a national Negro tennis tournament, after picking up a racquet for the first time just a few weeks earlier.

  But while he was solid on the diamond, Robby was hardly a match for some of the players thought most likely to crash through the wall of segregation, like Monte Irvin. Irvin, a powerful outfielder who would lead the Negro Leagues in hitting in 1946 while with the Newark Eagles, was the choice of most blacks to be the first to play in “white folks’ ball” (an honor few of them wanted), but before any inroads could be made in that department, Irvin was drafted. His three years of service in an engineering battalion in France and Belgium left him rusty, and he turned down overtures from Rickey in late 1945.

  Regardless of his actual ability on the field, Robinson had something the other candidates didn’t—experience playing college sports with, and in front of, whites. That counted for a lot, as did his maturity (Robinson was nearing twenty-seven in late 1945). Jackie was also engaged to a nursing student named Rachel Isum, whom he had met at UCLA. That domestic grounding helped further convince Sukeforth, and then Rickey, that Robinson had the right temperament for the role of race pioneer.

  Robinson was born in 1919, in Cairo, Georgia, to the son of a sharecropper. His grandfather was a slave. But the Robinson family moved to Pasadena, California, when Jackie was young, after the family patriarch, Jerry, left one day when Jackie was six months old and didn’t come back. His mother, Mallie, raised Jackie and his three brothers and one sister on her own, and they were the lone black family on their block. Nothing was easy; still, life on the West Coast was easier than it would have been in the Deep South.

  Jackie carried a sizable chip on his shoulder. Some of it was the natural arrogance of a great athlete, some of it his background, and some of it pure pride. He could be tough to get along with, and he had a violent temper (although, to his credit, he seldom let Rachel see that side of him away from the diamond). “Due to his inability to cool it, we were worried about him making the grade,” remembered Quincy Trouppe, a Negro Leaguer who played with Robinson during the winter of 1945. “I remember one day when [teammate] Felton Snow tried to talk to Jackie about the right way to handle a play at shortstop, and Jackie really talked back to him bad.” “A lot of us knew that,” said Negro sportswriter Wendell Smith, who always referred to Robinson as “the young man from the west.” “But we didn’t want to tell Mr. Rickey.” Rickey was clued in almost immediately upon meeting Jackie, writing that he possessed “more and deeper racial resentment than what was expected or hoped for.” He had quoted Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ to Robinson at that fabled first meeting, in August 1945, telling Jackie, “Only he who has conquered himself can conquer his enemies.”

  The press conference, on October 23, 1945, announcing the signing was a sensation. It was held in Montreal, and Rickey didn’t attend. “I just want a chance to play, and I think I can handle the worst of it,” Robinson told reporters. “I don’t look for anything physical. I really believe we have gotten beyond that in this country. I know I’ll take a terrible tongue beating, though. But I think I can take it. I know about that riding white players give one another, and I’m sure it will be much worse for me because I am a Negro.…I’ve had plenty of nasty things said about me from the stands, especially in basketball, where you can hear everything they shout. I think it made me play better.

  “I think I am the right man for this test,” he continued. “There is no possible chance that I will flunk it or quit before the end for any other reason than that I am not a good enough baseball player.” Robby was signed to a $600 monthly salary, with a bonus of $3,500. The Pittsburgh Courier put it aptly when it wrote that Robinson had “the hopes, aspirations and ambitions of 13 million black Americans heaped upon his broad, sturdy shoulders.”

  Upon his signing, most promised to judge Robinson on his merits. However, many critics readied their quills. “The waters of competition in the International League will flood far over his head,” opined the Sporting News. Jimmy Powers of the Daily News, who otherwise pushed hard for integration, thought Robinson “a 1,000–1 shot to make the grade.” Many black players privately thought Robinson had been selected precisely because he wasn’t that good—thus, when he failed, the cause of integration would be set back for years.

  Such a cynical ploy might well have been dreamed up by some of the plutocrats of baseball. Baseball had long resisted breaking the color line for various reasons, most financial. The owners made quite a bit of money renting their parks to Negro League teams, and they feared an end to that gravy train if blacks were allowed in the majors. They also greatly worried that white fans would stay away from the gates in droves if Negroes were competing. So while they stayed off the record as Rickey upended the status quo, privately they were aghast.

  Bob Feller, the Cleveland Indians star pitcher, had competed against Robinson the year before while barnstorming. He predicted Jackie’s failure on account of his “football shoulders,” which would make him vulnerable on inside pitches, or something like that, anyway. Robinson was puzzled by the remark, writing to Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier that fall,

  The few times I have faced Feller has made me confident that the pitching I have faced in the Negro American League was as tough as any I will have to face if I stick with Montreal. There is one thing I would like to have made clear; just what does Feller really mean when he says I have “football shoulders?”

  If Feller’s comments were aimed at getting under Robinson’s skin, he misfired. Jackie had already been through a much more trying episode.

  The success of black soldiers in the service emboldened the civil rights movement. How, went the common refrain, could Negro soldiers have fought for basic human rights when they didn’t have them when they returned home?

  Ironically, it was because of a terrible experience in the army that Robinson became Branch Rickey’s choice to integrate the game.

  Robinson was playing semipro football in Hawaii with the (integrated) Honolulu Bears in the winter of 1941 and working construction during the week. The season over, he embarked at Pearl Harbor on a ship back to California—on December 5, fewer than forty-eight hours before the naval base was attacked by the Japanese. Jackie joined up in early 1942, entering the army. Rachel took losing her boyfriend to war in stride. “All the men in my family were in the army,” she said. “My father was gassed in France during World War One. So I knew the army life. We worried, but we were confident they would serve and come home safe. It prepare
s you—you don’t wring your hands the whole time.”

  Indeed, Rachel too did her bit, becoming a riveter at the Boeing Aircraft factory in San Francisco at night, after a day spent studying nursing. Robinson started at Fort Riley in Kansas. He sent Rachel a box of chocolates every week. “My roommates always knew when to come and get their share,” she says. While in Kansas, Robinson, responding to a company-wide invitation to dinner, placed a telephone call to an officer who had mixed up his seat. Unaware he was talking to Robinson, the officer asked, “How would you like to have your wife sitting next to a nigger?”

  But things were worse at Fort Hood in Texas. He was with the 761st Tank Battalion, a superb unit that was preparing for combat in Europe. Robby was a second lieutenant, and by all accounts an outstanding officer. But an old football injury to his ankle was a piece of red tape the army didn’t like. Robinson was ordered to get an exam for an injury waiver if he wanted to continue with the battalion. He was on his way back from the doctor aboard a military bus when he was told by the driver to sit in the back.

  Service buses had already been desegregated by order of the Pentagon, but that command had not reached down deep in the heart of Texas. Robinson refused to move, and the driver backed down, but back at the fort the driver called the military police. One of the MPs dropped the N word on Robinson, who cursed him in return.

  The commander of the 761st, Paul L. Bates, refused to court-martial Robinson, but an officer higher up the chain wanted to exact a pound of flesh from the uppity black soldier, so Robby was transferred to the 758th, and military justice got involved. Jackie was brought up on multiple charges—drunkenness (Robby didn’t drink), insubordination, conduct unbecoming an officer, you name it. The NAACP wanted to furnish an attorney, but because there were so many pending cases (real or trumped up) against black soldiers, the organization couldn’t spare one. Jackie Robinson was not, as yet, Jackie Robinson.

  So Robinson defended himself. It wasn’t a long process. He admitted he had gotten riled up, explaining that he was “a negro, not a nigger,” and the word had set him off. He told the senior judge, a captain, that he would have cursed him too if the judge had used that word to describe Robinson.

  All nine judges found him not guilty.

  The episode was deeply distressing for Robinson, as one can imagine. But, in a circular way, it was critical to his later success. For after the court-martial, Robinson felt the patriotism leech from his system. He was sent back to the 761st, but even the battalion’s impending journey to fight the Nazis couldn’t rouse him. Robinson was no stranger to racism, but the court-martial charges had been different, more insidious, more upsetting. “He came to see me in San Francisco, and I could see he was ready to leave the Army,” Rachel remembers.

  So Robinson asked for a discharge. The army, eager to wash its hands of the whole affair, quickly agreed. He was transferred to Fort Breckinridge in Kentucky for a few months, then released. It was late fall of 1944.

  Of Robinson’s four sports, baseball was probably his weakest. But the NFL was a backwater, the NBA was yet to exist, and track only mattered every four years (and the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were canceled due to the war). So baseball was Robby’s best bet for getting paid to play ball, and that meant the Negro Leagues.

  In the black community, his name carried weight from his UCLA days, and the Kansas City Monarchs were eager to sign him up. His game was nothing special, and glory on the playing fields of Westwood didn’t sell too many extra tickets. But there was some upside. Robinson got some reps out on the diamond, crucial extra seasoning that he needed.

  More important, Sukeforth saw him playing, something that could not have happened had Robinson been in Europe fighting the Wehrmacht, or even stateside in a staff position. Because he was wearing a Monarchs uniform, and not an army uniform, Robinson was in the right place at the right time. Sukeforth, impressed by Robby’s maturity and athleticism, recommended him to Rickey. And thus was history made—a civil rights breakthrough borne on the winds of prejudice.

  Pee Wee Reese was on a troop ship headed back home from Guam when a sailor told him that the Dodgers had signed a black man. “I’d have to say the word he used was not ‘black,’” Reese added.

  Robinson spent the winter of ’45–46 playing ball in Venezuela. He was a shortstop and roomed with Roy Campanella, his future teammate in Brooklyn. He returned to California in February with an engagement ring in his luggage. “He wasn’t going to propose until he signed a professional contract somewhere,” Rachel remembers. “It was a promise he had made to himelf.” They married at the Independent Church in Los Angeles on the tenth. After a brief honeymoon, the couple arrived at Los Angeles Airport on the late afternoon of February 28. Jack wore a gray business suit, Rachel a long ermine coat with matching hat and an alligator handbag, all wedding gifts from her new husband. They boarded an American Airlines flight to New Orleans, en route to Daytona and a historic training camp.

  Mallie Robinson, Jackie’s mother, was there to see them off. She handed her son a shoe box, and Jackie was surprised to find it filled with fried chicken and hard-boiled eggs. Just what baseball’s race pioneer needed—a boxful of stereotype! But Mrs. Robinson insisted. “I thought something might happen and I didn’t want you starving to death and getting to that baseball camp too weak to hit the ball,” she said later.

  Jack and Rachel arrived in the Crescent City without incident. While waiting for the connecting flight to Pensacola, Rachel saw her first ever “Whites Only” sign. She deliberately drank from the water fountain reserved for caucasians and used the restricted ladies room. Their flight was departing at eleven a.m., but a few minutes before, they were told that they had been bumped and would have to take the noon flight. There was a flight every hour, and the couple was repeatedly bumped off for servicemen. Starving, they asked to sit in the airport restaurant but were refused. So they took a cab to a cruddy local dive that served blacks. “I was almost nauseated,” Rachel recalled. “It was a dirty, dreadful place and they had plastic mattress covers [for tablecloths].” They despondently ate Mallie’s chicken and eggs.

  Rachel shouldn’t have been too surprised, despite her West Coast upbringing and the shelter it brought from the South’s ugly overt racism. Only two days earlier, an argument between a black navy veteran named James Stephenson and his white radio repairman escalated into a full-blown race riot in Columbia, Tennessee. Almost the entire black section of town was arrested. Two weeks before that, a former army serviceman named Isaac Woodward was taken off a bus in South Carolina by police and clubbed so hard he was blinded. An all-white jury would later acquit the officers involved.

  At last, the Robinsons boarded the seven p.m. flight to Pensacola. It was scheduled to refuel and fly on to Daytona, but in the Panhandle, they were bumped again. As they left the plane, they watched two white passengers board. Jackie was already running late, and this was the last flight of the day, so the Robinsons dashed for a bus to take them the final 445 miles of the journey. It would take sixteen hours, so Rickey, covering, told the press that “bad weather” had slowed Jackie’s trip.

  The driver ordered them to the back of the bus, and, unlike at Fort Hood, Robinson was bound by his word to Rickey that he wouldn’t cause any trouble. So he and Rachel sat in the cramped caboose, on seats that didn’t recline, hungry and exhausted.

  Later that year, Robinson would give a long interview to the Richmond Afro-American in which he freighted that discouraging bus ride with considerable long-term import. “I was the advance guard, so to speak,” he said.

  I was the force that had been chosen to establish a beachhead in hostile territory. I was to test the potency of enemy fire. And as I sat there in the rear of that darkened bus with my eyes closed, I decided to map out the strategy I would use. The jostling of the rickety vehicle wouldn’t let me sleep, so there was plenty of time to think. That’s when it came to me that my cause was sure to be a winning cause. I thought of the various weapons the
enemy had used to prove that in the world my race was inferior to all others. One of those weapons was this senseless law which required my wife and me to sit on the backseat of buses in the South. We did it, we still do it, and except for a slight and temporary injury to our pride, nothing really serious comes of it. We suffer no physical harm and their only gain is a false sense of social security. And as I sat there thinking, I tore down each one of the enemy’s antiracial weapons in much the same way—from his carefully hidden peonage system to the Jim Crow educational patterns which still persist all the way up to the steps of the Capitol in Washington. I can’t help feeling that during the sleepless overnight ride from Pensacola, Jackie Robinson matured! By the time I stepped onto the practice field at Daytona Beach for my initial workout in organized baseball, I was ready for anything.

  For her part, Rachel quietly wept in the dark.

  Chapter 8

  Reality Check

  At last, on Saturday, March 2, Robinson arrived for his first pro camp. A racially mixed crowd surrounded the Robinsons as they disembarked from the bus, including John Wright, a second black player, a pitcher, signed (to far less fanfare) by Rickey to co-integrate baseball, and Wendell Smith, the sportswriter from the Pittsburgh Courier, the Negro newspaper with the largest circulation in the country.