Peter Dreier / Research & Analysis / Players
Jackie
Robinson was a radical – don’t listen to the sanitized version
of history
By
Peter Dreier
The
Conversation
April
14, 2022
Jackie
Robinson
addresses civil rights supporters protesting outside the 1964 GOP
National
Convention. Ted
Streshinsky/Corbis via Getty Images
In
our new book, “Baseball
Rebels:
The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and
Changed
America,”
Rob Elias and I profile the many iconoclasts, dissenters and
mavericks who defied baseball’s and society’s establishment.
But
none took as many risks – and had as big an impact – as Jackie
Robinson. Though Robinson was a fierce competitor, an outstanding
athlete and a
deeply religious
man,
the aspect of his
legacy that often gets glossed over is that he was also a radical.
The
sanitized version of the Jackie Robinson story goes something
like this: He was a remarkable athlete who, with
his unusual
level of self-control,
was the perfect person to break baseball’s color line. In the
face of jeers and taunts, he was able to put his head down and let his
play do
the talking, becoming a symbol of the promise of a racially integrated
society.
With
this April 15 marking the 75th anniversary of Jackie
Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color line, Major League Baseball will
celebrate
the occasion with great fanfare – with tributes,
movies, TV
specials, museum
exhibits and symposia.
I
wonder, however, about the extent to which these celebrations
will downplay his activism during and after his playing career. Will
they delve
into the forces arrayed against Robinson – the players, fans,
reporters,
politicians and baseball executives who scorned his outspoken views on
race?
Will any Jackie Robinson Day events mention that, toward the end of his
life,
he wrote that he had become so disillusioned with the country’s racial
progress
that he couldn’t stand for the flag and sing the national anthem?
Laying
the groundwork
Robinson
was a rebel before he broke baseball’s color line.
When
he was a soldier during World War II, his superiors sought to
keep him out of officer candidate school. He persevered and became a
second
lieutenant. But in 1944, while assigned to a training camp at Fort Hood
in
Texas, he
refused to move
to the back of an army bus when
the white driver ordered him to do so.
Robinson
faced trumped-up charges of insubordination, disturbing
the peace, drunkenness, conduct unbecoming an officer and refusing to
obey the
orders of a superior officer. Voting by secret ballot, the nine
military judges
– only one of them Black – found Robinson not guilty. In November, he
was honorably
discharged from the Army.
Describing
the ordeal, Robinson later wrote, “It was a small
victory, for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the
foreign
enemy, the other against prejudice at home.”
Three
years later, Robinson would suit up for the Dodgers.
His
arrival didn’t occur in a vacuum. It marked the culmination
of more
than a decade
of protests to
desegregate the national pastime. It was a political
victory brought about by a persistent and progressive movement that
confronted
powerful business interests that were reluctant – even opposed – to
bring about
change.
Beginning
in the 1930s, the movement mobilized a broad coalition
of organizations – the Black press, civil rights groups, the Communist
Party,
progressive white activists, left-wing unions and radical politicians –
that
waged a sustained
campaign to
integrate
baseball.
Biting
his tongue, biding his time
This
protest movement set the stage for Brooklyn Dodgers executive
Branch Rickey to sign Robinson to a contract in 1945. Robinson spent
the 1946
season with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm club, where he
led the
team to the minor league championship. The following season, he was
brought up
to the big leagues.
Robinson promised
Rickey that
– at least
during his rookie year – he wouldn’t respond to the verbal barbs from
fans,
managers and other players he would face on a daily basis.
His
first test took place a week after he joined the Dodgers, during
a game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Phillies manager Ben
Chapman called
Robinson
the n-word and shouted, “Go back to the cotton field where you belong.”
Though
Robinson seethed with anger, he kept his promise to Rickey,
enduring the abuse without retaliating.
But
after that first year, he increasingly spoke out against
racial injustice in speeches, interviews and his regular newspaper
columns for
The Pittsburgh Courier, New York Post and the New York Amsterdam News.
Many
sportswriters and most other players – including some of his
fellow Black players – balked at the way Robinson talked about race.
They
thought he was too angry, too vocal.
Syndicated
sports columnist Dick Young of the New York Daily News
griped that when he talked to Robinson’s Black teammate Roy Campanella,
they
stuck to baseball. But when he spoke with Robinson, “sooner or later we
get
around to social issues.”
A
1953 article in Sport magazine titled “Why They Boo Jackie
Robinson” described the second baseman as “combative,” “emotional” and
“calculating,” as well as a “pop-off,” a “whiner,” a “showboat” and a
“troublemaker.” A Cleveland paper called Robinson a “rabble rouser” who
was on
a “soap box.” The Sporting News headlined one story “Robinson Should Be
a
Player, Not a Crusader.” Other writers and players called him a
“loudmouth,” a
“sorehead” and worse.
Nonetheless,
Robinson’s relentless advocacy got the attention of
the country’s civil rights leaders.
In
1956, the NAACP gave him its highest honor, the
Spingarn Medal.
He was the first
athlete to receive that award. In his acceptance speech, he explained
that
although many people had warned him “not to speak up every time I
thought there
was an injustice,” he would continue to do so.
‘A
freedom rider before the Freedom Rides’
After
Robinson hung up his cleats in 1957, he stayed true to his
word, becoming a constant presence on picket lines and at civil rights
rallies.
That
same year, he publicly urged President Dwight Eisenhower to
send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students seeking
to
desegregate its public schools. In 1960, impressed with the resilience
and
courage of the college students engaging in sit-ins at Southern lunch
counters, he
agreed to raise
bail money for
the students stuck in jail cells.
Robinson
initially supported the 1960 presidential campaign of
Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat and staunch ally of the
civil rights
movement. But when John F. Kennedy won the party’s nomination, Robinson
–
worried that JFK would be beholden to Southern
Democrats
who opposed integration –
endorsed Republican Richard Nixon. He quickly
regretted that decision after Nixon refused to campaign in Harlem or
speak out
against the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. in rural Georgia. Three
weeks
before Election Day, Robinson
said that “Nixon
doesn’t
deserve to win.”
In
February 1962, Robinson traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to
speak at a rally organized by NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Later that
year, at
King’s request, Robinson traveled to Albany, Georgia, to draw media
attention
to three Black churches that had been burned to the ground by
segregationists.
He then led a fundraising campaign that
collected $50,000 to
rebuild the
churches.
In
1963 he devoted considerable time and travel to support King’s
voter registration efforts in the South. He also traveled to
Birmingham,
Alabama, as part of King’s campaign to dismantle segregation in that
city.
Jackie
Robinson, to the right of Martin Luther King Jr., appeared
at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963. Bettmann/Getty Images
“His
presence in the South was very important to us,” recalled
Wyatt Tee
Walker,
chief of staff of King’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference. King
called
Robinson “a
sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the
Freedom Rides.”
Robinson
also consistently criticized police brutality. In August
1968, three Black Panthers in New York City were arrested and charged
with
assaulting a white police officer. At their hearing two weeks later,
about 150
white men, including off-duty police officers, stormed
the
courthouse and attacked 10
Panthers and two white supporters. When he learned
that the police had made no arrests of the white rioters, Robinson was
outraged.
“The
Black Panthers seek self-determination, protection of the
Black community, decent housing and employment and express opposition
to police
abuse,” Robinson
said during
a press
conference at the Black Panthers’ headquarters.
He
challenged banks for discriminating against Black neighborhoods
and condemned slumlords who preyed on Black families.
And
Robinson wasn’t done holding Major League Baseball to account,
either. He refused to participate in a 1969 Old Timers game because he
didn’t
see “genuine interest in breaking the barriers that deny access to
managerial
and front office positions.” At his final public appearance, throwing
the
ceremonial first pitch before Game 2 of the 1972 World Series, Robinson
observed,
“I’m going to be
tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base
coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”
No
major league team had a Black manager until Frank
Robinson was
hired by the
Cleveland Indians in 1975,
three years after Jackie Robinson’s death. The absence of
Black managers and front-office executives is an issue that MLB
still grapples
with today.
Athlete
activism, then and now
Athletes
still face backlash for speaking out. When NFL
quarterback Colin Kaepernick protested racism by refusing to stand
during the
national anthem, then-President Donald
Trump said that
athletes
who followed Kaepernick’s example “shouldn’t be in the country.”
In
2018, after NBA star LeBron James spoke about a racial slur
that had been graffitied on his home and criticized Trump, Fox News’
Laura
Ingraham suggested that he “shut
up and dribble.”
Even
so, in the past decade, athletes have become more outspoken
on issues of racism, homophobia, sexism, American militarism, immigrant
rights
and other issues. They all stand on Robinson’s shoulders.
It
was Robinson’s strong patriotism that led him to challenge
America to live up to its ideals. He felt an obligation to use his fame
to
challenge the society’s racial injustice. However, during his last few
years –
before he died of a heart attack in 1972 at age 53 – he grew
increasingly
disillusioned with the pace of racial progress.
In his 1972 memoir, “I Never Had It Made,” he wrote: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.”