Jackie and Campy (11 page)

Campanella and Newcombe had personalities as different as their physical appearances. Campy was a squat, five-foot-nine, two-hundred-pound catcher with the build of a fire plug, while Newcombe was a gangling six-foot-four-inch giant with the long arms and broad shoulders of a pitcher. Campy was boisterous, outgoing, and cheerful. At the age of twenty-five, with nine seasons in the Negro Leagues under his belt, he was a confident and seasoned veteran who could have gone directly into the Majors. Newcombe, at the tender age of nineteen, had pitched just two seasons in the black leagues. He suffered from control problems and was much less confident in his abilities. Predictably he also was reserved and sullen in his personal disposition. For all their differences, however, the two men quickly discovered that they complemented each other, and a strong rapport developed between them during their first season together at Nashua.

On Opening Day Campanella went three for four at the plate, including a mammoth 440-foot home run, as Nashua defeated the Lynn Red Sox, 4–3. After a strong start, however, Campy went into a prolonged slump, due in part to an ankle injury that kept him out of the lineup early on. He rebounded in mid-June and, after a twenty-one-game hitting streak, boosted his average from .235 to .300 and led the team in homers and
RBI
s. A local poultry farmer, noting the formidable distances of the outfield fences, offered Nashua players one hundred baby chicks for every home run they hit. By season’s end Campanella had hit fourteen home runs’ worth of chicks, which he sent home to Philadelphia for his father, who started a small poultry business.
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Manager Walter Alston was so impressed with his catcher that he asked Campanella to manage the team if he ever got thrown out of a game. The opportunity arose in mid-June in a game against the Lawrence Millionaires. Alston was ejected in the sixth inning for arguing a called strike. Taking his leave, he handed the lineup card to Campy. The very next inning Campy was forced to make a strategic decision; with a runner on base and Nashua behind by two runs, he called on Newcombe to pinch-hit. The black hurler, already the team’s best pinch hitter, with a .311 batting average, smashed a home run to tie the game. Nashua went on to win the contest 7–5, giving Campanella his first victory as a professional manager.
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Both Campanella and Newcombe were quickly accepted by the town of Nashua, even though they were the only black residents. They didn’t have any difficulty finding accommodations for themselves and their families or being served at local restaurants. The few cases of racial discrimination they did encounter came against opposing clubs. Once, in a game against Manchester, Campy was giving signals to his pitcher when the opposing hitter, Sal Yvars, bent over, scooped up a handful of dirt and threw it in his face. Incensed, Campanella stood up, took off his mask, and staring Yvars directly in the eye said, “Try that again and I’ll beat you to a pulp.”
Yvars pretended to ignore him but gave no further trouble. On another occasion, the general manager of the Lynn Red Sox, bitter over losing first place to Nashua in a closely contested pennant race, approached Bavasi and griped, “If it wasn’t for them niggers, you wouldn’t have beaten us.” Bavasi charged the offending executive and had to be pulled away by his players.
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“As long as people didn’t put their hands on us physically,” recalled Newcombe, “we knew we could control ourselves.”
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With Campy behind the plate calling pitches, Newcombe elevated his game. He won his first four games before dropping a 1–0 decision on June 29. At season’s end, the big right-hander had fourteen victories to his credit and a .349 batting average. He would return as Nashua’s ace the following season and post a league-leading nineteen wins and 186 strikeouts. Campanella, on the other hand, was voted Most Valuable Player of the New England League for his .290 batting average, 13 home runs, 96
RBI
s, and a league-leading 687 put-outs.
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The Minor League successes of Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella cannot be overstated. Their campaign to integrate baseball took place at a time when Jim Crow defined the southern legal system and the early years of the cold war were stirring national hysteria over Communist infiltration of American society. Blacks had no choice but to tolerate racial abuse; those who fought back risked their lives. Lynching was still prevalent in America in the mid-1940s, and the campaign to end it, a major objective of the civil rights movement. Between 1882 and 1946 some 2,500 African Americans were lynched in the United States.
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Since the turn of the century black intellectuals and journalists had been encouraging public education, actively protesting and lobbying against lynch mob violence and government complicity in it. The
NAACP
made the quest to secure federal antilynching legislation its primary goal in the 1920s. As a result, the number of lynchings dropped to about ten per year in southern states by 1930. But advocates were still far from securing a federal antilynching measure.

During the 1930s Communist organizations, including the International Labor Defense, joined the antilynching campaign, along with such prominent black advocates as Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter Francis White. Bethune and White campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, hoping that the president would lend public support for their cause.
Other New Deal Democrats, like Senators Robert F. Wagner of New York and Edward P. Costigan of Colorado, introduced a bill to make lynching a federal crime and thus take it out of state hands. But the southern Democrats’ hold on Congress and Roosevelt’s fear of losing their support for his New Deal programs prevented passage of the Wagner-Costigan measure. Although FDR created the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department in 1939 to initiate prosecutions of lynchings, the Department failed to win any convictions until 1946.
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That year the lynching of four young sharecroppers in Walton County, Georgia, shocked the nation and motivated President Harry Truman’s decision to make civil rights a priority of his administration.
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Instead of dealing with civil rights on a case-by-case basis, Truman sought to address the issue on a national level. He began by appointing an interracial committee to examine the condition of civil rights in the United States. In a report titled
To Secure These Rights
, the committee proposed a detailed ten-point agenda of reforms, including the creation of a federal antilynching law and “the elimination of segregation based on race, color, creed or national origin from American life,” specifically in public education, employment, health care, housing, the military, public accommodations, and interstate transportation.
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When, in February 1948, Truman submitted a civil rights agenda to Congress to address many of these issues, he provoked a storm of criticism from southern Democrats. Realizing that he didn’t have the necessary support on Capitol Hill, Truman initiated three executive orders that would form the basis of future civil rights legislation, including the desegregation of the armed forces and equal employment opportunities for all persons applying for civil service positions.
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Truman’s support of civil rights was greeted with open hostility and suspicion on Capitol Hill, in part because of the close affiliation of Communist organizations with that cause. Throughout his presidency Truman had to deal with accusations that the federal government was harboring Soviet spies at the highest level, especially after August 1948, when Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy and a senior editor at
Time
magazine, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and presented a list of members of an alleged underground Communist network within the U.S. government. One of the accused was Alger Hiss, a
senior State Department official. Though Hiss denied the accusations, he was convicted of perjury in a controversial trial.
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The Chambers-Hiss incident opened the door for the demagoguery of Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, who accused Truman’s State Department of having Communists on the payroll. Congressional testimony garnered nationwide attention and McCarthy quickly established himself as a national figure at the expense of thousands of people in government, broadcast and newspaper journalism, and entertainment who were wrongly accused of being Communists.
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Professional baseball was not immune from suspicions of Communist infiltration. The Federal Bureau of Investigation took an aggressive role in monitoring the activities of any American suspected of Communist ties. For
FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover, civil rights activism and American Communism were inextricably bound and represented a national security problem. Communist interest in baseball’s integration, which continued to be heralded by leftist politicians and newspapers like New York’s
Daily Worker
, confirmed his suspicions.
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Shortly after Robinson signed with the Dodgers, Hoover began what would become an extensive file monitoring his political activities.
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Among the documents in the file were two feature articles on Robinson published in the
People’s Voice
, a magazine that had been cited by the California Commission on Un-American Activities as “Communist initiated and controlled, or so strongly influenced as to be in the Stalin solar system.” The
FBI
file also noted that Robinson served as New York’s honorary state commander for the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America, which was cited as “a Communist front to provoke racial friction” by the Internal Security Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
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Robinson might have suspected that he was under
FBI
surveillance, but entering the 1947 season he had much greater concerns on his mind.

At a meeting of the baseball owners in January, Rickey declared his intention to promote Robinson to the Dodgers. After discussing the issue, the owners voted fifteen to one against integration. Distressed by the opposition, Rickey met with Commissioner Happy Chandler who, to his surprise, agreed to “approve the transfer of Robinson’s contract from Montreal to Brooklyn.”
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Rickey had dodged a bullet. Now he had to convince the players to buy in to his experiment. Because Robinson’s success
with Montreal had been so impressive, Rickey initially assumed that all the Dodgers would accept his promotion to the Majors for the 1947 campaign. “After all, Robinson could mean a pennant, and ball players are not averse to cashing World Series checks,” he confided to an assistant.
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To promote and protect his black star, Rickey made some additional moves. First, in order to avoid Jim Crow restrictions, he relocated the Dodgers’ spring training camp from Florida to Havana, Cuba. Next, he shifted Robinson, an experienced shortstop and second baseman, to first base, where he would be spared physical contact with opposing players who might try to injure him deliberately. Finally, Rickey scheduled a seven-game series between the Dodgers and the Royals in order to showcase Robinson’s talent.
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“I want you to be a whirling demon against the Dodgers in this series,” Rickey told Robinson. “You have to be so good that the Dodger players themselves are going to want you on their club. . . . I want you to hit that ball. I want you to get on base and run wild. Steal their pants off. Be the most conspicuous player on the field. The newspapermen from New York will send good stories back about you and help mold favorable public opinion.”
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Robinson more than obliged, batting .625 and stealing seven bases in the series.
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But instead of helping him, the performance only served to alienate him from his future teammates, many of whom were southerners. Alabaman Dixie Walker drafted a petition stating that the players who signed would prefer to be traded rather than play with a black teammate. The first signatures came from southerners Bobby Bragan, Dixie Howell, Hugh Casey, and Kirby Higbe. While the Dodgers were playing exhibition games in Panama, Walker proceeded to gather signatures from others, including Carl Furillo and Eddie Stanky.
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Team captain Harold “Pee Wee” Reese, a Kentuckian, refused to sign. It was a tremendously courageous act on his part because, as the team’s shortstop, he had more to lose than any other Dodger. “I didn’t think of myself as being the Great White Father or anything like that,” Reese recalled many years later. “I just wanted to play the game. If Jackie Robinson was good enough to take my job, he was entitled to it. It didn’t matter to me if he was black or green.”
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When Dodgers manager Leo Durocher learned of the petition, he was furious. He had asked Rickey to bring Robinson up to Brooklyn during the previous year’s pennant drive. At a late-night team meeting, Durocher
told Walker and the other petitioners that they could “wipe their asses” with the document. “Robinson is a real great ballplayer,” he declared. “He’s going to win pennants for us. He’s going to put money in your pockets and money in mine.” In case there was any uncertainty about Durocher’s views on integration, the Dodgers’ manager quickly dismissed them. “From what I hear,” he added, “Robinson’s only the first
. Only the first!
There’s many more [black players] coming right behind him and they have the talent and they’re gonna play. So, unless you fellows wake up, they’re going to run you right out of the ball park.”
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