Jackie Robinson (54 page)

Just before quitting Yankee Stadium after the last game, Jack shook hands with Alston. If the two men had seen in one another “
a competitor for control of the team’s soul,” as one writer put it, this was no time for recrimination. “I want to tell you I sincerely appreciate being with you this year,” Robinson had assured Alston. “I’ve had my differences with Walt,” he told the writer, “but I want to pay tribute to him. I’ve gotten a big kick out of the way he handled the series.” Then, accompanied by the Dodgers announcer Andre Baruch and his wife, Bea, Jack and Rachel headed to Grossinger’s in the Catskills for a vacation. Here Jack could unwind, play golf, and mull over his likely future, if he had any, with the Dodgers. Playing in only 105 games (19 fewer than in 1954, 51 fewer than his MVP year, 1949), he had hit a mediocre .256, forty points under his previous low, which was his rookie year of 1947. Driving in only 36 runs, he had stolen only twelve bases (although he had only seven in 1954). He was in no position to demand much from the Dodgers. “
I’ll talk with the ball club,” he advised the New York
Post.
“It’s up to the club. I’m going to do what they want. I want to play for them. With the world championship and all, they may not feel so badly toward the old boy.”

Especially because of the new house, he needed the money (his World Series winner’s share, $9,768.21, certainly helped here). Jack also wanted to benefit fully from a new player-pension plan that could mean, as he told Rachel, an extra $300 a month in his retirement checks if he played again. Still, at Robinson’s prompting, his advisor Martin Stone was looking for the right job for him after baseball. But opportunities were severely limited for a man like Robinson. The columnist Jimmy Powers wrote the obvious: Jackie Robinson would probably make an excellent manager. In the
Post,
Milton Gross urged the Dodgers to hire him as a television announcer, paired with the outstanding Vin Scully; Robinson and Scully liked each other. But both jobs depended on O’Malley and Bavasi, and Jack probably knew that he could not expect their support.

R
ETURNING HOME
, he looked forward to a relatively quiet winter. Despite his resignation as a vice-president, he now appeared twice a week on NBC’s Channel 4 in New York. On Mondays at 6:30 in the evening he interviewed high-school students; on Friday nights his sports program followed the weekly fights. As always, he was a frequent visitor to the Harlem YMCA, and he also continued to work with the National Conference of Christians and Jews. On December 7, on behalf of the Canadian NCCJ, he arrived in Calgary for a two-day visit, including visits to high schools and a speech that night at an annual banquet. Dressed in a sleek charcoal-gray suit, his handsome dark face set off by silvery hair, Robinson was an impressive figure. He spoke easily and well, with just the right mixture of humor, sports talk, and somber commentary that ended in his righteous plea for social unity. To reporters, he gave frank answers. Who was the better manager, Alston or Dressen? Dressen, who “
was always a couple of plays ahead of the other guy.” Who was better, Mays or Snider, his teammate? “Willie is the best. No one can play with the kid. He does everything well.” As for himself, he believed he had another year left in baseball. He would accept a trade, but “I won’t play for any team in the American League unless the offer is very attractive.”

A few days later, the local writers were startled to receive a gracious letter of thanks from Robinson. “
Such a gesture proves what most of us thought,” a journalist wrote in the Calgary
Herald,
“that Robinson is a high-class individual—for few athletes take the time to express their gratitude the way Jackie did.” Jack had grown in graciousness, but he also had a special feeling for Canada that dated back to 1946. A few weeks later, Jack returned for the annual celebrity dinner of the Ontario Sports Writers and Sportscasters, to raise money for the Ontario Society for Crippled Children.

These visits, which forced Jack to talk before a foreign audience about race relations in the United States, came against a background of deepening crisis across the South, a crisis that troubled and challenged him. Six days before Jack’s banquet address in Canada had come the first distinct act of community resistance by blacks in the South in the wake of the Supreme Court school desegregation decision of May 1954. On December 1, a middle-aged black woman named Rosa Parks, boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sat down quietly but by design in an empty seat toward the front of the vehicle. When she refused to yield her place to a white man, as the law required, the police arrested her. The next day, local black leaders called for a boycott of bus services by their community. Assigned to lead the boycott was the young, moderate pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In charge of negotiations with the city was another pastor, Dr. Ralph Abernathy.

The blacks in Montgomery did not want much. They were not seeking an end to segregation on the buses. Seating for blacks and whites from the rear and the front, respectively, would continue, but with no restraint on the number of seats blacks could claim. They also wanted black drivers hired for routes serving their community. However, city officials, declaring these requests radical and impermissible, broke off negotiations. On February 26, 1956, almost one hundred blacks, including Dr. King, were indicted for conspiracy to promote an illegal boycott. On March 22, King was sentenced to prison, but avoided jail by paying a fine of $500. The NAACP, which hitherto had stayed out of the dispute because the boycotters condoned segregation, took the case to the federal district court. In June, the court ruled against the city, which promptly appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But in November, the Supreme Court upheld the district court ruling and declared bus segregation unconstitutional. The following month, a year after Rosa Parks’s action, blacks ended their boycott when the city agreed to abide by the ruling.

“
The more I read about the Montgomery situation,” Jack wrote Rachel from Florida during the boycott, “the more respect I have for the job they are doing.” The boycott mirrored almost exactly his own single most dangerous act of protest against Jim Crow—in July 1944, when he had refused to move to the back of the bus at Camp Hood in Texas. Without knowing it, at that moment he had placed at risk everything he would later become in life. Now, twelve years later, with his life utterly transformed, what was to be his role in the worsening crisis? Like most blacks and their liberal white allies, he hoped for a peaceful acceptance of the rulings of the Supreme Court and an orderly restructuring of the South. Some signs were positive. In February 1956, for example, just before reporting for spring
training, he played in a celebrity golf tournament that marked the first time that blacks had been allowed on the Miami Springs Golf Course for more than one day at a time. And because of Robinson and Newcombe, another Miami course, the Bay Front Golf Course, opened its facilities to blacks for daily use for the first time in its history.

But such tokens of progress mocked the reality of Jim Crow for the masses of blacks. The previous year, 1955, had been a time of violence and terror, as well as of bitterly contested moves on the part of the NAACP to engage white power. Once again, lynching had become a feature of Southern life. In Mississippi, two black leaders involved in voter registration drives were killed as part of a campaign of terror designed to gut the electoral rolls of black voters. Also in Mississippi, in perhaps the most brutal incident of the year, a fourteen-year-old boy, Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago, was murdered by white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Across the South, several school districts agreed to try to desegregate; but intransigence ruled in many more places. In Jack’s native Georgia, for example, the board of education voted to revoke the license of any teacher who belonged to the NAACP or who taught a class made up of different races.

Committed to working with the NCCJ, Robinson could not help recognizing that the conference was nowhere in the forefront of the fight that mattered most to him—the concrete struggle of blacks for their civil rights. Compared to that struggle, the moral and ethical goals of the NCCJ seemed almost flighty. He began to take a growing interest in the NAACP, whose lawyers, including men like Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall, had led the fight against Jim Crow with skill and courage. In April 1955, even as he made ready for the new season, Jack denied a published report that he was in line to become executive secretary of the organization, following the death of his friend Walter White, the blond, blue-eyed Atlanta-born Negro who had led the organization since 1931. How such an idea came to be floated is unclear; as yet, Jack had only modest ties to the NAACP. But Robinson probably dreamed from time to time of having such a job, a position of authority in which he could bring to the civil rights struggle the bravery and dedication he displayed almost routinely on the baseball field. (White’s successor was Roy Wilkins, a veteran NAACP journalist and executive long recognized as White’s heir apparent.)

Sports provided Jack a bridge into the civil rights world. In Chicago in January, speaking to a black sports organization, he attacked the governor of Georgia for trying to pull Georgia Tech’s football team out of a postseason game because its opponent, the University of Pittsburgh, had a black fullback. Jack called on other Southerners to speak out against such moves,
to say “
this is not what we want, that we don’t share this belief.” He had faith that most right-thinking white Southerners would stand alongside other Americans, black and white, against such bigotry. “I am awfully proud of the progress we have made,” he declared, “and we are going to make our way, regardless of a few bigots. I don’t believe the people who are responsible for this progress are going to let these few hold us back.”

In training camp, Jack tried to set aside his deepening concern about the civil rights movement and concentrate on the main business at hand—the 1956 pennant race. Riding high from their World Series triumph, Alston and Bavasi took pains to make Robinson feel wanted. When Jack approached the general manager about securing a personal loan of $5,000 from the club, Bavasi agreed promptly to the request. “
He then told me,” Jack wrote Rachel, “that Walt talked with him and said how pleased he was with everything. He said the way things are going I am the most valuable man on the team and hoped everything would go on as it is now. I really felt good about it because he seemed so sincere and asked me to keep it going just as it is now. Of course I promised, because I felt things were going well and to hear Buzzie say it makes me feel all the better.”

But Jack soon snapped out of this reverie. Challenging him now for the third-baseman spot was a potent threat, acquired over the winter: the former Chicago Cub Ransom “Randy” Jackson, who had hit twenty-one home runs in 1955. Jack greeted Jackson pleasantly but recognized the challenge. “
I am not worried in the least about Jackson,” he wrote home nervously to Rachel, “and I’ll play as long as my legs and body hold out.” Not everyone—he fretted about Duke Snider—was pulling his weight: “Duke has not worked very hard in training and is really out of shape. I hope he starts to realize this and decides to go to work. His condition can make the difference between a fast or a slow start.” As for pitching, the loss of young Johnny Podres to the Navy meant “we are in dire need of a left hander who can do a job.” The right-handers “have all looked good” but aside from Sandy Koufax, still a promising prospect, “that seems to me what we have. Thank goodness for Labine and [Don] Bessent, they must have good years again.”

Clearly Jack was shaky about his own place with the club. “
Except for myself,” he admitted to a reporter, “I don’t think any of the regulars is past his peak.” But his teammates seemed to be supporting him. “
I really have been hitting well,” he wrote home, “and all the fellows are on my side; at least some have said as much.” Robinson’s sense of team play was so strong that he was actually solicitous about his rival Jackson—up to a point: “It is a shame to see the way Randy has been playing but he’s surely a better ball player than he has shown.” But his main concern was himself: “I know that
if I can keep it as it is now there is no doubt as to who is going to play. Of course a couple of games don’t mean much but at least it has given me a lot of confidence.” Still later, he admitted that his hitting needed to improve but “
I have been moving well as you probably have heard and am really very satisfied with the progress I have made. The club is just about ready. Duke is beginning to hustle and the pitching seems to be perking up some.”

Although he tried to concentrate on baseball, a number of distractions, from Jim Crow to some teammates he now found tiresome, irked him. For blacks, Vero Beach was a barren place; segregated Miami, where blacks stayed at the mediocre, “colored” Lord Calvert Hotel, was only slightly more diverting. Travel was often humiliating, with the black Dodgers barred from the team hotels, forced typically to sleep at night on Brooklyn’s private train. Down south, both blacks and whites at times tried his patience. “
This is one real bad town,” he wrote at one point about a stopover in a segregated hotel. “There is absolutely nothing to do here. I have been to the movies once and am going again this afternoon. It’s like the worst we saw in Daytona Beach and the odors are terrible. It seems the fable about Saturday bathing is true here because it would take at least that long to get as much of an odor as some carry.” Folks seemed hopelessly backward: “It will take a tremendous educational job to get a lot of the people to understand just what is needed to get the ball rolling properly.” During a game in Mobile, Alabama, whites assailed Jack with insults. “
From the very first pitch the fans started,” he wrote home; “one fellow right in back of our dugout said something about taking it to the supreme court and I looked up and said why not stop fighting the civil war and start being a real American. It went over well as nothing was said. The names we were called convinced me Alabama is no place for me because I would get into serious trouble.… The sooner we leave the south the better all around.”