Jackie Robinson (82 page)

Later that afternoon, buoyed by their meeting, Morrison took Robinson in to meet her superiors, all white men, and make a pitch for the book. “By now I was very enthusiastic, I was ready to edit the book myself.” At first it was pleasant, Robinson sitting there among the men, trading stories about baseball. “I felt at a disadvantage,” Morrison said, “because I didn’t know baseball; but Robinson seemed such a fascinating person. He said that he wanted his book to be about more than baseball. He wanted it to be about the larger picture, about society and the times he had lived through. I knew what he meant, but I could also feel the interest ebbing from the room. The white men became cool, indifferent. They wanted something more exotic, something more voluptuous than he was prepared to offer. When he left, they complained that the book was going to be too political, too much social studies, it wouldn’t sell. They turned us down.”

To have his autobiography turned down by Random House was a rude slap—not least of all because in 1960 the company had eagerly published Carl Rowan’s biography of Jack,
Wait Till Next Year.
Nevertheless, the new book was soon placed with another publisher, Putnam, and Jack began work on it with Duckett.

With the New Year, 1970, Robinson had one unequivocal victory to celebrate. With its fifth anniversary in January, Freedom National Bank, where he was still chairman of the board, was firmly established as the most successful black-controlled bank in the United States. But at Sea Host, business was bad. On January 20, appearing in Washington, D.C., before the Senate Small Business Committee’s Subcommittee on Urban and Rural Development, which was investigating the franchising industry, Jack defended franchising as a partial solution to black economic problems. He blamed the Nixon administration for many of those problems. “
The very poor relations between black America and the present Administration are causing a serious rift in this country,” he insisted. The Nixon efforts seemed to be aimed mainly at creating a few black millionaires, not helping the mass of blacks. Late in 1969, after United States Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans met with black business leaders, including Robinson and Bill Hudgins, at Freedom National Bank, Jack praised Stans’s efforts but also criticized his call for patience. “
I don’t think anyone can ask us for patience,” he declared. “Black people have shown a tremendous amount of patience.”

He then made a bold move of his own, one that reflected both his continuing search for a business enterprise he could pass on to his family and his longtime belief in the premier role of housing as an issue in the black world. (Told once by a friend that schooling was the top need for any young black, Jack strongly disagreed: “
Housing is the first thing. Unless he’s got a home he wants to come back to, it doesn’t matter what kind of school he goes to.”) After much discussion, Jack reached an agreement with three young but highly successful real estate men, Arthur Sutton, Mickey Weissman, and Richard Cohen, who put up $50,000 to launch the project, to form the Jackie Robinson Construction Corporation. Although all his partners were white, Jack’s aim was both profit for the principals and a long-term benefit to the black community through the construction of low- and middle-income housing (an emphasis new to Jack’s partners). Robinson’s hope, Sutton said, “
was that it would be a truly interracial company dedicated to training contractors who had never worked on big projects.” In addition, “we had to keep the payroll money in the community we were working in.” “
There is enough profit,” Jack himself insisted, “so that we can share it with the community we are building in.” The construction company would support the Robinson family for many years after Jack died.

Soon, he had settled into what became his main business office: the headquarters of the company at 560 Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan. There, he had an able assistant, Merlyn White; a popular Harlem
man-about-town, Kiah Sayles, served as his boon companion and gofer. A letter on his new company stationery to his good friend and golfing partner Andre Baruch, now living in Beverly Hills, California, echoed Jack’s optimism: “
As you can see we are in another business and it’s very exciting. For really the first time we have a potential that is great.… As things have not worked out in other ventures I am trying to hold down my enthusiasm. However, with each passing day things look better.”

In setting up the company and then helping it to develop, Jack depended a great deal on the efforts of a young lawyer who quickly became a close advisor and friend. He was Martin Edelman, educated at Princeton and Columbia Law School, who met Robinson not long after joining the law firm of Battle, Fowler, the counsel for Freedom National Bank. Sent uptown to a bank meeting for the first time, he had met Robinson. “
It was January or February,” he recalled, “and the meeting was over. It was six-thirty, cold and dark. I went downstairs and was standing in front of the bank, on 125th Street, trying to decide whether to take a cab or the subway, when this enormous hand touched my shoulder from behind, and Jack said, ‘I bet you would like a ride.’ We talked all the way downtown. Because of bank business, we saw a fair amount of one another, and after meetings he would drive me home to Rye, on the way to Stamford. I wasn’t looking for a mentor; but I suppose I found one. We sort of ‘clicked.’ When the chance came for him to incorporate and go into construction, he asked me to be his lawyer. I agreed at once.”

Respecting Robinson, Edelman began to make a habit of calling him almost every weeknight around ten o’clock to go over the business of the day. He found Robinson not only grateful but also a spirited partner in their exchanges. “Both with the bank and with the corporation,” according to Edelman, “some people clearly imagined that Jack was a figurehead, that he was there for celebrity value only. It was not true at all. He had a very searching and determined intellect, a fine instinct for sensing that something was wrong, even if he couldn’t put his finger on it. He brought to his business, day in, day out, an incredible sense of determination, a sense of morality, and a value system that people he did business with felt was very special.”

Gradually, Edelman’s role expanded within Jack’s business affairs; the vetting of proposals once reserved for Martin Stone now passed to him. “It’s very convenient for people to say that Jack was naive and that he wasn’t that smart,” Edelman said. “Jack was plenty smart; there can be no issue here. You could explain something to Jack and he remembered it, and it became a part of his analytical framework. He was not one to command the absolute small details, but he mastered the implications, he had an
understanding of the financial impact, and he moved on.” If Jack was prone to any mistake, Edelman ventured, “it was in trusting people he happened to like.…”

A
S THE
J
ACKIE
R
OBINSON
Construction Corporation slowly established itself in the spring of 1970, Jack and Rachel were conscious of a mending in their lives, at least in some respects, after the horrors of 1968 in particular.

At Mount Hermon, David was doing very well; a recruiter from Stanford University had given him a top rating as a prospect, and he was admitted there for the fall. Sharon was happy again. On Christmas Eve, she had remarried; Jack liked and respected her new husband, Joe Mitchell, a former SNCC member who was eleven years older than Sharon. They had met at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she was now studying to become a nurse and he was studying to become a doctor.

At Christmas, too, Jackie had come home from Daytop, where his record had been inconsistent at best. Back in his old environment in Stamford he quickly backslid, according to his own reckoning. But after a while he headed back voluntarily to the discipline of Daytop. “
It makes us happy,” Jack wrote his friends the Wallersteins, “for it indicates he really understands his problem.”

Certainly Jack himself had come a long way toward understanding Jackie’s problems, and the menace of drug addiction in general. Earlier in the year, Robinson had spoken publicly about his experience as the father of an addict to a meeting called by the group Ministers Against Narcotics at the Holiday Inn at La Guardia Airport, attended by Governor Rockefeller and other high-ranking officials. He said that his decision to “
stick by my son” had been “tremendously rewarding.” That month, on a Harlem street corner, he also addressed some two hundred people at an antidrug block party on the subject of the epidemic sweeping the city. “
I’m here because I’m concerned about it,” he said. “I hope most of you will be concerned enough to go home and do something about the evil effects of this problem.”

And in a letter to Jackie, he had expressed both his love and his determination to balance love with sternness and vigilance. “
I know how difficult it is for you and realize as best I can what you are going through,” Jack wrote his son.

The turning point, in many respects, came in May of that year, 1970, after Jack and Rachel decided to host a picnic on the grounds of their home for about fifty members of Daytop as a way of thanking them for what they were doing for Jackie. The event, meticulously planned by the Daytop members themselves, led enthusiastically by Jackie, was a great success. In beautiful, warm spring weather, Jackie’s friends enjoyed an afternoon of fun and food. When it was time to leave on their bus, they lined up to thank Jack and Rachel for having them. At the end of the line, proud and happy, was Jackie himself. In 1964, when his parents had seen him off at the train station as he left for the Army, Jackie had embraced Rachel emotionally but had stopped his father when Jack tried to hug him. Now, at the end of the picnic for his Daytop friends, he embraced Rachel again but this time included his father. “
I stuck out my hand to shake his hand,” Jack wrote, “remembering the day of his departure for the service. He brushed my hand aside, pulled me to him, and embraced me in a tight hug. That single moment paid for every bit of sacrifice, every bit of anguish, I had ever undergone. I had my son back.”

Increasingly Jackie became attentive not only to his family on Cascade Road but also to his young daughter, Sonya Pankey, for whom he had developed a strong affection. Jack himself could see the difference. Jackie, he told the Wallersteins that summer, seemed finally to be “
on the right track. He understands and communicates a great deal more but the most important thing is his concern for others. I think he has learned a valuable lesson and we now await his leaving Daytop to see what happens once he drops his crutch. While we are not positive we are confident.”

Early in June came one of the most satisfying moments of Robinson’s life, when he delivered the commencement address at Mount Hermon before David’s graduating class. After a brief stay at home, and before leaving for Stanford in the fall, David was off to Springfield, Massachusetts, for a
summer of social work. There, as his father wrote proudly, he was living frugally with a Puerto Rican family who spoke little English, and “
eating rice and beans for every meal.”

I
N
H
ARLEM THAT SUMMER
, the old order changed. On June 23, 1970, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was defeated in the Democratic Party primary by Charles Rangel, who would go on to win Powell’s seat in Congress. Robinson had joined a broad group of black and white leaders backing Rangel, but his role was not small. Percy Sutton, then Manhattan borough president and young Rangel’s main champion, later praised Robinson both for himself and as a conduit to Rockefeller. “
When you see Charlie Rangel today as a congressman,” he said, “you have to appreciate that Rockefeller, a Republican, gave me the first money to put behind Rangel. And it was Jackie who made that possible; it was through him we were able to get Connecticut people with money to support us, and a lot of them were Republican. Jackie also got the Republican Party to endorse Rangel. And there were other things Jackie did for us over the years, right to the end of his life.”

But all the news was not good that summer. In July, the ax fell at Sea Host. Jack was at a Holiday Inn hotel in Coral Gables, Miami, when he received a letter dated July 17, air mail and special delivery, from the acting president of Sea Host, Samuel N. Rubin. Because of serious problems in cash flow, marketing, and general operations, Sea Host was now on an emergency footing. As of that day, July 17, Robinson was fired. The letter, almost certainly the same as sent to virtually all the employees, offered vaguely to help with finding another job but made no mention of compensation. Later that year, on November 19, Sea Host filed for bankruptcy in federal court in New York.

Jack now had no regular source of income other than a small salary from his construction company. But even with his worsening illness, he and Rachel had no overriding sense of financial danger. Rachel and Jack had been careful in their planning. For many years, at the insistence of an accountant, Jack’s life had been heavily insured, as was the mortgage on the house in Stamford. In Manhattan, they owned two apartments that would yield a very nice profit when sold. But Jack also had high hopes for his construction company. “
We are still struggling with business,” he wrote the Wallersteins, “but like the civil rights struggle are seeing the light at the tunnel’s end. We have a chance to develop something good but we have seen other chances fade so we will continue to do our job wherever we are and grab the opportunity to make it good if the chances come.”