Rickey & Robinson (30 page)

During the tormented 1930s a migration of blacks from the rural South to Bedford Stuyvesant coincided with the movement of whites to Long Island suburbs, made possible by the age of the automobile. This change of populace was sudden and dramatic.

Depression times were hard for many and indeed for New York City itself. Industrial jobs were disappearing. Old trolley lines were being abandoned. Only the tracks remained as iron skeletons. Blacks from the Carolina countryside moving into Bed Stuy had few skills to meet such urban needs as existed. There were no fields to plow, no cotton to chop in central Brooklyn. Poverty surged and as it did, there came a sharp increase in poverty’s ancient handmaiden, violent crime. The streets, Gates and Throop avenues, once mostly languid, evolved into a battleground with muggers and drug dealers waging combat against others, including other blacks. Studies indicate that middle-class blacks were the main victims of black crime.

The police presence became minimal. White policemen routinely were assigned to the 79th Precinct in Bedford Stuyvesant as punishment. Northern segregation was prevailing and in time the only whites to be seen on the byways of old Bed Stuy were brave social workers and angry cops. All this tumult broke within two miles of Ebbets Field.

A concern heard in the cabinets of major-league baseball was the imagined behavior of black fans. Would blacks, attracted and turned hyperactive by the appearance of Jackie Robinson, show up drunk and bellicose, shoot craps in the bleacher aisles, get into knife fights and generally misbehave? Would they then intimidate white
customers? This concern, publicly voiced by Larry MacPhail, who seldom had an unexpressed thought, was held privately by Rickey himself. He now sought help from religious leaders, mostly Baptists or followers of the African Methodist Episcopal faith. (The teetotaling Black Muslim movement was at the time insignificant in Brooklyn.)

Carlton Avenue is an undistinguished urban street, running roughly north–south on the western edge of Bedford Stuyvesant. It was the setting for the modest but functional Carlton Branch of the Brooklyn YMCA. In later years I caught Joe Black there as he kept his arm loose during the winter months and I helped coach a young and fiery all-black basketball team called the Sugar Rays. The great boxer Sugar Ray Robinson had bought the squad uniforms and warm-up jackets. These were attractive in shades of white and blue. Dodger blue. This was Brooklyn.

Blacks were welcome at the Carlton Y, as they were not at other Ys elsewhere in the borough, and Rickey chose the building as the setting for an unusual and contentious meeting on February 5, 1946. “I felt that if integration were to succeed,” Rickey told me, “the black fans would have to follow a code of discipline. I was, frankly, more concerned about them than I was about Robinson.”

Crowd behavior is always an issue at sports events. I have sat beside drunks at Shea Stadium and heard them curse out visiting ballplayers for nine innings. I’ve seen fistfights in ball club parking lots and angry and violent shoving around concession stands. Police security details are essential and sometimes, as with the tragic beating of a Giant fan outside Dodger Stadium in 2011, they are over-matched. But Rickey’s mistake—and like so much about Rickey it was outsized—was to focus entirely on the behavior of those people in the crowd who were black. Some of his notes, and those of his deputy, Arthur Mann, survive in the Library of Congress and provide a vivid reading of a night gone wildly wrong.

The Dodger organization had invited what it regarded as a
representative black leadership group: teachers, lawyers, merchants, judges, dentists, doctors, morticians. No blue-collar workers were invited, nor were student groups. This was in a sense the elite addressing the elite. Rickey seldom stumbled through as bad an evening.

Crowd control was and is a significant issue at ballparks. Many ballgames are exiting, pumping up energy. Fans drink beer. Some behave badly. Off-duty policemen, armed with authority and sidearms, are as much a part of ballpark crowds as hot dog salesmen. The invitation, formally issued by the Carlton Y, stated that Rickey would address “the things which are on his mind as well as ours, in connection with the projection of what seems to be inevitable.” Robinson remained on the Montreal roster. For questionable reasons, Rickey was holding back on the announcement that Robinson would join the Dodgers.

After a chicken dinner paid for by the Brooklyn organization, Rickey rose to speak to an audience of blacks. He had prepared a speech, which does not survive. However, he departed from that text. Arthur Mann reported what Rickey actually said.

Rickey declined specifically to predict that Robinson would be promoted to the Dodgers. In retrospect it seems unthinkable that Montreal’s brightest star would be sentenced to another season in the minor leagues. But Rickey had a particular strategy in mind, which later proved to be shaky. “If Robinson does become the first Negro major leaguer,” he said at the Carlton Y, “the biggest threat to his success is the Negro people themselves.” He went on, “Every one of you will go out and form parades and welcoming committees. You’ll strut. You’ll wear badges. You’ll hold Jackie Robinson Days and Jackie Robinson Nights. You’ll get drunk. You’ll fight. You’ll be arrested. You’ll wine and dine the player until he is fat and futile. You’ll symbolize [
sic
] his importance into a national comedy and an ultimate tragedy. To prevent this, the black community must police itself.”

In essence Rickey was telling a crowd of hardworking upper-middle-
class blacks not to shoot craps in the aisles at Ebbets Field and, outside of the restrooms, to keep their trouser flies firmly zipped at all times. A similar talk to black leaders today would prompt hoots, jeering and walkouts. The reality in that long-ago winter of 1946–47 was that the biggest threat to Robinson’s success was not the community of black baseball fans, raucous or silent, drunk or sober. It was the pervasive collection of white bigots, the Klansmen of Sportworld, who wore not bedsheets but stylish uniforms marked “Cardinals” and “Phillies” and “Reds.”

Joe Bostic of the short-lived black newspaper the
People’s Voice
subsequently wrote, “I’ve never forgiven any of these guys [Rickey’s audience] for not showing resentment and indignation at Rickey’s effrontery. They were adults. They were educated and intelligent people. And someone, a white man at that, is going to tell them how to act in a public place!”

But as Rickey expanded on his theme, he carried the black leaders along with his patronizing approach. Mann wrote that Rickey’s words prompted “deafening applause.” Before the evening was done, the blacks had agreed to create a “Master Committee” charged with controlling the enthusiasm of black fans. In time almost the entire black community of Brooklyn was involved, including bartenders who were advised to tell their patrons, “If you want to drink John Barleycorn, then stay away from the ballpark.” The black sportswriter Dan Burley, who was raised in Fort Worth, warned his readers against transforming “our Yankee Stadium routines, at Negro League games, to Ebbets Field.” Burley went on, “You know the Stadium routines, don’t you? They are staged with beer and pop bottles. Knives sometimes. Once in a while they use blackjacks for props. The variations come when two big fat ugly women get to wrestling with each other in the grandstands, sweating and cussing like sailor-trained parrots.”

I have not found a comparably appalling description of black baseball fans anywhere in the mainstream white press. Nonetheless Jackie
Robinson in Brooklyn was an idea whose time had come. It was safe even beyond a bit of after-dinner blundering by Branch Rickey and a misguided polemic typed by one Dan Burley.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

JACKIE HIMSELF WAS WINTERING in California. November brought the birth of Jackie Robinson Jr., a star-crossed child whose turbulent life ended in the wreckage of a sleek English sports car before he reached his 25th birthday. As a husband and now a father, Robinson faced a problem common to all young ballplayers in the employ of Rickey: money. Or rather the absence thereof. Rickey paid Robinson a $3,500 signing bonus, and $600 a month during the season. By his standards, these figures were generous. (He refused to pay anything to the Kansas City Monarchs for Robinson’s contract on the grounds that the Monarchs “are not a legitimate business.”)

Some forgotten black promoters out of Pittsburgh organized a barnstorming tour for the Jackie Robinson All-Stars to play exhibitions in October and November. “I came back to California with the promoters’ checks amounting to about $3,500,” he told me. “That would have gotten us through the winter in decent shape. But the damn checks bounced. Every one.” Robinson took his case to the famous black lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall. This produced promises but no cash. Robinson then signed to play with a semi-pro basketball team, the Los Angeles Red Devils, for $50 a game. But at Rickey’s insistence he quit after a few weeks. “He was afraid,” Robinson said, “that I’d get hurt.”

All but 1 of the 10 leading batsmen from the International League’s season of 1946 quickly were promoted to the major leagues. The exception was the batting champion, Robinson. As hot-stove league conversations rose and fell, questions about Rickey’s intent drew only stony silence from the normally loquacious executive. Jackie himself, who
never criticized Rickey, told reporters, “I guess he wants to make sure my good season with the Royals was no fluke. And I can’t say that I blame him.”

Years later, in a number of conversations, Rickey carefully explained to me his thinking during the winter of 1946–47. The concept that Robinson’s great season was a fluke, he said, “never crossed my mind. Just take one aspect of his play. Bunting. Jackie was an even better bunter than the old standard bearer, Ty Cobb. There was no question in my mind that Jackie would become a star.” But Rickey himself was feeling isolated. Almost to the man, the other club presidents opposed bringing Robinson into the major leagues. The commissioner, Happy Chandler, was not overly opposed to integration, as his predecessor, the sharp-faced Kensesaw Landis, had been, but Chandler offered no public words of support. The press was mixed. For every Jimmy Cannon whose heart and prose reached out to support integration, there was a Jimmy Powers dismissing Rickey as a cheap, self-promoting bum. So it was not as if when 1947 dawned Rickey was riding a mighty tide of approval for the long overdue integration of baseball. He was not.

“Even at home,” he said, “I faced opposition. My wife, Jane, a fine Christian woman, enthusiastically supported baseball integration but very firmly maintained that I should stay out of it. I was 67 years old. Jane thought the strains associated with integration would lay me underground.”

Looking for support, Rickey said, he turned to the ballplayers. “The Cardinals had just beaten the Dodgers in a pennant playoff. I thought, or anyway hoped, that when the Brooklyn placers saw Robinson, saw what he could do, they would rally round and demand that I call him up. I thought they would see not only a black star but also a World Series share, perhaps $7,500 in those days, essentially doubling the annual pay of many players.” As Rickey later conceded, this was a complete miscalculation. To once more cite Sartre
on anti-Semitism, “bigotry is a passion.” As such it can be totally dominating, like lust.

The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers would not undergo spring training amid the stubby palmetto trees and racist cops of southern Florida. Rickey moved the Dodgers and the Montreal Royals clear out of the country to a solid, if steamy, baseball town, Havana, Cuba. Broadly, this was a land dominated by a brilliant, charming and totally corrupt former Cuban army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista.

I was invited to lunch at Batista’s villa at another time. He proudly displayed a library of at least 1,000 books, all leather-bound and neatly inscribed in white ink
F. Batista
. “I have read every one,” he told me. His English was excellent and he said with some pride that he came from a poor working-class family and had been a laborer in the fields, on the docks and for the railroads. “I peddled fruit,” he said, “and I was a tailor and a mechanic. All this before I joined the army.” He advanced to sergeant and then, through the force of his charisma and his intelligence, he became the union leader of Cuba’s noncommissioned soldiers. In 1933 he led an uprising known as the Revolt of the Sergeants, and from that time forward he remained the Cuban Strongman. His absolute power endured until 1959, when Fidel Castro’s revolution forced him into exile in Spain. I remember thinking once or twice during a long and genial conversation with this stocky, loquacious character that he could have me liquidated in an instant in the manner of Josef Stalin.

I did ask him about some revolutionary rumblings, explosions in public places throughout Havana. “Hah,” he said. “In New York you have the Bomber Mad. Here we have
12
bombers mad.”

I thought that was an amusing and harmless response and published it in
Newsweek
, where I had been working as sports editor. The Cuban authorities dissented from my viewpoint. The next issue of the
magazine was censored by scissors. The Mad Bomber item was carefully cut out of every copy of
Newsweek
that entered Cuba.

The established white upper class in Cuba, wealthy from fields of sugarcane and tobacco farms, looked down on Batista as a boisterous multiracial character who was dangerous but could be bribed. Batista was of mixed European, Chinese, African and Amerindian descent. Initially he promised the Cuban people democratic socialism, but in a long and dismaying epoch, he sold out to big American industrial interests and then entered into horrific dealings with such American hoodlums as Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. In time Batista ceded to the hoods control of Cuba’s two preeminent tourist attractions, casino gambling and prostitution.

An American journalist named David Detzer, visiting Batista’s Havana back then, wrote an unsparing description.

Brothels flourished. A major industry grew up around them: government officials received bribes, policemen collected protection money. . . . Prostitutes could be seen standing in doorways, strolling the streets, or leaning from windows. . . . One report estimated that 11,500 of them worked their trade in Havana. . . . Beyond the outskirts of the capital, beyond the slot machines and the prostitutes, was one of the poorest—and most beautiful—countries in the Western world.