Fifty years ago Jackie Robinson kept a date with destiny to defy the bigots. Pat Putnam celebrates the historic day when a major talent stepped up to bring baseball’s race barriers tumbling down
IT has been a Lincolnian two score and 10 years since the time when sport was an all- white domain in the United States.
At the close of that era, when Jackie Robinson, a black baseball player, woke up in the home of his mother-in-law on Christmas morning of 1946, he was still officially listed on the roster of the Montreal Royals, a minor-league club. Until Robinson, no man of colour had ever played on a white team.
For a full season with the Royals, he had seen Southern ballparks padlocked to keep him out, had hotel doors slammed in his face, had endured the hate hurled at him by endless parades of racists. By that Christmas Day, Robinson knew his destiny. He knew that by the time the snows thawed and vanished in Brooklyn, he would be promoted to the Dodgers, on to a national stage where desegregation, especially in so hallowed a Caucasian stronghold, was an unspeakable act.
It would be another two years before President Harry Truman would order the desegregation of the armed forces. Seven years would pass before the US Supreme Court would mandate equal public schools for black students.
In Brooklyn, Robinson’s patron, Dodger owner Branch Rickey, was making every effort to ensure that destiny would not be trifled with, and not until five days before the 1947 season opened did he announce that the Dodgers had purchased the contract of Jack Roosevelt Robinson.
Rickey had feared that premature disclosure of his plan might doom his grand design. Since the 1890s, baseball executives such as commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had strictly policed the colour line, barring blacks from both major and minor leagues.
Before signing Robinson, Rickey had said to him: “This is not a hasty decision. I’m doing it because I can’t face my God much longer knowing that His black creatures are held separate … from His white creatures in a game that has given me all I can call my own. Not only will you be on trial, but all of black society. You must be a man big enough to bear the cross of martyrdom. You must not fight back. You must turn the other cheek. Can you do it, Jack Robinson?”
Robinson nodded and whispered: “I can do it, Mr Rickey.” Then in a stronger voice, he said: “I’ll turn the other cheek for as long as it is necessary. But when it is no longer necessary, I will be my own man.”
Only then, at last, the player played, with some of his own team-mates expressing open hatred, and others in the National League threatening to strike. But when Robinson stepped in against Boston’s Johnny Sain at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field on April 15 1947, tapping a grounder to third base, something was advanced in the US that could never be rewound.
Jackie Robinson became the most exciting player ever to step between the lines. Not the best hitter, not the finest fielder, not the best in stealing bases, although his accomplishments are legendary. He was simply just the most exciting. He gathered baseball’s highest honours: Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player, first-ballot election to the Hall of Fame. Born in 1919, he died in 1972, from complications of diabetes, but fatally weakened, they say, by the immense pressures he heroically endured.
How long ago it seems now, almost quaint, especially in a land where the majority were not even born when Robinson became a Dodger, and where history is so thinly taught that not even Jackie Robinson can be assumed to be a household name.
In a speech 10 years ago, Peter Ueberroth, then the commissioner of baseball, felt compelled to recall Robinson, lest he become “a forgotten moment”. And just recently, acting commissioner Bud Selig said that Robinson’s debut “was baseball’s proudest moment”.
And then Selig and every major-league franchise owner and every major-league player were conspicuously absent after being invited to participate in a nationally televised “town meeting” moderated by ABC’s Ted Koppel that sought to measure racial progress in sport since Robinson broke the colour barrier 50 years ago.
Baseball left it to Clifford Alexander, a consultant on minority hiring, to represent the sport’s executives. “It pains me to have a black lawyer to answer questions that should be addressed to white owners,” Koppel said. “It’s not a disgrace to be coloured,” said Bert Williams, a famous turn-of-the-century comedian, “but it is just so inconvenient.”
When Rickey’s family implored him to back off from his plan to bring Robinson into the National League, he refused, instead commending them to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, notably this part: “We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
Obviously, 50 years later, when the man Robinson is dead, when his plaque is in the Hall of Fame, when the Smithsonian will present a lecture series on Robinson, when the US Mint will produce a gold coin with Robinson’s likeness on one side and an etching of him sliding home on the other, when a 60-second video of Robinson stealing bases will be shown in every ballpark, when baseball dedicates this season to Robinson and every player and umpire will wear “Breaking Barriers” arm patches, when Bill Cosby will host a $1-million fund-raiser for the Jack Robinson Foundation, there is still much inconvenience around.
“Celebrations and anniversaries are important for reasons other than reminiscing about the past,” said Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow. “It’s an opportunity to look at where we are today with some of the issues Jack’s entrance into baseball raised. The residue of racism is still out there. The struggle is still going on.”
When asked what she thought of the state of the game today, Mrs Robinson said, “Jackie was very impatient for change and rightfully so. I believe he would say we have not come far enough.”
Most certainly not as far as the third stage of Pope’s continuum.