Spike Lee IT IS, SURELY, NOT JUST INCIDENTAL TO ALL THAT JACKIE Robinson accomplished, to the history and the allegory alike, that he was of the color black. Someone else had been “The Brown Bomber.” Roger Kahn, who covered Robinson as a Dodger, remembers the shade as an “imperial black” and imagines that it must have been that of Shaka, the greatest Zulu warrior. Less lyrically, more to the point, in a recent book tribute, “Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait” (Abrams), Roger Wilkins notes candidly that Robinson’s “skin was the color that, on others, caused even blacks to target them with scorn and ridicule.” But, ultimately, Robinson’s very blackness became a badge. “It mattered so much then,” says Jeffrey Sammons, an African-American historian at New York University, “the simple color of his skin. So dark the personification of ‘black is beautiful’.”
Jackie Robinson was a black man.
Although little else about him could ever be so neatly defined, this also we can say with authority: he was as superb an athlete as ever there was, and he was one of the most significant racial figures in American history.
Now it has been 50 springs since first he appeared in a major-league lineup, integrating Our National Pastime. No, he could not have done it without his white patron, Branch Rickey; yes, if not he, then some other black player in time. But it was John Roosevelt Robinson who did it, and it was he who did it so incredibly well–Rookie of the Year, MVP but two seasons later, Hall of Fame the instant he was eligible. And he did it every day with the spotlight upon his face, with his race upon his back, racists on his flanks, history at his feet. Every day, from April to October. What type of man did it take?
By now, a half century later, the most obvious legacy of Jackie Robinson is the utter African-American domination of so many of our most popular sports. But the unintended consequence of the legacy of Jackie Robinson is also the utter African-American domination of so many of our most popular sports, which may well have seduced whole generations of black boys to care only for the body, nothing for the mind.
Lenny Wilkens, who grew up in Brooklyn to become a Hall of Fame player and the NBA coach with the most victories in history, says, “Where Jackie Robinson inspired me was making me think I could achieve.” When Wilkens went off to Providence College, one of only a half-dozen blacks in the whole school, “I made a commitment to myself that, one, I was going to be as good as I could be at sport, but, two, I was going to let them know I could be just as good in the classroom as anybody else, too.” Sadly, that original Robinsonian model of the whole achieving, inspiring black man has been largely superseded by a one-dimensional creature of simple celebrity. For too many African-Americans, the black athlete has become as mythic as the white cowboy, as real as the father who is not there and as sweet a siren song as did ever lead boyhood dreams onto the rocks.
Then, too, although white fans may root for black athletes, happily wearing their sneakers and their jerseys, what difference have the heirs of Jackie Robinson made to race relations in American life? Are these players seen as black by the majority culture. or do they merely seem to belong to that other race of celebrities whose only color is klieg (following story)? Says John Hope Franklin, the eminent Duke University historian: “I don’t know what impact Michael Jordan had on Chapel Hill’s student body or what X or Y has on Alabama’s. They cheered for them, and that was their entertainment. But I don’t know if they regarded Jordan or whomever as schoolmates.” Robinson himself, at least until this season’s festivities, has been, as Sammons characterizes it, “neglected, marginalized, trivialized.” Spike Lee has been unable to find financing for a film about Robinson, for Hollywood shucks off Robinson as “a black baseball story with no foreign appeal.” As Joan of Arc is just another teen pic, no market beyond Lorraine.
Perhaps the legacy must forever be as conflicting as the man was. Physically, of course, he was simply extraordinary. Baseball, in fact, was something of an afterthought. At UCLA, Robinson was better at football and basketball, and almost surely would have won a gold medal in the long jump in 1940 if the war hadn’t canceled the Tokyo Olympics.
Yet Robinson, who was pigeon-toed, appeared as if he were ill-equipped even to walk (let alone run), and what issued from that great body was an incongruously high-pitched voice. Chosen by Rickey for his intelligence and temperament as much as for his ability, Robinson was, in fact, a seething turbulence. His old Negro League teammate Sammie Hayes recalls that once the manager had to rush to the team bus for reinforcements after a store owner called Robinson “boy.”
“Jackie’s gonna get us killed!” the manager screamed.
MY REFLEXES AREN’T CONSTRUCTED TO accept nonviolence in the face of violence-provoking attacks," Robinson himself said once about Martin Luther King Jr.’s ethos. Yet the instant Rickey ordained him and he was required to restrain his fury, he did. But rarely otherwise did Robinson bridle his natural assertiveness. Dick Young, a trucuent contemporary sportswriter, wrote once of his old adversary: “He has the tact of a child, because he has the moral purity of a child.” Robinson testified before a congressional committee against Paul Robeson, traded insults with Malcolm X–Uncle Tom! Racist!–quit the NAACP in disgust at its leadership, accused the Yankees of racial prejudice, sparred with Dr. King about the Vietnam War, called for a black boycott of the ‘68 Olympics, refused to play Old Timers’ Games until baseball hired a black manager, and supported Nixon over Kennedy, “the fair-haired boy of Southern segregationists.”
“Oh, yes, Jack could be very irritating to people,” his widow, Rachel Robinson, says, smiling. “What could make him so difficult to understand was that, whereas he applied his own reasoning-and always very carefully-he did not necessarily explain what that reasoning was.” What type of man did it take?
This spring, of course, the 50th anniversary of his ascension (and 25 years after his early death), there is much to-do and speechifying about him. Jackie Robinson’s image is on Wheaties boxes, Coke bottles, McDonald’s gimcracks and a U.S. gold coin. All baseball players will wear a commemorative patch. The president himself is expected at Shea Stadium, there to meet Mrs. Robinson when the Mets game against the Dodgers is halted on April 15 for the official ceremony. A statue is rising in Pasadena, his hometown. There will be TV programs, books and scores of articles like this one. The most sanguine fans are even speculating that, though nothing else has worked, the revival of the memory of number 42 in Dodger blue will be the one precious thing that could at last restore all baseball to glory.
Yet Robinson has always been an elusive icon. His career ended in 1957, and it is instructive that shortly thereafter in Harlem, where catch phrases were used to nickname the digits in the daily numbers game, the numeral zero was nicknamed “Jackie Robinson.” It wasn’t that he was identified with the zero for being a loser; it was for being such a sweet mystery to the black man in the street. By the 1980s, polls showed that many athletes had no idea who this Jackie Robinson fellow was; nowadays, says Hank Aaron, “some of the young players don’t have a clue.”
Moreover, Jeffrey Sammons of NYU adds, “it’s not just athletes. Jackie Robinson means very little to black students today.” Sammons is a sports historian, but most African-American academicians tend to shy away from studying this one most visible area of black triumph. He explains: “Whereas we should acknowledge that Jackie Robinson was an important civil-rights figure, blacks are the last to see sports as having a societal effect.” It is a constant counterpoint to the painful African-American experience. “Black literature has always been about striving,” Sammons says, “while black athletes are about success.”
It was not always thus. Just imagine, then, what Robinson’s baseball success meant to the black population in the ’40s. Fairly typical is Satch Sanders, the former Celtics star, now an NBA vice president, who recalls his mother’s admonishing him whenever he did anything even remotely naughty: “Jackie wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
Robinson’s effect on whites was more subtle and problematic. At the lowest level, he did prove that a black fellow could play bah with whites. Of course, few African-Americans in any sport had previously been given that main chance. Most conspicuous among them: Joe Louis. But as a boxer, Louis had not the lasting effect. Jackie Robinson was different; he integrated a communities team-“a Mrs. Roosevelt in spikes,” Wilfrid Sheed would so neatly make him. Even now, the image of Robinson, athlete, the player playing, is superseded by that one afternoon’s vision when Pee Wee Reese, the Dodgers’ Dixie shortstop, answered the mean racist curses firing from the other dugout by casually going over and draping his arm around his teammate.
Remember, when Rickey forced Robinson upon what is called “Organized” Baseball, three quarters of American blacks still resided in the South. Of major-league cities, only Washington and St. Louis dipped down into “organized” segregation. Rather, it was a tacit segregation that prevailed in Yankee America, an inequality most whites winked at, if indeed they acknowledged it at all. Blacks had a saying then that whereas down South whites hated Negroes as a race but could like certain individuals, up North whites professed to like Negroes as a race but did not care for any of them as individuals.
Well, here was Jackie Robinson, Negro individual. You couldn’t miss black number 42. He was in the lineup. “Jack heightened awareness,” Rachel Robinson says, in some gentle understatement. “So many white people were simply oblivious to what was going on around them. Sometimes, you know, indifference is the most pernicious attitude you try to fight.”
There is an expression in baseball: set the table. The table setter is the intrepid fellow who starts things off, gets on base so that the big slugger can bring him in-make a run, clear the table. So was Robinson the table setter for Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King and all who followed. Had Robinson not won the North, how much longer would it have taken for his successors to have won all the nation?
Marvin Bressler, the esteemed sociologist at Princeton, says: “Simply by his presence on the field, Robinson persuaded more white people to be fair about black people than have all those endless government or university meetings where everybody ventilates, and then we agree that it is so wonderful that we have, quote, identified the issue, which leads to another forum, so that still more professionals can make a payday off misery.” There would be irony ahead for Robinson’s sport. Baseball has lost African-American participants and spectators to the popularity of the hoop and the gridiron. Still, the result can be misunderstood. Major-league baseball really does remain the National Pastime, at least demographically: about 16 percent black, with a large Hispanic component and even a few Asians.
Tragically, Robinson would live to be 58, when diabetes and a bad heart stilled the fires. By then his hair was a ghostly white, accenting even more that bold ebony skin. “I remember,” Mrs. Robinson says. “His legs were the first to be affected. Those legs! Always so extraordinary. Isn’t that ironic?” But then she smiles. “You know, I loved the way he was pigeon-toed.” And again, more seriously: “I know that diabetes is exacerbated by stress, but I have chosen to believe that the stress did not kill him. Why, if you think that, you might frighten someone from ever daring to try something that will be stressful. And we can’t have that, can we?”
No.
Certainly, though, Robinson was under a sorrowful strain as his end neared, for his eldest son and namesake had only recently been killed in an automobile accident. However, two other children, Sharon and David, survive him. In fact, there is a sweet touch in that Sharon’s own son, Jesse Simms, will be going to UCLA on a football scholarship this fall, just as his grandfather did so many years ago.
AS FOR DAVID, WHEN HIS BROTHER AND his father died, he left Stanford and went back to Africa, which he had originally visited a few years before. “Jack never had any interest in Africa,” Mrs. Robinson says. David walked the land for 18 months, learning to love it, thinking of his father and his brother gone, his heritage past and his life ahead.
In time, he decided to settle in Tanzania. “Africa does still have an important position in African-American strength,” he says, “and I was a natural recruit as a human component for that linkage. After all, race and the development of our race was the atmosphere I had breathed growing up at home. And in that era, it wasn’t what you made, but what you did.”
David Robinson married an African woman, Ruti, “a good old country girl” who could cope with the rigors he knew lay ahead-raising a family and crops, far from everywhere, at the edge of a little village where they were allowed to “farm as much land as we could clear.” It came to 120 acres. By now, the Robinsons have planted 28,000 coffee bushes and some corn and beans on the land they named Sweet Unity Farm. Together they have four children.
It’s easy to see the sons of Jackie Robinson on the playing fields of America–all black American athletes, all the baseball and football and basketball stars, all the Olympic champions. But David Robinson, the surviving son of Jackie Robinson, is in Africa. “My going to Africa is very logical,” he says. “I come from a people taken in chains, sent on a boat for three months to a strange land, enslaved for $50 years. By comparison, there’s very little I’m up against.” With the assistance of a New York charity, haft a dozen young black men have traveled to Sweet Unity, there to work for a few weeks. Appropriately, all the boys were from Brooklyn. “My father showed that you could see the struggle and find your role, and through your own endeavors, and with great courage, you could pick up a burden and succeed.”
He paused, a wry smile cutting through his gray beard. “Anyway, for me,” he said, “it would be unfair to Jackie Robinson for Jackie Robinson’s son not to be a striver, wouldn’t it?”
Yes.
Jackie Robinson was not the only athlete to challenge the color barrier. Some important moments in black sports history:
John Baxter (Doc) Taylor: Sprinter was the first U.S. black to win a gold medal, running the third leg of the winning 4x100 meter relay. He died months later of pneumonia.
Fritz Pollard: Running back for Akron Pros was first NFL black; teammate of Paul Robeson for one season.
Jackie Robinson: On April 15, he suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke through baseball’s color barrier.
Nat (Sweetwater) Clifton: Signed by the Knicks, he was the NBA’s first black player. The Boston Celtics’ Chuck Cooper was the first black player drafted.
Elijah (Pumpsie) Green: The Boston Red Sox was the last team to integrate, signing Green 12 years after Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers.
Bobby Mitchell: It took 42 years, but the Wash ington Redskins finally added a black to their roster when they traded for Mitchell. He became one of the league’s most dangerous receivers.
Bill Russell: The legendary Celtics center became the NBA’s first black coach, while continuing to play. He led the team from the floor to the 1968 and 1969 World Championships.
Frank Robinson: The Hall of Famer became major-league baseball’s first black manager, with the Cleveland Indians. He hit a home run in his first game as skipper.
Art Shell: He was a star offensive lineman for the Oakland Raiders. After the team moved to Los Angeles, he was named the first black coach in the NFL.
