Jackie Robinson (2 page)

For all four men, as for virtually all baseball players, entry into the Hall of Fame was the crowning achievement of their lives. The white-haired McKechnie, breaking down at the podium, could not finish his remarks. More poised, Robinson was also deeply moved by the significance of the moment. “
What I remember above all,” Gabriel recalled, “was how absolutely radiant he looked. He wore a dark suit and a dark tie and his skin
was very dark, too. But his hair was thick and a glowing white and his eyes were sparkling because he was obviously very proud and very, very happy.” When it was his turn to speak, he did not hide his joy. “
I feel inadequate,” he confessed. “I can only say that now everything is complete.”

Quickly, Robinson turned to include others in his moment of triumph. “
I could not be here without the advice and guidance of three of the most wonderful people I know,” he declared. One was a bulky, bushy-browed white man, Branch Rickey, eighty years old, “
who was as a father to me.” In 1945, as general manager of the Dodgers, Rickey had made up his mind to attack Jim Crow in baseball, and with many men to choose from in the Negro baseball leagues had summoned a rookie shortstop on the Kansas City Monarchs to walk point. The second was Robinson’s mother, Mallie McGriff Robinson, seventy-one. Once a sharecropper’s wife in rural Georgia, then a domestic servant in California, to which she had fled in 1920, she had also been the single most influential person in her son’s often troubled youth, urging him on toward a clean, God-fearing life and whatever success he could wrestle for himself in a world hostile to blacks. The third was his wife, Rachel Robinson, whom he had married in 1946, just as his baseball ordeal was beginning, and who had shared with him most of the grief and the glory of the years since then. These three people “
are all here today,” Robinson said, “making the honor complete. And I don’t think I will ever come down from Cloud Nine.”

In January, five years after retiring, when he had become eligible for the Hall of Fame following a rule instituted in 1954, he had expected to be ignored. That month, according to a secret ritual, 160 members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America had each nominated ten eligible players for the Hall of Fame. (A separate, smaller committee chose from among old-timers, executives, and the like.) To enter the Hall, a player first had to appear on 75 percent of these ballots. The standards for nomination were in part subjective; the writers were often unpredictable. In the history of the Hall, no one had entered in his first year of eligibility since its opening in 1936, when the selectors tapped five immortals: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson. In 1939, his last season, Lou Gehrig had entered by acclamation, because everyone knew that the “Iron Horse” of baseball was dying. But Rogers Hornsby, said to be the finest right-handed hitter ever, had waited six years; and Joe DiMaggio, lauded by Robinson himself as the finest player of their era, had waited two. Since 1956, the writers had not chosen any players.

Judged by the statistics of his career, Robinson’s chances were strong but not overwhelming; judged by the many controversies of a career born in raw controversy, they were slim. Robinson himself thought he had no chance.
“
I’m positive I won’t be accepted this year,” he had told a reporter. “Maybe someday. But regardless of what some of my achievements were, many writers are going to disregard this because of Jackie Robinson, Negro outspoken.”

“Negro outspoken” he had been as a player and in the five years since his retirement, which had coincided with the deepening crisis across the nation over civil rights for blacks. Putting his immense prestige at risk, he had almost recklessly thrown in his lot with the Movement. As a fearless competitor with the Dodgers, he had also clashed often with sportswriters; and the men who ran baseball, with one clear exception only, had both opposed his right to play the game with whites and turned their backs on him when he retired. “
If I had been white with the things I did,” Robinson offered sourly, “they would never have allowed me to get out of baseball.” But he also commanded respect from many of the people who disliked him for stirring up antagonism. “
He has a talent for it,” one writer shrewdly judged. “He has the tact of a child, because he has the moral purity of a child. When you are tactless, you make enemies.” Still, he concluded, “I am confident that Jackie’s non-friends will sweep him into the Hall of Fame.” “
The aggressive Robbie carried a chip on his shoulder,” another newsman declared, “and inspired among writers and fellow players little of the warm affection they lavished on such as Roy Campanella and Willie Mays. Yet he unmistakably won their admiration. What a whale of a competitor he was!… Jackie rates the Hall of Fame on merit and merit should be color-blind.”

But color had to do with so much in Robinson’s career. An incident on a cold, windy morning in Manhattan in January had poignantly underscored that fact. He was stepping briskly on his way to his office on Lexington Avenue when a black man, a stranger, stuck out his hand. “Jackie,” the man said, “I know you are going to be elected into baseball’s Hall of Fame. And when you are, it will be the happiest day of my life.” Stunned, Robinson walked slowly away, musing on the man’s words. “
I was greatly moved by what that fellow said and the way he said it. Imagine him saying it would be the greatest day of his life if I made the Hall of Fame! It meant more to me than anything I can tell you.”

In January, sure enough, merit was sufficiently color-blind for Robinson to garner 124 votes, or four more than he needed for admission. With congratulations pouring in, he had passed the months since his selection keenly anticipating this historic moment in Cooperstown. Three days before his induction, on the evening of July 20, he had sat in a golden haze of glory when some nine hundred admirers, led by the governor of New York, who hailed him as “
a hero of the struggle to make American democracy a genuine reality for every American,” honored him with a testimonial dinner at
the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In an evening rich with praise, three messages stood out. One was from Richard Nixon, the former Vice-President of the United States, whom Robinson had firmly supported in the 1960 presidential election. “
There are days when I feel a special pride simply in being American,” Nixon had written Robinson when the news first broke, “and Tuesday, January 23, 1962, was certainly one of them.” The second was from John F. Kennedy, who tuned out the persistent drumbeat of Robinson’s opposition to his presidency to offer a glowing tribute. “
He has demonstrated in his brilliant career,” President Kennedy declared, that “courage, talent and perseverance can overcome the forces of intolerance.… The vigor and fierce competitive spirit that characterized his performance as an athlete are still evident in his efforts in the great battle to achieve equality of opportunity for all people.”

The most eloquent tribute had come from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the central figure in the civil rights movement and the inspiration behind the testimonial dinner. King, like Kennedy and Nixon, was absent on July 20; he was in Albany, Georgia, caught up in perhaps the most explosive crisis of the Movement to that point, as a coalition of liberal organizations confronted one of the worst strongholds of segregation, about sixty miles from the place where Robinson himself was born on a plantation in 1919. Spelling out the meaning of Jackie Robinson’s example, King defended Robinson’s right, challenged by some observers who saw him as a faded athlete perilously beyond his depth, to speak out on matters such as politics, segregation, and civil rights. “
He has the right,” King insisted stoutly, “because back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides. And that is why we honor him tonight.”

Praised by friend and foe alike, a hero to the heroes of a struggle inspired in many ways by his own achievements in baseball, Robinson felt a profound sense of satisfaction in what he had accomplished and was helping to accomplish. Now the vice-president of a successful company, living with his handsome family in a fine home in a wealthy Connecticut town, he seemed the epitome of success. “
You are the richest man I know,” a friend wrote to him a few days later, “because you have
everything;
who could ask for more?”

Now, at Cooperstown, Robinson set aside his bad memories and acknowledged the inner truth about his relationship to the game that had transformed his life even as he had helped to transform the game. “
I’m a tremendously fortunate individual,” he told the assembled guests. “I gave baseball all I had for ten years and baseball has given me everything I’ve got today.”

When the simple ceremony was over, Gabriel beat the crush of spectators storming the stage and offered congratulations to Robinson, and Branch Rickey, too. “
I thanked Rickey,” he recalled, “for being the man behind this great moment. He liked what I said, I could tell that. I could also see that only Robinson was paying him any attention. He seemed far on the sidelines for a man who had helped to make the history we were witnessing.” Standing a few feet away, Gabriel watched as photographers snapped pictures of the two men together; then he trailed them as they toured the wall of plaques, now ninety altogether, that was the heart of the Hall of Fame. He listened closely as writers peppered Robinson with questions about his dramatic entry into white baseball, his pact with Rickey to endure abuse and not strike back while the game and the nation absorbed the shock of his black presence. “The one question that stood out for me,” Gabriel said, “was whether he was proud to have been the first black in major league baseball. And I heard him say, ‘Yes, that’s something I can really feel proud about. I will always be proud of that particular fact.’ I could tell that his answer came from his heart, that he was not boasting but was really terribly proud that he had done that particular thing.”

And yet the Hall of Fame plaque bearing Robinson’s likeness said nothing about his black skin—or his ordeal. In the Hall of Fame, each man was finally the same color: bronze. But Robinson’s color was central to his story. “Later his name would appear on two other plaques,” Gabriel said, “and then you had a hint of what he had gone through. But not on his own plaque. I always thought that a pity.” Under the heading “
Brooklyn N.L. 1947 to 1956” Robinson’s plaque read only: “Leading N.L. batter in 1949. Holds fielding mark for second baseman playing in 150 or more games with .992. Lead N.L. in stolen bases in 1947 and 1949. Most valuable player in 1949. Lifetime batting average .311. Joint record holder for most double plays by second baseman, 137 in 1951. Led second basemen in double plays 1949–50–51–52.” Those numbers did not tell the whole truth, Gabriel knew. “
To see Robinson’s career in numbers,” Roger Kahn would write, “is to see Lincoln through Federal budgets and to miss the Emancipation Proclamation. Double plays, stolen bases, indeed the bat, the ball, the glove, were only artifacts with which Jackie Robinson made his country and you and me and all of us a shade more free.”

Leaving the museum, Robinson, Rickey, and others in the main party went on their way. After a quick meal alone, Gabriel strolled over to the venerable Otesaga Hotel, where he knew most of the honored guests were staying. Easing himself near a doorway that opened onto the glittering dining room, he had no trouble finding Jackie Robinson once more. “
Again, Robinson was like a vision,” he recalled. “He and his mother and his wife
and their three children stood out because they were all dressed up, beautifully dressed up; but they were also the only black family in the entire room. Jackie couldn’t keep still; he was talking to waiters, moving around his table, making sure everything was fine for his family. It was truly a beautiful thing to see.

“But it was also heartbreaking, too. I asked myself, are they the first black family to sit in that dining room? Somehow, it looked that way. Jackie seemed very much at ease and yet also a stranger, a man inside and yet, at the same time, apart. But he had earned his place, his right to be there. I thought, gee, this is really wonderful, this is what America is all about.”

Fifteen minutes before game time, the skies opened and cool rain began to drench the village. For the first time in the history of the ceremony, officials had to call off the game. Disappointed, but musing still on the significance of all that he had seen, Gabriel boarded a bus for the long ride home.

N
EAR SIX O’CLOCK
on the evening of January 31, 1919, Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born somewhere near the town of Cairo in Grady County in southern Georgia, a few miles north of the Florida state line. Precisely where he was born is open to question, although only two answers make sense. In one place, a crumbling brick chimney is all that remains of the dwelling. In the other, two brick chimneys rise now above burnt-out ruins. The first place was a rough cottage, the home of Jack’s parents, Jerry and Mallie Robinson, on a plantation just south of Cairo owned by a white farmer, James Madison Sasser. The other site, not far away, was a somewhat more pleasant house sitting among whispering pine trees on the edge of Hadley Ferry Road near Rocky Hill, also to the south of Cairo. There, Mallie Robinson’s parents, Washington McGriff and Edna Sims McGriff, lived on twelve acres owned at that time by Edna.