Authors: Arnold Rampersad
The trip to New York was very important. She and Jack had set the date—February 10 of the following year, 1946—but their future seemed tightly circumscribed. Setting the date seemed like surrendering to the ordinary. “My concern was that I was going to get stuck in California and never get out of there,” she recalled. “I was getting ready to marry a man who didn’t really have a job, and we didn’t know what our future held. So I needed that adventure in New York.”
On August 24, at Comiskey Park, Jack was out on the field, but nursing a sore shoulder, when a white man called out his name and beckoned. Jack went over. The man introduced himself as Clyde Sukeforth, which meant nothing to Robinson. Then he said he was there on behalf of Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Now he had Jack’s attention. Mr. Rickey was starting a team, the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. He wondered about Jackie’s arm strength; could Jack throw a few balls for Sukeforth? The Dodger scout would remember Jack listening “
carefully, and when I was through he spoke right up—Jackie was never shy, you know.”
“Why is Mr. Rickey interested in my arm?” Jack asked. “Why is he interested in
me?
”
Sukeforth convinced Robinson to meet him after the game at the Stevens Hotel, where the scout was staying, and where he bribed a bellman two dollars to allow Jack to use the passenger elevator, from which blacks were normally barred. Eventually Jack arrived and began to pepper Sukeforth with questions. One thing above all intrigued both men. Mr. Rickey had made it clear, as Sukeforth informed Jack, that if Robinson would not come to him, he would come to Robinson. Both Jack and Sukeforth now suspected that something more than a place on the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers might be at stake.
The men agreed to meet in Toledo, where Sukeforth had to observe another player, then take the train to New York. Sukeforth then sent a wire to Rickey telling of Jack’s injury (“
Player fell on shoulder last Tuesday. Will be out of game a few more days”). On Sunday night, after the white scout convinced a ticket seller that, yes, he intended to share quarters with the black man, they left Toledo. On the morning of August 28, after spending the night in Harlem, Jack met Sukeforth outside 215 Montague Street in Brooklyn. On the fourth floor, a receptionist waved them toward an office door. In a darkly paneled office, an illuminated fish tank glowed in a corner, and on a wall were four portraits, including the one of Lincoln and another of the Dodgers’ field managers, Leo Durocher. On another wall, a blackboard held the names of all the baseball personnel at every level in the Dodgers organization. Behind a mahogany desk was the bulky white figure
of Branch Rickey. Light gleamed off his spectacles; his bushy eyebrows flared above oddly expressionless eyes; between his pudgy fingers was a cigar. The room pulsed with summer heat, but he wore a jacket and a bow tie. He listened as Sukeforth glided through an introduction.
“
Hello, Jackie,” Rickey offered. Then he seemed to lose consciousness of everything but Jack’s face and body, as if forty years of fantasy had in the twinkle of an eye become flesh. “He just stared and stared,” recalled Sukeforth. “That’s what he did with Robinson—stared at him as if he were trying to get inside the man. And Jack stared right back at him. Oh, they were a pair, those two! I tell you, the air in that office was electric.”
“Do you have a girl?” Rickey asked suddenly.
“I’m not sure,” Robinson replied, taken aback. He was sitting now, in an overstuffed leather chair that barely eased the tension. Perhaps he was not sure which answer Rickey wanted to hear; but Jack explained quickly that with all his traveling and the uncertainty of his employment, he was not sure he should count on any girl, or that any girl should count on him.
Rickey made it clear that Robinson should marry, if he had found the right woman. A dangerous challenge was at hand, in which Robinson would need the support of a good wife.
“Do you know why you were brought here?” Rickey demanded.
To play on a new colored Brooklyn team, Jackie replied.
“No,” Rickey corrected him. “That isn’t it. You were brought here, Jackie, to play for the Brooklyn organization. Perhaps on Montreal to start with, and—”
“Me? Play for Montreal?”
“If you can make it, yes. Later on—also if you can make it—you’ll have a chance with the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
“
I was thrilled, scared, and excited,” Jack would recall. “I was incredulous. Most of all, I was speechless.” Silent before Rickey’s revelations, Jack listened in wonder as the Dodgers’ general manager, with rhetorical flourishes, revealed his hand. “I want to win the pennant and we need ball players!” he thundered, whacking his desk. “Do you think you can do it?”
Clyde Sukeforth would remember that “
Jack waited, and waited, and waited before answering.… We were all just looking at him.”
“Yes,” he finally replied.
Rickey made it clear that Jack’s ability to run, throw, and hit was only one part of the challenge. Could he stand up to the physical, verbal, and psychological abuse that was bound to come? “
I know you’re a good ball player,” Rickey barked. “What I don’t know is whether you have the guts.”
Jack started to answer hotly, in defense of his manhood, when Rickey explained, “I’m looking for a ball player with guts enough not to fight back.”
Caught up now in the drama, Rickey stripped off his coat and enacted out a variety of parts that portrayed examples of an offended Jim Crow. Now he was a white hotel clerk rudely refusing Jack accommodations; now a supercilious white waiter in a restaurant; now a brutish railroad conductor. He became a foul-mouthed opponent, Jack recalled, talking about “
my race, my parents, in language that was almost unendurable.” Now he was a vengeful base runner, vindictive spikes flashing in the sun, sliding into Jack’s black flesh—“How do you like that, nigger boy?” At one point, he swung his pudgy fist at Jack’s head. Above all, he insisted, Jack could not strike back. He could not explode in righteous indignation; only then would this experiment be likely to succeed, and other black men would follow in Robinson’s footsteps to make a living reality of Rickey’s unspoken promise to Charlie Thomas forty-one years before.
Robinson sat, transfixed but also stirred. “
I had to do it for several reasons,” he now knew. “For black youth, for my mother, for Rae, for myself. I had already begun to feel I had to do it for Branch Rickey.”
Turning the other cheek, Rickey would have him remember, was not proverbial wisdom but the law of the New Testament. As one Methodist believer to another, Rickey offered Jack a copy of an English translation of Giovanni Papini’s popular
Life of Christ
and pointed to a passage quoting the words of Jesus—what Papini called “
the most stupefying of His revolutionary teachings”: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”
Thus, cannily acting out of both religious faith and a sympathetic grasp of political history, the Mahatma invoked the Christian counterpart of the ancient Hindu philosophy of
satyagraha,
or active nonviolence, which Mohandas K. Gandhi, the original Mahatma, had adopted in his long struggle for Indian independence from British imperialism. Within three years, in 1948, India would be free—and Gandhi would be assassinated. Within less than a generation, black and white Christian ministers, led by Martin Luther King Jr., would themselves invoke Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence to bring down the walls of segregation across the South.
More than two hours after he entered the dark office on Montague Street, Jack stumbled out into the Brooklyn sunshine. He had just signed an agreement, dictated by Rickey, that bound him to the Brooklyn Dodgers organization. On signing a player’s contract he would receive a bonus of $3,500. His salary would be $600 a month. Until Rickey gave the word, Robinson must keep the arrangement a secret. Finally, according to the
agreement, he would be signed, probably by the Dodgers’ Montreal club, on or before November 1. This stipulation suggests strongly that Rickey was thinking about the city and state elections in early November and the impact the news of this signing might have on both.
Returning to the Monarchs, Jack looked on the team with an eye now hopelessly alienated; he could hardly wait to leave. He told no one on the team about Rickey’s invitation. Even with his mother he only hinted at the news; she had no real idea what he was talking about. He was also guarded with Rachel: “
On the telephone, he would tell me only that something wonderful had happened that would affect us both. He said he couldn’t tell me, but that I’d know soon enough. He was excited, but he wouldn’t give it away. He never mentioned Branch Rickey or the Dodgers.”
A few days later, Jack proposed to the Monarchs that he be allowed to play until September 21 only, then go home. But the club, displeased by his sudden, unexcused trip to New York, and fearing the new league and the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, laid down the law; “
I was told I would have to play all the games or none.” This threat was delivered in front of other players probably by Richard Wilkinson, the son of J. L. Wilkinson, who “gave me a lecture about my trip to New York and assured me that if I left the club I was through; that I could play no place outside of the Negro National League, and he was sure that Kansas City was the only team with which I could play.” Seizing on this provocation, Jack left the Monarchs and returned to California.
By this time, some of his excitement about the Dodgers had worn off. Despite the signed agreement, little might come of the electrifying meeting in Brooklyn. Thus he presented the news to Rachel when he saw her. Still, Rickey had impressed him deeply. When he hinted at the news to family and friends—Mack and Willa Mae, Sid Heard and Jack Gordon—he found an unwillingness to listen, because they could not believe it. The white world was unreliable, even treacherous. But Jack’s attitude was different. He had pride and anger, but because of his skills as an athlete he had been too deeply involved with white authority, with white coaches and administrators, who depended on him even as he depended on them, not to know that Rickey was, at the very least, credible. He understood that if something wonderful was to happen to him, as was now promised, a white man would almost certainly be central; and Rickey was more than a plausible white man. In their relatively brief meeting, Rickey had probably shown more concentrated personal fury and passion on the question of race and sports than Jack had ever seen in a white man. Within months, at least one black writer would call Branch Rickey a modern-day John Brown, the brooding, vengeful, God-haunted martyr of Harpers Ferry in
1859. Robinson’s sensitivity and intelligence begged him to submit to this force.
In October, Jack and Zellee saw Rachel and her roommate Janice Brooks off to New York on their adventure. Then, having agreed to travel with a black barnstorming team in Venezuela, it was now Jack’s turn to head east to join the team. He was in New York City when the call came from Branch Rickey. On October 7, Rickey had written to Arthur Mann, his publicist, indicating that he was thinking of extending the deadline for signing Robinson to January 1. Then he would sign several blacks “
and make one break on the complete story”; also, he did not want to sign Robinson with other, “possibly better” players unsigned.
However, as the New York City mayoral election campaign drew to a close, the issue of blacks and the three city teams—the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers—flared up. On the defensive, and coveting the black vote, Mayor La Guardia was eager to announce that his progressive racial program was yielding results. La Guardia wanted the teams to sign a formal pledge to uphold the spirit and the letter of the Ives-Quinn state law forbidding discrimination in hiring, and he wanted formal assurances that blacks would soon be hired. But the last thing Rickey wanted was to seem to be succumbing to local political pressure to hire a black. He decided to act preemptively, and to do so not in New York City but in Montreal, where Robinson would be playing.
On October 23, in the presence of the head of the Dodgers’ farm system, Branch Rickey Jr., and the president of the Montreal club, Hector Racine, Jack Robinson signed a contract to play with the Royals. The terms were exactly those set forth at the August 28 meeting in Brooklyn.
For all the agitation by the politicians in New York, the news shocked many listeners, including the reporters present. They surged forward to hear what Robinson had to say about his hiring. Jack met the press calmly but said little. “
Of course, I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that I am the first member of my race in organized baseball,” Robinson said. “I realize how much it means to me, my race, and to baseball. I can only say I’ll do my very best to come through in every manner.” Branch Rickey Jr., who sought to make it clear that the search had been thorough and expensive (scouting Robinson had cost the Dodgers $25,000, he revealed), tossed in a note of defiance. Racine and his father “
undoubtedly will be criticized in some sections of the United States where racial prejudice is rampant. They are not inviting trouble, but they won’t avoid it if it comes.” No doubt, the decision would cost the organization some support, but the Dodgers would not turn back. “Some players now with us may even quit, but they’ll be back in baseball after they work a year or two in a cotton mill.”
Support came quickly for Rickey’s decision. Horace Stoneham, president of the New York Giants, calling it “
a fine way to start a program,” promised to look for black players next year. In Boston, Eddie Collins recalled Robinson’s workout for his Boston Red Sox and warned that “
very few players can step into the majors from college or sandlot baseball,” but gallantly wished “more power to Robinson if he can make the grade.” Satchel Paige, the best-known and most admired player in black baseball, was the soul of grace even as he was passed over for the role of ending Jim Crow. “
They didn’t make a mistake by signing Robinson,” Paige said. “They couldn’t have picked a better man.” But there was also opposition. The commissioner of minor-league baseball, Judge William Bramham, conceded that he was legally bound to approve Robinson’s contract. However, he ridiculed Rickey as a whiteface version of the black religious charlatan Father Divine. Worse, Rickey was a carpetbagger: “
It is those of the carpetbagger stripe of the white race, under the guise of helping but in truth using the Negro for their own selfish interests, who retard the race.”