Jackie Robinson (41 page)

The next morning, and in the ensuing days and weeks, a deluge of congratulations poured over him—especially in the white press. Newspaper editorials and cartoons sang his praises, and the New York
Post
even offered an excerpt from his speech as an editorial entitled “
Credo of an American.” “
Quite a man, this Jackie Robinson,” the
Daily News
mused at the end of its own editorial. “Quite a ball player. And quite a credit, not only to his own race, but to all the American people.” But the black press was more equivocal. To the New York
Age
newspaper, Harlemites were “
split sharply on the issue.” Robinson had come back from Washington “in the dual role” of leader of his race and “handkerchief head.” The Baltimore
Afro-American
reported that HUAC’s maneuver in summoning Robinson had “
boomeranged,” in that he had been much more severe on racism than on communism. Its headline read: “Jackie Flays Bias in Army.”

From Lester Granger, Jack heard a far more favorable, if perhaps not altogether reliable, report on reaction on the streets of Harlem. After the first reports of Jack’s testimony on the day of his talk, he had spent five hours sampling the opinions of strangers and friends, but in “
not one single case” had he heard “anything but praise” for Robinson.

As for Robeson himself, he refused to denounce Robinson. “
I have no quarrel with Jackie,” he affirmed. “I have a great deal of respect for him. He is entitled to his views. I feel that the House Committee has insulted Jackie, it has insulted me, it has insulted the entire Negro race.”

The patriotic aspects of Jack’s speech clearly touched many white readers. One congressman, a former commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, cited Jack’s testimony in nominating him for the VFW gold medal for good citizenship. Other honors followed from local organizations, including the Junior Chamber of Commerce of Philadelphia, the Rotary Club of Hudson, Massachusetts, and the Queens Catholic War Veterans, who in December named Robinson to receive a citation of praise. The patriotic Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, named him as an honoree in a group that included General Eisenhower. Not surprisingly, Jack was pleased but also a little defensive about the episode. “
I have boxes of letters from many people regarding my testimony in Washington,” he assured the public in August. “Ninety-nine per cent of them are friendly. I can show them to you.” He still had not met Robeson but would like to
ask him a question: “Can you sit down in Russia and say the head man is a louse?” The answer was obviously “No. Not unless you want to play centerfield in Siberia.”

Within a few days, however, events in upstate New York, in the normally quiet community of Peekskill, shook Jack’s sense of peace about his role in the HUAC affair. On Saturday, August 27, Robeson’s scheduled appearance there at a benefit concert on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress, an organization denounced as subversive by the United States attorney general, brought out hundreds of angry opponents. They set up roadblocks, burned crosses, attacked buses and cars, demolished and torched the concert stage, and set off fights with concert patrons in which thirteen people were injured, including three with knife wounds. Friends of the singer, fearing for his life, spirited Robeson away.

The next day, Jack was sitting quietly in the Dodgers dugout, preparing for a game, when the
Daily Worker
sports editor, Bill Mardo, approached him with a newspaper account of the riot. Unaware until then of the events, Robinson read in shocked silence. Then he slowly lifted his eyes, as Mardo recalled, and with “
anger written all over his face,” gave his considered response: “Paul Robeson should have the right to sing, speak, or do anything he wants to. Those mobs make it tough on everyone. It’s Robeson’s right to do or be or say as he believes. They say here in America you’re allowed to be whatever you want. I think those rioters ought to be investigated.” Communism was not outlawed in the U.S.A., Jack pointed out; thus, “
if Mr. Robeson wants to believe in Communism, that’s his right. I prefer not to.” He ended by expressing regret that in America, “anything progressive is called Communism.”

Near the end of his life, in his autobiography
I Never Had It Made,
Robinson would write of eventually having grown “
wiser and closer to painful truths about America’s destructiveness,” and of gaining thus “an increased respect” for Robeson and his sacrifice. To Mardo, however, Robinson’s change had started with Peekskill. At that point, recognizing how much experience he and Robeson shared as blacks in America, “
Jackie Robinson put his hand in Paul Robeson’s, and together they fought the same fight. Each in his own voice, sure. But it was the same fight.”

A
FTER THE
A
LL
-S
TAR
G
AME
, Robinson’s excellent play continued. Still batting above .360 in August, he became a contender for the Most Valuable Player award. Pee Wee Reese was having the season of his life; but Robinson, who publicly backed Reese as MVP, seemed more important to the Dodgers. “
Without Robinson,” Enos Slaughter declared, “they would be in
the second division.” In the New York
Post,
Jimmy Cannon, after listing the myriad troubles overcome by Robinson, from Jim Crow to changes in the infield, asked that Jack’s baseball performance alone be considered. “
You must admit,” he concluded, “this is the Most Valuable Player in the National League.”

To an almost uncanny degree for so talented a team, Brooklyn seemed to rise and fall according to Jack’s playing. So Shotton thought. Early in August, when a badly bruised left heel seemed bound to keep Jack out of the next game, Shotton insisted that the Dodgers needed him against the Phillies. They did: in the ninth inning, with a man on base and the game tied, Jack hit his fourteenth home run of the season to lift the Dodgers to a win, 7–5. His heel injury persisted, and his overall fatigue was clear; but he kept playing. “
They couldn’t get me out of the lineup with a meat-axe,” he insisted.

Late in August, the Dodgers lost six games out of eight but then righted themselves. On September 13,
Look
magazine hailed Robinson as “the Ball Player of the Year.” In a tight race to the wire for the batting title with Musial and Slaughter, he prevailed with an average of .342 to Musial’s .339 and Slaughter’s .336. Second to Musial in singles, Jack tied for second place in doubles and was second in triples. He led the league in stolen bases. In November, a twenty-four-member committee of the Baseball Writers Association designated him the MVP for 1949 in the National League. Securing twelve first-place votes, he was mentioned on every ballot; Musial and Slaughter finished second and third respectively. “Well,
what do you know,” Jack piped modestly. “I ought to sleep well tonight. This is the nicest thing that could have happened to me.”

The 1949 World Series was bad news for the Dodgers and Robinson himself, who had only three hits in a series won 4–1 by the Yankees. “
What is there to say?” Jack asked in the
Courier.
“They beat us; in fact, they kicked heck out of us.”

Then, he, Campanella, and Newcombe (who was declared Rookie of the Year in the National League by the
Sporting News
), joined by Larry Doby of the Indians, left on what was planned as a thirty-day barnstorming tour of the South. With the Jackie Robinson All-Stars playing against the Negro American League All-Stars, the tour drew well at first but ended prematurely, in part because three of the four major-league stars ceased to shine. Nervous about his arm, Newcombe declined to pitch; Doby, struck painfully on the elbow by a pitched ball, dropped out; and then Robinson himself withdrew from the lineup with what was called “
a light case of the flu.” Whatever the underlying reasons, the promoters halted the tour.

Jack had good reason to return to New York, where several new opportunities arising out of his MVP year awaited him. A New York City television
station, WJZ-TV, signed him up to do two weekly sports shows. One, on Saturday afternoons, would aim at young people; the other, on Thursday nights, would feature Jack interviewing celebrities, especially from the sports world. He also agreed to host a daily radio sports show on the ABC radio network. In addition, there was the solid prospect of a Hollywood movie based on the biography of Jack written by Arthur Mann, in which Jack might play himself. “
All this,” he told the press, “means that I need somebody to handle my business interests. I can’t do it myself. And I know it.”

Most important of all, Rachel was pregnant, with their second child expected in January. Their home in St. Albans still needed work, including painting, much of which Jack wanted to do himself. Christmas 1949, celebrated by the Robinsons in a house of their very own for the first time, with Jack at the height of his career, Rachel awaiting the birth of their second child, and Jackie Junior happy and beloved, was a season of unusual joy and hope, abundance and the promise of greater prosperity to come. Then, on January 13, after a pregnancy free of the mysterious fevers that had plagued her in Montreal while she carried Jackie Junior, Rachel gave birth easily to their second child. Both Jack and Rachel had wanted a girl, and a girl the new baby was. They named her Sharon. The next morning, in front of the YMCA building on 135th Street, Jack handed out cigars and accepted congratulations and was the happiest man in the world.

S
HARON’S BIRTH IN
J
ANUARY
1950 was only the happiest event of a season filled with honors and awards, large and small, from the black world and the white, for Jackie Robinson. In Harlem, the Uptown Chamber of Commerce hailed him for his contribution to race relations. The United States Maccabi Association, perhaps the major Jewish athletic group, awarded him its Good Sportsmanship trophy.
Sport
magazine featured Robinson, along with the golfer Sam Snead, the tennis player Pancho Gonzales, and the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, as among the “top performers” of 1949. The newspaper publisher Frank E. Gannett presented him with the gold medal of the George Washington Carver Memorial Institute, an honor previously accorded to Eleanor Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, and the movie producer Darryl F. Zanuck. “
All America must applaud this award,” Gannett declared. “It goes to a real All-American.”

In the limelight, Jack tried to maintain a sense of balance. In an autobiographical series in the Brooklyn
Eagle,
he stressed his dependence on religion, his faith in God, his nightly habit of getting down on his knees at bedtime. “
It’s the best way to get close to God,” he quipped, “and a hard-hit ground ball.” Sunday games kept him from going to church, he complained; perhaps “a little chapel could be built at Ebbets Field, where the fellows of all religions could go and worship a little while.” Jack talked, too,
about the end of his career as if it might be close. By September, he revealed, his bat weighed heavily in his hands and his legs were often numb; but the worst pressure was psychological. “
The strain of the last three or four years,” he told the writer Dick Young, has “done something to me. Not that I have anything to worry about, but I’m jumpy and nervous all the time.”

For all his success Jack felt unfulfilled; or his success stirred in him sharp feelings of guilt about the poor and the sick. His work with children at the YMCA, where he was now on the board of directors, was fine, but he wanted to do more. “
This is too supervised for me,” he told Lester Rodney of the
Daily Worker.
“I want to see the kids who can’t even come into the Y. I want to try to help where it’s needed more.” He liked visiting the sick. Race seemed not to matter as he reached out; or perhaps it mattered that he reached out to whites as well as blacks, to set an example of interracial charity. Although Jack tried to avoid publicity on these occasions, his kindness to white children often made the news. At the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled in New York, he was photographed signing a ball for a fourteen-year-old Bronx patient, Carlo Accappicini, on Child Health Day in New York, for which Jack also raised money. When he (and other Dodgers) gave blood to help save the life of a four-year-old girl, Linda Pietrafesa, newspapers took note. Jack also went well out of his way, the press pointed out in admiration, to send a baseball signed by the team to a fourteen-year-old invalid, Johnny Nagelschmidt, of Cooperstown, New York.

Robinson clearly felt the urge to take his new fame and make something political out of it, something that more directly addressed broader questions of social injustice. About this time, he became fascinated by the efforts of the Anti-Defamation League, the most influential wing of the main Jewish community organization, B’nai B’rith (“Sons of the Covenant”). According to the ADL leader Arnold Forster, Robinson “
heard me speak at a civil rights dinner, phoned and asked to meet. Jackie asked searching questions about fighting anti-Semitism. Satisfied that we Jews were on to something effective, Jackie helped intensify our cooperative relationship with black civil rights groups, determined that they use our techniques. In his speeches about racism, it became his custom to quote me by name on ADL methods, adding that when blacks succeeded in creating a duplicate operation for themselves, they would at long last be on the road to racial equality. And he worked hard to make it happen.”