Authors: Arnold Rampersad
In Los Angeles, his welcome home brought out some of the top city leaders. For the County Board of Supervisors, Kenneth Hahn, who had escorted Walter O’Malley on his helicopter ride over Los Angeles the previous year, presented Jack with a scroll hailing him as “
a living legend in the field of sports, one whose career has blazed the way toward better understanding between people, whose unique abilities as an athlete have commanded the respect and admiration of people the world over.” At a testimonial luncheon on January 28, Wilbur Johns, Jack’s former basketball coach and now the UCLA athletic director, was one of two co-chairmen, and the guest list included the mayor, various supervisors, including Jack’s boyhood friend Warren Dorn, Charlie Dressen, now the manager of the Washington Senators, and Kenny Washington, as well as several members of Jack’s family, including his mother, Mallie. (In a speech, Dressen called Jack the “
smartest man in baseball” and offered him a job as a scout for the Senators.)
Jack’s poise surprised some of his old friends. To Sam Maltin, a reporter and longtime friend, “
When Jackie spoke, it was not a matter of a few fumbling, half-apologetic phrases to the effect that, Shucks, you do me too much honor. It was a full-bodied speech, warm with remembrances of his youth in this area, singing out names of people who had helped him along the rocky road … and then business-like in its devotion to his primary duty.” Robinson also gave a glimpse of the resentment he still harbored against Pasadena, where he had first met Jim Crow. Would he, someone asked, return to live there? “
Has Pasadena changed since I left it?” Jack asked in reply. “In Atlanta, I know what I can do. In Pasadena, I didn’t know.”
Robinson was “
extremely easy” to work with, Franklin Williams reported to Roy Wilkins at the NAACP headquarters in New York, and found no request or assignment “burdensome.” Coachable as always, Jack sought and used advice at every point. Williams had prepared a series of cards outlining ideas for Jack’s speeches; Robinson not only read the cards but also sought suggestions on ways to improve his lecture. The inconveniences of travel and a tough schedule did not affect his spirit. According to Williams, summing up the tour, “From every standpoint, it was extremely successful.”
If Williams had any criticism of Robinson, it was that “Jackie is completely frank—almost to the point of naivete.” Specifically, in discussions
with him, it was “imperative” to make “extremely clear” which matters “are confidential and which are for publication.” Williams was struck, too, by Robinson’s degree of certainty as a worker for the association; he was “extremely confident” that the main problem keeping black Americans from rallying to the side of the NAACP was, “as he puts it, our inability to get our story told.” In other words, Robinson was to some extent an idealist and an enthusiast with a possibly unrealistic grasp of the multiple problems facing the organization.
This was a shrewd judgment. Whether there was room for a person as idealistic and passionate as Robinson in an organization like the NAACP, which was hidebound in many of its ways, remained to be seen. The tour, however, only intensified Jack’s desire to help the association. He now proposed two fund-raising ideas for which he would work. One was for a $100-a-plate dinner in New York; the association had never attempted anything so grand. The other called for a committee of artists and entertainers, including athletes, in support of the NAACP. For Jack, whose presence would sell tickets and attract other celebrities, these proposals were only a token of his zeal to offer something tangible to the civil rights struggle.
Returning to New York, Jack was soon on the road again for the NAACP, with trips to Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, and Atlanta before the beginning of March; for much of the year, he would travel almost every weekend on its behalf. His visit to Boston on February 1 showed his drawing power and zeal. He appeared at functions sponsored by the NAACP, the NCCJ, and the Massachusetts Jewish War Veterans organization. He spoke at a breakfast gathering attended by the mayor, greeted several hundred cheering members of the Boy Scouts and other boys’ clubs, visited eagerly with Ted Williams (“
a fine person”) at a sportsmen’s show, and then spoke again for the NAACP at a church. In March, Jack appeared before four thousand persons in Memphis, Tennessee, and before three thousand more in Richmond, Virginia. As a speaker, he was the first choice of many NAACP branches. If he could not come, according to the New Britain, Connecticut, branch, then Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Thurgood Marshall would do.
By late June, at the 48th Annual NAACP Convention in Detroit, he spoke as a man transformed. “
I sometimes find it hard to remember,” he said, “what my life was like just a brief year ago.” In those days, “the big thing in it was the National League pennant, with all its problems of team, and strategy, and injuries and the tough competition that go into big league baseball.” Now he was concerned with more important matters.
These matters included his health. About this time, Jack discovered that he, like his brothers Edgar and Mack, was suffering from diabetes. Jack
Gordon recalled that Robinson had been at the clothing store on 125th Street when he left for a physical examination by a doctor in midtown Manhattan. “
He left in high spirits,” Gordon recalled, “but when he came back a couple of hours later, he was very quiet. He said that the doctor had told him that for someone who had played sports for so long and didn’t smoke or drink, he had never seen a body so badly deteriorated. Jack found out that he had diabetes. It was very, very sad.”
In 1957, despite intense research, diabetes was a mysterious, often devastating disease that affected about two percent of the American population. As Jack was doubtless told, at its core is the inadequate production or utilization of insulin by the body. Insulin controls the amount of sugar in the blood system but somehow also affects protein and fat metabolism in addition to carbohydrates such as sugar. Diabetes seemed to lead in some way to early arteriosclerosis, with the increased danger of heart attacks and strokes. Unlike “normal” arteriosclerosis, this version typically affected smaller arteries, especially those in the nerves, skin, kidney, and eyes; blindness was a distinct eventuality, although many diabetics escaped it. Many diabetics also had trouble fighting bacteria in general. It remained now for Robinson to find out, over time, how his own case of the disease would proceed. Even with insulin, Jack had to know, the life expectancy of a diabetic around this time was less than two-thirds of that of a nondiabetic.
His first task was to learn to inject himself. “
He practiced for a few days on a tomato, sticking in the needle and squeezing,” Rachel remembered. “Then he started on himself. Pretty soon, it had become routine. But his diabetes was a huge shock to us all.” He also had to abandon some of his eating habits. “Jack used to put away a pint of ice cream at one sitting,” according to Rachel. “That stopped, along with the pies and cake.” His weight soon dropped by about twenty pounds, in part because of the restrictions on his diet, in part because of diuretic drugs and the diabetes itself.
A year later, Jack was as comfortable with his regimen of injections as might be expected. “
Taking the insulin has become pretty much of a habit,” he wrote his Chicago friends David and Caroline Wallerstein, “and I don’t really mind it at all. I am just thankful it wasn’t any more serious.”
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ONDAY
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ARCH 3
, Jack drove from his home to Manhattan on the first day of his new career as a company vice-president. At 425 Lexington Avenue, with some trepidation as he entered a hitherto alien world, he took possession of his office and tried to settle into his job as principal personnel officer of the Chock Full o’ Nuts corporation.
A month later, a visiting journalist found no trace of his storied baseball career on display, no indication that the new vice-president had been a star athlete. Eventually Jack’s desk sported one memento from sports, a bronzed, size-13 football shoe from his glory years at UCLA. (Still later, in 1960, he would also display a small mahogany piece about the Emancipation, in the shape of a hand—Abe Lincoln’s—clutching a scroll; this was a gift from Dick and Pat Nixon.) Quickly Jack was able to recite the precise location of each of the twenty-seven company restaurants, most of which he had visited in his quest to meet as many employees as possible. He had also toured a coffee-roasting plant in Brooklyn and a bakery in Harrison, New Jersey, that were crucial to the operation, which would gross $25 million in the coming year. He loved his work. “
From the start to the end,” Rachel said, “Jack devoted all the time he needed to do it well. At the end of every day we knew what had gone on in this office and that, at this shop or that. The details that bored other people seemed to energize him. He was very happy there.”
On the job, Jack tried hard to set an amiable tone; he offered himself as a friend, a colleague, a teammate. A sign on his desk read “Mr. Jack R. Robinson Vice President,” but he did not stand on ceremony. “
The name Jackie has been part of me all my life,” he said to a reporter, “and most people call me Jackie. Sometimes the employees call me Mr. Robinson, but if they call me Jackie, I don’t mind. They like to kid with me, and I enjoy kidding them back.” From years of playing team sports he knew the importance of helping employees to see themselves not as isolated individuals in a hierarchy but as a fluid group with common goals. “
This is a team operation,” he insisted. “To gain the confidence of employees, you must be willing to discuss their problems openly with them. Then, when you’re looking for their cooperation, you find it working for you.”
Clearly, he saw himself as an advocate for the employees. In June, he contacted a friend at the White House to seek help for a worker who wanted to bring his two sons, born out of wedlock, up from Jamaica. “
He is one of our good men,” Robinson wrote, “and I would like to help him if possible.” At least once, Jack went to court to testify for an employee. In a case involving a coffee roaster who had slashed a man with a knife (the other fellow had a pitchfork, Jack pointed out), Judge Benjamin Gassman Jr. imposed a six-month sentence but then suspended it. Jack’s presence was obviously a factor in the decision. “
Your having left the Dodgers,” Judge Gassman admonished him, “is the reason they’re in last place now.”
Robinson’s desire to be liked also made him vulnerable. From the start, the worst part of the job was the fact that he had the last word on the
dismissal of employees. A fierce competitor, he was known to teammates and friends as a soft touch (like his mother) for individuals in distress, for panhandlers, for the appealing poor. “
The day when I had the worst butterflies in my stomach, far more than I ever had with the Dodgers, was the day I had to fire an employee,” he told a reporter. “I felt like the governor who sends a man to the electric chair even though he believes that the verdict of the jury and the judge’s sentence were just.” But he soon found out, to his chagrin, that some workers were liars. “
They looked right at you,” Jack told a friend about many of the employees, “looked you right in the eye, and told you these things, and it wasn’t true at all.”
Another complicating factor on the job was race. Race had helped to land him the job, and race helped and hampered him on it. He came to believe that many black workers expected too much of him, especially when their work habits were questioned, but also that some white employees resented his authority. Bill Black did not help matters when he revealed that “
I hired Jackie because a majority of the people who work for me are colored—and I figured they would worship him.” The threat of unionization also persisted, with Robinson seeing himself as an obvious target. “
They are going to attempt to discredit me in some way,” he wrote a friend about the unions, “because they feel if they can intimidate me they will have a chance of getting into our shops. I feel pretty well set up defensively so I am not worried.” After losing a vote about unionization overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, some workers filed a complaint that Robinson had warned certain black employees that a trade union would cost him his job, and had said that “
the white employees were jealous of my position in the company.” Robinson denied both allegations and the NLRB exonerated him.
Percy Sutton, a major Harlem political and business leader, and a lifetime union member who was once a radical socialist, would insist that Robinson was not antiunion. “
Jackie Robinson wasn’t antiunion. He was hired to represent his company, just as the union leader represents his union. One of the things Jackie had to do was negotiate with the union. He did that. He wasn’t against the unions.”
Such setbacks did not lessen his love of the job. “
I feel fine in my new setup,” he wrote to a friend, “and am looking forward to a long relationship with this company. I have certainly seen a great deal of difference in working with a man like Bill Black and his company than a Bavasi and the Dodgers. Frankly there’s as much difference in character as day and night and I am proud to be away from baseball and the insecurity that goes with it.” More than a year later he was still pleased, if more realistic. “
My job is developing,” he wrote, “but it really is a long hard struggle each day. I have
a good idea about the company and personnel is interesting. Some of the things I run into make interesting work. It seems something different happens every day.… It will be nice if this develops into a lifetime job.… The help is pleased, I am not certain about Black.”
If he was unsure about Black, possibly it was because Jack could not quite believe his luck in finding an employer so willing, whatever his reasons, to allow him the freedom he craved to speak out on civil rights. This generosity was even more important because Jack also knew that, as a black man, he was lucky to have the job at all. Black himself, a quiet man who saw himself as something of a maverick, heard protests about Robinson’s activities even before he reported his first day. To one complainant he offered a stern rejoinder about Robinson: Black would not interfere with “
his right to think and speak his mind.” In the face of many other protests in the coming years, Black would maintain this position.