Authors: Arnold Rampersad
The importance of Robinson’s efforts on behalf of the NAACP was emphasized the month of his first tour when, following the victory by the boycotters led by Martin Luther King Jr., bombs exploded in four black churches in Montgomery, as well as at the homes of two ministers, one black, the other white, who had supported the protest. Almost as disturbing was the ensuing silence of President Eisenhower—“
our great President in the White House,” Jack called him, without a trace of irony. Eisenhower’s silence puzzled Jack, so certain was he of the President’s decency. “
Knowing President Eisenhower as I do,” he declared in Los Angeles, “I am confident he will protest against the bombing in the South. Our struggle for civil rights is … the struggle of all Americans. We are losing prestige because of things like the bombings of churches and Negro homes in the South.” Only slowly did it dawn on Jack that politics could overwhelm individual decency in Ike’s case. “
I have the greatest respect for President Eisenhower,” Robinson insisted in Boston, “but he must step into the breach in this situation and show everyone that the U.S. government will not condone these bombings.” The church bombings were particularly ominous because “the Negroes are being hit in the one place where they have felt safe.”
These appeals by Jack were a token of his growing concern with the political aspect of the struggle, the extent to which elected officials, especially those at the highest levels, were responding to what he saw as their obligations. He seemed drawn not so much to the Republican Party as, at first, to the party’s men in the White House, with his personal experience of Eisenhower and Nixon, the Vice-President, shaping his opinions. He had never forgotten Eisenhower’s remarkable gesture of respect at the B’nai B’rith dinner in November 1953, when the President had crossed a room to shake
his hand. Similarly, with Nixon, he had been charmed by their first meeting, which took place in the lobby of a Chicago hotel during the Republican National Convention of 1952, when the Dodgers were also in town. Nixon was in the lobby, chatting with Harrison McCall, another party loyalist, when McCall asked him if he wanted to meet Jackie Robinson. McCall had noticed Robinson talking in a corner to Paul Williams, a delegate from California.
Introduced to Robinson, Nixon completely dazzled the ballplayer. Not only did they have a southern California boyhood in common, with Nixon a graduate of Whittier College, a frequent opponent in sports of Pasadena Junior College; congratulating Jack on hitting a home run that day, Nixon also recalled, in astonishing detail, a football game in which Jack had played for UCLA against the University of Oregon, probably in the fall of 1939 (because their annual game was played that year in Los Angeles). To Jack’s delight, Nixon asked about a particularly intricate play that Jack had helped to execute that day, and which Jack himself remembered clearly and took pleasure in explaining to an apparently enraptured Nixon. “
I said to Nixon as we walked away,” McCall wrote, “that, while Robinson had undoubtedly met a lot of notables during his career, nevertheless I was sure there was one person he would never forget.”
Jack’s eventual support of Nixon in 1960 would seem to prove the astuteness of this judgment. For some time after Jack started working with the NAACP, a quotation from Nixon on race and America’s international reputation would be a feature of many of his speeches. But flattery was not the only basis of Nixon’s appeal to Robinson, who had been lavished with praise since his boyhood. He viewed Nixon not only as a champion of civil rights who might lead the country to a new high ground of tolerance but also as a potential friend. The meaning of Nixon’s notorious smearing of opponents, notably Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1948 race for the U.S. Senate, and his resolute support for the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy to the bitter end, had little adverse impact on Robinson. For one thing, Robinson was himself a fervent anticommunist. “
Our country is engaged in a titanic struggle with a resourceful and powerful enemy,” he insisted in 1957. “This conflict has not yet reached the shooting stage. It is now largely a struggle for men’s minds.” In the battle for the darker millions of the world, American segregationists “provide grist for the Soviet propaganda mill.” Robinson’s anticommunism was as heartfelt in 1957 as it had been in 1949, when he spoke out against Robeson. It also reflected official NAACP policy, which barred Communists from its membership. In 1958, the 49th Annual Convention would kill efforts to change the association’s policy in this regard.
Although it is possible that he voted for the liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952, in 1956 Jack was a solid supporter of the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket, and taken with the Republican Party especially after, in August, the Democratic Party Convention rejected a report on civil rights championed by Senator Herbert H. Lehman of New York, to whom Jack dispatched a vivid telegram of support. In contrast, Robinson was heartened by Eisenhower’s championing of the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1957. At first, Eisenhower resisted a key provision that would allow the Department of Justice to file suit on behalf of blacks denied the right to vote, but he shifted his position in the middle of the 1956 campaign. The move won him Jack’s endorsement, which the White House made clear it valued. On October 4, the only black appointee of any consequence in the executive branch, E. Frederic Morrow, who had visited the Robinsons in Stamford several times and was a champion of Vice-President Nixon in particular, wrote to assure Jack that the White House was in the Dodgers’ camp in the World Series. The Dodgers lost, but Eisenhower did not, to Jack’s obvious satisfaction. In January, Maxwell M. Rabb, the secretary to the cabinet, thanked him for his “
very fine letter” about the President and civil rights.
Recognizing now the lukewarm nature of Eisenhower’s approach to civil rights, Jack took comfort in statements attributed to Nixon and emanating from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, where Nixon was on official business. Speaking out against Communist charges about the prevalence of racism in the United States, Nixon had made (according to a report in the
Herald Tribune
) a ringing endorsement of integration: “
We shall never be satisfied with the progress we have been making in recent years until the problem is solved and equal opportunity becomes a reality for all Americans.” This was precisely the kind of firm statement Robinson had been awaiting from the White House. Congratulating Nixon on the forthrightness of his pronouncement, Jack emphasized how important it was that the Vice-President had made this declaration about race and civil rights “
in the heart of Africa.” Hereafter, Robinson would fold this quotation from Nixon into most of his speeches on civil rights.
In turn, Nixon responded to Robinson’s praise with warm words of his own. He had received several messages of commendation for his statements in Africa, but “
none which meant more to me.” It was a privilege, Nixon wrote, “to be working along with someone like yourself” for the goal of equal opportunity for all Americans. He hoped Robinson would continue to support him: “Your expressions of approval will be a constant source of strength and encouragement to me.” In April, Jack was encouraged again about the administration when he read a speech delivered by Sherman
Adams, a special assistant to the President, at a dinner in New York to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the American Jewish Committee. Robinson wrote to tell Adams, formerly the governor of New Hampshire, how encouraged he was “
to know our national leadership is sensitive to and concerned about the remaining vestiges of discrimination here at home.”
Seeking a larger political role involving civil rights, Jack saw his communications with the White House—almost perfunctory in reality, although he was genuinely admired—as evidence that he was succeeding. In April, his confidence was boosted when he was invited to appear on the respected political interview program
Meet the Press,
to be questioned by four reporters including Lawrence E. Spivak of NBC, who later congratulated Jack on having done “
a superb job.” Certainly Jack had taken his appearance seriously. In preparation, he had written Maxwell Rabb asking for a briefing at the White House. Almost certainly, this meeting never took place. However, a month later, Rabb welcomed Jack to the White House on a visit to Washington, then surprised him by taking him in to meet Eisenhower. The President had given him “
another big thrill,” Jack wrote in thanks. Because of his talk with Rabb, Jack went on, “I have a much better understanding of your thinking in the field of race relations.”
In turn, Eisenhower expressed his thanks in a letter that was gracious and yet unconsciously coded with two ideas that would soon disturb Robinson and other civil rights leaders. Thanking Jack for “
your approval of our efforts to achieve equality of opportunity,” the President went on: “It is our hope that we can continue to foster a moral climate within which the forces of informed good will operate effectively in an atmosphere of democracy.” The first of the two ideas was contained in the phrase “equality of opportunity,” which marked with some precision the limits of Eisenhower’s commitment to racial change. “Equality of opportunity” was a goal far more limited than the comprehensive integration that inspired Robinson, King, and most liberal supporters, black and white, of the civil rights movement. The other idea, obscured by the President’s notoriously awkward syntax, was his emphasis on fostering “a moral climate” that would ease social change. Unmentioned here were factors such as vigorous executive leadership, strong new legislation, and the tough enforcement of laws, which Robinson thought necessary in the face of Jim Crow.
As the Republican-inspired civil rights package moved through the Senate, Robinson watched closely as Southern Democrats, in particular, tried to block it. Normally, the legislation would have gone to the Judiciary Committee, headed by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who fully intended to bury it there. Efforts to bypass the Judiciary Committee were opposed by several Democrats, including two senators who thereafter would
find it hard to win Robinson’s support: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The President, too, dismayed Robinson. As opponents targeted Title III of the bill, which gave the Justice Department the right to sue on behalf of civil rights, Eisenhower’s support weakened. At a press conference early in July, after Senator Richard Russell of Georgia publicly questioned the President’s understanding of the bill, Eisenhower played into the hands of the Southerners by conceding that there were indeed “
certain phrases I didn’t understand.”
This admission, followed by the excision of Title III, upset Robinson. “
I am really in a muddle, and I don’t know exactly what to do,” he wrote Rabb. He respected the President’s previous statements on civil rights, but “then we are knocked spinning by his press conference at what appeared to be a complete about face.” To such protests, Eisenhower and his associates, with one exception, responded with a shrug. That exception was Nixon, who privately characterized the bill as “
watered-down” in promising Robinson that he himself would fight for more vigorous legislation. Eager to believe Nixon, Robinson heard several warnings about his record but dismissed the past as irrelevant. “What you do and say is the important thing,” he assured the Vice-President. “We are all very proud of what you are doing. As far as I am concerned, a man’s motives don’t mean a thing as long as he is attempting to do good. We sincerely believe that is your intention, and we heartily endorse it.”
Within a few days, Jack’s respect for the White House was tested as never before. At the Robinsons’ as in millions of American homes, the start of the school year in the late summer of 1957 was a time of mingled anxiety and joy. But Jack and Rachel’s attention, and the nation’s, was soon drawn to events surrounding the opening of school in Little Rock, Arkansas. They could not help seeing a link between events there and their own nervous negotiation of the hitherto all-white Martha Hoyt Elementary School when Jackie had enrolled there. In Little Rock, on September 2, the day before the start of classes, Governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard, ostensibly to preserve order but in reality to bar the entry of nine black students. Backed by the Arkansas NAACP, the students were to integrate Central High School according to a plan set by the local school board and approved by the courts. Two days later, with a white mob yelling defiance—and worse—at the black children, the Guard prevented them from entering the school. In response, Eisenhower promised to uphold the Constitution but also called on all parties to be patient. The Justice Department then entered the case with a friend-of-the-court brief. On September 20, ruling against Governor Faubus, the presiding federal judge ordered the admission of the black students to Central High.
Jack responded indignantly to Eisenhower’s call for patience. “
We are wondering to whom you are referring,” he sarcastically wired the White House, “when you say we must be patient.” Blacks had been patient for hundreds of years; the time had come for action. Although Eisenhower did not respond directly to this message, a few days later Rabb spoke on the telephone to Robinson to try to explain the administration’s position on the explosive situation. Whatever Rabb said hardly encouraged Robinson, who wrote his friend Caroline Wallerstein in Chicago that “
as far as ‘Ike’ goes he has been a real disappointment.” On Monday, September 23, three days after the ruling against Faubus, the nine black students, attempting to enter the school, found the guardsmen gone but city police present along with a vicious mob of about one thousand whites. At noon, on the orders of city officials, the students went home. Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas NAACP, then announced that they would not return “
until they have the assurance of the President of the U.S. that they will be protected from the mob.”
On Wednesday, to Jack’s relief, Eisenhower finally acted. Placing ten thousand National Guardsmen on federal duty, he also sent one thousand paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the six black girls and three black boys in one of the strongest assertions of federal force against a local authority in the South since the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The paratroopers would stay in Little Rock until late November, but some guardsmen were still on duty when the school year ended. Eisenhower’s action drew immediate praise from civil rights supporters in the movement and certainly transformed Robinson’s opinion of the President’s performance. “
Please accept my congratulations,” he wired Eisenhower, “on the positive position you have taken in the Little Rock situation. I should have known you would do the right thing at the crucial time. May God continue giving you the wisdom to lead us in this struggle.”