Authors: Arnold Rampersad
On October 17, with the situation in Little Rock far from resolved, Jack joined Henry Lee Moon, Herbert Hill, and Lucille Black of the NAACP in New York for an open telephone conversation with Daisy Bates and seven of the nine children who had integrated Central High. With his typically warm feeling for young people, Robinson was moved as he chatted with each youngster in turn, praising them and Mrs. Bates for their heroism in the face of mob behavior that had shocked many Americans and galvanized new support for civil rights. “
I think you and the youngsters are doing a tremendous job,” Robinson told Mrs. Bates, “and it makes us swell up with pride.… You certainly have the support of many, many people and it is just wonderful.”
A year after quitting baseball, Robinson had become a forceful, respected part of the civil rights debate, able to hold his own on programs such as
Meet the Press
or to field bristling questions from the journalist Mike Wallace about housing discrimination. At a commencement program, when Dr. King was also honored, Howard University in Washington, D.C., awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree. The same day, Governor Abraham Ribicoff announced Jack’s appointment to a new three-person board of parole of the Connecticut state prison system, effective September 1. Serving with him would be a Yale University professor of law and the chief justice of the state supreme court. This appointment moved Jack, because it seemed a tribute to his integrity and selflessness—the job carried no pay. Inexperienced about prisons, he would learn from the other men. “
I’m not dumb enough to try to run things,” he said. “I know I have a lot to learn.” If he was “a little bit soft-hearted,” he would aim to be judicious: “Sentiment is a good thing in its place, but when you’re dealing with human lives then it seems to me that there are much more important considerations.”
Almost everything he touched seemed to work well. At his $100-a-plate NAACP dinner, about fifteen hundred guests showed up to mark the end of the 1957 Fight for Freedom Fund drive. In his after-dinner speech, Jack talked of the pervasiveness of bigotry, of its power over money and fame, as exemplified by the recent failure of Nat “King” Cole to win a new national sponsor for his television show despite a successful season, and the rebuff of Willie Mays when he attempted to buy a house in San Francisco following the Giants’ move there. “
None of us,” Jack ended in a theme he would repeat the rest of his life, “no matter how hard he has worked or how much money he has contributed, can afford to rest until this fight for freedom is won—and I assure you that it will be won. How, in my opinion, will be determined by the Negro himself. It is, indeed, a fight for survival, not alone for the Negro, but for the nation.”
In January 1958, he denied a report that he would top off this new phase of his prestige and popularity by running for public office: “
There just is not one kernel of truth to any such reports or rumors. I am perfectly happy with my job at Chock Full o’ Nuts. I’m not entering politics. Period.” Instead, he rededicated himself to the NAACP, the Harlem branch YMCA, and his other voluntary involvements. For the annual YMCA campaign, he raised $55,000 after challenging the official fund-raising committee to match every dollar he himself would raise independently. For these and other efforts, a flood of local honors—from the Young Adult Fellowship of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem to the Brooklyn chapter of the National Association of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs—came his way. He was a popular graduation speaker, as in June at P.S. 111 in New York, when he urged parents not to dictate too sternly to their children. “
These are swiftly
moving times,” he said, “and our children must move fast too. They have to stay with the times or otherwise be hopelessly left behind.”
Recognizing his sterling work, the NAACP elected him to its board of directors. Later, along with the popular NAACP fund-raiser Kivie Kaplan, a wealthy Jewish manufacturer from Boston, Jack became a co-chairman of the Life Membership Committee. He then undertook perhaps his most dangerous assignment for the NAACP, with a trip through the South that included stops in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. From Jackson, Mississippi, sending Robinson the names of prosperous blacks who might be approached for life memberships, the NAACP state leader Medgar Evers warned him: “
Do not have N.A.A.C.P. on any part of the envelope. It is all right to be contained in the letter.” On February 16, which the NAACP declared “Jackie Robinson Day” in Mississippi, he received a rousing welcome at a state conference of NAACP branches in Jackson. There, in an address called “Patience, Pride and Progress,” Robinson challenged the notion that patience meant submission, or that impatience always meant radicalism. “
Although we who struggle to secure civil rights deplore prejudice,” he declared, “its elimination is not our goal. Containment is our goal. What we seek is the suppression, by law and the weight of public opinion, of the hostile manifestations of racial prejudice. We wish that the hearts of all men were filled with good will for their fellow human beings. But this goal is beyond our reach and we cannot wait until men’s hearts are changed to enjoy our constitutional rights.”
Jack’s reception in Mississippi moved him. “
We had an overflow crowd and they were very receptive,” he wrote home to Rachel. “You would be amazed at how eager they are for someone to lend a helping hand and I must say I got a thrill out of the way they took to me.”
Completing the tour in Florida, tired from his grinding schedule and on the strong advice of his doctor, Jack stopped off in Miami for a vacation. Drifting back into the past, he stayed at the “colored” Sir John Hotel, formerly the Lord Calvert, where he, Campanella, Newcombe, and other black Dodgers had lived over the years during spring training. No doubt he felt a twinge of nostalgia for his vanished days as a big-league star. “
Miami isn’t what it once was,” he wrote home. In weather too cool for his liking he played some rounds of golf, but mainly he sought to rest after a grueling year in which he had often felt extreme fatigue. No one was sure how much his diabetes had to do with this condition, but his illness certainly did not help him as he kept up a dense schedule. “I needed this very much,” he wrote Rachel from Miami, “and hope I don’t allow myself to get this tired again. I was shot both mentally and physically when I arrived. I am coming around now and should be fine very soon.”
As for baseball, Jack still had a soft spot in his heart for his former teammates, and even for the team. The previous year, in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, he spoke free of charge at a testimonial dinner for Clem Labine, one of his favorite teammates over the years with Brooklyn. Declining to join the chorus of outrage and recrimination in Brooklyn, Jack watched from a distance as the Golden Age ended and the Dodgers left a community that would never recover fully from this loss, and moved to Los Angeles. Most Dodger supporters heaped abuse on Walter O’Malley, but to his son, Peter, “
it took a great deal of courage to move the franchise to Los Angeles without a place to play, until eventually a stadium could be designed and built. It was an extraordinary move. My father had believed in building a stadium in Brooklyn, and it didn’t happen. He believed in the move to Los Angeles, and it did happen, and it proved to be very, very successful.”
In January 1958, Jack heard with dismay the tragic news of the crippling of Roy Campanella in an accident at night, when a rented car he was driving skidded on an icy patch of road near his home on Long Island. The impact crushed the catcher’s fifth cervical vertebra and left him, in mid-career, a quadriplegic. Despite Jack’s clashes with Campanella, or perhaps because of them, he felt the tragedy of the accident keenly. In the years to come, he would be moved both by Campanella’s indomitable response to his injury and by the unflagging devotion of Walter and Peter O’Malley to the welfare of the Campanellas.
In Los Angeles, awaiting the completion of their stadium, the team now played before huge crowds in the Coliseum, where Jack had starred in many a football game in 1939 and 1940. But when the stress of its transcontinental move, the uncertainty of a coming city referendum on its right to own and develop land in Chavez Ravine, and conditions in the Coliseum unsuited to baseball led to a dreadful record, he took no comfort in Dodger misery. “
I root for them and wish them well,” he said publicly in May. Jack was sincere. “
I really feel sorry for the Dodgers,” he wrote to a friend. “It seems they can’t do a thing right and I am really hoping things break for them very soon.” As for Campanella, “I am sorry to see him in this condition but feel he may pull out [of it] if he has any luck.”
However, Robinson snapped when he heard that the Urban League of Los Angeles had given Walter O’Malley a plaque to mark his “
enlightened leadership in opening the door to employment of Negro athletes in major league baseball.” The report touched Jack in a tender spot; he could not bear to see Branch Rickey’s glory given away so brazenly—especially since O’Malley, in a recent
Time
magazine cover story, had hinted that one reason for the Dodgers’ move from Brooklyn was the rapid growth of its black and Puerto Rican populations. “
That’s preposterous,” Jack said publicly
about the citation. “O’Malley had nothing to do with it. It was all Mr. Rickey’s idea, and I don’t believe O’Malley even knew anything about it. In fact, he wasn’t too keen about it in the first place.” (On the defensive, the Urban League announced that the award was going to the Dodgers as an organization, not to O’Malley personally.)
The incident only deepened Jack’s disappointment with baseball. In July, in Cleveland, when he ran into Bill Veeck and stopped to chat with the affable, progressive former owner of the Indians, Jack confessed that he had not bothered to watch the recent All-Star Game in Baltimore on television. “
Baseball has nothing for me,” he told Veeck bitterly, “and I am damn sure I have nothing for it.”
L
ATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1958
, Jack and the entire Robinson home on Cascade Road endured a gentle but reverberating shock when Rachel, after several months of intense preparation, including study sessions starting at two in the morning, enrolled full-time at New York University in downtown Manhattan in a program leading to a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing.
Rachel had decided to go back to school for two main reasons. One, the less important, was money. Jack’s position at Chock Full o’ Nuts, she knew, was hardly set in stone; in addition, their household expenses were mounting steadily and would only continue to climb as the three children approached college. Moreover, she needed to prepare herself in case anything untoward should happen to Jack. The second major reason had to do with her individual sense of fulfillment. After more than a decade spent in loyal support of Jack, she now wanted a career of her own, and in the profession she knew best, nursing, preferably as a teacher. She and Jack had many long discussions about his wish to see her remain at home and her desire to go back to school. “
He was never adamant,” she said later, “although he wasn’t happy. I guess we both knew that the bigger problem would come later, if—or when—I took a job.”
For several months, Jack watched curiously, perhaps hoping against hope that she would give up her plan, as Rachel became a diligent student again, just as she had been when he had first observed her in Westwood in the fall of 1940. Some eighteen years and three children later, uncertain of how she would fare, she had prepared for the Graduate Record Examinations, which were mandatory for admission to graduate school. “
Rae is studying again,” Jack wrote Caroline Wallerstein in Chicago. “She wants a masters in Nursing and the exam is rather hard. She spends most of her time (spare) with the books.”
Helping to make Rachel’s plans possible in 1958 was the presence in the Robinson home of her mother, Zellee. Following her own mother’s death in Los Angeles, and at Jack’s urging, Zellee had moved east. (With her coming, the Robinsons’ live-in arrangement with Willette Bailey ended, although she remained like one of the family.) When the Robinsons bought her a car, she was able to help get the children, especially young David, to and from school; she could also prepare dinner when Rachel was away. On weekends, she would head for Brooklyn, where she had her own room at the Covingtons’ and where she attended church and quickly developed a solid circle of friends, including Willette. For Zellee, the move was almost in every way a step upward. “
I was less enthusiastic than Jack about having my mother live with us,” Rachel said, “but she absolutely blossomed with the move. The children loved her, she made friends easily, and she took to East Coast life in a big way. And Jack, as always, adored her, just as she adored Jack. It freed me to make some changes in my life.”
Changes in Rachel’s life meant changes in Jack’s life. Despite Rachel’s astute handling of their finances, he was well aware of the tenuousness of his job, Bill Black’s good intentions at Chock Full o’ Nuts notwithstanding. Alertly, Jack continued to keep an eye open for new business opportunities, although nothing he attempted could be in conflict with his main job. But opportunities dwindled with each year away from baseball. That year he sold his share of the struggling Jackie Robinson Store on 125th Street; Jack’s ventures in housing construction were still dormant.
Now and then he was teased by the prospect of another Hollywood film. Despite a show of nonchalance, when a telephone call alerted him that Kirk Douglas was doing a movie in which there might be a part for Jack, he hurried to explore his chances. “
Frankly I don’t care one way or the other,” he wrote to the Wallersteins, who had very good movie connections, “but I heard it was to be filmed in Europe and you know how Rae has been dying for such a trip.” Finally Jack confessed: “I guess I’m really a ham at heart because the call did excite me a bit.” (The movie was probably
Spartacus,
released in 1960; if so, the coveted role went to Jack’s statuesque teammate at UCLA Woody Strode, who still possessed the lithe physique that had entranced Bruin fans in the late 1930s.) Later, in Los Angeles, Jack had a chance to speak to the producer Sam Goldwyn Jr. about his proposed film version of
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
To Jack’s disappointment, Goldwyn decided to look elsewhere for an actor to portray Mark Twain’s noble slave Jim. “
It’s a pretty good script,” Jack judged wistfully. “The last I heard Archie Moore [the boxer] was leading the field for the role. I just hope it turns out well.”