Authors: Arnold Rampersad
On the whole, his column lived up to this prescription. It struck a balance between sports and other subjects but kept its author’s sensitivity to racism and civil rights at the fore. Over the first year, baseball was the subject of the largest number of columns on any single subject. Jack also wrote several pieces on boxing; occasionally only, he wrote on football, basketball, golf, and tennis. But sport was perhaps the least inspired aspect of the column, which sparkled mainly when Robinson made civil rights, or some other aspect of the fight for social justice, his focus. Now and then, as in taking on the Professional Golfers Association for its explicit “Caucasians Only” membership policy, sports and civil rights were coupled. In fact, Jack’s columns attacking the PGA and the local Metropolitan Golfers Association, which abided by the PGA’s Jim Crow rule, were a factor in the PGA’s decision to grant membership to Charlie Sifford. Near the end of March 1960, Sifford became the Jackie Robinson of golf.
On the whole, Jack tried to express his views on a wide range of interrelated topics: politics in Harlem, juvenile delinquency, housing and school discrimination in New York and elsewhere, migrant workers, trade unions, and personalities who caught Robinson’s fancy, including Belafonte and Poitier, the intelligent, socially conscious broadcaster and former attorney Howard Cosell, and the singer and actress Diahann Carroll. Modestly, Jack probed international affairs. He wrote a few columns on Africa, including South Africa and Southwest Africa, Liberia, and the Congo. After an erroneous report that Fidel Castro had invited him to dinner in Havana, Jack (“
somewhat peeved by this report”) sent Castro a letter urging him to build on the residue of American goodwill toward his revolution and act more responsibly. Castro should “stop now to see where he is going rather than continue to plunge along blindly. Passion and zeal are fine qualities. But a dose of foresight is a pretty good commodity to have along with them.”
His real interest was America, and civil rights. In taut language, his second column described an incident that had occurred six days before, in Poplarville, Mississippi, when “a quiet,
hooded, well-drilled group of men entered an unguarded jailhouse in southern Mississippi. And when they left, they took with them a screaming, beaten, bloody, human being.” Jack’s focus was the contrast between the terrible fate of the prisoner, Mack Charles Parker, a young black man who had been accused of raping a white woman, and the folly of those people who opposed civil rights legislation as
being punitive of the South. In particular, Robinson criticized the delaying tactics of the governor of Mississippi, who claimed to oppose lynching but resisted laws to prevent it. “I can’t really express my deep outrage,” Jack wrote, “about this terrible incident.… The lynching of Mack Parker is but the end result of all the shouts of defiance by Southern legislatures, all the open incitement to disobey the law by Southern governors, and all the weak-kneed ‘gradualism’ of those entrusted with enforcing and protecting civil rights.”
(Parker’s body soon surfaced in the nearby Pearl River. The FBI, after investigating the lynching and deciding that it violated no federal law, turned over its findings, including the identities of the lynchers, to local authorities. But a grand jury of whites refused even to hear evidence against these men.)
On May 8, Robinson took an even bolder step in his column. Looking ahead to the elections the following year, 1960, he announced that his column would soon venture into the arena of politics. In 1959, this was a nervy step for a black man, a former professional athlete, publishing a column in the sports section of a newspaper. Nevertheless, Jack moved with some confidence, and his basic idea from the start was to sway voters. In 1947, he noted, players opposed to him had come around to his side because winning games meant more money; politics now “
is somewhat similar to that situation—except that instead of money, it’s votes.” As 1960 approached, “all the politicians who have kept their distance since the last campaign are out in force now—each with a big smile, a warm handshake and a hatful of promises.” He would try to find out the truth about each man.
For the presidency, the likely candidates included, among the Republicans, Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller, the newly elected governor of New York. Among the Democrats were Rockefeller’s predecessor as governor, Averell Harriman; Adlai Stevenson, twice defeated for the presidency; the liberal Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota; and John F. Kennedy, the handsome, wealthy young senator from Massachusetts.
In his column, Jack positioned himself as belonging to neither party. “
I guess you’d call me an independent, since I’ve never identified myself with one party or another in politics.” He was, in fact, a registered independent. But already Robinson had shown a clear disposition to support the Republicans, and in particular Vice-President Nixon. His major motive for doing so was not personal gain. “
I have no political ambitions,” he would declare, “and want no job other than the excellent non-political one I already have. There are no rewards or payoffs that could ever make me sell out in my determination to fight for equal rights for all.” Even with Eisenhower and Nixon, he was quick to strike when either man deviated from a firm
commitment to civil rights. “How long,
Mr. President,” Jack asked after reading about the latest salute to democracy by Eisenhower, “must we continue to wait before you back up those fine and singing words with definite, positive action?”
But Robinson was a Republican at heart, albeit a liberal Republican on the key matter of civil rights. Flattered at their first meeting, he genuinely liked Nixon insofar as he knew him; perhaps Jack made a great deal of their common Californian roots. But he also had a good feeling about the Republican Party in general. He liked its toughness on communism, its image of moral austerity that was unsullied, unlike the Democratic Party’s, by Southern bigotry or by the seedy corruption of some urban Democratic machines; he liked the Republicans’ association with capitalism and business, an area Robinson was determined to learn and even conquer. Nevertheless, quite consciously, he also set out to achieve a difficult, perhaps impossible goal. Seeking to make his voice influential in both parties on the matter of civil rights, he aimed to influence both nominations for the presidential election. Each candidate would be measured by his ongoing record on civil rights legislation and his willingness to enforce laws to protect blacks. This refusal to pick a party and stick with his choice would be the defining factor in Robinson’s politics for almost the rest of his life. It would make him often appear noble in his loyalty to principle, especially on civil rights; but it would also make him seem to some people self-righteous and even undependable.
In 1959, after Senator Hubert Humphrey addressed a formal dinner at the Harlem branch YMCA, Jack was sure that he had found his man among the Democrats. Humphrey’s record as a liberal on race went back at least to 1946, when, as mayor of Minneapolis, he secured enactment of the first municipal Fair Employment Practices Act in the United States. In 1948, at the Democratic National Convention, in support of an uncompromising civil rights plank, he had called the delegates to action against Jim Crow. “
Now is the time,” Humphrey had urged, “for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadows of states’ rights and walk in the sunshine of human rights.” In July 1959, addressing the 50th Annual Convention of the NAACP in Minneapolis, he linked his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the matter of civil rights. With civil rights, “
more than a question of law enforcement is involved,” Humphrey argued; “at stake is a basic
moral
issue which underlies our very conception of democracy.” Impressed by the breadth of Humphrey’s vision, Robinson endorsed him. “
This man and his principles must be supported,” he told his
Post
readers. “For Humphrey’s is the kind of leadership that brings pride and inspiration to people in all walks of life.”
Jack’s will to emphasize civil rights was only reinforced on October 25, when for perhaps the first time since his early days in baseball he came face to face with Jim Crow as enforced by armed white policemen in the South. Arriving at the airport in Greenville, South Carolina, for an NAACP event, he discovered that several people awaiting him had been forced out of the main or “white” waiting room by authorities. Returning to the airport for his flight home after a lively speech to some seventeen hundred people in Greenville, he decided to test the Jim Crow regulations there. Accompanied by Gloster Current, national director of NAACP branches, and a local supporter, Jack entered the main waiting room. Suddenly, “a disheveled,
unshaven man in a jacket approached us. He was wearing a gun and told us he was a policeman. In halting, seemingly uneducated speech, he told us either to move on or be moved.” No one moved. The airport manager then ordered the three blacks out of the main lounge. When they again refused, he summoned a uniformed policeman. “If they sit down,” he told the policeman, “put them in jail.” Jack and his friends, still refusing to budge, argued that the airport was a federally subsidized facility, operating under federal authority. Uncertain how to proceed, the officer quit the airport. Shortly afterward, Robinson boarded his plane without further incident.
This episode, mild compared to what blacks routinely faced in the South, only stiffened Jack’s resolve to hold officials accountable about civil rights. Among the Republicans, he congratulated William Rogers, the attorney general, for deploring the miscarriage of justice in the Mack Charles Parker case; he strongly criticized Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York for agreeing to return a black fugitive to the South. (It was perhaps significant that Rogers was known to be a Nixon man, and Rockefeller a Nixon adversary.) Robinson was increasingly harsh on President Eisenhower, who in his travels overseas mouthed “
words of great hope and encouragement concerning freedom and independence” to emerging nations such as India and Afghanistan but preached patience to blacks at home. “If there had been vigorous and uncompromising leadership from the White House,” he insisted, “America would never have had the shame of a Little Rock or a Poplarville.” “
Could it be,” he asked of Eisenhower, “that his frequent trips for golf and hunting in Georgia bring him in contact with people whose rigid opposition to equal rights he is affected by? Or has he all along adhered to the position he took before a Congressional committee in 1948 opposing the elimination of racial segregation in the armed forces?”
When, at the close of 1959, Rockefeller announced his decision not to seek the nomination for the presidency in 1960, Robinson showed the rest of his hand. Nixon, he argued with studied nonchalance, was not nearly as weak a candidate as many Democrats supposed. “
I’ve been following
Nixon’s career for some time now,” Jack wrote, “and I don’t mind admitting that generally I’ve liked what I’ve seen and heard.” Acknowledging Nixon’s reputation for unscrupulousness, he argued that the Vice-President had grown much since his election in 1952—“grown more than any other person presently in political life.” His visit to Russia and his celebrated “kitchen” debate with Nikita Khrushchev showed this growth, but earlier trips, especially one to India and other “colored” nations in 1953, had deepened Nixon’s understanding of racism. Nixon, Jack suggested, might yet prove attractive to voters “
the Democrats consider safely in their pockets. And if it should come to a choice between a weak and indecisive Democratic nominee and Vice-President Nixon, I, for one, would enthusiastically support Nixon.”
The hostile response by many
Post
readers to the column surprised Jack, as he wrote to Herbert Klein, an assistant to Nixon. “
I thought I was controversial,” Jack confessed, but he could see that Nixon “really has a battle to overcome some of his critics.” Robinson now felt free to press Nixon at crucial times with telegrams calling for action, as on February 25, when he warned that events in Biloxi, Mississippi, where a “wade-in” by blacks at a Jim Crow beach led to gunfire that left ten blacks wounded, could lead to a general explosion. “
The Negro is in an inflammable state,” he wrote in pressing for a face-to-face meeting to discuss civil rights with the Vice-President. A major challenge for Nixon and all the other candidates, Jack knew, was the rising tempo of activism among blacks in the South. On February 1, in what would prove a historic step, four college students from North Carolina A&T sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and kept their places after being refused service. This single action, barely premeditated, set in motion a wave of similar protests, mounted by blacks and whites, which began to roll across the South as segregated churches, restaurants, beaches, libraries, and other facilities found themselves under siege.
In March, in the middle of the Wisconsin primary, Robinson flew to Milwaukee to campaign for Humphrey. Earlier, through his friend Frank Reeves of Washington, D.C., a black lawyer active in NAACP and Democratic Party circles, he had startled Humphrey by offering to work for him as Humphrey wrestled with his main rival, John F. Kennedy, in a crucial stage of the race for the nomination; Robinson also helped to open the Humphrey for President office in Washington. These were significant steps for Jack; they marked his first direct involvement in a political campaign. Admiring Humphrey, he was perhaps even more eager to upset the candidacy of Kennedy, for whom he had taken a deep dislike. In particular, Kennedy’s publicized breakfast meeting at his home the previous June with
the segregationist governor of Alabama, John Patterson, and the president of the Alabama White Citizens Councils, Sam Englehardt, had led Jack to brand Kennedy an enemy of blacks. Robinson also knew of Kennedy’s obstructionist role in the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill, when only a concerted effort had saved the bill from death in the Judiciary Committee. In Milwaukee, when Robinson heard from a reporter that Robert Kennedy, who was managing his brother’s campaign, had claimed that Humphrey had paid Robinson for the visit, he was livid. “
I want right here to emphasize what I told that reporter,” he wrote on March 16 in the
Post.
“Whoever originated such a story is a liar.”