Authors: Arnold Rampersad
The controversy seemed about to escalate after pink-and-black handbills announced a “
mass rally” sponsored by the Nation of Islam, aimed at the “moral elevation of our community.” Led by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam combined major elements of orthodox
Islamic traditions with a dogmatic faith in the inherent evil of whites. Behind the rally was Elijah Muhammad’s Mosque No. 7, located on West 116th Street in Harlem. The event was to take place on July 21 on the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue—outside the Chock Full o’ Nuts restaurant. The main speakers, according to the handbill, would include both Lewis Michaux and the controversial leader of Mosque No. 7, Malcolm X.
For a while the picketers continued to impede customers entering the restaurant. Then, following a heated debate between Jack and Michaux over the radio station WWRL, and an informal talk between Jack and Malcolm at another point, tempers began to cool. In a strange about-face that was evidence of the sometimes surreal nature of Harlem life, Michaux not only attended Jack’s testimonial dinner at the Waldorf Astoria but also sat at Schiffman’s table. Warmed by the praise heaped on Robinson, he soon declared himself forever one of Jack’s fans. In the end, Michaux denied that his group had voiced anti-Jewish chants, while Robinson upheld the right of the group to picket, as long as it expressed no race hatred. Michaux then called upon his followers to put away their signs. A few weeks later, he announced that his group, Blaine, and Singer had reached an agreement on all issues concerning the restaurant, which would open in the fall.
To some ultranationalist blacks, however, Jackie Robinson was a traitor. Hostile letters reached the offices of the
Amsterdam News.
“
You have banished yourself from the Black Race,” one informed him. “You are no longer one of us. You are a man without a race.… We can never destroy the white race with rattle snakes like you.” But such letters did not intimidate him. “
Jack had been attacked so often for so long,” Rachel said, “that nothing they wrote could upset him. He shrugged the words off.” In fact, he faced accusations of being a white man’s Negro by offering columns in defense of white friends such as Pee Wee Reese, under fire in Louisville for allegedly owning a segregated bowling alley, and the television star Ed Sullivan, attacked by a young black dramatist for allegedly keeping serious black drama off his nationally popular weekly show. But he also defended blacks, including those in the Nation of Islam. On August 25, he published a column chastising the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, after Walter announced that he was thinking of launching “
a very intensive investigation of a Negro group known as the Black Muslims.” Jack was indignant. What about an investigation of white supremacist groups, including the White Citizens Councils?
In any event, unbowed by attacks on him because of the steakhouse episode, he moved to his testimonial dinner and his Hall of Fame induction confident that he had done the right thing in standing up to racial and religious hatred. The outpouring of respect and love at the dinner and the
induction ceremony in Cooperstown, New York, healed whatever wound the episode had inflicted.
E
VEN IN THE DOG DAYS
of August, Robinson remained busy. On August 16, he was the main speaker in Springfield, Massachusetts, at a dinner marking the hundredth birthday of Amos Alonzo Stagg, the “Grand Old Man” of football, so called because of his long career as a coach, including forty-seven years at the University of Chicago, and his many innovations in the sport.
Some days later, he left home on an even more important task: a visit, at the request of Dr. King, to speak in Albany, Georgia, at the dangerous height of the concerted civil rights action there known as the Albany Movement. On the morning of August 26, Jack was at the Atlanta airport, en route to Albany, when he heard the news of the destruction by fire of two black churches near Albany that had been involved in voter registration. About two weeks before, another black church, the Shady Grove Baptist Church in Lee County, had also burned. Accompanied by Dr. King’s executive assistant, Wyatt Tee Walker (who had delivered King’s speech at Jack’s Hall of Fame dinner the previous month), he flew south to Albany. There, he delivered a rousing address to an overflow crowd. Then, with some trepidation (“
There was fear in the voice of someone,” he said, “who thought it might not be wise to go”), he joined Walker and other figures in the Albany Movement who headed south in three cars to the small town of Sasser to view the still-smoldering ruins of the Mount Olive Baptist Church. There, its pastor, the Reverend F. S. Swaggot, wept openly as he walked with them about the grounds. “
It really makes you want to cry deep down in your heart,” Jack told a reporter. When Walker insisted that something should be done in response, Robinson knew at once that the churches had to be rebuilt. To that end, he pledged one hundred dollars on the spot. Later that day, Dr. King telephoned to ask him to serve as national chairman of the rebuilding fund. Jack agreed to do so.
“
Jackie Robinson had long been a hero to me,” Walker later recalled, “and it was like a dream come true to work with him. His presence in the South was very important to us. I have said a number of times that Jackie Robinson’s entrance into the big leagues did more for race relations than all the work of the so-called forces of Christ combined. We worried about his safety in Albany and later in Birmingham, and we had a small group of people, bodyguards really, to look out for him. He was brave—he had already proven his bravery, but he showed it again in the South at a very bad time in our history.”
Returning home, Jack boldly launched the Church Fund to rebuild the Shady Grove, Mount Olive, and Mount Mary Baptist Churches. The fund netted $6,000 in its first hour, with Bill Black of Chock Full o’ Nuts giving $5,000 and C. B. Powell of the
Amsterdam News
donating $1,000. At Jack’s invitation, five hundred of his fellow employees pledged to donate a dollar a week for twenty weeks to raise an additional $10,000. Governor Rockefeller, a Baptist, contributed $10,000. Frank Schiffman gave $1,000 and stopped performances nightly at the Apollo Theater to take up a collection. Floyd Patterson agreed to turn over a share of his purse from his upcoming title fight with Sonny Liston. On radio and television and in the newspapers, Robinson appealed for checks from the public made out to King’s SCLC but mailed to him for conveyance to King. “
Let’s rebuild these churches,” he urged. “Let’s do it ourselves.”
To Jack’s disappointment, the Church Fund soon bogged down. Some blacks flatly refused to give anything. “
It is sad to think,” he wrote in his column, “that any Negro would refuse to give even a coin to show how he feels about race-haters who burn down Negro churches which are trying to help the Negro to vote in the South. Thank God, those kind of people are in the minority, and the overwhelming majority of Negro people recognize their own responsibility.” Eventually, almost two years later, he was able to announce that he had collected $50,000 and that all three churches had been mostly rebuilt. He was glad that white Georgians had also helped. Donations came from the Atlanta
Constitution
Fund and various white church groups, including the Georgia Council of Churches, the United Citizens of Christ, and a Trappist monastery in Georgia that provided stained-glass windows free of charge to the new buildings.
On September 24, he was back in the South, invited by King to address the sixth annual convention of the SCLC in Birmingham, Alabama. At the airport, police stopped an attempt to form a motorcade that would escort Robinson into town. Nevertheless, he delivered a stirring speech even as the focus of national attention to civil rights swung sharply to the University of Mississippi, where an Air Force veteran, James Meredith, was seeking to attend classes as the first black student at “Ole Miss.” (After rioting that left two dead and more than one hundred injured, a force of three thousand federal troops restored order.) In Birmingham, however, the SCLC convention took an important step. Emphasizing the role of Jim Crow in employment, SCLC leaders decided to open a new front, in addition to voter registration. Jack supported this expanded role for the SCLC even as leaders at the NAACP saw its own powers being usurped. To Robinson, the common goal was greater freedom for blacks. Two days
later, back in New York, he gladly served as the central figure at a mammoth NAACP voter-registration rally at Metropolitan Baptist Church at 128th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem.
The fall of 1962 was dominated by important local elections, including races for the United States Senate and the governorship. To Jack’s satisfaction, the Republican Jacob Javits won easy reelection to the Senate. Governor Rockefeller’s task was harder, and Jack was active in his support. On August 29, Robinson was prominent in a reception honoring Rockefeller for “
his continued and sustained interest in behalf of the Harlem community.” Jack also helped smooth the way in various campaign walks by Rockefeller in Harlem and Brooklyn; in October, he presented a Baptist layman award to the governor at Antioch Baptist Church in Brooklyn. However, in one election race Robinson stirred up antagonism from many other blacks. In the race for state attorney general, he openly opposed the Democratic Party candidate, Edward Dudley, who was seeking to become the first black to hold statewide office in New York. (Dudley was the president of the Borough of Manhattan; he was also the NAACP official who had corresponded with Robinson in 1944 about his court-martial.) But Robinson endorsed Dudley’s Republican opponent, Louis Lefkowitz. “
Do you turn your back on a white candidate for re-election,” Jack asked, “who has built a reputation for being one of the most dedicated, militant and conscientious public servants in the nation and who has steadily batted 1,000 percent on the civil rights issue? Do you turn your back on him because he is a white man and you are a Negro who would like to see another Negro move up to a high office?” On Election Day, most black voters answered yes. They voted for Dudley—but Lefkowitz won.
One other election of special concern to Robinson took place on the other side of the country. In California, where Jack had campaigned for him, Richard Nixon lost the race for the governorship. Bitter and exhausted, he then unloaded on the press and declared himself done with politics forever. But Robinson hurried to console him. “
I hope that you will reconsider, Dick,” Jack wrote, “because it is the great men people attack. You are good for politics; good for America.… I urge you to remain active. There is so much to be done and there are too few qualified people to do the job now. Your loss would be an added blow to our efforts.”
C
HRISTMAS 1962 WAS AS
usual a happy time in the Robinson home, a season of giving and celebration; but it was also overshadowed a little by Jack’s nervous expectation of surgery
early in the new year. His left knee was the
problem. For some time he had been playing tennis again, but finally had to give it up because of chronic pain from arthritis and a torn cartilage that needed repairing.
On January 7, Jack underwent surgery at Mount Vernon Hospital in Westchester County near New York City. His doctors, Dr. Robert Rosen and Dr. Arthur Sadler, pronounced the operation successful. With his left leg in a cast from ankle to thigh, Jack was wheeled back to his fifth-floor room, where he expected to stay two or three days before returning home. But two weeks later he was still there. Complications set in: staphylococcal bacteria had infected his knee, which became almost unbearably painful, and spread poisonously into his blood system; the septicemia also threw his diabetes wildly out of control. Treated with massive doses of penicillin and insulin and fed intravenously, Robinson slipped in and out of consciousness. “One day, early in the morning, I came into his room as I did every day,” Rachel recalled, “and he did not know who I was. He was delirious, completely out of it. The poison was systemic, and it wasn’t clear right away that the antibiotics would work in time.”
After a while he began to recover. Certainly the ordeal disturbed him. Lavished with attention by the hospital staff, he could only wonder what might have happened to him otherwise. “
I was not afraid,” he wrote from the hospital, even as he joked nervously about not being quite ready to “steal home.” He was “deeply concerned” mainly about the effect on his wife and children “if I were taken away at this time. I like to believe that God has a lot of work left for me to do and wants to give me time to do it the best I possibly can.”
Flowers, cards, and letters poured into the hospital, as well as a stream of visitors that included eighty-two-year-old Branch Rickey, who had almost stolen home a few times himself because of chronic heart problems. Chastened, Jack looked forward to returning to Stamford and the comfort of his home, with his family about him. Rachel’s daily visits had meant a lot to him, but the children, too, had been attentive. Lying in his hospital bed, he had been deeply moved by a Christmas gift they had given him and Rachel—a loving cup, engraved with the words “To the Best Parents” and, underneath, the children’s names. The cup, Jack told his readers, was worth more to him than all the trophies he ever received. “
Like any other family, we have our problems,” he confessed. “Up until this Christmas, we haven’t been sure we were even on our way to solving some of our problems.” But things were better now; the cup symbolized the new unity of the Robinson family.
Mainly, if not exclusively, Jack was referring to Jackie, who had failed again at boarding school. Refusing to honor the dress code and other rules and ignoring his schoolwork, he had also been involved in fights. The
school asked him not to return. Back in Stamford, where he enrolled in Rippowam High School, he fell back into some of his old ways but also seemed to be trying hard to improve. That November, he turned sixteen. By Christmas, he seemed a much more contented person than in the past. To Jack, the loving cup was the final touch in what he was sure was Jackie’s emerging maturity.