Authors: Arnold Rampersad
Jack’s first day back home was a pleasure. Hobbled by bandages on his left leg and supported by crutches, he could not move about much. But he could look through the window out onto the snowy ground strewn with granite boulders, and the pond he had come to love and the green willows his family had planted on the banks. Above all, he looked forward to his first dinner with his family since the first week of January. But near dinnertime, no one could find Jackie. Urgent telephone calls to his friends brought no news. “
Then someone called us from the bank,” Rachel recalled. “Jackie had stopped by and withdrawn all of his money and stuffed it into a paper bag. Something didn’t seem right, and the bank thought that maybe we ought to know. Sooner or later we realized that Jackie had run away. Jack just crumbled. He started to cry. It was the first time the family—Sharon and David, my mother, all of us—had seen him break down and cry. What he had just been through at the hospital had something to do with it, but he was deeply, deeply hurt.”
Jackie and a fellow Rippowam High student, a white youngster whose family was also left in the dark, had taken off by bus for California. They ran out of money in Texas but somehow made it to California, where they expected to find jobs picking fruit—except that the fruit harvests were some months away. Finally, in frustration, Jackie called home from Los Angeles, where local police soon picked him up along with his companion. After about two weeks away, they returned home to Stamford.
For Jack and his son, this was a turning point in their relationship, from which they would not recover for several years.
F
ORCED NOW TO USE A CANE
, his full head of hair gone gray, Jack was a sobering sight to old friends who recalled him in his athletic prime. For the first time in years, his traveling to raise money for the NAACP fell off; he was not up to taking long trips in cramped airplanes. Staying close to home, however, he did what he could to help. At the Harlem branch YMCA, he became a co-chairman of a drive to raise $137,000 to renovate the decaying main building on 135th Street and the boys’ department across the street.
His column showed no loss of vigor. In March, Jack startled readers by an open letter blasting the most powerful and beloved elected official in
Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church and a veteran congressman. To Robinson, Powell had long been a hero. A brilliant civil rights leader in Harlem during the Depression, Powell had entered Congress in 1945. There, his aggressive civil rights leadership, as well as his flamboyant personal style, had made him stand out; admired and even beloved by most blacks, he was also criticized by many whites. Scrutiny of Powell’s record only increased after 1960, when his seniority gave him the chairmanship of the important House Committee on Education and Labor, the first House chairmanship held by a black. By 1963, Powell was the center of controversy over charges of corruption and absenteeism from the House. His absenteeism was clear; having lost a libel suit in the amount of more than $200,000 brought against him by a Harlem woman, Powell now kept his distance from New York to avoid paying up. In 1963, when Robinson attacked him, Harlem had just answered the charges against Powell by reelecting him by a landslide.
To this point, Jack had avoided any public criticism of Powell; in fact, at a recent appearance at Howard University, a student had berated him for not speaking out against Powell. But Jack had been provoked by a widely reported speech, “One Thousand Tomorrows,” delivered by Powell first at the Capital Press Club in Washington, then at a rally on 125th Street. Behind the speech was Powell’s anger at the major black civil rights organizations for failing to come to his defense. Much of the speech was familiar stuff—a call for black racial unity, an attack on the black middle class for evading their duty to the race, and resentment that liberal whites were offering mainly charity when blacks wanted a fair shake. Now, however, Powell came close to urging a boycott of the leading civil rights groups, because they included too many whites among their leaders. “
We have got to have organizations where Negroes control the policy,” he told the crowd. “How many Negroes sit on the Board of Directors of the American Jewish Congress or the Italian societies?” Naming the NAACP, the National Urban League, SCLC, and CORE, he insisted now that “we must consider boycotting those organization we don’t control.”
At the NAACP and the National Urban League, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young reacted with outrage. Robinson’s own reply was an open letter to “
a friend in the wrong.” His tone was a mixture of regret and censure: “I write it because it is my sincere belief that you have set back the cause of the Negro, let your race down and failed miserably … as an important national leader of the Negro in this nation.” Defending the role of white veterans of the NAACP such as its president, Arthur Spingarn, and its life-membership chairman, Kivie Kaplan, he also attacked Powell’s benign views of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Powell knew that “the answer for the Negro is to be
found, not in segregation or in separation, but by his insistence upon moving into his rightful place—the same place as that of any other American—within our society.” As for Powell’s personal troubles, it was “pretty obvious that you had placed yourself in a vulnerable position to be condemned by many people with many different motives.”
The open letter enraged some blacks, and especially Malcolm’s supporters. One of them offered three messages: “
To Jackie Robinson: ‘Shut your mouth, go away.’ To Adam Powell: ‘Welcome home brother, you’ve been gone too long.’ To Malcolm X: ‘I’d be lost without you.’ ” “
We as black people,” another letter suggested, “must get rid of fellows like Jackie Robinson, who can be purchased by our number one enemy.” “
I was one of your admirers, Jackie,” still another warned, “but you must remember that you are not on the ball field now. You are playing with the destinies and freedom of your people in America.” Although the response was intense, Jack would not budge. “
If I have to give up my right to say exactly what I believe to earn popularity and admiration,” he declared, “you can keep the popularity and admiration.” He was “deeply proud” of his link to men like Black and Rickey. (In fact, in the middle of the controversy he published a column in praise of a veteran white civil rights lawyer, David Levinson, in Philadelphia.) As for Powell: “Adam was my friend and if he so chooses, he still is. Sometimes it takes a friend to say the things other people won’t say.”
Jack’s antipathy to President Kennedy about civil rights helped to close the distance between himself and Powell, if only to some degree. When, in April, Powell broke a truce between himself and Kennedy over the issue of discrimination in public housing, Robinson praised Powell: “
This kind of forthright action is exactly what we meant when we wrote that Adam could once again exert leadership if he so desired.” On July 8, the second speaker in a lecture series on the “Black Revolution” at Abyssinian Baptist Church was Jackie Robinson.
In April, still leaning on his cane and eager for the tropic sun, Jack and Rachel flew to Venezuela as the guest of the Sheraton chain for the opening of one of its hotels there; they also attended the inauguration of Rómulo Betancourt as president of the country. This baseball-loving country, where Jack had played in 1945 as a barnstormer with a Negro leagues team, welcomed Jack as a hero, and he and Betancourt even shared a press conference. Rested, he returned to the United States prepared to resume his traveling for the civil rights movement. The center of attention was now, once again, Birmingham, Alabama, where that month Martin Luther King Jr. announced a campaign to breach its thick walls of segregation. Commanded by the infamous police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor, officers arrested over two thousand demonstrators and jailed more than one
thousand; but the most harrowing stage of the action began on May 1, when King summoned black schoolchildren to join the desegregation campaign. Filmed images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on demonstrators, including women and children, sickened much of the nation and swept around the world.
On May 7, after a briefing by Al Duckett and Noel Marder, a wealthy young white publisher from Yonkers committed to the movement, who had just returned from visiting King in Birmingham, Jack sent out a flood of telegrams announcing an emergency meeting at Sardi’s restaurant in Manhattan to discuss the crisis in Birmingham. He also dispatched an impassioned telegram to President Kennedy protesting the sluggish pace of civil rights progress and calling for federal support of the protesters. “
The revolution that is taking place in this country,” Robinson insisted, “can not be squelched by police dogs or high power hoses.” A host of leaders and celebrities, from A. Philip Randolph, Arnold Forster, and Louis Lefkowitz to Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, and Juanita Poitier, turned out for what Jack described as the organizing meeting of a new support group, “Back Our Brothers,” of which Marder and Robinson were co-chairmen. The luncheon netted more than $8,000 for Dr. King, as well as a pledge to raise $20,000 more at a dinner in June.
With news cameras rolling, Jack also announced that, at King’s invitation, he would soon fly to Birmingham to join the protest. This news brought a flood of calls from friends eager to support the Birmingham effort. Ella Fitzgerald sent a check for $1,000. Floyd Patterson, training doggedly for his rematch with the new heavyweight boxing champion, Sonny Liston, telephoned to ask if he could accompany Jack. “
I can’t stay in jail but three days,” he told Robinson, who hoped not to go to jail at all, “but I’ll go down and stay that long with you.” Never one to offer himself as a martyr, Robinson downplayed the courage involved in his decision. “
I don’t like to be bitten by dogs,” he confessed, “because I’m a coward. I don’t like to go to jail either, because, as I say, I’m a coward. But we’ve got to show Martin Luther King that we are behind him.”
On May 10, in Birmingham, Dr. King announced an agreement reached with the Senior Citizens Committee, a group of leading white businessmen, for desegregating the city. But euphoria about this victory was soon shattered. On May 13, at one o’clock in the morning, an urgent telephone call from Wyatt Tee Walker in Birmingham awakened Jack with the news that a bomb had shattered part of the black-owned Gaston Motel, which King used as his headquarters there. Walker needed to reach White House officials who might intervene to protect King from another assassination attempt. Jack was able to reach a presidential advisor and inform him of
their concern. Later that day, Robinson, Patterson, and eleven others in their party left Newark Airport. That evening, just after 7 p.m., they reached Birmingham. There, Walker, whose wife had been clubbed savagely in her head with a rifle butt by a police officer, greeted them with a warning about new threats of violence against them in particular.
With a police escort, Robinson, Patterson, and their party drove to the Fifth Street Baptist Church, where Dr. King, his associate Ralph Abernathy, and other top leaders warmly greeted them. Inside, a capacity crowd of some two thousand persons were singing a movement anthem when the two celebrities made a dramatic entrance, Robinson gray-haired and leaning on his cane, Patterson young and vigorous but with a bandaged right hand from a training-camp accident. The assembly erupted in joy at the sight of two men so closely identified over the recent years as symbols of brave black manhood. In his speech, Robinson attacked President Kennedy for not sending troops into Birmingham and also excoriated the Alabama State Police and Bull Connor in particular for their response to protesters. Then he and Patterson went to Pilgrim Baptist Church, where hundreds of participants at a youth rally gave them another wildly enthusiastic reception. At the end of a long evening, after uneasily inspecting the bombed-out section, they went to bed at the Gaston Motel.
The next morning, Robinson and Patterson were joined by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the most prominent local protest leader and a veteran of many clashes with the police, who had been hospitalized after being struck by high-pressure hoses. Accompanied by the Reverend A. D. King (Martin’s brother), Robinson then returned to New York in time to take a major role in an NAACP rally on Seventh Avenue in Harlem to commemorate the ninth anniversary on May 17 of
Brown
v.
Board of Education.
If he was a hero to many for having visited Birmingham at this time, he was not a hero to all. The New York
Daily News
questioned the wisdom of the trip, as did the former star athlete Jesse Owens; they saw Robinson and other Northerners stirring up trouble rather than ending it. (In an exchange of messages, Robinson rebuked Owens.) Also critical of the Birmingham effort was Malcolm X: Robinson and Patterson had gone there at the behest of white liberals, to defuse black rage. Moreover, Malcolm argued, no self-respecting black man would send his children to be abused by police dogs and fire hoses, as the protestors had done.
The danger facing blacks protesting in the South was tragically underscored on June 12 when, near midnight, a gunman shot and killed thirty-seven-year-old Medgar Evers in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, as he returned from a civil rights meeting. At least twice, Evers had welcomed Robinson to Jackson in support of the NAACP. Robinson
did not attend the funeral but sent an impassioned telegram to President Kennedy pleading for protection for Dr. King, who attended the event on June 15. If King were harmed, Robinson declared, “
the restraint of many people all over this nation might burst its bonds and bring about a brutal bloody holocaust the like of which this country has not seen.” Ironically, the murder occurred only a few hours after another extraordinary moment, when the President finally threw his full support behind the movement. Pressed by King and other civil rights leaders to take a moral stand against Jim Crow in addition to signing legislation, President Kennedy had just delivered a television address, some of it improvised, of surpassing eloquence and insight. After hearing the address, Jack at once sent a telegram to the White House: “
Thank you for emerging as the most forthright President we have ever had and for providing us with the inspired leadership that we so desperately needed. I am more proud than ever of my American heritage.”