Authors: Arnold Rampersad
That summer, Robinson and Hudgins tried again, this time bidding for a 216-acre parcel of land in Lewisboro, New York, on the Connecticut border. Acting on behalf of several dozen prospective club members, Jack headed a small group that presented plans to the Lewisboro Zoning Board for the Pheasant Valley Golf and Country Club, complete with an eighteen-hole golf course. Membership would be limited to 250 persons, including local residents; the actress Colleen Dewhurst, who lived nearby, and her husband, the actor George C. Scott, would be members. After hearing a variety of complaints from local residents about the effect of the course on water supply, drainage, errant golf shots, traffic flow, and the like, the zoning board finally gave permission for the project, but with strict conditions. For example, members had to be American citizens but politically neither to the far right nor the far left of the spectrum; they could not build homes or live on the club property, or even stay there overnight.
Jack and his partners were preparing to move forward when two owners of adjoining land took the case to the State Supreme Court. Early in January 1967, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Once again, Robinson and Hudgins found themselves appealing to the State Commission on Human Rights. Once again, they lost. The NAACP promised to continue the fight, but by this time—to Jack’s dismay—many of the black investors had lost heart. In a column months later in the
Amsterdam News,
Jack wrote off his dream of an integrated country club. He blamed his fellow blacks, mainly. “
They told me in effect,” he said, “ ‘We’re not ready for this.’ They
didn’t say it in so many words, but the defeatism was there.… I must confess that I became disgusted.… I don’t want to give up. But it gets to be like bumping your head against a brick wall. You bump and bump and all you get is a headache.”
At least Freedom National Bank was flourishing. On January 9, 1967, it opened its first branch office, in the predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn. In ceremonies to mark the opening, Jack made much of what he called his return to the borough that had embraced him in 1947. “
Coming back as a banker,” Jack said, “will give me an opportunity to attempt to repay some of the people of that Borough for all the good which has come my way.” In fact, this was Jack’s second major attempt to “return” to Brooklyn. The previous May, he had taken on yet another job, albeit one that proved more illusory than real. At a press conference, he accepted the post of general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers football team of the fledgling Continental Football League. Although the team, sponsored by a group of Brooklyn-based investors, had neither players nor an arena, Robinson spoke aggressively about its plans. “
We want to build a stadium in Brooklyn for both football and baseball,” he announced, “and we hope to bring back major league baseball. Brooklyn is starving for a sports team.”
(With yet another job title to his name, Robinson found himself lampooned by a cartoonist in the
Amsterdam News.
Jackie Robinson “
oughta be tired of firsts,” one character comments; “what
does
he need all those jobs for?” Another quips: “Baby,
I
dig
that
completely! If he hangs around the house, his wife’ll really put him to work!!”)
T
HE GALA OPENING
of the Brooklyn branch of the bank was overshadowed by upsetting news: the House of Representatives had stripped Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of his chairmanship of the Labor and Education Committee. The next step would be to oust him from Congress altogether. Like many other leading blacks, Jack had severe misgivings about Powell’s ways. “
I am not an Adam Powell fan,” he admitted. Powell had said and done many things “absolutely distasteful” and had been “offensively arrogant” to both blacks and whites and “made a joke out of his office.” But Jack stood solidly behind him in this fight—especially because Powell had been an effective committee chairman, praised by President Johnson for expediting legislation. Robinson saw Jim Crow at work against a black man with power. “
It’s the same kind of conspiracy,” he wrote, “used to defranchise the Negro during Reconstruction.” Meanwhile, he pointed out, perhaps irrelevantly, whites in Georgia had just elected the demagogue Lester Maddox, who was
infamous for wielding an ax handle to bar blacks from his restaurant, as governor of the state.
On March 1, the House voted to expel Powell and call a special election to replace him. When Powell indicated that he would contest the election—although he would not actually return from the Bahamas to campaign for himself—Robinson continued to defend him. Jack reacted with outrage when white Republican Party leaders tried to push forward the candidacy of James Meredith, the black man who had briefly integrated the University of Mississippi, against Powell. This plan was quickly dropped. In the special election on April 11, Harlem spoke: Powell won eighty-six percent of the vote. But some people speculated, not for the first time, that Jackie Robinson was about to run for public office. In the
Amsterdam News,
the columnist James Booker observed: “
Jackie Robinson and his wife have purchased a cooperative apartment on 96th Street and will move back to Manhattan later this year. Any special political plans, Jackie?”
In fact, Jack and Rachel had bought two apartments, not one, and both were in a building on Ninety-third Street. They had bought them for pleasure and convenience and as a financial investment—not with any possible political office in mind. (Rachel and a friend had found the building and negotiated the financial structure for a takeover by a group of owners. The building was in a “redeveloped” section of the Upper West Side, and she was able to purchase the two apartments on very favorable terms.)
Robinson had no interest in running for office. He supported Powell now because of principle, just as he also defended Muhammad Ali, arrested for refusing to enter the military because of his religious convictions. When Ali was finally convicted, Jack drew attention to “
the heroism and the tragedy” of Ali’s case. “He, in my view, has won a battle by standing up for his principle. But will he lose the war in terms of the greater contribution he could have made, based on his splendid career and prospects?”
Principle also led to another troubling feud, this time with the sixty-six-year-old Roy Wilkins. Once again, Wilkins had beaten back a challenge to his leadership of the NAACP and overseen the reelection of ancients to the board of directors. Robinson had seen enough. Now, threatening to quit the board, on which he had served for almost a decade, he fired two broadsides. First came a speech that asked, “Is NAACP Contracting Infantile Paralysis?” Next, in a column, Jack published the attack: “
I am forced to say sadly that I am terribly disappointed in the NAACP and deeply concerned about its future.” He had watched “the brave but unsuccessful efforts of younger, more vibrant, more aggressive, well-prepared insurgents to inject new blood and new life into the Association. But Mr. Wilkins and his Old Guard always seem to stomp these efforts down.” In addition, Jack accused
the NAACP of being too dependent financially on white organizations like the Ford Foundation.
But Wilkins, a masterful debater, seemed to demolish Jack’s arguments. The column, he said, came from either “
gross misinformation or deliberate distortion.” The NAACP was structurally far more democratic than any other major black civil rights group; only the NAACP elected its board in a democratic process. The previous year, moreover, it had raised eighty-two percent of its income from its almost five hundred thousand members while all other civil rights groups had depended upon “the general public (which means white people) for their funds.” Wilkins ended with a blast of his own: “One of these days before you are seventy, some down-to-earth wisdom will find its way into your life.… If you had played ball with a hot head instead of a cool brain, you would have remained in the minors.”
Although there was more than an element of truth in his criticism of Wilkins, Robinson managed only a sputtering response to this counterattack. “
I am so sorry you cannot accept honest criticism,” he wrote Wilkins. “I saw for years, first hand, what was going on and it is obvious things have not changed. I don’t intend to remain silent when I see things I believe to be wrong. I have to laugh when you talk about down-to-earth wisdom. When I speak it’s because I know what I am doing. I am sorry the truth hurts so much. I don’t really have to answer to you for what I have done and I certainly will not apologize.… I don’t intend to get into a further hassle with you. Whenever I feel criticism of you, the N.A.A.C.P. or any other organization is justified—expect it.” Five days later, he wrote Wilkins again. “
I am not proud of the progress we have made and cannot see why you should be. The Association needs new blood. It needs young men with new ideas and a mind of their own. Unfortunately I don’t think this is true of the present Board.”
Jack continued to work with the NAACP and other major civil rights groups, but also continued to have serious reservations about their leaders. In 1967, as word spread that Dr. King might run for the presidency on an anti–Vietnam War ticket, Robinson turned his attention to him. On April 8, Robinson made his first, gentle criticism of King, “
an idol of mine” but a voice now largely silent about civil rights. Carefully Jack laid out his objection: “It happens that I do not agree with Dr. King in his stand on Vietnam.” America was crying out for leadership on civil rights: “Let us hear from Dr. King on the DOMESTIC crisis.” When King did not reply at once, Robinson raised his voice. “
Confused” by King’s record, he called on “Martin” to end his unilateral criticism of United States policy in Vietnam: “Aren’t you being unfair when you place all of the burden of blame upon America and none upon the Communist forces we are fighting?” King
should not demand that the United States stop bombing North Vietnam without also insisting that the North Vietnamese cease their own attacks. “Why is it, Martin, that you seem to ignore the blood which is upon their hands and to speak only of the ‘guilt’ of the United States?”
But as much as he supported Johnson’s Vietnam policy (and lauded his domestic moves, as in that year nominating Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court), Robinson did not want to break with Dr. King. Thus he was utterly relieved late one night when the telephone rang and King was on the line, ready to have a long talk and defend his efforts in the antiwar movement. Robinson’s sense of relief was almost palpable when, in his next column, he bowed to King as “
still my leader—a man to whose defense I would come at any time he might need me. This is a personal commitment and a public pledge.” Despite their differences about Vietnam, Jack made clear, he revered King: “If ever a man was placed on this earth by divine force to help solve the doubts and ease the hurts and dispel the fears of mortal man, I believe that man is Dr. King.”
B
ETWEEN BLACK POWER
and the antiwar movement, the summer of 1967 was a season of turmoil. As a special assistant to the governor, Jack found himself trying to chill one overheated situation after another across the state. Rockefeller understood Jack’s importance in the trenches, as when in June he helped to resolve a “
potentially explosive situation,” as Rockefeller called it, in Rochester; or in Buffalo, where Jack roamed the hot streets speaking to people and preaching calm after days of unrest in which more than two hundred youths went to jail. Jack was a shield again when he and the governor attended an acrimonious meeting on racism in the state civil service; or again when, at a “town meeting” in Harlem, the local firebrand Charles Kenyatta, head of a group called the Mau Mau Society, fulminated before Rockefeller against the sinister control of crime and drugs in the ghetto by “
the men behind you.”
Faced by demagogues, Robinson would not back down. In his column, he attacked black leaders who “
chickened out” in the face of trouble “for fear of criticism and attack from that noisy minority which seeks to inflame, to urge burning and hate.” A certain statement sent out by Roy Wilkins was fine, but “it should have nailed down issues and called names. It should have identified H. Rap Brown [who had replaced Stokely Carmichael as the leader of SNCC] for what he is—a sensationalist, dangerous, irresponsible agitator who has a talent for getting fires ignited and getting himself safely out of the way.” Brown and Carmichael did not intimidate Robinson. “
Stokely Carmichael’s version of Black Power,” Jack declared on television,
“can only get us more [George] Wallaces elected to office.” Despite “the frustrations that our young people have had over the years,” street violence served no useful purpose. Black Power should mean “the wise use of our dollar, the wise use of our political strength.… But if we are talking about getting in the streets, resorting to violence, creating disturbances, this cannot help anything.” And yet, asked if he believed with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. that an “obscene distinction” existed between justice for blacks and whites in America, he replied: “There’s no question about it. I agree with him 1,000%.”
Nevertheless, that November, 1967, Jack called on the unregenerate Powell to resign his seat. In major cities that month, including Gary, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, blacks won office as mayors; Powell was out of step with black progress. And yet Jack’s position also seemed to some people out of step with reality in its linkage to the political fortunes of Rockefeller. This connection offered Jack a measure of authority, as when, in Albany late in November, he addressed a state Conference on Critical Health Problems; or in December, when he and Rachel filled in for Nelson and Happy to host a function at the governor’s mansion. Fundamentally, however, Robinson was in a dependent position. In the superheated political and racial climate of 1967 he had to endure accusations that he was an Uncle Tom.
Early in 1967, at a gathering of black Republicans in Albany, Jack had fended off unspoken charges that their activity was somehow shameful and compromised. “
We will not be traitors to principle,” he insisted. “We will not sell out for personal advantage or gain. We will not become the creatures of either great white fathers or black uncle toms.” But by year’s end he had to deal with two separate public charges by younger blacks that he had indeed become an Uncle Tom. Robinson stood his ground: “
I feel perfectly secure in saying that I have not been an Uncle Tom to him and happy to say that the Governor neither wants me as an Uncle Tom nor believes I could become one.”