Authors: Arnold Rampersad
As the struggle at the bank grew more intense and his health suffered, Jack was heartened that spring mainly by his son Jackie’s continuing progress. Steadily, Jackie was emerging as a respected, quietly eloquent leader in the Daytop community; he had become assistant regional director of Daytop. In March, Jack and Jackie appeared together on a program about drug abuse sponsored by the New York State Narcotics Addiction Control Commission for the Scotia-Glenville school district. Father and son worked so well together, with Jackie speaking of the personal trauma of drug abuse, and Jack telling of the importance of family support based on love and discipline, that they began to plan other joint engagements. Jack and Rachel also decided to make Daytop the beneficiary of the next “Afternoon of Jazz” on the grounds of their home, on the last Sunday in June.
This decision worked to inspire Jackie further; he took on the main task of organizing the concert even as he kept up his activity at Daytop, including his growing schedule of speeches against drug abuse. On June 13, for example, he spoke about the menace of narcotics to the congregation at the Nazarene Congregational Church in Brooklyn, where Lacy Covington was assistant pastor. As the concert drew near, Jackie found himself working long hours as he lined up not only the musicians but also the various support staff that could make the “Afternoon of Jazz” a financial bonanza for Daytop. He now had the help of David, who was home for the summer after his freshman year at Stanford, having driven back across the country in his MG.
Early in the morning of Thursday, June 17, with Rachel away at a conference on group relations at Holyoke in Massachusetts, Jack was asleep at home after a dinner out with Sharon and David when the sound of the doorbell ringing awakened him. By the time he reached the door Sharon was already there. In the doorway was a policeman, who gently broke the news that Jackie was dead. Driving home in David’s car on the Merritt Parkway from New York City around two o’clock in the morning, he had lost control of the MG. Spinning wildly, the little car had crashed into an abutment, demolished various guard-rail posts, then come to rest. Jackie was pinned in the wreckage, his neck broken.
By this time David had roused himself and also come to the door. Shocked himself, he could also see the terrible effect of the news on his father. “
I had gone weak all over,” Jack would write. “I knew that I couldn’t go to that hospital or morgue or whatever and look at my dead son’s body.”
While David, thrust suddenly by the crisis into authority, went to the morgue to identify his brother’s body, Jack and Sharon drove to Holyoke to break the news to Rachel. They found her in her hotel room, about to go to breakfast. Hearing the news, she collapsed into almost violent crying. Marian Logan was at the Robinsons’ home when Jack, Sharon, and Rachel returned. “
You could hear Rachel screaming, screeching like a banshee,” she said; “all the way up to the house, she screamed, screamed, screamed. When she got out of the car, she began running around the house, up and down the fields and everything.” Watching her, Jack himself broke down into tears.
On June 21, more than fifteen hundred persons attended Jackie’s funeral at Antioch Baptist Church on Greene Avenue in Brooklyn. The pastor and longtime family friend, George Lawrence, conducted the service, accompanied by Lacy Covington; a choir from Daytop sang hymns. David again stood strong; for many people, the most memorable moment would be his reading of a long, imagistic prose narrative he had written that seemed to capture his brother’s lifelong wrestling with demons, and the ecstatic freedom Jackie had finally achieved in death. Draped with flowers, the bronze casket was taken to Cypress Hills Cemetery for burial.
Six days after Jackie’s funeral, the “Afternoon of Jazz” planned for the benefit of Daytop took place as scheduled. Roberta Flack sang, and Dave Brubeck, Billy Taylor, Herbie Mann, and Clark Terry were among the other musical stars in a concert haunted by sadness but lifted by the fine music and the inspirational words of Jesse Jackson, Bayard Rustin, and Marian Logan, who read a poem she had written for Jackie’s funeral. Then Jack himself spoke, in “
a moving and dramatic talk that reached the hearts of all there,” according to one reporter. Quietly Robinson explained that the concert had gone on despite his son’s death because Jackie had worked so hard to make it a success. Aided by many extra donations, the event raised more than $40,000 for Daytop.
Not long afterward, having shown himself to be possessed of an almost uncanny strength and calm, but hurting from the tragedy of his brother’s death, David left the United States to travel for the rest of the summer. First he went to the Netherlands and to Scotland, to Loch Ness, then to Africa, where his traveling ended in Tanzania on the Indian Ocean. He made up his mind not to return to Stanford University.
When David came back later that year to the United States, he stayed near home so as to be close to his father in particular. Soon he began to dream about Africa. After a while, he said, “
four or five nights every week, I would dream about Tanzania. I would dream about leaving the United States and going to live there.”
Jackie’s death deeply affected Jack, but it devastated Rachel. For weeks she was inconsolable, and virtually silent; laughter and lightness went out of their lives. Jack had a strong element of religious faith and fatalism to fall back on; Rachel’s sense of God was different from Jack’s, and provided little comfort now as she struggled with the banality of Jackie’s death, the pain of having had her son sink so low, rise again, then be snatched away just when he was whole and healed, ready at last for life. In turn, her withdrawal into grief had a chilling effect on Jack. In 1941, the death of her father, and the depth of Rachel’s pain in response to it, had helped to bring them together as young people moving forward with their lives. Thirty years later, they could see little or nothing to be salvaged from this death, no redemptive lesson that needed to be learned, no sense of a bright, mysterious, but life-affirming future that would one day give meaning to the terrible present loss. She blamed no one for Jackie’s death—not Jack, not herself—but her sense of having failed Jackie, of having failed to rescue him, was overwhelming and profoundly painful. Increasingly, she withdrew into herself at home.
A degree of serious tension entered their lives for the first time since they were married. As Jack’s illness became more oppressive, he began to return home earlier than ever. On a strict diet, he craved an early evening meal, but refused to touch any food unless Rachel was there to share it. As a gesture of love, this restraint was touching; but it also amounted to blackmail, and Rachel saw it as such. “
What made it worse,” she recalled, “was that I discovered that my mother was also moving against me. She was working with Jack to make me feel guilty for being away at work. One way was to prepare the meal well ahead of time. I would come in the house and smell the cooked food and become angry. Even the vegetables she had already done and were now soggy. And Jack would be waiting, hungry and fuming, and I would walk in as the villain of the piece.”
One evening after supper, when Sharon happened to be back visiting, she was walking from her old bedroom to the kitchen when she heard something that made her freeze. “
As I neared the entrance to the living room I stopped, startled by the sound of muffled sobs,” she wrote. “I stood still listening for a minute trying to identify the source. I looked into the living room. There was a shadowy figure silhouetted by the light coming into the room from a full moon. As my eyes adjusted, I realized that the slumped body sitting on the couch was my father. Dad was sitting alone in the darkness crying.” Sharon, unaccustomed to seeing her father break down, was unsure what to do. But then she decided to speak to him. “Dad, why are you crying?” she asked. In a trembling voice, her father answered: “
First Mr. Rickey and my mother, then your brother. Now I wonder if I am losing my wife.”
Still afraid she might be intruding, Sharon left him and tapped on her parents’ bedroom door. Rachel heard from Sharon what was happening, put down the book she was reading, and hurried to Jack. Slowly, over the coming weeks and months, they began to get over the raw pain of Jackie’s death.
A
S
J
ACK WAITED FOR
his construction company to gain momentum, he kept himself busy with other, smaller entrepreneurial ventures that brought in little money but also scarcely taxed his remarkably abundant energy. Two ventures were in the West Indies. Once he sank some money into a Chicken Shack fast-food franchise restaurant in St. Martin, in partnership with an old friend, the singer Jimmy Randolph. With a partner, he also visited Port of Spain, Trinidad, seeking a deal that would permit the production of gold and silver commemorative coins on behalf of an Italian company. In yet another move, after talking Rachel out of $12,000 she had squirreled away, he invested in a cosmetics-distribution scheme in partnership with Marian Logan. But while the products piled up at her home, she and Jack neglected to develop a sales force to distribute them. At one point, Jack also joined two associates in bidding for a license to operate a radio station in Stamford.
A former associate, Peter Bienstock, remembers a business venture involving Robinson as chairman of the board of a company that would produce radio spots about black culture for sale to radio stations. “
Jackie indeed opened doors in the financial community,” Bienstock said. “Everyone leapt at the idea once they heard Jackie was involved. This was not mere greed; these people were like little boys, eager to meet Jackie, to be in a room with him and to talk with him.” Unfortunately, baseball dominated the meetings, “and we took forever to get to the business at hand.” Also, Jackie, while charming, “wanted to organize Wall Streeters to fund [civil rights] work, and he would go on at great length about this, to the point that eyes glazed over and people started to look at their watches.”
He was not always so serious. Marian Logan portrayed his part in their cosmetics venture as “
almost cavalier,” as a writer put it. “Jackie put me in charge,” she said, “set me up, and then he’d go off laughing, you know. I got mad one time; I said, ‘Jack, you know I’ve lost eight thousand dollars in this venture so far,’ and he would just laugh.” He was very serious, however, about his construction company. Thus he was very pleased when his group at last broke ground on its first major effort: Whitney Young Manor, a development of 197 units in Yonkers, New York, named after the former National Urban League director, who had drowned tragically on a visit to Nigeria.
Despite this success, and the sound underpinnings of his personal finances, Robinson remained interested in finding a salaried job not unlike his previous position with Rockefeller; but he could not bring himself to ask the governor for another job. At one point, Rachel made the move herself. “
I asked Arthur Logan to speak to Nelson Rockefeller about a job for Jack,” she recalled. “But Arthur had his own problems by that time and I think he spent the time talking with Rockefeller about something for himself. In any case, Rockefeller did nothing for Jack. I was deeply disappointed. I thought he owed Jack something. I think Jack felt the same way, too, although he wouldn’t admit it.” But Evelyn Cunningham, a Rockefeller stalwart, believed that the governor never understood Jack’s need. “
He would not have wanted to insult Jackie by offering him a charity job,” she believed. “He assumed Jack was well taken care of.” In fact, when a gubernatorial appointment finally came for Jack, it almost mocked his need. On May 27, following confirmation by the state senate, Jack was sworn in to a two-year term on the New York State Athletic Commission, which oversaw boxing and wrestling. But the job carried no salary. Members received $100.33 for each working day.
However, on September 13, 1971, Jack was probably happy not to be working still as a special assistant to Rockefeller. Protesting conditions at Attica State Prison in upstate New York, inmates there had engineered a mass uprising and taken hostage twenty-eight correction officers. Tense negotiations followed, with a demand by the prisoners that Rockefeller meet with them to discuss their grievances. Instead, heeding advice not to give in, he ordered an assault that claimed the lives of thirty-two prisoners (twenty-three blacks and nine whites) and ten prison guards. Jack’s longtime friend Wyatt Tee Walker, special assistant to the governor for urban affairs (in addition to being pastor of Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem), had counseled patience but had also become caught up in the emotional and political complexities of the situation. “
If I had been an inmate at Attica,” Walker declared after the killings, “I would have joined the liberation front because there was no other alternative.” Governor Rockefeller “had scarred his illustrious political career” forever.
To Rachel, the massacre at Attica was the last straw in her relationship with Rockefeller. Jack’s response is not clear; he no longer had a public forum from which to express his opinions. He sent a telegram at once to Rockefeller, to which an aide responded: “
To use your own words, no one has had a finer friend than you.” Robinson was in touch with Rockefeller again later in the year, when a grand jury began a probe of the affair. In December, Jack wrote to suggest a meeting between the governor and Jesse Jackson as a way perhaps of clarifying the situation. On the whole, he
appeared to remain loyal to the governor despite his severe misgivings about the horrifying events at Attica.
Attica was only the most gory single manifestation of the violence that seemed endemic to race relations and life in general in big American cities in 1971. In Harlem, Robinson found himself in at least two dangerous scrapes. Once, he stepped boldly in to rescue an elderly white man, an office worker on 125th Street, from a group of menacing young blacks. On another occasion, in the tense aftermath of the killing of two police officers in Harlem, a white plainclothesman roughly barred Jack’s way as he tried to enter the lobby of the Apollo Theater, then grabbed him and drew a gun when Robinson protested being manhandled. The policeman backed off only after excited bystanders told him who Robinson was. “
Thinking over that incident,” Jack wrote, “it horrifies me to realize what might have happened if I had been just another citizen of Harlem.”