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Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball
By Scott Simon
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Hero
As I began this book, many Americans were
beginning to be cautious about whom they
called a hero. Athletes, actors, entrepreneurs,
and celebrities had casually and carelessly been described
as such. To do so after September 11, 2001, seemed preposterous.
In the weeks following the attacks on New
York and Washington, D.C., and the foiled attack that
sent a plane crashing into western Pennsylvania, Americans
saw the grim and affecting faces of genuine heroes --
and they were caked in ash, blood, tears, toil, and sweat.
A man or woman might sink a basketball, strike a baseball,
or scintillate before a camera lens. Those talents can
be worthy. But real heroes risk their lives for others.
My wife and I were crossing midtown Manhattan
about three weeks after the attacks and saw an assemblage
of broad shoulders in blue uniforms with red patches
standing outside the entrance to a church. The men and
women talked softly; anonymous black cars thrummed
their motors softly; pink and white flowers were piled
softly into the crooks of the concrete stairs. It was the
funeral for a New York firefighter. We went inside, impulsively,
and then stayed, decisively. Gerard Barbara, who
was a fifty-three-year-old assistant chief of the Fire
Department of New York, had died risking his life for
strangers. It did not seem strange -- in fact, it seemed
important -- to take a seat amid some of the men and
women who had loved him. They wore blue uniforms,
thick-soled black shoes, and red eyes. Mayor Giuliani got
up to speak, a gravelly voiced man in a gray suit, who also
had red eyes. It was Mayor Giuliani's fourth funeral service
of the day.
"Your father," he said to Gerard Barbara's son and
daughter, "used his great gift of courage to serve others.
The name he gave you," he continued in the blunt tone
of a commandment, "is now a permanent part of the history
of this city. And now, I would like everyone here to
stand and express their appreciation for your father." We
stood, cried, and clapped our hands until our palms
burned like our eyes, then we applauded some more. A
line of blue shoulders with red patches filed softly out of
the church and back onto Fifth Avenue, where, for at
least a time, FDNY had replaced DKNY as a signature of
distinction.
The following weekend, we watched Cal Ripken Jr.
play his last game of major league baseball -- his 3,001st.
Over a quarter of a century as a professional athlete, Cal
Ripken had become such an insignia of sturdiness and
class that the umpires stood in a line to shake his hand.
His opponents removed their fielding gloves to applaud
him. The signs blooming amid the green seats of Baltimore's
Oriole Park at Camden Yards said WE LOVE YOU
CAL; THANKS, CAL; and CAL: WE'LL NEVER FORGET YOU.
But the word hero seemed conspicuously, deliberately
absent. Events had revised our national vocabulary. At
least for the moment -- it would be nice to think even for
longer -- it would be hard for Americans to look out at a
mere playing field and see the kind of heroism we had
been reminded to revere in men and women in blue uniforms
with red patches.
But even by this wiser standard, Jackie Robinson was a
hero. The baseball diamond is not simply a playing field
in his story. It was the ground on which he was most
open and vulnerable to taunts, threats, and sharpened
spikes.
The first African American major league ballplayer of
the twentieth century routinely took his rolling, pigeon-toed
stride out into the infield or batter's box on days
and nights when local police had culled the stadium's
mail to show him an assortment of explicit and persuasive
death threats. It is tempting today, when Jackie Robinson
is enshrined in halls of fame, social studies curricula,
classroom calendars, songs, and statues, to suppose those
threats were empty. But in the late 1940s, beatings,
bombings, lynchings, and shootings scarred the landscape
of the United States. They could be just as public as --
well, as baseball games.
Jackie Robinson gave his life for something great;
heroes do. He chose to bear the daily, bloody trial of
standing up to beanballs and cleats launched into his
shins, chest, and chin, and the race-baiting taunts raining
down from the stands, along with trash, tomatoes, rocks,
watermelon slices, and Sambo dolls. And then he performed
with eloquent achievement and superlative poise.
Robinson allowed that hatred to strike him as it would a
lightning rod, channeling it down into the rugged earth
of himself. All that America saw for many years on the
baseball field was that iron as upright as a steeple, never
bending. But inside, the strain slowed his body, whitened
his hair, thickened his circulation, aggravated his diabetes,
and rendered him slow and blind. He was dead by the
age of fifty-three -- a martyr (a word as deliberately
applied as hero) to trying to make America live up to its
creed.
If Jackie Robinson had not been selected to play the
role he performed so well, no doubt other superb African
American athletes would have soon stepped onto the
stage. The skills of Larry Doby, Roy Campanella,
Sam Jethroe, Ray Dandridge, Willie Mays, Monte Irvin,
Ernie Banks, and an aging Satchel Paige were too great
not to tempt major league clubs who were searching for
new sources of talent. World War II had moved many
Americans to examine their nation's own self-image as a
bulwark of freedom. Editorial writers and civic leaders
were already clamoring for America to integrate the
armed forces, which had just won the world's liberty, the
schools, in which children learned about justice, and
sports, which purported to epitomize American values.
How could a young black man who might be called up
to risk his life backing up Pee Wee Reese in Guam, or
Yogi Berra in Normandy, not be allowed to earn a living
alongside them on the same playing field?
America's modern civil rights revolution was already
stirring by the time Jackie Robinson arrived in major
league baseball. With Vernon Johns, Thurgood Marshall,
A. Philip Randolph, and many more, it had already produced
heroes. But Robinson's courage and accomplishment
put a familiar face on the kind of bravery that it
took for blacks to stand up for their rights. His heroism
was no greater than that of millions of others -- some
achievements simply cannot fit into box scores. But
Robinson's renown gave his heroism reach. It is possible
to see, in Robinson's slow, purposeful walk into the face
of taunts and threats, some of the same unbowed
courage that Americans would later admire in the civil
rights marchers who faced down stinging water sprays,
sharp rocks, and snapping police dogs. When Robinson
joined Dr. Martin Luther King's nonviolent campaign in
Birmingham in 1963, marchers called out, "Show us,
Jackie!"
Jackie Robinson is so highly esteemed for his
Gandhian restraint against the onslaughts of bigotry that
it is easy to mistake him for a social activist. He certainly
became a militant campaigner for civil rights, an outspoken
newspaper columnist, and a combative Republican
when that party was more identified among blacks with
Lincoln, La Guardia, Rockefeller, and Lindsay, while the
Democrats were dishonored by Strom Thurmond,
Orville Faubus, and George Wallace.
But first and last, Jackie Robinson was a hard-nosed,
hard-assed, brass-balled, fire-breathing athlete. The Jackie
Robinson that his old Pasadena and UCLA teammates
remembered could be a petulant star. He mocked lesser
competitors and came to expect that his regal status on
fields of play would excuse him from the need to attend
class or complete assignments; and so it did. When, on a
couple of occasions, Robinson's high spirits and dark skin
brought him into the grasp of the Pasadena police, his
case was considered with compassion by a local judge,
who was loath to deliver a penalty that would cause the
accused to miss next Saturday's game. Few other young
black men in Southern California could rally so effective
a defense as Robinson's in rushing yards, passes caught,
and punts returned.
Jackie Robinson played less than a single season in the
Negro Leagues, for the fabled Kansas City Monarchs.
Among a group of gifted professionals who had to
endure all-night rides on bone-clattering buses and
blocked doors at whites-only diners and motels, Jackie
Robinson was remembered more for griping about
the league's showboating and lack of training and discipline.
He let his teammates know that he considered the
league beneath his talents (and maybe it was -- for all of
them).
The Jackie Robinson who stayed on to become a
perennial major league star after he became a hero could
be prickly. Another way to say it is: Jackie Robinson could
be a prick. Even after he had become one of the most
admired personalities in America, Robinson could spring
up and cry racism at umpires with the impudence to call
him out on a close slide or a strike. He could crash into
an opponent's knees on inconsequential plays, just to let
them know he could hurt them. He harangued opposing
players, and sometimes his own teammates, with graphic
epithets of the kind that would have once been considered
legal provocation for a duel (although the epithets
were never racial and rarely sexual -- Jackie Robinson was
no racist, and he was even a bit of a prude).
But Jackie Robinson was no less a hero for being a
full-blooded human being. When he was summoned by
history, he risked his safety and sanity to give history the
last full measure of his strength, nerve, and perseverance.
In the end, real heroes give us stories we use to reinforce
our own lives.
Shortly before nine o'clock on the morning of September
11, 2001, Jackie Robinson's widow, Rachel Robinson,
and Dorothy and Mark Reese, Pee Wee Reese's widow
and son, were in New York's City Hall, along with old
Dodgers Ralph Branca and Joe Black. They were there to
choose among five sculptor's models arrayed on a conference
table, each depicting that fabled moment from
the 1947 season in which Pee Wee Reese had crossed the
field from his post at shortstop during a downpour of
racial taunts to slip his arm encouragingly around Jackie
Robinson's shoulders.
Before the group could choose a model to be cast in
bronze and put up in Brooklyn, they heard a boom, then
a commotion. New York police officers rushed them onto
a bus. The bus got blocked and could not move through
the tangle in the streets. New police officers sprinted
aboard and took the Dodger family members into the
bomb shelter of a nearby bank building, which is where
they were, huddled and held rapt before a television set,
when the first World Trade tower fell from the skyline.
Dorothy Reese turned to her son, who is a California
filmmaker. "I'm just glad," she said in the first gloom of
the attack, "that Jackie and your father aren't here to see
this." Mark Reese gently, consolingly, disagreed. "I think
Pee Wee and Jackie are here," he told his mother. "And
we need their courage now." I can't think of a time when
we don't.
The story of Jackie Robinson's arrival in the major
leagues is a heroic American legend. It is not in the same
rank as Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Lincoln's trials, Harriet
Tubman's bravery, Chief Joseph's valor, or the gallantry
of the police and firefighters who ran willingly into the
firestorm of the World Trade Center. But Jackie Robinson's
story still testifies to the power of pure personal
courage to turn history and transform adversaries into
admirers. It is a story that endures all the nicks and nits of
revisionism because, when the last page is turned, it plays
on in our minds and lives: a bold man, dark-skinned and
adorned in Dodger blue, who displays the daring and
audacity to stand unflinchingly against taunts, strike back
at beanballs, and steal home with fifty thousand people
watching and waiting for Jackie Robinson to spring willingly
into the path of a pitched ball and slide into the
ironbound clench of a catcher protecting home plate. It is
a story that still rouses us to shake off dust, blood, and
bruises and keep going.
From Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ISBN: 047126153X
© 2002 by Scott Simon
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