Jackie Robinson
Authors: Arnold Rampersad
OF THE PIONEER WHO BROKE BASEBALL’S COLOR LINE.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Admiring but not worshipful … It avoids the temptation to rhapsodize over a figure whose life reads almost like a religious allegory, so full is it of redemptive power. Professor Rampersad unobtrusively lays out the facts, including the facts of Robinson’s edgy and sometimes irritating combativeness, allowing us to make out the meaning of the story on our own.”
—
The New York Times
“Rampersad … peels away the gloss that years have added to Robinson’s legend.… By focusing on Robinson the man, Rampersad makes him all the more the hero.”
—
USA Today
“Rampersad presents a portrait of a figure whose impact reached beyond sports into the most crucial areas of American life.… Never, perhaps, has his life been rendered with such depth and unsparing detail.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Riveting as a historic narrative, unflinching in its discussion of American racism in Jackie Robinson’s time, this sympathetic biography of the first black man to play major-league baseball is a model of its genre. Once again, Arnold Rampersad is to be commended for the sensitivity and intelligence of his writing.”
—J
OYCE
C
AROL
O
ATES
“One of the most compelling true-life epics of this American century … Rampersad … is to the art of biography what Paul Warfield was to the craft of catching footballs: smooth, graceful and effective, with no unnecessary moves and an affinity for cool restraint. There is passion here, though it is conveyed with streamlined subtlety and through a scrupulous attention to detail.… A model of how to weave what seems like acres of source material into flowing, absorbing narrative.”
—
New York Newsday
Rampersad matches Robinson’s intensity in his chronicle of the great ballplayer’s life.… Rampersad allows the reader to feel the humanity of both [Dodger general manager Branch] Rickey and Robinson as the two men from different origins forged a father-son relationship en route to a common goal.”
—
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Rampersad puts forward Robinson as a force in history, not its pawn, and his portrayal rings true.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
“In an era when much of the focus in major-league sports is on money, this book reminds us of Jackie Robinson’s courage. It does an outstanding job of describing his journey from a small town to a historic career in baseball and beyond.”
—B
ILL
B
RADLEY
“Through exhaustive research and dozens of interviews with family members, teammates, business associates, and friends, Rampersad vividly recreates the life of a man who may have had history thrust upon him by circumstance but who also understood the magnitude of his burden.… Rampersad is an evenhanded biographer, and he brings an objectivity to his subject that only enhances Robinson’s place in history. We close this remarkable book realizing again that while any number of others, under different circumstances, might have been the first African American to break baseball’s color line, few would have been able to carry it off with Robinson’s integrity and courage.”
—
Booklist
(starred review)
“In capturing the life of trailblazing black major leaguer Jackie Robinson, Rampersad has found a subject to match his considerable talents as a biographer. Rampersad is the first biographer to be given complete access to Robinson’s papers, and his book is a thoroughly researched, gracefully written and vividly told story of one of the country’s most gifted, courageous athletes.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(boxed review)
“Gripping … This outstanding biography is in every way worthy of its esteemed subject.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
ALSO BY ARNOLD RAMPERSAD
Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays
, editor
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
, editor
Days of Grace: A Memoir
, with Arthur Ashe
Slavery and the Literary Imagination
, coeditor
Richard Wright, Works
, 2 vols., editor (The Library of America)
The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I,
1902–1941
: I Too Sing America
The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. II,
1941–1967
: I Dream a World
The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois
Melville’s Israel Potter: A Pilgrimage and Progress
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1997 by Arnold Rampersad and Rachel Robinson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint
previously published material:
Random House, Inc.:
Excerpts from
Wait Till Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson
by Carl T. Rowan with Jackie Robinson, copyright © 1960 by Carl T. Rowan and Jack R. Robinson, copyright renewed 1988 by Carl T. Rowan and Rachel Robinson. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
GRM Associates, Inc.:
Excerpts from articles of 1947 and 1948 from
The Pittsburgh Courier,
copyright 1947, 1948 by
The Pittsburgh Courier,
copyright renewed 1975, 1976 by
The New Pittsburgh Courier.
Reprinted by permission of GRM Associates, Inc., agents for
The Pittsburgh Courier.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-96149
eISBN: 978-0-307-78848-1
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
v3.1
for Luke Rampersad,
who loves baseball—and books
You opened the door for me and others who followed you and when you opened it you threw it wide open.
—
Brooks Lawrence (
1957
)
The word for Jackie Robinson is “unconquerable.” … He would not be defeated. Not by the other team and not by life.
—
Red Smith (
1972
)
He could beat you in a lot of ways.
—
Yogi Berra (
1972
)
A
RNOLD
R
AMPERSAD
is a Professor of English at Stanford University. His books include the two-volume
Life of Langston Hughes
and, with the late Arthur Ashe,
Days of Grace: A Memoir
. In 1991, he was appointed a MacArthur Foundation fellow.
1962
Now everything is complete.…
—Jackie Robinson (1962)
O
N THE MORNING
of Monday, July 23, 1962, in the pretty and historic village of Cooperstown in upstate New York, a young white man awoke nervously in the darkness just before dawn, dressed himself quickly, and was out of his hotel, the Cooper Inn, just after six o’clock. The previous evening, he had left his home in Brooklyn, boarded a bus at the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan, and traveled some seven hours through the gathering darkness to be in Cooperstown in good time to witness the events of this day. Outside his hotel, he found the air more than a shade nippy for a midsummer morning; the sky, heavy and sodden with moisture, hung in thick shrouds that hid the sun. This was poor weather for the events he had come such a long distance to see. Later that morning, at ten-thirty, the Baseball Hall of Fame would induct four men into its ranks. Then, at two o’clock in the afternoon, two teams, the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves, would meet in a memorial game played annually near the spot where—all facts to the contrary—baseball was said to have been invented by Abner Doubleday in a cow pasture in 1839, when the nation was young.
By seven o’clock, hours before the ceremony, the young man, Ron Gabriel, twenty-one years old and on summer vacation from his university, had eagerly claimed a seat in the front row of some two thousand chairs set out on Main Street before the official rostrum. This wooden dais stood on
the lawn in front of the brick building, rich in baseball memorabilia, that housed the museum that was the Baseball Hall of Fame. Neither the chilly air nor the menace of rain could temper Gabriel’s excitement: “
I wanted to see everything!” Born and reared in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Gabriel had come above all to witness one event: the induction of Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson into the Hall of Fame. Since his days as a boy haunting Ebbets Field, the aged ballpark that the Brooklyn Dodgers called home, Gabriel had admired Robinson. But his interest in the ceremony ran deeper. Four years before, in 1958, the Dodgers had quit Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles. Soon, to make way for an apartment complex, a wrecking ball had reduced Ebbets Field to rubble.
To Gabriel, as to his parents and thousands of other fans, Brooklyn and its old, sweet ways had begun to die the day the Dodgers left. Gabriel’s grandparents had come to the United States from Russia and Austria, in the long river of migration that had brought millions of foreigners to New York. Almost as much as any other single force, the Brooklyn Dodgers had helped to make the children and grandchildren of many of these migrants truly American. With the departure of the Dodgers, that vision of old Brooklyn would live thereafter mainly in memory and legend, and most vividly in thrilling recollections of the baseball team of which Jackie Robinson, between 1947 and 1956, had been one unforgettable part.
When the ceremony at last started, every seat before the rostrum was taken, and all eyes were on the four men being inducted. Two were old-timers, chosen by a special committee: Edd Roush, sixty-eight years old and, in the seasons just before the ascendancy of Babe Ruth and the mighty home run, one of the premier hitters in the game; and Bill McKechnie, seventy-six, mediocre as a player but a paragon among managers. The other two inductees were stars of the recent past, selected by a far more exacting process. One was Bob Feller, forty-three, a flame-throwing pitcher from an Iowa farm whose 266 wins included three no-hitters and a dozen one-hitters. He had been, as one reporter put it, “
supreme, a model athlete cast in the heroic mold, as a boy wonder who became a national sports idol.” The other was Robinson, also forty-three years old. Robinson’s complex fate had been to be the first black player in the major leagues of baseball in America in the twentieth century.