Jackie Robinson (46 page)

In the National League, the Rookie of the Year award, previously won by Robinson and Newcombe, went to a young black player, Willie Mays of the New York Giants. (Early in the next season, Robinson would marvel at a catch by Mays. “
It was not only the best catch I’ve seen,” he said, “but probably the best catch anyone has ever seen, because they just can’t come any better.”) In 1951, the project started in 1947 by Rickey and Robinson
continued to grow, as fourteen black men played in the majors. No one could doubt the quality of their play; five were in the All-Star Game at mid-season. Only five teams fielded a black at any time that year, but those five teams finished in the first division of their league. In the World Series, in another landmark event, the Giants’ Mays, Monte Irvin, and Henry Thompson formed the first all-black outfield in major-league history, when they faced the Yankees.

But Negro-league baseball, which had nurtured almost all of these players, was now virtually dead. Something else had happened. “
Fans used to travel hundreds of miles to see Robinson and Doby,” Walter O’Malley said in explaining a decline in Dodger attendance. “But they don’t have to do that anymore. Negro players are all over the country.” In the wake of Robinson’s success, doors previously shut to black Americans were opening, however slowly. Althea Gibson became the first black woman to be invited to play at Forest Hills, New York, in the United States lawn tennis championships. The American Bowling Congress dropped its whites-only policy. And all but three teams in major-league baseball now had a black player under contract somewhere in their farm systems.

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, in Wilmington, Delaware, Robinson started what he hoped would be his last barnstorming tour ever, a month-long ramble through some thirty towns and cities of the South, the Southwest, and California. “
These trips are really tough,” he complained. “The accommodations in the South are not good. You live on short-order food, have irregular hours and dress out of a suitcase.” But a flood of letters “from my people in the South” (as well as the promise of good money) had made him play. Also encouraging was “the amazing overall change in attitude” of Southern whites to black players. “The reaction now,” he said, “compared to when I first played down there in 1947 is unbelievable.”

This time, Campanella led a rival team. He and Robinson jostled each other to claim the leading black stars—Larry Doby and the young first baseman Luke Easter of the Cleveland Indians and the veteran Sam Jethroe, sold by the Dodgers to the Boston Braves. With all three men joining Robinson, his team outdrew all other barnstorming outfits. “
It’s Robinson they come to see,” the promoter Ted Worner knew; “I don’t have any doubts about that.” This was certainly so in California, where Oakland, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and San Diego all honored him. November 4 was “Jackie Robinson Welcome Day” in Los Angeles, when fifteen thousand fans saw his team beat a group of West Coast all-stars led by Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians. The next day, before a UCLA
homecoming crowd of fifty-five thousand in the Los Angeles Coliseum, Jack was honored before a football game against UC-Berkeley; a tumultuous reception greeted him when he rode with Rachel in an open, banner-draped car through the streets of Westwood as grand marshal of the Homecoming Day parade.

Back home in St. Albans, Jack faced so many engagements and tasks the New York
Journal-American
called him “
the league’s busiest non-working ball player.” He continued to spend a great deal of his time at the YMCA facility on 135th Street in Harlem, and he accepted several invitations to speak at school assemblies. On December 4, for example, he addressed the history club at the elite Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. Gracefully he fielded questions about baseball but also tried to steer his remarks toward social problems. The next day, he played a leading role at a YMCA dinner at which Campanella and Sugar Ray Robinson won awards; Jack presented a plaque to Morris Morgenstern, a generous supporter of the Harlem branch. On December 28, at a function of the black Philadelphia Cotillion Society, he presented the Gold Cross of Malta to Branch Rickey—and received the Toussaint L’Ouverture Medal of Honor from the contralto Marian Anderson. On February 12, at its annual dinner, Robinson and Rickey were honored again, by the black Loendi Club of Pittsburgh. Accepting a plaque as the outstanding athlete of 1951, Jack emphasized the extent to which he had matured from his early days in the major leagues, when “
I had a chip on my shoulder.”

In the month before leaving for training camp, he took two more impressive steps beyond baseball. One solidified his place in television. On February 4, in Manhattan, the flagship stations of the NBC network, WNBC and WNBT, announced that they had signed Robinson to a two-year contract “
unique in the field of broadcasting” as director of community activities, with the rank of vice-president. As such, he would not only perform on air but also supervise the development of youth programs, especially those involving sports, as well as work with organizations such as the Police Athletic League, the Catholic Youth Organization, the Boy Scouts, and the YMCA and YMHA. Jack’s color was a major factor in the appointment. The general manager of the stations, Ted Cott, spoke of the appointment as “another trail blazing experience” by Robinson, one that would link the network to “the more than one million negroes” in the city area. Robinson would be concerned with combating juvenile delinquency and other “social service activities.” To Jack, the new job pointed directly toward his retirement from baseball. “I have had to realize,” he said, “that my baseball days will one day be over and, therefore, I’ve been thinking about a new turning point. This is it.”

A few days later, he took another big step away from baseball, into the world of real-estate development. At this time, Robinson knew little or nothing about this field, but it would claim his attention, on and off, for the rest of his life. After discussions over the course of a year, he signed an agreement with a real-estate developer to construct a project, the Jackie Robinson Houses, on a site in or around New York City. The developer, Arnold H. Kagan, would supply the start-up funds, up to $250,000, and almost all the expertise; Jack’s main contribution would be in using his fame to help secure a mortgage for the project under Section 213 of the U.S. Housing Act of 1949. (Kagan would get seventy-two percent of the profits, Jack would receive sixteen percent, and attorneys would get the rest.)

Although Jack hoped to make some money here, he had other motives as well. Perhaps equally important was his desire to help poorer blacks as they faced the postwar housing crisis in the New York area and elsewhere. The Housing Act of 1949 had set lofty goals; its central aim was to provide “
a decent home in a suitable living environment for every American citizen.” Under Title 1 of the act, developers could purchase slum property at drastically reduced prices; with this incentive, Congress expected them to build new housing for the poor and middle-class. Already the reality was proving to be somewhat different; many dilapidated dwellings were being razed by developers and replaced, all too frequently, by luxury apartments. The Jackie Robinson Houses, Robinson and Kagan hoped, would be built in the true spirit of the Housing Act of 1949.

(Ten years after its passage, in 1959, the number of housing units torn down under the provisions of Title 1 of the Housing Act far exceeded the number of new units. Taking the brunt of this imbalance in the major cities, including New York, were people of color, especially blacks. Easily displaced, they were also the least likely to find new housing. Less than two percent of new housing from all sources, including those sponsored under Title 1, would go to blacks.)

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, after the disappointment of 1950 and the disaster of 1951, the Dodgers faced the 1952 season with no bravado, only a feverish determination. “
I think every player on the team,” Robinson said, “will be putting out a little more this year because he feels that we let the fans down in bad finishes in the two previous years.” This training camp was different in another way. Clyde Sukeforth, the veteran coach who had escorted Jack to Brooklyn in 1945 to meet Branch Rickey, was gone; unfairly, some people blamed him for the choice of Branca to relieve Newcombe in the last, fatal inning of 1951. Whatever the reason for Sukeforth’s departure, Jack
had lost his most reliable friend among the Dodger coaches, a man who had treated him from the start with decency and respect. Still, Jack’s relationship with Walter O’Malley and, especially, Buzzie Bavasi remained sound. On January 9, when he signed his 1952 contract for $42,000, again the top salary on the team, he had declared himself “
perfectly satisfied with my contract.” O’Malley and the Brooklyn organization, Jack said publicly, “have treated me fairly.”

At Vero Beach, a chastened Dressen, in greeting the team, openly thanked Robinson for his sturdy public support during the off-season. The Dodgers had nothing to be ashamed of, he told the club; they had been unlucky. But the bad luck seemed to continue when the Korean War claimed Newcombe, who entered the Army for a two-year stint. Fortunately, the Dodgers found two stellar pitching replacements. One was black—Joe Black, a handsome, six-foot-two-inch player from Plainfield, New Jersey, formerly with the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro leagues, then with St. Paul and Montreal in the Dodgers organization. A college man like Jack, Black was an alumnus of Morgan State with a degree in psychology and physical education. The other promising pitcher was white—Billy Loes, a young New Yorker of eccentric ways and an idiosyncratic curve ball. Roommates bonded further by race and education, Black and Robinson quickly became friends; but against all reasonable expectations, Loes slipped past Robinson’s normal standards to become one of his favorites on the team.

Black was sitting in their room nervously waiting to meet Robinson when the star walked in. When Black asked Jack which bed he wanted, Jack brushed aside the question. Instead, he sized up Black’s powerful body. “
Can you fight?” he asked. “Yeah,” Black answered. “But,” Robinson insisted, “we’re not going to fight.” This was Robinson’s reprise of Rickey’s speech to him in 1945. Black must not strike back, Robinson warned. The first challenge came soon enough. Playing exhibition games in Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama, in particular, the heckling by whites was vicious. “
I don’t mind the booing,” Robinson told a writer. “What got me was when some of them started to holler, ‘Hit him in the head.’ ” But there were also signs of progress. In St. Petersburg, Florida, for example, blacks were finally admitted to the grandstand with whites. Another wall had fallen in a region of walls.

When the season opened, the Dodgers started slowly, in part because Campanella, for one, was mired in a prolonged slump, but also because Brooklyn had not yet discovered Joe Black. At first, Black seemed not much more than mediocre. If his fastball was impressive, his curve ball seemed modest; a wartime injury had damaged fingers on his right hand. And two
pitches comprised his entire repertoire. But after Black pitched two excellent innings against the Cincinnati Reds in Brooklyn, to bring his record to seven innings without giving up a run, Dressen saw the light and announced that he would rely on Black in relief in the future. On June 1, when the rookie preserved a victory, the Dodgers also moved into first place for the first time in 1952. Eventually that season, as the heart of the Dodgers pitching staff, Black appeared in fifty-six games, won fifteen, saved fifteen, and lost only four.

The season was still young in May when Jack found himself embroiled again in controversy with umpire Frank Dascoli. After a report that certain Dodger players had taunted Dascoli, Warren Giles, the newly elected president of the National League, sent an official letter of rebuke to Chuck Dressen. Deploring ethnic slurs allegedly hurled at Dascoli, Giles singled out Robinson as “
a greater offender than others.” Upset by the charge, which he strongly denied, Jack protested to Giles in person. Giles ignored him. He then had both Martin Stone, his business manager, and O’Malley write formal letters of complaint to Giles about the error. Giles, no fan of Robinson, responded only to O’Malley. “I am satisfied that the matter is ended,” O’Malley soon announced, “and that Jackie Robinson did not address anyone in uncomplimentary terms.” But on May 13, visiting Brooklyn to present Campanella with the 1951 MVP trophy, Giles surprised his listeners by adding a brief, gratuitous bow to Jack to his praise of Campanella: “
The National League is also proud of Jackie Robinson.” This sly, patronizing response to his protests served only to annoy Robinson, who made it clear that he considered Giles’s praise as an apology.

Apology or not, the Dascoli charge further damaged Jack’s reputation. Although he was elected to the All-Star Game, where he and Campanella represented Brooklyn, some fans there booed him. July also brought a clash in Cincinnati, after an umpire declared a runner safe at second base and Robinson exploded. Leaping up and down, he threw ball and glove to the turf, then dispatched his glove with a vicious kick; the Associated Press photograph of Robinson punting his hapless glove was widely circulated. After the incident, as usual, Jack was contrite. “
I know it’s wrong for me to lose my temper,” he confessed. “It doesn’t do me any good and I really make an effort not to. The wife is after me about it all the time, too.” But “when an umpire makes an obvious mistake it seems I automatically blow up. I just can’t help myself.”

He had other troubles. Earlier, when Joe Black entered a game in St. Louis, insults from certain Cardinals became so graphic that Robinson and Dressen protested to the league about the rabid use of the term “nigger,” linked to obscene and other demeaning terms. (The targets were only Black
and Robinson; Campanella made it clear that no one had insulted him.) When Eddie Stanky, now managing St. Louis, dismissed the nasty language as typical baseball teasing, and the team president, Eddie Saigh, brushed off the protest as “
too much fuss over nothing,” Robinson disagreed. Race baiting, he insisted, had no place in the game. “You’d think that after six years they would cut that stuff out,” he said. “I thought I had proved that those names don’t hurt my play a bit.”