Jackie Robinson (23 page)

Encouraging Muchnick was Wendell Smith, a crusading sports journalist of the black Pittsburgh
Courier,
who then set about finding the players. At noon on April 16, with expenses paid by Smith’s newspaper, the trio arrived at Fenway Park with Smith and Muchnick. They met a chilly reception but were allowed to enter. This was Jack’s first time in Boston, much less in the historic ballpark with its massive and storied green left-field wall. Also on hand were a dozen or so high school prospects, all white, and most of them pitchers; but the three black players commanded attention. “
I was in the outfield and the other two were in the infield,” Jethroe remembered.
“We fielded, threw to bases, ran and hit.” Even with five years off, Robinson was ready; all reports called him the most impressive of the three. “
I’m telling you, you never saw anyone hit The Wall the way Robinson did that day,” Muchnick said in 1959. “Bang, bang, bang: he rattled it.” Jethroe agreed: “Jackie hit balls over the fence and against The Wall.” Even the Red Sox were impressed. “
What a ballplayer!” the chief scout and a former star hitter, Hugh Duffy, is said to have exclaimed. “Too bad he’s the wrong color.”

After an hour or so, the session came to an end. Muchnick remembered meeting Cronin, who seemed taken with Robinson: “
He said to me, ‘If I had that guy on this club, we’d be a world beater.’ ” But after they filled out applications, their exit was as frosty as their entrance. Jack returned to Houston expecting little from the Red Sox beyond the courtesy of a reply—which never came.

But he had gained an important ally in Wendell Smith. Once a gifted pitcher, Smith had one day won an American Legion championship game with a shutout, then looked on in disbelief as the famed Detroit scout Wish Egan invited Smith’s catcher and boyhood friend Mike Tresh (later of the White Sox), as well as the losing pitcher, to a tryout. “
I wish I could sign you, too, kid,” Egan told Smith. “But I can’t.” Smith’s widow recalled: “
He went home and cried that night.” Joining the
Courier
after college, Smith had enlisted with a vengeance in the sporadic campaign to end Jim Crow in baseball. In the black press, he found allies in men like Frank Young of the Chicago
Defender,
Sam Lacy of the Baltimore
Afro-American,
and Joe Bostic of the Harlem
People’s Voice,
who fought consistently against segregation. The most vigorous efforts came from the Communist press, including picketing, petitions, and unrelenting pressure for about ten years in the
Daily Worker,
notably from Lester Rodney and Bill Mardo. In the mainstream press were men like Ed Sullivan and Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler of the Chicago
Tribune,
Shirley Povich of the Washington
Post,
Jimmy Powers of the New York
Daily News,
and Dave Egan of the Boston
Record.
Surveying the long list of downtrodden peoples of the world uplifted by the United States, Egan once asked: “
Could we, by any chance, spare a thought for the Negro in the United States? Do we, by any chance, feel disgust at the thought that Negro athletes, solely because of their color, are barred from playing baseball?”

Meanwhile, white baseball claimed that no ban existed. In 1942, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball, made it clear that “
Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner,” and “no rule in organized baseball” prohibited their entry. In the South, segregationist laws barred interracial teams and competition, but nothing
stood legally between blacks and the major leagues. Many factors were cited to explain why the majors included no blacks. No blacks wished to play in the majors—the Eddie Collins argument. No blacks were qualified to play—an argument routinely diminished by the record of black teams and individuals against their white counterparts outside the majors. White players, especially Southerners, would revolt if blacks tried to join their ranks; a 1942 New York
Post
column warned that white Southerners would “
brandish sharp spikes with intent to cut and maim Negro infielders” and throw “murderous bean-balls” at their heads. However, a 1938
Courier
poll told a different tale: most white players would accept a black among them. In 1939, Wendell Smith, the celebrated performer Paul Robeson, and other leading blacks had met with Landis to explore the issue. “Frankly,” Smith recalled, “
we were met with silence.”

This silence was the silence of contented lions. But in 1943, in the middle of the war, a dissenting voice began to be heard. At the Brooklyn Dodgers’ headquarters on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, the new general manager, Branch Wesley Rickey, proposed a daring response to the wartime shrinkage in talent. Instead of cutting back on scouting, as other teams had done, the Dodgers would intensify their efforts and be poised to dominate the market when the war ended. Rickey had another, related idea. In the course of this expanded scouting, a superior Negro player or two might materialize; perhaps the Dodgers would sign them. Approached first, George V. McLaughlin of the Brooklyn Trust Company, which provided the Dodgers with their financial base, had responded positively: “
Why not? You might come up with something.” Rickey had then found further support among other key members of the Dodgers family, including his main rival for control of the club, Walter O’Malley.

Now past sixty years old, Branch Rickey was a man to follow. In addition to a highly successful reign as general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1930s, he had invented or perfected several staples of modern baseball, including the farm system of minor-league clubs nurturing talent for the big leagues. A moralist some people found insufferable, Rickey was a dedicated, Bible-loving Christian who refused to attend games on Sunday. He was also a master of rhetoric, a grandiloquent speaker whose high-flown locutions overwhelmed most opposition and often obscured or embroidered key facts; reporters called his office the Cave of Winds. Personalizing the evil of Jim Crow in baseball, Rickey told of an incident that happened in South Bend, Indiana, in 1904, when he was coach of the Ohio Wesleyan baseball team and had gone there to play Notre Dame. A hotel manager had tried to bar the only black team member, Charles Thomas, from the hotel. Then, following Rickey’s strong protests, Thomas was allowed to
share Rickey’s room. Rickey had returned to find Thomas, distraught, trying to peel the flesh from his hands. “
Damned skin … damned skin!” he muttered. “If I could only rub it off.” “
That scene haunted me for many years,” Rickey would write, “and I vowed that I would always do whatever I could to see that other Americans did not have to face the bitter humiliation that was heaped upon Charles Thomas.” The story begged comparison to another, lodged in American lore, about Abe Lincoln going down the Mississippi and seeing slavery, and vowing to see it end one day. Indeed, a portrait of Lincoln hung in Rickey’s office.

In twenty years with the Cardinals, Rickey had done little or nothing about racism in baseball. On this question, he argued, Missouri was stony soil: St. Louis barred blacks from the grandstand. However, arriving in Brooklyn in 1942, he began to move. After two seasons, he had become familiar with the pool of “colored” talent available not only in the United States but also in such baseball-loving lands as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. At some point, he decided not to take the easy route of hiring Latin players of African or Indian descent but to turn instead to the pool of bona fide African-American athletes whose inclusion would confront Jim Crow head on. The Negro leagues were no mystery to major-league baseball; many of the black teams, in renting white-owned stadiums, provided significant revenue to white clubs. The truly gifted black players, such as Paige and Gibson, were well known. But Rickey had to sort through the lot to find the player or players who would satisfy, in Rickey’s mind, the complex requirements of his experiment.

Although Rickey and his publicists, formal and informal, would assert that pragmatism—the desire to win games and to profit from these victories—and not the ideal of social justice played the central role in his decision (a position shared, ironically, with cynics of various persuasions), Rickey’s thinking clearly went beyond pragmatism. A man of grand gestures, already lampooned as “the Mahatma” by ridiculing scribes, but also a man of some vision, especially in contrast to other leaders of baseball, Rickey saw a chance to intervene in the moral history of the nation, as Lincoln had done. Aware of the dangers, he moved cautiously. However, he also saw history on his side. With the war, the logic of Jim Crow had been set back as never before. The 1943 Harlem riot, smashing the image of New York City as a haven of democracy, encouraged passage in 1945 of the Ives-Quinn Bill, establishing the State Commission Against Discrimination (even as Congress gutted its Fair Employment Practices Commission by declining to fund it). In the spring, at a joint meeting of the major leagues, Rickey agreed to serve with Larry MacPhail of the Yankees and two black leaders (to be selected) on a four-person committee to investigate the issue of the ban on black players.
When Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, organizing a ten-person panel to work against discrimination, appealed to baseball to allow his committee to supplant its own unit, Rickey and MacPhail agreed to do so.

Despite such moves, Rickey camouflaged his ultimate aims. On April 6, 1945, he reacted angrily when Joe Bostic of the Harlem
People’s Voice
showed up at the Bear Mountain, New York training camp of the Dodgers to demand a tryout for two veteran players, Terris McDuffie, a pitcher with the Newark Eagles, and Dave “Showboat” Thomas, a first baseman with the New York Cubans. Although Bostic got his tryout, Rickey was incensed both by the surprise nature of the attack and by the fact that the
People’s Voice
was a Communist publication. At a press conference, he attacked the Negro leagues and the Communists. Accusing the leagues of being dominated by gamblers and of condoning shoddy business practices, he praised the new all-black United States League, founded in January mainly by Gus Greenlee, a former president of the Negro National League and the owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords, which Greenlee had withdrawn from that league. Rickey then announced that he would put together his own team, the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers, to play in the new league. This team would use Ebbets Field when the white Dodgers were away.

Many blacks resented Rickey’s remarks. In the Pittsburgh
Courier,
Cumberland “Cum” Posey, a pillar of the Negro leagues, denounced the Dodgers and Red Sox tryouts as “
the most humiliating experience Negro baseball has yet suffered from white organized baseball.” In the Chicago
Defender,
Frank Young ridiculed Rickey for “
trying to assume the role of an Abraham Lincoln”—a charge Rickey would hear with increasing frequency and perhaps some satisfaction. However, the myth of the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers now freed Rickey to deploy the main Dodger scouts, Tom Greenwade, George Sisler, Clyde Sukeforth, and Wid Matthews, to gather information on black players openly. The list of prospects began to shrink. Over the years, Rickey had evolved three key questions about any prospect: Can he run? Can he throw? Can he hit with power? Emerging at the top was Jackie Robinson, who had been identified to Rickey by Wendell Smith as perhaps the most promising prospect. Shrewdly, Rickey sent three scouts at different times to observe Robinson, with none knowing what the others were doing, and with Robinson unaware that he was being watched. To Sisler, only Robinson’s throwing arm was less than superb; Greenwade called him the finest bunter in baseball; and Matthews noted that Robinson protected the strike zone better than any rookie he had yet seen. When all three reported independently—if Rickey’s later statements are to be believed—that Robinson was the one, “
the ideal Negro star to lead the invasion of organized baseball,” Rickey then made inquiries himself in California about Robinson’s
character. The news that Robinson was known to resent segregation, far from dismaying Rickey, encouraged him.

(The scouts also reported favorably on Sam Jethroe and an even younger prospect, the hard-throwing future Dodgers star Don Newcombe of the Newark Eagles. From the start, Rickey intended to sign not one token black player but several players, and thus quickly change the complexion of baseball. Because of certain circumstances, the spotlight would fall on Jackie Robinson. By the end of 1947, however, the Dodgers organization would have signed several black players, the fruit of Rickey’s intense scrutiny of the Negro leagues over the previous three years.)

Now Rickey made his intentions clear to members of his family and other trusted advisers. When he brought the matter up casually at a card game, with seven other persons present, not one supported him. His wife and his son, Branch Rickey Jr., wanted integration but feared that the ensuing storm would hurt him badly. The Dodgers’ traveling secretary, Harold Parrott, counseled that the team was poised to win the pennant; why risk almost certain success? (Parrott’s job was to travel with the team and make all living arrangements. “
I knew most of the problems would be mine if we brought in a black player. Ebbets Field would embrace a Negro, or even a Chinaman in a pigtail, if he could drive in runs for the Dodgers. But road games would bring up many headaches.”) Nevertheless, toward the end of August, Rickey ordered Sukeforth, who had not yet scouted Robinson, to go to Chicago, where the Monarchs were to play the Lincoln Giants in Comiskey Park, and bring in Jackie Robinson.

B
Y LATE
A
UGUST 1945
, Jack was pretty much fed up with life as a Monarch. Having threatened once to quit, he was ready to make 1945 his last year in professional baseball, with a barnstorming venture after the end of the regular season. He would then seek a job as a high school coach, marry Rachel Isum, and settle down in Los Angeles.

In June, Rachel had graduated, with honors, from the University of California. In a secret ballot, the students and faculty at her hospital in San Francisco had also given her the Florence Nightingale Award as the outstanding clinical nurse in the graduating class. She then returned home to Los Angeles, where she quickly found a job in the nursery of Los Angeles General Hospital. With her mother’s graduation present of $100, plus whatever else she could save, she planned to travel to New York in October with her college roommate, Janice Brooks, and live there for a few weeks. Then Rachel expected to return home and settle down with Jack.