Jackie Robinson Read online

  “THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY

  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.”

  —JOYCE CAROL OATES

  “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

  “MASTERFUL …

  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.”

  —BILL BRADLEY

  “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.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  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)

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue (1962)

  1. In Pharaoh’s Land: Cairo, Georgia (1919–1920)

  2. A Pasadena Boyhood (1920–1937)

  3. Pasadena Junior College (1937–1939)

  4. Blue and Gold at UCLA (1939–1941)

  5. Jack in the World at War (1941–1944)

  6. A Monarch in the Negro Leagues (1944–1946)

  7. A Royal Entrance (1946)

  8. A Brooklyn Dodger (1946–1947)

  9. A Most Valuable Player (1947–1950)

  10. Free at Last (1950–1952)

  11. Dodging Blows, Fighting Back (1952–1955)

  12. The Bottom of the Ninth (1955–1957)

  13. Like Starting Over (1957–1960)

  14. A New Frontier (1960–1964)

  15. On the Killing Ground (1964–1968)

  16. Rounding Third (1968–1971)

  17. Heading Home (1971–1972)

  Epilogue (1997)

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ARNOLD RAMPERSAD 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.

  Prologue

>   1962

  Now everything is complete.…

  —Jackie Robinson (1962)

  ON 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.

  For all four men, as for virtually all baseball players, entry into the Hall of Fame was the crowning achievement of their lives. The white-haired McKechnie, breaking down at the podium, could not finish his remarks. More poised, Robinson was also deeply moved by the significance of the moment. “What I remember above all,” Gabriel recalled, “was how absolutely radiant he looked. He wore a dark suit and a dark tie and his skin was very dark, too. But his hair was thick and a glowing white and his eyes were sparkling because he was obviously very proud and very, very happy.” When it was his turn to speak, he did not hide his joy. “I feel inadequate,” he confessed. “I can only say that now everything is complete.”

  Quickly, Robinson turned to include others in his moment of triumph. “I could not be here without the advice and guidance of three of the most wonderful people I know,” he declared. One was a bulky, bushy-browed white man, Branch Rickey, eighty years old, “who was as a father to me.” In 1945, as general manager of the Dodgers, Rickey had made up his mind to attack Jim Crow in baseball, and with many men to choose from in the Negro baseball leagues had summoned a rookie shortstop on the Kansas City Monarchs to walk point. The second was Robinson’s mother, Mallie McGriff Robinson, seventy-one. Once a sharecropper’s wife in rural Georgia, then a domestic servant in California, to which she had fled in 1920, she had also been the single most influential person in her son’s often troubled youth, urging him on toward a clean, God-fearing life and whatever success he could wrestle for himself in a world hostile to blacks. The third was his wife, Rachel Robinson, whom he had married in 1946, just as his baseball ordeal was beginning, and who had shared with him most of the grief and the glory of the years since then. These three people “are all here today,” Robinson said, “making the honor complete. And I don’t think I will ever come down from Cloud Nine.”

  In January, five years after retiring, when he had become eligible for the Hall of Fame following a rule instituted in 1954, he had expected to be ignored. That month, according to a secret ritual, 160 members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America had each nominated ten eligible players for the Hall of Fame. (A separate, smaller committee chose from among old-timers, executives, and the like.) To enter the Hall, a player first had to appear on 75 percent of these ballots. The standards for nomination were in part subjective; the writers were often unpredictable. In the history of the Hall, no one had entered in his first year of eligibility since its opening in 1936, when the selectors tapped five immortals: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, and Christy Mathewson. In 1939, his last season, Lou Gehrig had entered by acclamation, because everyone knew that the “Iron Horse” of baseball was dying. But Rogers Hornsby, said to be the finest right-handed hitter ever, had waited six years; and Joe DiMaggio, lauded by Robinson himself as the finest player of their era, had waited two. Since 1956, the writers had not chosen any players.

  Judged by the statistics of his career, Robinson’s chances were strong but not overwhelming; judged by the many controversies of a career born in raw controversy, they were slim. Robinson himself thought he had no chance. “I’m positive I won’t be accepted this year,” he had told a reporter. “Maybe someday. But regardless of what some of my achievements were, many writers are going to disregard this because of Jackie Robinson, Negro outspoken.”

  “Negro outspoken” he had been as a player and in the five years since his retirement, which had coincided with the deepening crisis across the nation over civil rights for blacks. Putting his immense prestige at risk, he had almost recklessly thrown in his lot with the Movement. As a fearless competitor with the Dodgers, he had also clashed often with sportswriters; and the men who ran baseball, with one clear exception only, had both opposed his right to play the game with whites and turned their backs on him when he retired. “If I had been white with the things I did,” Robinson offered sourly, “they would never have allowed me to get out of baseball.” But he also commanded respect from many of the people who disliked him for stirring up antagonism. “He has a talent for it,” one writer shrewdly judged. “He has the tact of a child, because he has the moral purity of a child. When you are tactless, you make enemies.” Still, he concluded, “I am confident that Jackie’s non-friends will sweep him into the Hall of Fame.” “The aggressive Robbie carried a chip on his
shoulder,” another newsman declared, “and inspired among writers and fellow players little of the warm affection they lavished on such as Roy Campanella and Willie Mays. Yet he unmistakably won their admiration. What a whale of a competitor he was!… Jackie rates the Hall of Fame on merit and merit should be color-blind.”

  But color had to do with so much in Robinson’s career. An incident on a cold, windy morning in Manhattan in January had poignantly underscored that fact. He was stepping briskly on his way to his office on Lexington Avenue when a black man, a stranger, stuck out his hand. “Jackie,” the man said, “I know you are going to be elected into baseball’s Hall of Fame. And when you are, it will be the happiest day of my life.” Stunned, Robinson walked slowly away, musing on the man’s words. “I was greatly moved by what that fellow said and the way he said it. Imagine him saying it would be the greatest day of his life if I made the Hall of Fame! It meant more to me than anything I can tell you.”

  In January, sure enough, merit was sufficiently color-blind for Robinson to garner 124 votes, or four more than he needed for admission. With congratulations pouring in, he had passed the months since his selection keenly anticipating this historic moment in Cooperstown. Three days before his induction, on the evening of July 20, he had sat in a golden haze of glory when some nine hundred admirers, led by the governor of New York, who hailed him as “a hero of the struggle to make American democracy a genuine reality for every American,” honored him with a testimonial dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In an evening rich with praise, three messages stood out. One was from Richard Nixon, the former Vice-President of the United States, whom Robinson had firmly supported in the 1960 presidential election. “There are days when I feel a special pride simply in being American,” Nixon had written Robinson when the news first broke, “and Tuesday, January 23, 1962, was certainly one of them.” The second was from John F. Kennedy, who tuned out the persistent drumbeat of Robinson’s opposition to his presidency to offer a glowing tribute. “He has demonstrated in his brilliant career,” President Kennedy declared, that “courage, talent and perseverance can overcome the forces of intolerance.… The vigor and fierce competitive spirit that characterized his performance as an athlete are still evident in his efforts in the great battle to achieve equality of opportunity for all people.”