Jackie Robinson Read online

  The most eloquent tribute had come from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the central figure in the civil rights movement and the inspiration behind the testimonial dinner. King, like Kennedy and Nixon, was absent on July 20; he was in Albany, Georgia, caught up in perhaps the most explosive crisis of the Movement to that point, as a coalition of liberal organizations confronted one of the worst strongholds of segregation, about sixty miles from the place where Robinson himself was born on a plantation in 1919. Spelling out the meaning of Jackie Robinson’s example, King defended Robinson’s right, challenged by some observers who saw him as a faded athlete perilously beyond his depth, to speak out on matters such as politics, segregation, and civil rights. “He has the right,” King insisted stoutly, “because back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides. And that is why we honor him tonight.”

  Praised by friend and foe alike, a hero to the heroes of a struggle inspired in many ways by his own achievements in baseball, Robinson felt a profound sense of satisfaction in what he had accomplished and was helping to accomplish. Now the vice-president of a successful company, living with his handsome family in a fine home in a wealthy Connecticut town, he seemed the epitome of success. “You are the richest man I know,” a friend wrote to him a few days later, “because you have everything; who could ask for more?”

  Now, at Cooperstown, Robinson set aside his bad memories and acknowledged the inner truth about his relationship to the game that had transformed his life even as he had helped to transform the game. “I’m a tremendously fortunate individual,” he told the assembled guests. “I gave baseball all I had for ten years and baseball has given me everything I’ve got today.”

  When the simple ceremony was over, Gabriel beat the crush of spectators storming the stage and offered congratulations to Robinson, and Branch Rickey, too. “I thanked Rickey,” he recalled, “for being the man behind this great moment. He liked what I said, I could tell that. I could also see that only Robinson was paying him any attention. He seemed far on the sidelines for a man who had helped to make the history we were witnessing.” Standing a few feet away, Gabriel watched as photographers snapped pictures of the two men together; then he trailed them as they toured the wall of plaques, now ninety altogether, that was the heart of the Hall of Fame. He listened closely as writers peppered Robinson with questions about his dramatic entry into white baseball, his pact with Rickey to endure abuse and not strike back while the game and the nation absorbed the shock of his black presence. “The one question that stood out for me,” Gabriel said, “was whether he was proud to have been the first black in major league baseball. And I heard him say, ‘Yes, that’s something I can really feel proud about. I will always be proud of that particular fact.’ I could tell that his answer came from his heart, that he was not boasting but was really terribly proud that he had done that particular thing.”

  And yet the Hall of Fame plaque bearing Robinson’s likeness said nothing about his black skin—or his ordeal. In the Hall of Fame, each man was finally the same color: bronze. But Robinson’s color was central to his story. “Later his name would appear on two other plaques,” Gabriel said, “and then you had a hint of what he had gone through. But not on his own plaque. I always thought that a pity.” Under the heading “Brooklyn N.L. 1947 to 1956” Robinson’s plaque read only: “Leading N.L. batter in 1949. Holds fielding mark for second baseman playing in 150 or more games with .992. Lead N.L. in stolen bases in 1947 and 1949. Most valuable player in 1949. Lifetime batting average .311. Joint record holder for most double plays by second baseman, 137 in 1951. Led second basemen in double plays 1949–50–51–52.” Those numbers did not tell the whole truth, Gabriel knew. “To see Robinson’s career in numbers,” Roger Kahn would write, “is to see Lincoln through Federal budgets and to miss the Emancipation Proclamation. Double plays, stolen bases, indeed the bat, the ball, the glove, were only artifacts with which Jackie Robinson made his country and you and me and all of us a shade more free.”

  Leaving the museum, Robinson, Rickey, and others in the main party went on their way. After a quick meal alone, Gabriel strolled over to the venerable Otesaga Hotel, where he knew most of the honored guests were staying. Easing himself near a doorway that opened onto the glittering dining room, he had no trouble finding Jackie Robinson once more. “Again, Robinson was like a vision,” he recalled. “He and his mother and his wife and their three children stood out because they were all dressed up, beautifully dressed up; but they were also the only black family in the entire room. Jackie couldn’t keep still; he was talking to waiters, moving around his table, making sure everything was fine for his family. It was truly a beautiful thing to see.

  “But it was also heartbreaking, too. I asked myself, are they the first black family to sit in that dining room? Somehow, it looked that way. Jackie seemed very much at ease and yet also a stranger, a man inside and yet, at the same time, apart. But he had earned his place, his right to be there. I thought, gee, this is really wonderful, this is what America is all about.”

  Fifteen minutes before game time, the skies opened and cool rain began to drench the village. For the first time in the history of the ceremony, officials had to call off the game. Disappointed, but musing still on the significance of all that he had seen, Gabriel boarded a bus for the long ride home.

  CHAPTER 1

  In Pharaoh’s Land: Cairo, Georgia

  1919–1920

  Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic ground.

  —W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)

  NEAR SIX O’CLOCK on the evening of January 31, 1919, Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born somewhere near the town of Cairo in Grady County in southern Georgia, a few miles north of the Florida state line. Precisely where he was born is open to question, although only two answers make sense. In one place, a crumbling brick chimney is all that remains of the dwelling. In the other, two brick chimneys rise now above burnt-out ruins. The first place was a rough cottage, the home of Jack’s parents, Jerry and Mallie Robinson, on a plantation just south of Cairo owned by a white farmer, James Madison Sasser. The other site, not far away, was a somewhat more pleasant house sitting among whispering pine trees on the edge of Hadley Ferry Road near Rocky Hill, also to the south of Cairo. There, Mallie Robinson’s parents, Washington McGriff and Edna Sims McGriff, lived on twelve acres owned at that time by Edna.

  Of these two places, the more plausible is the cottage on the Sasser plantation. Later, Mallie spoke of giving birth at a farmhouse with about five big rooms. With her were a doctor, her husband, her brother, and a brother-in-law. A major flu epidemic was raging, she noted; there were no women around. The physician, the first doctor to attend Mallie in her five birthings, was a white man, a Dr. Reynolds. Almost certainly he was Dr. Arthur Brown Reynolds, a University of Georgia medical school graduate who had come to practice in the area around 1910. The epidemic was the “Spanish flu,” which in 1918 and 1919 killed millions of Americans.

  Mallie had given birth to a healthy boy. In choosing his middle name, his family intended to honor Teddy Roosevelt. As President, the patrician Roosevelt had inspired many blacks because of his outspoken disdain for racism, especially during his first term in office, before white supremacist power made him retreat into conservatism. He had condemned lynching and had also attacked the system called peonage, which had emerged as the new slavery in much of the rural South. Working with the premier black leader of the age, Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Roosevelt had appointed several blacks to high office. He had also tried hard, if with little success, to forge a political coalition of Southern whites and blacks under enlightened white leadership. Roosevelt, a bitter critic of the sitting President, the segregationist Woodrow Wilson, was widely expected to run aga
in for the White House in 1920. But on January 6, 1919, he died. When Mallie’s son was born later that month, she named him after the twenty-sixth President of the United States.

  Mallie had wanted a girl; now she had four sons, but only one daughter. She also knew that Jack’s birth would not help her marriage, which was doomed. She and Jerry had been separated at least three times. Every patching-up had meant only false hopes and another child.

  Marrying for love, Mallie McGriff perhaps took a step down. Jerry’s father, Tony Robinson, had crossed over the state line from Florida to rent and farm land on the Sasser plantation. Jerry, most likely the eldest of eleven children, had labored all his life for the Sassers; tied to the soil, he could neither read nor write. Mallie had known a different life. The seventh of fourteen children, she had grown up on land owned by her parents and gone to school up to the sixth grade—no small feat for a black girl in rural Georgia. Born slaves, Wash and Edna McGriff had pressed education on their children; when Mallie was ten, she repaid her father by teaching him to read his beloved Bible. The McGriffs had brought up their children to fear God but also to plan for the future, and Mallie had learned those lessons well. For her, hope was essential. Everywhere around her, she could see history weighing heavily on the lives of blacks and whites alike.

  Slavery had defined, and continued to shape, the culture of the region. Before the Civil War, the fertile “Black Belt” across the middle of Georgia comprised the densest population of blacks anywhere in the United States. Most were slaves, who lived and died on rich cotton plantations in what one observer mordantly called “the Egypt of the Confederacy.” The region where the McGriffs and their relatives lived was well to the south, but was usually seen as part of the Black Belt because it, too, was fertile and home to many blacks. Taking in Grady County and the adjoining Thomas County, this area rolled on as far south as Tallahassee, the hilly capital of Florida. Compared to northern Georgia, the region was isolated, and home mainly to striving small farmers. Striving was part of its history. Needy white pioneers, many coming from the Carolinas, had helped to drive the native Seminole Indians from their ancestral grounds. Most of the territory that in 1909 would become Grady County, with Cairo as its seat, was given away in the land lottery that followed, in 1820. The architect of the overthrowing of Indian sovereignty was undoubtedly Andrew Jackson, later President of the United States, who profited enormously from this wanton theft and destruction.

  Slaves had been essential to the growth of the region; slave labor had cleared its primeval forests, nurtured and harvested its crops. After the Civil War, which saw little destruction in this part of Georgia, blacks like Wash and Edna McGriff had looked forward to enjoying the fruits of their labor and freedom. Instead, Reconstruction became for them, in the words of a local historian, “a period of broken promises, abject poverty and crushed dreams.” By 1900, because of the punitive use of devices such as the poll tax and stringent literacy requirements, few blacks could vote, and Jim Crow laws and customs also harshly shut off even the most common avenues to prosperity, especially jobs.

  White hostility took even more violent forms. Between 1890 and 1902, when about 200 lynchings made Georgia the worst state in the Union in this respect, six took place in Thomas County. The years between 1909, when Jerry and Mallie were married, and 1918 saw more than 125 lynchings of blacks across the state, often for flimsy reasons and always unpunished. Mob violence was a daunting feature of black life in Georgia, with the most harrowing single episode the Atlanta riot of September 1906, when four leading blacks were killed by whites, who also looted and burned black homes and businesses. The effect on blacks of so much repression was widespread poverty, disease, and crime, as well as cynicism and despair. For many, freedom had actually been a step down from slavery. “Although there were white people in Thomas County,” it was noted, “who believed that blacks should have a chance to have freedom on a par with whites, most local white leaders opposed black advancement at every turn.”

  Still, some blacks managed to rise. A chronic labor shortage made black people, no matter how poorly paid, necessary to white self-interest. In the 1880s, local blacks also benefited when tourism became important, as well as a new plantation culture that brought rich Northerners, including those with names such as Whitney, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, to acquire estates in the region. Attracted by the sunny climate, stunning landscapes, and rock-bottom prices after a plague of bankruptcies, the newcomers began to transform decrepit estates according to their fanciful notions about the Old South in its golden age, before the Civil War. Blacks were essential to this fantasy, which also encouraged not only prosperity but new standards of civility as well. In 1904, the region ardently supported the charming Tom Watson as the Populist candidate for the U.S. presidency. Nevertheless, white supremacy was the first rule of life. In 1910, when the local Board of Trade published a brochure designed to attract new businesses to Grady County, it offered as one inducement “the interesting fact” gleaned from the last U.S. Census that “the rural South is becoming white with the coming in of farmers from the Central West” to buy cheap land in Georgia. Cairo, the brochure boasted, “is the Diamond Stud on Grady County’s Snow-White Front.”

  In southern Georgia, as elsewhere, some blacks seized on almost every passing chance, every loophole in the logic of Jim Crow, to build as best they could. Family, the land, and the church became central to their lives. Clearly the McGriffs, Mallie’s family, were part of this group; clearly, too, they prospered. When Wash’s sister Eliza McGriff married Jerry Walden Jr., her former teacher at the black school in nearby Beachton, the McGriffs became even more deeply rooted in the community of landed black farmers who believed in family pride, education, the accumulation of property, and God. (Walden was a Morehouse College graduate whose family owned several hundred acres of land.) In the region south of Cairo, with its fertile red clay soil and rolling, pine-covered hills, black families like the McGriffs, the Waldens, and their relatives the Hadleys (whose patriarch, Richard Hadley, owned four hundred acres by the 1870s) endured and, now and then, even flourished. Prolific in offspring and intertwined in marriage, they forged this union despite the resentments of most of their white neighbors; the black families bought land that their descendants would own tenaciously a hundred years later. Raising livestock and planting fields of corn, cotton, sugar cane, peanuts, and garden vegetables, they were able both to feed themselves in times of grave financial hardship, which were not infrequent, and also to save a little money toward the future.

  Religion was important. Breaking away from white churches, where they were unwanted, blacks dipped into their meager resources to build and maintain more than thirty churches in the region by the turn of the century. Mallie’s people, generous in their support of religion, worshiped at churches like the Evergreen Congregational Church in Beachton, built on land donated by the Waldens; or the Rocky Hill African Methodist Episcopal Church, which the McGriffs attended; or Ochlocknee Baptist, important in Hadley family history. Mallie’s faith in God was linked to her keen sense of family, and both were blended with her belief that family and God were the main defenses against the evils of the unjust world into which she had been born as a black in the Deep South.

  Mallie no doubt would have remained in Grady County, a devoted wife and mother, but for her husband’s philandering. Handsome and virile, Jerry Robinson had first flashed his teeth at her during a party at Christmas, 1906. He was eighteen years old, she only fourteen. Taking her home, he promised to call on her on Sunday and escort her to church. Incensed, Wash McGriff put a stop to that: Mallie was too young, he insisted. Almost certainly, he saw that Jerry Robinson was a shabby prospect; instead, McGriff had in mind for Mallie an upstanding young man, originally from South Carolina, whose family lived in the best tenant house on the Sasser plantation. But Mallie, pretending to be scared of strange South Carolinians, ignored him and encouraged Jerry. On Sunday, November 21, 1909, about three years after their first
meeting, she and Jerry Robinson were married.

  At first, Mallie was happy with Jerry in their cabin on Jim Sasser’s plantation; but Sasser’s terms and conditions soon disturbed her. To her dismay, she found out that his tenants had to beg him for any farm produce they wanted, from collard greens to turnips. Hog-killing time that Christmas brought a further shock; Mallie was stunned to hear that Sasser allowed his black workers only scraps—he reserved even the neckbones and backbones. When Jerry, borrowing against his next year’s salary of twelve dollars a month, gave Mallie five dollars to make the season merry, she found the sum inadequate; furthermore, Sasser expected her to spend it all at his plantation store. Farming here smelled like slavery, and Mallie said so. A bold young woman, she set about changing their life. She made Jerry insist on sharecropping status with Jim Sasser rather than monthly wages. Sasser was not happy about the request, but agreed to it. In the usual arrangement, he provided housing, the land, fertilizer, and seed in return for half of whatever Jerry Robinson grew.

  Mallie then threw her energies into making sharecropping pay, and their life improved dramatically. Soon the Robinsons owned their own fat hogs, chickens, and turkeys as well as the cotton and peanuts, sugar cane, corn, and potatoes that were some of the staples of the Sasser plantation. But prosperity worked poorly on Jerry; with money in his pocket, his eye began to rove. “We were just living as I wanted to live,” Mallie declared sorrowfully some forty years later; “only his love [was] drifting away.” Dazzled by the lights of Cairo, Jerry wanted to move to town, but Mallie could not be swayed. Fed up, Jerry tried to put her out, but she refused to leave. He left, then returned; she forgave him. He left again, and came back again; she forgave him once more. Meanwhile, their children came—Edgar in 1910, Frank in 1911, Mack in 1914, Willa Mae in 1916; and Jack in 1919.