Jackie Robinson was a radical – don’t listen
to the sanitized version of history
“I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.”
The Conversation
April 14, 2022
In our new book, “Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America,” Rob Elias and I profile the many iconoclasts, dissenters and mavericks who defied baseball’s and society’s establishment.
But none took as many risks – and had as big an impact – as Jackie Robinson. Though Robinson was a fierce competitor, an outstanding athlete and a deeply religious man, the aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over is that he was also a radical.
The sanitized version of the Jackie Robinson story goes something like this: He was a remarkable athlete who, with his unusual level of self-control, was the perfect person to break baseball’s color line. In the face of jeers and taunts, he was able to put his head down and let his play do the talking, becoming a symbol of the promise of a racially integrated society.
With this April 15 marking the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s breaking baseball’s color line, Major League Baseball will celebrate the occasion with great fanfare – with tributes, movies, TV specials, museum exhibits and symposia.
I wonder, however, about the extent to which these celebrations will downplay his activism during and after his playing career. Will they delve into the forces arrayed against Robinson – the players, fans, reporters, politicians and baseball executives who scorned his outspoken views on race? Will any Jackie Robinson Day events mention that, toward the end of his life, he wrote that he had become so disillusioned with the country’s racial progress that he couldn’t stand for the flag and sing the national anthem?
Laying the groundwork
Robinson was a rebel before he broke baseball’s color line.
When he was a soldier during World War II, his superiors sought to keep him out of officer candidate school. He persevered and became a second lieutenant. But in 1944, while assigned to a training camp at Fort Hood in Texas, he refused to move to the back of an army bus when the white driver ordered him to do so.
Robinson faced trumped-up charges of insubordination, disturbing the peace, drunkenness, conduct unbecoming an officer and refusing to obey the orders of a superior officer. Voting by secret ballot, the nine military judges – only one of them Black – found Robinson not guilty. In November, he was honorably discharged from the Army.
Describing the ordeal, Robinson later wrote, “It was a small victory, for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home.”
Three years later, Robinson would suit up for the Dodgers.
His arrival didn’t occur in a vacuum. It marked the culmination of more than a decade of protests to desegregate the national pastime. It was a political victory brought about by a persistent and progressive movement that confronted powerful business interests that were reluctant – even opposed – to bring about change.
Beginning in the 1930s, the movement mobilized a broad coalition of organizations – the Black press, civil rights groups, the Communist Party, progressive white activists, left-wing unions and radical politicians – that waged a sustained campaign to integrate baseball.
Biting his tongue, biding his time
This protest movement set the stage for Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey to sign Robinson to a contract in 1945. Robinson spent the 1946 season with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ top farm club, where he led the team to the minor league championship. The following season, he was brought up to the big leagues.
Robinson promised Rickey that – at least during his rookie year – he wouldn’t respond to the verbal barbs from fans, managers and other players he would face on a daily basis.
His first test took place a week after he joined the Dodgers, during a game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Phillies manager Ben Chapman called Robinson the n-word and shouted, “Go back to the cotton field where you belong.”
Though Robinson seethed with anger, he kept his promise to Rickey, enduring the abuse without retaliating.
But after that first year, he increasingly spoke out against racial injustice in speeches, interviews and his regular newspaper columns for The Pittsburgh Courier, New York Post and the New York Amsterdam News.
Many sportswriters and most other players – including some of his fellow Black players – balked at the way Robinson talked about race. They thought he was too angry, too vocal.
Syndicated sports columnist Dick Young of the New York Daily News griped that when he talked to Robinson’s Black teammate Roy Campanella, they stuck to baseball. But when he spoke with Robinson, “sooner or later we get around to social issues.”
A 1953 article in Sport magazine titled “Why They Boo Jackie Robinson” described the second baseman as “combative,” “emotional” and “calculating,” as well as a “pop-off,” a “whiner,” a “showboat” and a “troublemaker.” A Cleveland paper called Robinson a “rabble rouser” who was on a “soap box.” The Sporting News headlined one story “Robinson Should Be a Player, Not a Crusader.” Other writers and players called him a “loudmouth,” a “sorehead” and worse.
Nonetheless, Robinson’s relentless advocacy got the attention of the country’s civil rights leaders.
In 1956, the NAACP gave him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. He was the first athlete to receive that award. In his acceptance speech, he explained that although many people had warned him “not to speak up every time I thought there was an injustice,” he would continue to do so.
‘A freedom rider before the Freedom Rides’
After Robinson hung up his cleats in 1957, he stayed true to his word, becoming a constant presence on picket lines and at civil rights rallies.
That same year, he publicly urged President Dwight Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students seeking to desegregate its public schools. In 1960, impressed with the resilience and courage of the college students engaging in sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, he agreed to raise bail money for the students stuck in jail cells.
Robinson initially supported the 1960 presidential campaign of Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat and staunch ally of the civil rights movement. But when John F. Kennedy won the party’s nomination, Robinson – worried that JFK would be beholden to Southern Democrats who opposed integration - he endorsed Republican Richard Nixon. He quickly regretted that decision after Nixon refused to campaign in Harlem or speak out against the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. in rural Georgia. Three weeks before Election Day, Robinson said that “Nixon doesn’t deserve to win.”
In February 1962, Robinson traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to speak at a rally organized by NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Later that year, at King’s request, Robinson traveled to Albany, Georgia, to draw media attention to three Black churches that had been burned to the ground by segregationists. He then led a fundraising campaign that collected $50,000 to rebuild the churches.
In 1963 he devoted considerable time and travel to support King’s voter registration efforts in the South. He also traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, as part of King’s campaign to dismantle segregation in that city.
“His presence in the South was very important to us,” recalled Wyatt Tee Walker, chief of staff of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King called Robinson “a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.”
Robinson also consistently criticized police brutality. In August 1968, three Black Panthers in New York City were arrested and charged with assaulting a white police officer. At their hearing two weeks later, about 150 white men, including off-duty police officers, stormed the courthouse and attacked 10 Panthers and two white supporters. When he learned that the police had made no arrests of the white rioters, Robinson was outraged.
“The Black Panthers seek self-determination, protection of the Black community, decent housing and employment and express opposition to police abuse,” Robinson said during a press conference at the Black Panthers’ headquarters.
He challenged banks for discriminating against Black neighborhoods and condemned slumlords who preyed on Black families.
And Robinson wasn’t done holding Major League Baseball to account, either. He refused to participate in a 1969 Old Timers game because he didn’t see “genuine interest in breaking the barriers that deny access to managerial and front office positions.” At his final public appearance, throwing the ceremonial first pitch before Game 2 of the 1972 World Series, Robinson observed, “I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”
No major league team had a Black manager until Frank Robinson was hired by the Cleveland Indians in 1975, three years after Jackie Robinson’s death. The absence of Black managers and front-office executives is an issue that MLB still grapples with today.
Athlete activism, then and now
Athletes still face backlash for speaking out. When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick protested racism by refusing to stand during the national anthem, then-President Donald Trump said that athletes who followed Kaepernick’s example “shouldn’t be in the country.”
In 2018, after NBA star LeBron James spoke about a racial slur that had been graffitied on his home and criticized Trump, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham suggested that he “shut up and dribble.”
Even so, in the past decade, athletes have become more outspoken on issues of racism, homophobia, sexism, American militarism, immigrant rights and other issues. They all stand on Robinson’s shoulders.
It was Robinson’s strong patriotism that led him to challenge America to live up to its ideals. He felt an obligation to use his fame to challenge the society’s racial injustice. However, during his last few years – before he died of a heart attack in 1972 at age 53 – he grew increasingly disillusioned with the pace of racial progress.
In his 1972 memoir, “I Never Had It Made,” he wrote: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world.”
By Peter Dreier, E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Baseball greats, family honor Jackie Robinson
Column: Remembering Jackie Robinson in town where it started
By PAUL NEWBERRY
1 of 10
By PAUL NEWBERRY
1 of 10
A jersey of Jackie Robinson is displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, commemorating the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's integration of Major League Baseball, Thursday, April 7, 2022. Robinson became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball breaking the baseball color barrier on April 15, 1947, when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Far off the beaten path, way down in southwest Georgia near the Florida state line, a remarkable life began in the most humble of circumstances.
Jackie Robinson was born just outside the small town of Cairo (pronounced “KAY-ro”), the child of sharecroppers struggling to make ends meet in the grinding poverty of the Jim Crow South.
As Major League Baseball honors the 75th anniversary of Robinson’s historic breaking of the color barrier, let’s not forget where he came from.
Robinson spent the first year of his life near Cairo. For decades, there was nothing to mark that he was ever there — a forgotten first chapter to one of America’s most significant stories.
That has changed over the last quarter-century.
There are now a pair of historic signs honoring Robinson — one downtown in front of the library, another at the remnants of the rural shack where he was delivered by his grandmother, a midwife, on Jan. 31, 1919, less than three months after the end of World War I.
Even more significantly, the Jackie Robinson Boys & Girls Club was founded about a dozen years ago, striving to create a better life for Cairo’s young people, many of whom still face some of the same challenges that Robinson did a century ago.
Stephen Francis, the club’s director, proudly notes that it’s the only Boys & Girls Club in the entire world to bear Robinson’s name.
Its mission certainly would’ve met with his approval.
“Being named after Jackie Robinson makes us feel a little more special than the normal Boys & Girls Club,” Francis said. “But it’s also a great responsibility with what he stood for. We have to uphold that and pass it down to the children in our daily programs and the life skills that we teach. We want to make sure we’re instilling the character that Jackie Robinson stood for.”
What was that?
“It’s OK to fall as long as you get back up,” Francis replied. “Failing is not falling. Failing is giving up when you fall. You’re gonna go through some things. But if something is worth it, it’s worth fighting for.”
The Jackie Robinson Boys & Girls Club was at the center of a big celebration Friday.
In a most fitting gesture, the Atlanta Braves brought their World Series championship trophy to Robinson’s birthplace on Jackie Robinson Day.
The whole town was buzzing over its appearance.
“People are cleaning their yards like the the trophy is coming to their house,” Francis said, chuckling. “They’re cutting their grass and washing their cars and getting their hair done. It’s like a big party.”
Dr. Linda Walden was among those who planned to attend the trophy celebration. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Walden is a third cousin of Robinson’s. A native of Queens, she never met Robinson — who died in 1972 at age 53 — but moved to Cairo in the mid-1990s to start a much-needed medical practice in an area that played such a significant role in her family’s history.
She was stunned at what she found — or, more accurately, what she didn’t find.
No statues. No monuments. Not even a simple marker to commemorate this is where it all began for Robinson. Heck, he wasn’t even in the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame (which finally inducted him in 1998).
Maybe that was only natural since Robinson spent such a short time in Georgia. After his father left the family, his mother packed up Jackie and his four siblings and moved to Pasadena, California in search of a better life.
Even so, Walden has dedicated much of her life outside of medicine to making sure that Cairo is remembered for more than its famous syrup.
She now owns the site where Robinson was born. A fence protects the grounds, though all that is left is a brick chimney. The abandoned structure burned down long ago.
Walden also had a historic marker installed, which sadly became a symbol of just how far we have to go in this country. Vandals damaged the plaque with gunshots. She suspects it was the work of racists who were none too pleased with the progress that Robinson fought for throughout his all-too-short life.
“I’m gonna let God handle all that and take care of whoever did it. He has his ways to dealing with people,” Walden said. “But it’s really disappointing that people would show the ugly face of racism that still exists. I just pray for those people.”
Fortunately, the nasty part of the story takes a more promising turn. MLB made a $40,000 donation that got the ball rolling to install not one, but two replacement markers. One at the library, where more people in the town of roughly 10,000 would be able to see it, and another at the birthplace outside the city limits.
“Birthplace of Jackie Robinson: First African American in Modern-Day Major League Baseball,” the marker says.
A dedication ceremony for the new plaques was held in January.
“I’m very proud,” said Walden, who still gets emotional every time she talks about her distant relative. “This means his legacy will continue. Those signs represent the man and the resilience of Jackie Robinson. They’re a symbol of hope, a symbol of courage, a symbol of confidence and determination, a symbol of excellence. No matter what, we can achieve.”
The damaged sign, meanwhile, was shipped to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. Missouri, which held its own event Friday to unveil the marker “as a reminder that the ugliness of America’s past persists to this day.”
It will remain on temporary display through mid-August, said Raymond Doswell, the museum’s vice president and curator. Then it will become part of a permanent exhibit.
“We’re not going to try to repair it,” he said. “We want to show people his humble origins, and at the same time show with the damaged marker that the fight against racism and violence continues.
”We have a long, long way to go.”
We’d like to see MLB take another big step to honor Robinson’s legacy.
Bring a real big league game to the town where it all started.
Already, MLB has constructed a pair of temporary stadiums to host a one-off game at the Fort Bragg military base in 2016 and the wildly popular “Field of Dreams” game in Iowa that will have an encore in 2022.
How about a “Jackie Robinson Day” game in Cairo next April 15 between the home-state Braves and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that Robinson played his entire big league career for while they were in Brooklyn?
The Braves could wear replica uniforms from the Atlanta Black Crackers, the city’s Negro Leagues team. The Dodgers could don the caps they wore during the Robinson era, adorned with a “B” rather than “LA.”
Walden has long dreamed of raising funds to build a field that could host big league teams in Cairo. This seems like a perfect opportunity for MLB to step up again to honor its most significant ballplayer and, hopefully, boost waning interest in the national pastime among Black Americans.
If a fictional movie is worthy of a special game, Jackie Robinson most certainly is, too.
His story really happened.
___
Paul Newberry is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at pnewberry(at)ap.org or at https://twitter.com/pnewberry1963
___
More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
Far off the beaten path, way down in southwest Georgia near the Florida state line, a remarkable life began in the most humble of circumstances.
Jackie Robinson was born just outside the small town of Cairo (pronounced “KAY-ro”), the child of sharecroppers struggling to make ends meet in the grinding poverty of the Jim Crow South.
As Major League Baseball honors the 75th anniversary of Robinson’s historic breaking of the color barrier, let’s not forget where he came from.
Robinson spent the first year of his life near Cairo. For decades, there was nothing to mark that he was ever there — a forgotten first chapter to one of America’s most significant stories.
That has changed over the last quarter-century.
There are now a pair of historic signs honoring Robinson — one downtown in front of the library, another at the remnants of the rural shack where he was delivered by his grandmother, a midwife, on Jan. 31, 1919, less than three months after the end of World War I.
Even more significantly, the Jackie Robinson Boys & Girls Club was founded about a dozen years ago, striving to create a better life for Cairo’s young people, many of whom still face some of the same challenges that Robinson did a century ago.
Stephen Francis, the club’s director, proudly notes that it’s the only Boys & Girls Club in the entire world to bear Robinson’s name.
Its mission certainly would’ve met with his approval.
“Being named after Jackie Robinson makes us feel a little more special than the normal Boys & Girls Club,” Francis said. “But it’s also a great responsibility with what he stood for. We have to uphold that and pass it down to the children in our daily programs and the life skills that we teach. We want to make sure we’re instilling the character that Jackie Robinson stood for.”
What was that?
“It’s OK to fall as long as you get back up,” Francis replied. “Failing is not falling. Failing is giving up when you fall. You’re gonna go through some things. But if something is worth it, it’s worth fighting for.”
The Jackie Robinson Boys & Girls Club was at the center of a big celebration Friday.
In a most fitting gesture, the Atlanta Braves brought their World Series championship trophy to Robinson’s birthplace on Jackie Robinson Day.
The whole town was buzzing over its appearance.
“People are cleaning their yards like the the trophy is coming to their house,” Francis said, chuckling. “They’re cutting their grass and washing their cars and getting their hair done. It’s like a big party.”
Dr. Linda Walden was among those who planned to attend the trophy celebration. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Walden is a third cousin of Robinson’s. A native of Queens, she never met Robinson — who died in 1972 at age 53 — but moved to Cairo in the mid-1990s to start a much-needed medical practice in an area that played such a significant role in her family’s history.
She was stunned at what she found — or, more accurately, what she didn’t find.
No statues. No monuments. Not even a simple marker to commemorate this is where it all began for Robinson. Heck, he wasn’t even in the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame (which finally inducted him in 1998).
Maybe that was only natural since Robinson spent such a short time in Georgia. After his father left the family, his mother packed up Jackie and his four siblings and moved to Pasadena, California in search of a better life.
Even so, Walden has dedicated much of her life outside of medicine to making sure that Cairo is remembered for more than its famous syrup.
She now owns the site where Robinson was born. A fence protects the grounds, though all that is left is a brick chimney. The abandoned structure burned down long ago.
Walden also had a historic marker installed, which sadly became a symbol of just how far we have to go in this country. Vandals damaged the plaque with gunshots. She suspects it was the work of racists who were none too pleased with the progress that Robinson fought for throughout his all-too-short life.
“I’m gonna let God handle all that and take care of whoever did it. He has his ways to dealing with people,” Walden said. “But it’s really disappointing that people would show the ugly face of racism that still exists. I just pray for those people.”
Fortunately, the nasty part of the story takes a more promising turn. MLB made a $40,000 donation that got the ball rolling to install not one, but two replacement markers. One at the library, where more people in the town of roughly 10,000 would be able to see it, and another at the birthplace outside the city limits.
“Birthplace of Jackie Robinson: First African American in Modern-Day Major League Baseball,” the marker says.
A dedication ceremony for the new plaques was held in January.
“I’m very proud,” said Walden, who still gets emotional every time she talks about her distant relative. “This means his legacy will continue. Those signs represent the man and the resilience of Jackie Robinson. They’re a symbol of hope, a symbol of courage, a symbol of confidence and determination, a symbol of excellence. No matter what, we can achieve.”
The damaged sign, meanwhile, was shipped to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. Missouri, which held its own event Friday to unveil the marker “as a reminder that the ugliness of America’s past persists to this day.”
It will remain on temporary display through mid-August, said Raymond Doswell, the museum’s vice president and curator. Then it will become part of a permanent exhibit.
“We’re not going to try to repair it,” he said. “We want to show people his humble origins, and at the same time show with the damaged marker that the fight against racism and violence continues.
”We have a long, long way to go.”
We’d like to see MLB take another big step to honor Robinson’s legacy.
Bring a real big league game to the town where it all started.
Already, MLB has constructed a pair of temporary stadiums to host a one-off game at the Fort Bragg military base in 2016 and the wildly popular “Field of Dreams” game in Iowa that will have an encore in 2022.
How about a “Jackie Robinson Day” game in Cairo next April 15 between the home-state Braves and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that Robinson played his entire big league career for while they were in Brooklyn?
The Braves could wear replica uniforms from the Atlanta Black Crackers, the city’s Negro Leagues team. The Dodgers could don the caps they wore during the Robinson era, adorned with a “B” rather than “LA.”
Walden has long dreamed of raising funds to build a field that could host big league teams in Cairo. This seems like a perfect opportunity for MLB to step up again to honor its most significant ballplayer and, hopefully, boost waning interest in the national pastime among Black Americans.
If a fictional movie is worthy of a special game, Jackie Robinson most certainly is, too.
His story really happened.
___
Paul Newberry is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at pnewberry(at)ap.org or at https://twitter.com/pnewberry1963
___
More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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