what was robinsons purpose for writing to the mayor?

Brian Helgeland, the author and managing director of 42, the well-nigh recent film to tell the story of Jackie Robinson, cuts the motion picture at the end of Robinson'due south first flavour with the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947.

But The Jackie Robinson Story , released in 1950, the first feature film about Robinson — and having the advantage of starring Robinson playing himself — ends with Robinson testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Washington DC.

"I know that life in these United states of america can be mighty tough for people who are a niggling different from the majority," Robinson says, in a recap of his actual advent earlier HUAC in 1949. "I'm not fooled because I've had a chance open to very few Negro Americans. But I practise know that democracy works for those who are willing to fight for it, and I'grand certain it's worth defending. I can't speak for whatsoever 15 one thousand thousand people, no one person can, only I'yard certain that I, and other Americans of many races and faiths, take also much invested in our state's welfare to throw it away, or to permit it be taken from us."

To today's audience, this testimony sounds like standard patriotic rhetoric, not much dissimilar than the ritual singing of the "Star Spangled Banner" before a ball game.

Merely to a 1950 audition, in the early days of what came to be known every bit the McCarthy era, this was an unmistakable bow to the war-mongering, anti-communist and anti-Soviet hysteria of the fourth dimension. It was also a thinly veiled set on on Paul Robeson, so the most famous Negro American in the earth, renowned equally a singer, actor and athlete — and an untiring fighter for social and economical justice for African Americans, including the integration of baseball.

Robeson had famously declared, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1949, "We shall not make war on anyone. We shall not make war on the Soviet Union…. We shall support peace and friendship among all nations…" This is what had earned Robeson the ire of HUAC and caused them to summon Robinson to testify before the committee.

Years later, Muhammad Ali expressed much the same sentiment as Robeson, though somewhat more pithily, when he proclaimed, "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger."

Less than a month after the release of The Jackie Robinson Story, troops of the Democratic People'south South korea launched an assail on the U.Due south.-backed boob authorities in the south, ceremonious war was raging in Korea, and the question of the willingness of African Americans, indeed of all Americans, to fight in defense of "democracy" was of paramount importance.

Robinson would come to regret his testimony earlier HUAC.

TROUBLE Alee, Trouble Behind

Helgeland wisely leaves the HUAC hearing out of 42, although he does include a lengthy rendition of the Star Spangled Banner on the mean solar day Robinson debuted for the Dodgers at Ebbets Field, on April fifteen, 1947.

The HUAC hearing is non all Helgeland leaves out. 42 essentially begins in 1945 when Branch Rickey — the President, General Manager and function owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers — recruited Robinson. Every bit a result, so much of the historical context is missing that the initiative to integrate baseball game seems to take come full-blown out of the head of Branch Rickey.

Rickey deserves his due for backbone and tactical genius, but 42 lacks whatever acquittance of the years of struggle against segregation in general and against the magnates of baseball in particular, which created the ground on which Rickey could fight.

For case, in 42, we see Wendell Smith, a Black sportswriter for the Pittsburgh Courier, but learn niggling nigh him. In reality, Smith had been writing nigh Jim Crow baseball for years, starting with a groundbreaking series of articles in 1939.

Smith was not alone in this crusade, but was joined by others in the Blackness printing, similar Frank Immature of the Chicago Defender, Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American and Joe Bostic of the Harlem People's Vocalization. The long campaign by the Black press against segregated baseball does non makes its manner into 42.

And we certainly practice not see or hear anything in the motion-picture show nigh the unremitting entrada of the Communist Party to desegregate baseball, despite the fact that, as acknowledged past Arnold Rampersad in his authoritative Jackie Robinson, A Biography, "the well-nigh 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." The Daily Worker was the Communist Party newspaper, based in New York.

Nor, in 42, practise we hear or see annihilation about the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball, launched in 1940 by the New York Trade Matrimony Athletic Association (TUAA). The TUAA, with over 300,000 members, organized sports programs for union members. The Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball also included college sports editors from Columbia Academy, New York University (NYU), Metropolis College of New York (CCNY), Brooklyn College, and St. John's University.

On July 7, 1940, the TUAA officially took over the New York World's Off-white Stadium for a labor sports carnival, fabricated the theme for the day "Ending Jim Crow in Baseball," sponsored baseball games between racially-mixed teams, and collected more than 10,000 signatures on a petition confronting segregated brawl.

Both Rodney and Mardo report that by 1942 the Commissioner of Baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, had more than i meg signatures on his desk. In that same yr, the Greater New York Industrial Wedlock Council, representing over a one-half meg Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union members, unanimously passed a resolution to "end jim-crow in the large league baseball now."

42 besides tells us goose egg about the delegation of Black publishers that Paul Robeson took to the almanac wintertime coming together of major league baseball team owners in 1943. Robeson's history equally an outstanding All-American college football game thespian was well known, equally well as his struggle against bigotry when he joined Rutgers' all-white team in 1915. "I was well-nigh killed the get-go year," he told the squad owners.

Commissioner Landis presided over the meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel. Landis, one of the master enforcers of the ban against Black players, had lied to the press the year earlier, challenge that, "Negroes are not barred from organized baseball… and never have been in the 21 years I take served."

Introducing Robeson at the meeting, Landis said, "Everybody knows him or what he's done as an athlete and an artist…

"I want to make it articulate that in that location is non, never has been, and equally long equally I am connected with baseball, in that location never will be whatever agreement amongst the teams or between any 2 teams, preventing Negroes from participating in organized baseball. Each manager is free to choose players regardless of race, color, or any other condition."

Robeson then proceeded to urge the magnates to integrate the game and that "action be taken this very season." Information technology didn't happen that way. Landis had to dice offset, afterwards a heart assail in Nov 1944. Subsequently, Albert Benjamin "Happy" Chandler was appointed Commissioner. And that'due south almost where 42 starts.

Years later on, information technology was learned that the FBI had monitored the 1943 baseball game owners meeting. A study to
J. Edgar Hoover read:

"Pressure is being exerted for the purpose of lifting the ban upon Negro players participating in organized ball…. All of these individuals take been reliably reported as members of the Communist Political party."

And thus practically written out of history, both textbook and cinematic.

BASEBALL IS Almost GREEN, NOT BLACK AND WHITE

Rickey exhibited no inclination to integrate baseball during his 25 years as an executive with the St. Louis Cardinals. Even after he moved n and took over the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942, he showed no outward sign of involvement in recruiting Black players.

When Joe Bostic of Harlem's People'southward Voice and Nat Low of the Daily Worker showed up unannounced at the Dodger preseason camp in April 1945 with two Negro League players, pitcher Terris McDuffie and offset baseman Dave Thomas, request to let them endeavour out, Rickey flew into a rage for being put on the spot. He immune McDuffie and Thomas on the field for about 45 minutes, then summarily dismissed them.

Rickey never spoke to Bostic once more. A month later he called a printing conference and denounced much of the agitation to integrate baseball as communist-inspired. At this point, no one could accept guessed that Rickey was concocting a program to integrate the game.

At his printing conference, Rickey also proclaimed that the existing Negro Leagues were nothing more than "rackets" and announced a program to create a new circuit for Blackness players, which he named the United states League. Of class, the Negro Leagues were no more a noise than Major League Baseball. But the United States League proved to be the biggest noise of all. The new organization never held a game. It did, all the same, provide comprehend for Rickey to send scouts out for Blackness baseball game players to Negro League games without tipping his mitt almost his existent intentions.

The Negro Leagues were a known quantity to Major League Baseball magnates. Many of the Black teams played in white-owned stadiums, including Yankee Stadium, paying substantial rent money. Some of the Black teams had white owners. Nearly all of the booking agents, who skimmed upwardly to twoscore% of the gross receipts off the summit, were white. While most Negro League players had their eyes on the majors, the Negro League owners and agents had everything to lose if baseball were to be integrated, which would surely lead to the plummet of the Negro Leagues. Just Rickey had no pale in the Negro Leagues, any more than he did in his brand-believe Us League.

The economic imperatives pushing Rickey toward integration are non complex. Bringing Black talent onto the Dodgers would potentially give them an border in winning games, pennants and mayhap even a World Series or two — equally it did. Winning meant money. Bringing Black fans into the stadiums would also mean more coin.

Early on in 42 Rickey lays it on the line. "Dollars aren't black and white, they're dark-green." Robinson says much the same thing in his autobiography: "Money is America'southward God, and business organization people tin can dig black power if it coincides with dark-green ability." Baseball may be America's pastime, but business is America's centre and soul.

In the globe of 42, the main pillars of segregation are ignorant managers, redneck players, and racist fans. The owners are largely invisible, only they were then, as now, the ones calling the shots. Most owners feared that a inundation of Black fans would hateful white flight from the stadiums, especially in the South. That didn't mean coin, it meant ruin. The owners' animalism for profits was cardinal, not their fear of Blacks in the shower rooms.

"The about prejudiced of the club owners were not as upset about the game beingness contaminated by blackness players equally they were past fearing that integration would hurt them in their pocketbooks," Robinson writes. "In one case they found out that more — non fewer — customers, blackness and white, were coming through those turnstiles, their prejudices were suppressed."

Rickey, smarter than nearly of the owners, had the wisdom to run into that integration was going to happen in baseball sooner or later. This was easier to encounter in New York.

It wasn't simply the agitation around integrating baseball, much of which was centered there. When a New York cop shot a Black soldier at the Hotel Braddock in 1943, Harlem exploded, an uprising later memorialized by James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son. Black soldiers were dying in Europe and the Pacific. They weren't going to be overseas forever. Times were irresolute.

Rickey was a homo to ride the tiger, non wait for information technology to attack him. Why not be the first to integrate baseball and reap the economic rewards that would bring?

In a later scene in 42, Rickey and Robinson are lonely in a locker room, Robinson having just been stitched upwards afterward being spiked in the leg. Robinson asks Rickey to tell him why he is doing this.

Rickey'due south first reply is, "We had a victory over fascism in Germany. Fourth dimension we had a victory over racism at home."

"No, why?" Robinson demands. "Why'd you exercise it? Come on. Tell me."

Rickey pauses, then tells Robinson:

"I honey this game. I love baseball game. Given my whole life to information technology. Forty odd years ago I was a player/coach in Ohio, Wesleyan Academy. Nosotros had a Negro catcher, best hitter on the team, Charlie Thomas, fine young homo. Saw him laid depression, broken, because of the colour of his skin, and I didn't do enough to help. Told myself I did, merely I didn't. At that place is something unfair at the heart of the game I love and I ignored information technology."

The real Rickey told the story about Thomas many times. One can credit him with having a college purpose hither than cold cash or not. But integration would simply piece of work for the Dodgers, or any other team, if it penciled out green. Fortunately for justice, information technology did.

Rickey was certainly correct about in that location being "something unfair at the heart of the game." But at that place is more unfairness at the heart of the game than racism, as vile equally that is. Equally Light-headed Dean, a lifetime 150-83 pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs, once told a group of ballplayers in Indianapolis in 1948:

"Don't forget the boss is settin' back there computin' the dough equally it rolls in. He'due south makin' money and enough of it. That's about all he thinks most…

"The fourth dimension will come when you can't throw and run and hit like yous exercise at present. Merely the owners volition yet be makin' dough. In that location ain't no age limit on that. Take a tip from ol' Diz."

Rickey is frequently credited with saying:

"I'k a man of some intelligence. I've had some education, passed the bar, practiced law. I've been a teacher and I deal with men of substance; statesmen, business organization leaders, the clergy…
So why do I spend my time arguing with Dizzy Dean?"

Don't argue with Giddy. He had baseball downward common cold.

ROBINSON'S "EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION"

In 1949, Rickey released Robinson from his vow non to fight back. Robinson quotes Rickey in his autobiography: "I realized the point would come when… Jackie would break with ill feeling if I did not issue an emancipation proclamation for him. I could come across how the tensions had congenital upward in 2 years and that this young man had come through with courage far across what I asked, yet, I knew that burning inside him was the same pride and determination that burned within those Negro slaves a century earlier… So I told Robinson that he was on his ain. Then I sat back happily, knowing that, with the restraints removed, Robinson was going to show the National League a thing or two."

Robinson did indeed bear witness the world a thing or 2. He helped lead the Dodgers to 6 pennants and a World Series Championship. He was a National League All-Star every year from 1949 to 1954. He was voted into the Baseball game Hall of Fame in 1962, the kickoff year of his eligibility.

Merely Robinson as well "fabricated enemies," wrote Dick Young, a sportswriter for the New York Daily News. "He has a talent for it. He has the tact of a child because he has the moral purity of a child."

Rickey had been correct when he told Robinson that when he fought back, many would only see Robinson'southward blows, not the blows that had been inflicted on him. Robinson had many quarrels with umpires, who frequently gave him much less slack than they would have given a white player. Sportswriters tried to fan the flames of discord between Robinson and Roy Campanella, the Blackness catcher who joined the Dodgers in 1948, claiming that "Campy" was unhappy with Robinson'southward allegedly quarrelsome carry. Robinson also lodged complaints about Jim Crow hotel arrangements, notably calling out the Hunt Hotel in St. Louis.

In 1951, Rickey was forced out of the Dodgers organization in a ability movement by the other owners. Rickey's replacement was Walter O'Malley who, in Robinson'south words, was "viciously antagonistic." Robinson relates one fourth dimension when O'Malley told him that he "had no correct to complain about beingness assigned to a separate hotel. A separate hotel had been good enough for me in 1947, hadn't it?"

In 1953, Robinson appeared on a Tv set show and, in response to a question, defendant the Yankees, still lily-white at the time, of discriminating against Blackness players. This gear up off an explosion in the press. Robinson was accused of existence a "soap box orator" and a "rabble-rouser."

Robinson'south fights weren't e'er most baseball. In 1954, after the Supreme Court ordered the nation'southward schools to be integrated, there was a wave of church bombings in the South. Robinson caught flack for telling a group of reporters that "people who would flop a church had to be ill and that our federal government ought to use every resource to prosecute them."

Another time, at that place was a hullabaloo in the printing nearly the problem Robinson and his family were having trying to purchase a house in Connecticut.

Mayhap almost ironic of Robinson'southward troubles was an incident that happened in 1949, presently afterward Robinson's testimony before HUAC. On September 4, Robeson sung at an open-air concert in Peekskill, in New York's Westchester Canton. At the concert, Robeson had been under heavy guard past trade marriage allies, because the week before a racist mob, armed with baseball bats and rocks, had prevented a Robeson concert in Peekskill.

At the Peekskill concert at which Robeson sung, a sniper'south nest was discovered in the hills overlooking the concert expanse. The occupants had been disarmed and run off. The concert then went off without issues, just as the concertgoers left they were attacked by the mobs one time once more, this time nether the clear protection of country and local police.

The windows of cars and busses were shattered and much blood flowed — the blood of men, women, and children. At one indicate, the country police force charged a group of concertgoers, guns drawn and clubs flailing, but were fought off. Miraculously, nobody was killed.

As Beak Mardo, the sportswriter for the Daily Worker at the time, relates, "I remember rushing to Ebbets Field the morning later on the Peekskill bloodbath and actually breaking the news to Jackie as he saturday in the Dodger dugout a few minutes before gametime…

"Reading the newspaper accounts of the symbolic lynching of Robeson at Peekskill, Jackie Robinson slowly lifted his eyes from the newspapers I had handed him and, anger written all over his face up, told me:

" 'Paul Robeson should take the right to sing, speak, or do anything he wants to. Those mobs make information technology tough on everyone. Information technology'due south Robeson's right to exercise or be or say as he believes. They say hither in America y'all're immune to be whatever you desire. I retrieve those rioters ought to be investigated, and let'south find out if what they did is supposed to be the democratic way of doing things.'

"And and so, Jackie, conspicuously opposed to communism, nailed the insanity of those days right where it lived. 'Annihilation progressive is chosen communism,' he sighed.

"Permit me add together that the very aforementioned newspapers that had salivated over Jackie's political difference with Robeson at the House hearings… somehow missed Jackie's passionate defense force of Robeson'due south rights just five weeks later! How they missed this Daily Worker front-folio exclusive [August 29, 1949] is something to think nearly.

"But one matter is sure. Jackie Robinson didn't miss spotting the lynch rope at Peekskill… didn't miss seeing the white sheets at Peekskill."

In 1953, Robeson wrote an Open Alphabetic character to Robinson. "I notice… that some folks recall you're too outspoken. Certainly not many of our folks share that view… Perhaps those protests effectually you, Jackie, explicate a lot of things about people trying to shut up those of us who speak out in many other fields…

"The aforementioned kind of people who don't want you to indicate upwards injustices to your folks, the same people who remember you ought to stay in your 'place,' the same people who want to close you lot up — desire to shut upward any one of us who speaks out for our full equality, for all of our rights. That'southward the middle of what I said in Paris in 1949."

LIFE AFTER Baseball game: Ceremonious RIGHTS AND POLITICS

When Robinson retired from the Dodgers after the 1956 season, he was done with baseball or, more accurately, baseball was done with him, except every bit legend. No team offered him a job as a coach or fifty-fifty in the front office. Such positions were still not open up to Black men, especially not to Black men like Robinson. Despite turning the other cheek at the beginning of his career, he had go also outspoken, as well militant — too Black — to go along getting a cheque from the magnates.

Robinson became very agile politically once baseball was backside him. He worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), particularly every bit a fundraiser. He also worked with Martin Luther Male monarch Jr.'due south Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Jesse Jackson's People United to Save Humanity (Functioning PUSH), making many speeches and appearances in support of the growing ceremonious rights movement.

Despite his active back up for civil rights, in 1960 Robinson campaigned for Richard Nixon in his battle with John Kennedy for the presidency, a decision Robinson later acknowledged was non "one of my finer ones." Ironically, Nixon had been a member of HUAC when Robinson testified earlier the committee in 1949, although Nixon wasn't present for Robinson's testimony.

In 1964, Robinson worked actively for Nelson Rockefeller in his chief campaign for the Republican nomination for president. That was the yr Barry Goldwater won the nomination. Robinson was appalled by the conduct of Goldwater's supporters at the convention in San Francisco, and subsequently campaigned for Lyndon Johnson.

In 1966, Robinson went to work for Nelson Rockefeller as a Special Banana to the Governor for Community Affairs. He quit that postal service in 1968 in order to entrada for Hubert Humphrey for president, confronting his sometime marry Nixon.

Although Robinson worked with and for Martin Luther King, Jr., he disagreed "with the stand up Dr. Martin Luther King took on the war" in Vietnam and "didn't similar…anti-war demonstrations." Equally a supporter of the war in Vietnam, he felt that unity between the ceremonious rights movement and the peace motion would exist a "disastrous brotherhood."

Oddly, however, Robinson felt that although he worked with King, "I never would have made a good soldier in Martin's army. My reflexes aren't conditioned to accept nonviolence in the face of violence-provoking attacks."

ROBINSON: "I NEVER HAD IT Made"

Robinson's politics did not accommodate to anybody's stereotype.

In 1972, Robinson published his autobiography, I Never Had It Fabricated. This was also the year he died, manner too immature, at the age of 53, from a middle assail complicated past diabetes. His autobiography reveals that his politics were continuing to evolve. Where he would have gone if he had lived longer will remain a mystery. But his book reveals much about where he was going.

He wrote, for example, well-nigh a "unsafe confrontation with a white policeman in the lobby of the Apollo Theater recently. It was a day soon afterwards a couple of constabulary officers had been killed in Harlem… On my way into the lobby, an officer, a plainclothesman, accosted me. He asked me roughly where I was going, and I asked what the hell business it was of his. He grabbed me and spectators passing by told me later that he had pulled out his gun. I was so angry at his grabbing me and so busy telling him he'd better get his hands off me that I didn't recall seeing the gun. By this time people had started crowding around, excitedly telling him my name, and he backed off. Thinking over that incident, it horrifies me to realize what might have happened if I had been just another citizen of Harlem."

Although Robinson had been bitterly opposed to Malcolm 10'due south politics, peculiarly during Malcolm'southward clan with the Nation of Islam, here is what Robinson says in his autobiography:

"People have asked me, 'Jack, what's your beef? You've got it made.'

"I'm grateful for all the breaks and honors and opportunities I've had, simply I always believe I won't accept it made until the humblest black kid in the about remote backwoods of America has it fabricated…

"…till every homo can hire and lease and buy co-ordinate to his coin and his desires; until every child can have an equal opportunity in youth and manhood; until hunger is not just immoral but illegal; until hatred is recognized as a disease, a scourge, an epidemic, and treated as such; until racism and sexism and narcotics are conquered and until every man can vote and whatsoever man can be elected if he qualifies — until that day Jackie Robinson and no i else can say he has it made…

"I disagreed with Malcolm vigorously in many areas during his earlier days, but I certainly agreed with him when he said, 'Don't tell me about progress the black human has fabricated. Y'all don't stick a pocketknife ten inches in my back, pull information technology out iii or 4, so tell me I'm making progress.'"

One wound Robinson felt keenly was his troubled relationship with his start-born son, Jackie Robinson, Jr. Estranged from his begetter, Jackie, Jr. volunteered for the Regular army in 1964. He was shipped to Vietnam and into gainsay. Robinson supported the state of war and had, of course, famously testified earlier HUAC that Blacks should fight for their state.

But in 1967, Jackie, Jr. was discharged, and came home a drug aficionado. Earlier long he was arrested on charges of possession and carrying a concealed weapon. Jackie, Jr. struck a deal allowing him to go into a rehabilitation plan in guild to avoid a prison house sentence. He successfully bankrupt his drug habit and then became a respected advisor with the rehabilitation programme that had helped him.

Yet tragedy struck once more when he was killed in a solo car accident in 1971.

Robinson, who had previously criticized Male monarch's antiwar politics, probably had his son in listen when he wrote in his autobiography:

"I cannot bitterly oppose…[Rex's] notion that America leads the world in violence… I feel that the regime we are supporting in S Vietnam is corrupt and not representative of the people… I cannot take the idea of a black supposedly fighting for the principles of freedom and democracy in Vietnam when so footling has been accomplished in this country. In that location was a time when I deeply believed in America. I have go bitterly disillusioned."

And on Robinson'south HUAC testimony against Robeson:

"In those days I had much more faith in the ultimate justice of the American white man than I accept today. I would reject such an invitation if offered at present."

Those are startling words from Robinson, but not every bit startling every bit this:

"I guess if I could choose one of the virtually important moments in my life, I would become back to 1947, in the Yankee Stadium in New York City. It was the opening solar day of the Earth Series and I was for the first time playing in the series as a fellow member of the Brooklyn Dodgers team…

"There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, role of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. Information technology should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national canticle poured from the stands…

"Today as I await back on that opening game of my earth series, I must tell you lot that it was Mr. Rickey'southward drama and that I was only a principal actor.

"As I write this twenty years subsequently, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black homo in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my nascence in 1919, I know that I never had it made."

These words are the legacy of a man who is honored every year, and in 42, with elaborate on-field celebrations, including, of course, billowing flags and the singing of the Star Spangled Imprint.

The real movie about Jackie Robinson has withal to be made.

Copyright © 2013 by Marc Norton
Marc has made some revisions from the Z Magazine version of this article. His website is www.MarcNorton.us.

This slice first appeared in Z Magazine and we thank them for permission to repost

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Source: https://beyondchron.org/the-untold-story-of-jackie-robinsons-i-never-had-it-made/

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