Jackie Robinson

Baseball Player

• Born: January 31, 1919
• Place of Birth: Cairo, Georgia
• Died: October 24, 1972
• Place of Death: Stamford, Connecticut

Jackie Robinson was the first black to play in the major leagues and as such is known for breaking the “color line” in baseball. A hero for his brilliant career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Early Life

Jackie Robinson was the fifth child born to Mallie Robinson and Jerry Robinson, sharecroppers of Cairo, Georgia. Robinson’s grandparents had been slaves. When he was six months old, his father abandoned the family, and a year later his mother took the family to Pasadena, California, where Robinson grew up. Although poor, Robinson’s mother saved money and ultimately purchased a house in a previously all-white neighborhood. This was Robinson’s first experience as a pioneer in integration. As a child, Robinson excelled in all sports. In high school, community college, and at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Robinson starred in baseball, basketball, football, and track. In 1938, at Pasadena Junior College, he broke the national community college record for the broad jump, previously set by his older brother, Mack Robinson, who himself had won a silver medal at the 1936 Olympics. In 1939, he entered UCLA, where he became the school’s first letterman in four sports. Robinson’s best sport was football; in 1941, he was named an All-American. That year, he dropped out of college to earn money for his family.

In 1941, Robinson played professional football with the Honolulu Bears. Drafted in 1942, Robinson applied for Officer’s Candidate School at Fort Riley, Kansas. Although admitted to the program, Robinson and the other black candidates received no training until pressure from Washington forced the local commander to admit blacks to the base training school. Robinson’s reputation as a sports hero helped to generate that pressure. As a second lieutenant, Robinson successfully challenged some of the Jim Crow policies at the base post exchange. He quit the base football team in protest when the Army agreed to keep him out of a game with the nearby University of Missouri, because that school refused to play against black opponents. Transferred to Fort Hood, Texas, Robinson protested segregation on an Army bus. His protests led to a court-martial, at which he was acquitted. In November 1944, he was honorably discharged. The Army had little desire to keep the person who kept fighting against racism, and for his part, Robinson was, as he later wrote in his autobiography, “pretty much fed up with the service.”

Life’s Work

Out of the Army, Robinson secured a tryout with the Kansas City Monarchs, a leading team in the segregated Negro Leagues. He was quickly offered four hundred dollars a month. In August 1945, while playing for the Monarchs, Robinson was approached by a scout for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dodger president Branch Rickey was publicly calling for a new black baseball league, with a team to be called the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. Rickey wanted Robinson for the team and asked him to come to Brooklyn for a meeting.

Robinson traveled to Brooklyn to meet Rickey. The twenty-six-year-old Robinson was just under six feet tall and weighed 195 pounds. He was handsome, agile, and a natural athlete of almost limitless potential. He was also intelligent and articulate, and one of the best-educated black baseball players in the United States. He had grown up in an integrated world and played on integrated teams in high school and college. He was the perfect candidate for Rickey’s great experiment: the integration of the major leagues.

The meeting between Robinson and Rickey is a classic in American sports. Robinson expected to talk about a new black baseball team. Instead, Rickey asked him if he had a girlfriend, and on hearing about Robinson’s college sweetheart, Rachel Isum, Rickey told him to marry her. Robinson was puzzled. Rickey continued the conversation, asking Robinson if he knew why he was there. Robinson mentioned the Brown Dodgers. No, Rickey told him, Robinson was brought there to play for the real Dodgers, to integrate baseball. Rickey then began to detail Robinson’s life for him. Robinson had not been scouted simply for his baseball skills; he had been scouted for his character. Rickey wanted to know if he had the courage to be the first black athlete to play in the major leagues if he could stand the insults, the racial slurs, the beanballs, without fighting back. Rickey swore at Robinson, called him the worst possible names, and tried in other ways to anger him. The meeting was “tough” according to Robinson, but necessary, because for Robinson, baseball would not simply be a matter of box scores. That day, he signed a contract for six hundred dollars a month with a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bonus. Rickey, who was a businessman as well as a man with a strong sense of social justice, knew that Robinson had only an oral contract with the Monarchs, which was renewed monthly. Thus, Rickey never offered to pay the Monarchs for the rights to Robinson’s contract.

On October 23, 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers shocked America by announcing that Jackie Robinson would be playing for their number-one farm team, the Montreal Royals. Southerners asserted that they would never play on the same team as Robinson; white sports reporters declared that he had few baseball skills and would never make it to the major leagues; owners of other baseball teams complained about Rickey’s breaking the unwritten rule against hiring blacks. The manager of the Royals, a Mississippian, privately begged Rickey not to send Robinson to his team. In spring training in Florida, Robinson faced segregation as he had never seen it before. Buses, restaurants, hotels, and all other public facilities were rigidly segregated. On the way to Florida, Robinson and his new wife were twice asked to leave their airplane seats to make room for white passengers. Later, they were forced to move to the back of a bus. These were common experiences for southern blacks but had been unknown to the California couple. During training, Robinson could not stay with the team at a local hotel but had to live with a local black family. Tensions were high throughout the spring.

Despite a poor spring training, Robinson started at second base for the Montreal Royals in the opening game. His performance was masterful. He had four hits, including a three-run home run, scored four times, and stole two bases. His baserunning so unnerved opposition pitchers that twice they balked with Robinson on third base, which allowed him to score. This was the beginning of a promising career.

That first year, Robinson faced hateful racist crowds and opponents in a number of cities. Often this only spurred Robinson on. For example, at Syracuse, the opposing players threw a black cat on the field, yelling, “Hey, Jackie, there’s your cousin.” Robinson then hit a double and shouted to the Syracuse bench, “I guess my cousin’s pretty happy now.” Robinson was totally unnerved by the crowd, however, when he played in Louisville in a postseason championship game. The southern crowd mercilessly booed him with “a torrent of mass hatred,” as he later described it. In Montreal, on the other hand, Robinson, nicknamed the Dark Dasher for his baserunning skills, was a star and a hero. When he made the game’s winning hit in the last game of the “little world series,” he was carried off the field by his teammates and had to run from an adoring crowd. One sportswriter noted that it was “probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind.”

In 1947, Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Enormous pressures and racial insults hampered his playing. A few Dodgers, most notably Fred “Dixie” Walker, asked to be traded. The St. Louis Cardinals, playing in a segregated city, threatened to boycott Dodger games. The manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman of Alabama, became so abusive that the commissioner of baseball, himself a southerner, intervened. By the end of the season, most of Robinson’s teammates were behind him, as were many opponents. Robinson smothered his temper, absorbed insults, and fought back only with his bat, glove, and baserunning. He led the league in stolen bases that year, batted .297, and electrified fans with his baserunning, including his ability to steal home. The Sporting News, which had initially predicted that he would never make it to the major leagues, voted him Rookie of the Year. More significant, a public opinion poll found him the second most popular man in America, behind the singer Bing Crosby.

Two years later, in 1949, Robinson led the National League in hitting with a .342 average and was named Most Valuable Player. By then, a few other blacks, including Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby, and the legendary pitcher LeRoy “Satchel” Paige, had entered the major leagues. Most major league teams were beginning to scout black ballplayers. In 1950, Hollywood gave its stamp of approval to the experiment by hiring Robinson to star in a film about himself entitled The Jackie Robinson Story. Robinson was now making the rather princely sum of thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the Dodgers, as well as additional income from endorsements and promotions. The Dodgers were the dominant team in their league, and Ebbets Field was attracting large crowds. The experiment seemed to be paying off for all concerned. The owners of teams in the Negro Leagues, however, complained that their players were being stolen from them by the major league teams and that, with one or two exceptions, they were never compensated. The complaints were justified as Negro League stars such as Paige, Campanella, and Monte Irvin, and future great stars such as Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, were indeed being hired by forward-thinking, previously all-white baseball teams. By the early 1950’s, all but a few teams, most notably the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, would have black players.

After the 1950 season, Rickey left the Dodgers and was replaced by Walter O’Malley. Robinson feuded with his new boss for the next six years. O’Malley seemed uninterested in challenging the status quo, while Robinson would no longer quietly accept racist insults. For example, O’Malley was unsympathetic to Robinson’s demand that he be allowed to stay at the same hotels as his teammates. Robinson contemplated leaving baseball in 1954 and finally did so after the 1956 season. Robinson secretly sold the exclusive story of his retirement to Look magazine. Meanwhile, the Dodgers sold Robinson’s contract to the New York Giants, their crosstown rival. Despite an offer of sixty thousand dollars a year, Robinson stuck to his plans and left baseball.

Robinson did not, however, fade from public life. He accepted a job with a New York restaurant chain and continued to work actively in civil rights causes. He became a major fund-raiser for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1950’s. In the 1960 presidential election primaries, he campaigned for Hubert H. Humphrey, but in a decision he later regretted, he supported Richard M. Nixon in the general election. Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s running mate, promised Robinson that Nixon would appoint a black to a cabinet position. In addition, Robinson was unimpressed with John F. Kennedy’s record on civil rights. Robinson later wrote: “The Richard Nixon I met back in 1960 bore no resemblance to the Richard Nixon as President.” After the 1960 election, Robinson became closely associated with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal New York Republican governor. In 1964, he became one of Rockefeller’s advisers on civil rights and a deputy director of his presidential campaign. After the nomination of Barry Goldwater, however, Robinson became a national leader of the Republicans for Johnson. At about this time, Robinson also became involved in the formation of a black-owned bank in Harlem, the Freedom National Bank. Robinson correctly noted that white-owned banks offered few services to blacks, and he believed that the situation could be remedied only with black-controlled capital. In 1966, he accepted an appointment from Governor Rockefeller as a special assistant to the governor for community affairs.

While Robinson became involved in politics and business, he was never fully divorced from baseball. In 1962, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. In the early 1950s, he had publicly attacked those teams, such as the New York Yankees, which had not yet hired black players. In the late 1960s, he began to campaign for the hiring of a black manager. He accused the men of professional baseball of hypocrisy and of maintaining a double standard in allowing blacks to play but not to manage. In 1972, Robinson threw the first ball out at the World Series. Given a public forum, he declared, on national television, “I’d like to live to see a black manager; I’d like to live to see the day when there is a black man coaching at third base.” When asked why he had to use the World Series to raise this issue, he responded, “What better place? What better time?” Nine days later, Robinson died at age fifty-three of complications caused by diabetes.

In 2024, the MLB officially added Negro League statistics (from regular league play, not including exhibition games and other independent appearances) to its historical records. This increased Robinson's career stats, leaving him with a career .313 batting average, 141 home runs out of 1,563 hits, and 761 RBIs.

Significance

Robinson’s significance is twofold. First, he was an outstanding athlete and one of the most exciting baseball players of his time. In the late 1970’s the New York Mets would use pictures of Robinson in their advertising campaigns, knowing that the memory of his playing could still thrill fans. In an age of power-hitters, Robinson brought back base-stealing, bunting for hits, and finesse. His ability to unnerve pitchers was uncanny. His daring in stealing home, even in a tight World Series game, brought spectators to their feet. He was a trusted player who came through with the big hit, or the big stolen base, at a crucial moment in the game. He was a star with charisma and class. He was truly one of the greatest sports heroes of his age.

Second, Robinson was a pioneer. While he had the backing of Rickey and the help of many players and fans when he integrated baseball, it was Robinson who had to bear the racial slurs, duck the beanballs, and dodge spikes aimed at his body. Robinson did this with grace and dignity, but he also did it with fire. Moreover, he was able to make the transition from turning the other cheek to fighting back verbally. He was the ultimate competitor, for after his baseball career he continued to fight for racial justice and equality. To the end, Robinson spoke out against all forms of segregation.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1941-1970: April 15, 1947: Robinson Breaks the Color Line in Major-League Baseball.

1971-2000: October 2, 1974: Robinson Becomes Baseball’s First African American Manager.

Bibliography

Eig, Jonathan. Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Erskine, Carl, with Burton Rocks. What I Learned from Jackie Robinson: A Teammate’s Reflections on and off the Field. McGraw-Hill, 2005.

Frommer, Harvey. Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Line. Macmillan, 1982.

"Jackie Robinson." National Baseball Hall of Fame, baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/robinson-jackie. Accessed 2 July 2024.

Lamb, Chris. Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training. University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Lowenfish, Lee. Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White. Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Robinson, John Roosevelt. Baseball Has Done It. Edited by Charles Dexter. J. B. Lippincott, 1964.

Robinson, John Roosevelt. I Never Had It Made. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972.

Rogosin, Donn. Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues. Atheneum, 1983.

Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. Oxford University Press, 1983.