Jackie Robinson: Nothing Inevitable About Him
One of the few infuriating aspects of Jackie Robinson Day is the blowback from the uninformed. I have read today of how integration in this country was inevitable, and Robinson’s success in 1947 was just a happy coincidence. I have read that the talent of the Negro Leagues was just too great and had Robinson failed, had he hit .197 instead of .297, it was still inevitable that those great athletes would have forced their way into the mainstream of American sports.
Utter nonsense.
Was it inevitable when Frank Grant led the International League in homers in 1887? Was it inevitable when John McGraw put the great second baseman Charlie Grant on his 1901 Baltimore Orioles squad under the pretense that he was a Native American named Tokohama? Was it inevitable when the Oakland Oaks of the PCL signed pitcher Jimmy Claxton in 1916 only to drop him days later? Was it inevitable when Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson both played in Pittsburgh in the early ’30s and the Pirates desperately needed a starting pitcher and a catcher? Was it inevitable when John Henry Lloyd and Cool Papa Bell and Judy Johnson and Jose Mendez and nearly three dozen more future Hall of Famers spent their entire lives playing for peanuts in separate and unequal conditions?
Baseball had fought integration ever since the 1884 major league team in Toledo signed Fleet and Welday Walker. It had slowly closed the door on African-American players in the minors, through boycotts and threats, and by 1900 they were all gone. And the spasmodic attempts to sneak in a Grant or a Claxton as a Native American had been met with crushing responses and threats of retribution. Even when Robinson seemed safely over the threshold, other teams integrated haltingly and – as in St. Louis with the Browns – sometimes disastrously. Many of the others hung back. The New York Yankees saw nothing “inevitable” about integration: they did not add a black player until Elston Howard in 1955.
While the Boston Braves were signing Hank Aaron and Billy Bruton and Wes Covington and then moving to Milwaukee to win pennants with them, the Boston Red Sox chose not to sign Robinson in 1945, and not to add any African-American player until 1959. The Sox, intentionally or otherwise, kept to a limit of no more than five African-American players on their roster well into the ’70s. It was maintained with extraordinary efficiency. On June 14, 1966, the Sox made a trade that added the former Negro Leagues pitcher John Wyatt to their bullpen. On June 15, 1966, they gave away pitcher Earl Wilson to the Detroit Tigers and their quota was back down to five.
And there was nothing inevitable about black athletes getting another chance in the major leagues had Jackie Robinson failed. He didn’t win the civil rights war by himself (indeed, it has hardly been won), but his role was pivotal and unique. Leaders from each decade and every perspective have said that Robinson provided the cultural groundwork that made integration not necessarily possible, but practical. Unlike Jack Johnson or the less threatening Joe Louis, he had succeeded in a previously all-white team sport. He had white teammates and white friends.
It is little credited today, but Jackie Robinson’s real contribution was not to convert the haters and the proactive racists towards an enlightened view of this country. In fact, what he did would’ve been impossible before the vastly increased interaction between whites and blacks in the military during World War II, and it might’ve been impossible if he had then failed on the ballfield or in his relationship with his white teammates: He erased benign prejudice.
My late father, nearly as liberal a man as I’ve ever known, used to look back at attending games of the New York Black Yankees as a teenager, with a sense of astonishment and shame. “It never occurred to us, never occurred to us, that the black players didn’t want to play only with other black players. We had no idea this was segregation. We thought it was choice.”
And for every open-minded individual like him whose consciousness was raised by Jackie Robinson, there was another who had no animus towards blacks but was convinced that there was either no way they had the athletic chops to succeed at the major league level, or no way they had the psychological stability to withstand the pressure of the game or of the process of integration.
Some large, but ultimately never-to-be-measured, group of Americans went from believing in 1946 that blacks had chosen their own world, or couldn’t physically or psychologically function next to whites, to realizing that these convictions were the most insidious forms of racism. These were the white men and women who supported Brown v. Board of Education, and the marches in the South, and the integration in Little Rock, and Martin Luther King, and the repeal of the laws forbidding blacks to marry whites that stayed on the books of some states as late as the mid-’60s. These were the men and women who began to attend pro football and basketball games in the large numbers they needed to succeed as stable national enterprises only after these leagues began to fully integrate – and, yes, the NBA didn’t integrate until Robinson had completed his fourth season with the Dodgers.
It is imperative to remember that none of the progress – in baseball or in America – that followed in Jackie Robinson’s wake was inevitable. There were millions of hateful Americans who would have exploited a Robinson failure to roll back the limited gains of the war years. There were millions more who would’ve thought that Robinson’s season, or half-season, or six weeks in the spotlight, had been a noble experiment, but that he and his race just weren’t up to it. And when their support was needed to beat back the Orval Faubuses and Bull Connors and Strom Thurmonds, they would not have been there. Even today there are those who would push us back towards our awful past. Who would have stood against their predecessors – who sought a virtual apartheid in this country – had Robinson failed in 1947?
Inevitable! In 1948, when Thurmond ran on an openly segregationist, racist platform as a third-party candidate for president, he received 1,175,930 votes. In 1968 – after Jackie Robinson and after Malcolm X and after the rise and death of Martin Luther King – George Wallace ran on virtually the same platform and still got 9,901,118 votes.
There was nothing inevitable about the healing of this nation at the center of which was Jack Roosevelt Robinson.
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Great info KO, love how you stand up for people. Sorry that thier are people out there that do not want to listen to the truth about what happened at Current. Keep it up, progressives and fans are behind you all the way.
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My opinion is that nothing is inevitable. Change requires a push, and even then, a good hard push is usually not enough. We are creatures of habit, and far too many of us fear change, because change brings with it the unknown, the new and different, and the “other”. Fear is a powerful motivator, and it is also a powerful bulwark against change. It requires courageous souls who are willing to stand up to powerful forces to effect any kind of real and substantive forward progress. Jackie Robinson was one of those courageous souls. He remained strong against pressures that would make most of us crumble. Thank you for honoring him, and for being one of the courageous few.
Yeah, I know. I use the same words too often.
Ah well. Thanks, Keith!
Finished reading. Absolutely brilliant. Something you said reminded me of high school, in the seventies. I was in Foreign Exchange, and although I never traveled abroad, I met many students from other countries. One year, there were two White students from South Africa who joined us at a regional meeting. They had just arrived, and when we discussed apartheid, they were absolutely stunned at the thought that it should end. One of them went so far as to say “But the Blacks don’t want to be equal. They don’t want the same things we do – they’re happy just as they are.” It shocked them that anyone might believe otherwise. It is amazing what kind of cognitive dissonance can exist in a person’s mind, if they are not willing to openly and honestly examine what they believe. And like you said “indeed, it has hardly been won” – we still have a long way to go. I miss your “voice” on Countdown, but I’m grateful that it’s still here, and on Twitter. Thank you.
Powerful piece, Keith. I’ve never believed for a moment that the first black President was inevitable, either. For the past four years, our President has been treated deplorably and with a level of disrespect that no one in the Executive Office should have to tolerate. He has carried out his duties with dignity and grace in the face of it. No, I believe there were plenty of voters out there in 2008 who simply couldn’t stomach the thought of a woman in the White House sitting in the big chair in the Oval Office.
Thanks for what you do!
As always, you pound nails into the coffin of hatred and hubris of those who will choose, in their willful ignorance, to deny the truth. While your words will no doubt fall upon deaf ears to the many who continue to hide in their prejudice, I am graced to have your words that enliven the truth in sports and other topics. Thank you for not being silent.
Trivia-4/15/47, Jackie Robinson, the opposing pitcher that day? Jamie Moyer.
Cody, Robinson’s reaction was, “Why is someone so old pitching against me?”
Keith, great piece. Worth noting: Judge Landis, the longtime commissioner, was definitely a racist. Happy Chandler, who did some incredibly silly things as commissioner (the Durocher suspension in particular), backed Branch Rickey after other owners had voted 15-1 against integration.
Your father was much like my Grandfather of whom we have spoken, Keith. Grampy put a curse on the Braves for leaving Boston (maybe not as good a curse as he might have intended) primarily because as a huge baseball fan he was disgusted he would have only the Red Sox left and the “YawkeySox” were in his opinion hopelessly racist.
But this day, Jackie Robinson Day, makes me think not only of him, but also of when I lived for awhile while teaching at a Major University near the small Southwest Georgia town of Cairo; Mr. Robinsons’ birthplace. The town has little to crow about except for a guitarist in Jefferson Airplane/Starship and the Roddenberry family {Pickles and Gene Roddenberry as a member} but they are very proud of Jackie Robinson. This even though you are more likely to find Judge Crater there than a Liberal.
Cheers!
Words matter ,truth matters .You Sir ,have a gift with both.
Only those who deny that racism still breathes it’s foetid breath upon America will argue that anything about thi was inevitable.
Once a thinking person considers the context of the times ,and congruence of events that were necessary for Jackie Robinson to enter the “bigs” , and for other to
blacks to follow and remain, a viable, thriving ,accepted aspect of sport and the social fabric of America , they will wonder that it ever happened at all .
One can argue that timing was everything, but, it took you looking backward and articulating as much ,for me to see it .
In truth, I had barely considered what had to occur for Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier.Like so many others, I just accepted the result as part of a world I was lucky to be born into .
For the new perspective you have given me I am grateful .
I love it when you get all political. <3
The rich always exploit the poor and middle class in this country and grow richer off the talent of others. This is even more the case with wealthy whites exploiting blacks and making money off their work. So the “feelbad” side to Jackie Robinson’s story is that it might not have happened if Branch Rickey and the Dodgers hadn’t seen the opportunity to boost attendance and make more money. Whites have also liked to pat themselves on the back for doing the right thing at last when they should have been doing it all along, so it wasn’t just about the money with Rickey, it was about right and wrong– but as usual a white man was setting the rules. And it really wasn’t until free agency that baseball players– of all races– were paid what they were worth. So it’s the usual story– America is all about money and winning. If the Dodgers hadn’t started winning with Robinson on the team things would have turned out differently. But even as they were going to the World Series year after year (or almost going in 1951) and finally beating the Yankees in 1955, attendance and demographics in Brooklyn were changing. In post-War America, wealthier white Brooklynites were moving out. And finally the Dodgers moved too. It would be inaccurate to call it “white flight” but the success of Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers in Brooklyn 1947-1957 should have solidified their presence with their adoring fans. And I tie this in with free agency– after the most talented players (often black and/or Latino) were getting paid what they were really worth, white American sports fans started complaining about high salaries and turning to sports (or “sports”) like NASCAR, a case of “white flight” from black/Latino-dominated sports. And today Jackie Robinson has made it possible for young black kids across the country to ignore baseball (the schools may have cut the baseball programs anyway because the rich won’t pay their taxes) and play football or basketball. So it’s sad that after all those gains there aren’t as many blacks in the majors now as there were a few decades ago. Now the rich white owners (Magic not included) are turning to poor Latin American countries to exploit them for their talent.
You hit a home run that time KO. Let us remember the actions of the 2008 Teapartiers.
Typically brilliant post by KO. The historical context is invaluable. The “inevitable” crowd is the same group (like Haley Barbour) who are eager to build Civil Rights Museums in their Southern states so that that “history” can be relegated to the past now that we’ve achieved full equality, everything is swingin’ and the Trayvon Martin murder case has nothing to do with race. (Oh, and the Tea Partiers are racists, they just oppose Obama because of his progressive policies).
KO, you are a treasure. Here’s hoping you are back on the air in primetime SOON. There’s simply no other broadcaster who combines your historical scholarship, your razor-sharp writing skills, your don’t-flinch, go-straight-at-the-bastards commentaries…and your love for Thurber and Bob & Ray, of course. KO off the air and feckless poltroons like Sean Hannity putter on? Jesus weeps
I have seen exactly one “major league” game in my life (no worries; television suits me fine, and I can even name the starting line-up of the ’61 Yankees from memory. CBS carried Dizzy Dean and PeeWee Reese doing the Yankee games when they owned the franchise).
This one was around ’65, and the San Francisco Giants and the Cleveland Indians, the parent club of our AAA “Bees,” played an exhibition game here. I’ve shared about being at that game on a couple of sites, and it’s been nice hearing others were there as well. Willy Mays and Orlando Cepeda hit home runs for the Giants, and Marichal pitched. Rocky Colavito was back with the Indians and hit one as well. That’s what 12-year olds wanted, of course.
One of the older “cyber-reporters” told me one I didn’t know, which was that the Afro-Americans on the Giants team were not permitted to stay at the old Hotel Utah, then the nicest one in the valley (Ronald Reagan was the last president to stay there; it’s now an LDS “memorial” building to church founder Joseph Smith).
There was a scandal, and the whole team opted for the Newhouse Hotel instead. This was 1965 for crying out loud!
You are alive! A good thing to know. And a well written comment BTW. Worthy of an English Major
Thank you CB. As can be seen, however, I’m in need of a good editor; I hit the “send” button on this one just as I looked at Mays’ first name, and I shuddered. I shall apply some cattle prods to some Internet trolls somewhere as penance. BTW, I figured out the secret decoder function over on FOK…
On Blacks
(Affect(ing) a black accent to recount San Francisco mayor Willie Brown asking) “Who is this “Emily List? She’s supportin’ all these people. She’s supportin’ Sen. Dianne Feinstein. She’s supported Sen. Barbara Boxer….She supported everybody. Why won’t she support me?” — Hillary Clinton. Source: John Broder of the LA Times
“Some junior high n*gger kicked Steve’s ass while he was trying to help his brothers out; junior high or sophomore in high school. Whatever it was, Steve had the n*gger down. However it was, it was Steve’s fault. He had the n*gger down, he let him up. The n*gger blindsided him.” — Roger Clinton, the President’s brother on audiotape
“You’d find these potentates from down in Africa, you know, rather than eating each other, they’d just come up and get a good square meal in Geneva.” — Fritz Hollings (D, S.C.)
“Is you their black-haired answer-mammy who be smart? Does they like how you shine their shoes, Condoleezza? Or the way you wash and park the whitey’s cars?” — Song from the show of left-wing radio host Neil Rogers
Blacks and Hispanics are “too busy eating watermelons and tacos” to learn how to read and write.” — Mike Wallace, CBS News. Source: Newsmax
Black on Black
“In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and [there] were those slaves that lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master … exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him. Colin Powell’s committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.” — Harry Belafonte
“Republicans bring out Colin Powell and J.C. Watts because they have no program, no policy. They have no love and no joy. They’d rather take pictures with black children than feed them.” — Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s Campaign Manager for the 2000 election
(On Clarence Thomas) “A handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom.” — Spike Lee
“He’s married to a white woman. He wants to be white. He wants a colorless society. He has no ethnic pride. He doesn’t want to be black.” — California State Senator Diane Watson’s on Ward Connerly’s interracial marriage
Comments From The Past
“Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.” — Former Klansman and current US Senator Robert Byrd, a man who is referred to by many Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate”, in a letter written in 1944, after he quit the KKK.
“I am a former kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County and the adjoining counties of the state …. The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia …. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state of the Union. Will you please inform me as to the possibilities of rebuilding the Klan in the Realm of W. Va …. I hope that you will find it convenient to answer my letter in regards to future possibilities.” — Former Klansman and current US Senator Robert Byrd, a man who is referred to by many Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate”, in a letter written in 1946, after he quit the KKK.
“These laws [segregation] are still constitutional and I promise you that until they are removed from the ordinance books of Birmingham and the statute books of Alabama, they will be enforced in Birmingham to the utmost of my ability and by all lawful means.” — Democrat Bull Connor (1957), Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Alabama
“I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” — Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One according Ronald Kessler’s Book, “Inside The White House”
(On New York) “K*ketown.” — Harry Truman in a personal letter
“I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s not a n*gger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a White man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, Yellow men in Asia and White men in Europe and America.” Harry Truman (1911) in a letter to his future wife Bess
“There�s some people who�ve gone over the state and said, �Well, George Wallace has talked too strong about segregation.� Now let me ask you this: how in the name of common sense can you be too strong about it? You�re either for it or you�re against it. There�s not any middle ground as I know of.” — Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace (1959)
On Jews
“You f*cking Jew b@stard.” — Hillary Clinton to political operative Paul Fray. This was revealed in “State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton” and has been verified by Paul Fray and three witnesses.
“The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a good name. Hitler was a very great man. He rose Germany up from the ashes.” — Louis Farrakhan (1984) who campaigned for congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in 2002
“Now that nation called Israel, never has had any peace in forty years and she will never have any peace because there can never be any peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your dirty religion under his holy and righteous name.” — Louis Farrakhan who campaigned for congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in 2002, 1984
‘Hymies.’ ‘Hymietown.’ — Jesse Jackson’s description of New York City while on the 1984 presidential campaign trail.
“Jews � that’s J-E-W-S.” — Democratic state representative Bill McKinney on why his daughter Cynthia lost in 2002
On Whites
“I want to go up to the closest white person and say: ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.” — Charles Barron, a New York city councilman at a reparations rally, 2002
“Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them.” — Mary Frances Berry, Chairwoman, US Commission on Civil Rights
(I) “will not let the white boys win in this election.” — Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s Campaign Manager on the 2000 election
“The old white boys got taken fair and square.” — San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown after winning an election
“There are white n*ggers. I’ve seen a lot of white n*ggers in my time.” — Former Klansman and US Senator Robert Byrd, a man who was referred to by many Democrats as the “conscience of the Senate”.
“The Medicaid system must have been developed by a white male slave owner. It pays for you to be pregnant and have a baby, but it won’t pay for much family planning.” — Jocelyn Elders
The white man is our mortal enemy, and we cannot accept him. I will fight to see that vicious beast go down into the lake of fire prepared for him from the beginning, that he never rise again to give any innocent black man, woman or child the hell that he has delighted in pouring on us for 400 years.” — Louis Farrakhan who campaigned for congresswoman Cynthia McKinney in 2002, City College audience in New York
“There’s no great, white bigot; there’s just about 200 million little white bigots out there.” — USA Today columnist Julienne Malveaux
“We have lost to the white racist press and to the racist reactionary Jewish misleaders.” — Former Rep. Gus Savage (D-Illinois) after his defeat 1992
“White folks was in caves while we was building empires… We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.” — Rev. Al Sharpton in a 1994 speech at Kean College, NJ, cited in “Democrats Do the Dumbest Things
“The white race is the cancer of human history.” — Susan Sontag
“Reparations are a really good way for white people to admit they’re wrong.” — Zack Webb, University Of Kentucky NAACP
WOW. I’m blown away…in a good way. Thank youf or taking the time to do this.
I found myself flashing back to Al Campanis and his “black players lack the necessities” for management — he later explained that he meant they didn’t have the experience, but how were they going to get experience unless someone gave them a shot? Great piece, as always. (Just a request, when you do your NL West preview, can you ignore Tim Lincecum’s woes?)
I just learned while watching Yankees and Twins that Robinson Cano was named after Jackie Robinson and his number is Mr. Robinson’s inverted. Cool. He is right up there with Dr. MLK Jr. Thanks.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/keith_raised_stink_Fe4fWsVng0ZWuK5VBqWi8N