I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson Read online

  I recall one instance when his resentment showed. Jackie was about three and we were living in Brooklyn. Life magazine was doing a cover piece on the Robinson family. The cover picture was to show Rae and myself sitting on the stoop with Jackie riding around in front of us on his bicycle. Something in Jackie’s little boy psyche told him that he should refuse to pose. Nothing was going to change his mind, and, of course, we were not about to tell him he must pose. The picture came out with Rae and me sitting on the step and Jackie on his tricycle with his back to the camera. It was then that Rae decided there had been too much pressure on him and that we would declare a moratorium on any picture-taking of Jackie until and unless he wanted it. Shortly after that, he went through an exhibitionist stage, and we couldn’t keep him out of things when the photographers were around.

  Jackie certainly seemed to be proud of me, but he had an interesting problem when he was first attending school. We think he was a bit confused as to why I spent my time playing ball and being away from home instead of having a normal job like those of his classmates’ fathers who were policemen, teachers, businessmen. Playing ball didn’t seem too much like an occupation to him, and his teachers reported that he very seldom spoke about what I did for a living.

  He must have been confused also about the kinds of places where we lived as a family. When he and his mother were with me during spring training, he lived in a rigidly segregated atmosphere. He hardly ever saw a white person then. Later, when we moved to Stamford, Connecticut, we lived in a totally white neighborhood. When Jackie was growing up, Rae and I mistakenly tried to shield him from knowledge of racial prejudice. Later when his sister Sharon and his brother David came along, the subject of racial differences was all over television and we discussed it openly as a family.

  There was an episode in Vero Beach in 1949 that was symbolic of the kind of ordeal Rachel and little Jackie had to face, mainly in Southern communities. I don’t think Jackie was old enough to really understand how ugly and bigoted it was, but youngsters are peculiarly attuned to the stress of parents, particularly when they are as close as Rachel and Jackie were. Some of the annoyances Rachel had to put up with may seem petty, but they were terribly difficult for a proud black woman. In the Vero Beach days black women had their hair done in a black beauty shop in a black neighborhood. Since Rae didn’t know the town well—and we were almost always strangers in town—she needed a taxicab because she didn’t want to take the chance of getting lost on public transportation. One day, with Jackie, Rae set out for the beauty shop. She saw a taxi stop a few feet away from her and discharge a passenger. She walked over to the cab only to be informed that it was a “white cab.” The driver gave her a telephone number to call to get a “colored cab.”

  Rae and Jackie sat on the lawn in front of the main building, waiting for the “colored cab.” After a while, along came a huge bus that was empty except for a black driver. It was dilapidated and had broken windows. As soon as she realized this was the “colored cab” Rae got on the bus. Jackie scrambled along after her, undoubtedly thinking he was about to embark on a remarkable adventure. The “bus” circled and passed the swimming pool where all the other baseball wives and their children were relaxing. They all stared. Rachel, of course, felt humiliated. Jackie, happily innocent, was waving good-bye to the white children and their mothers. The bus let them off at a little shack somewhere in the vicinity of the beauty shop. Rachel was so furious that she vowed they would not take that bus back. There was no place to eat in the vicinity, and when they started back, they set out down a long dusty road. Suddenly, Rachel looked down at our son manfully puffing along, tired, hungry, and probably puzzled, but not complaining. She realized that she was giving vent to her hurt and pride and that little Jackie was suffering for it. She stopped, waited, and, in due time, along came the “colored cab” bus, bringing back the black workers from the village to do the evening meal for the ballplayers and their families. Rae was still pretty angry, and she had to find some way to express herself so she simply did not put any fare in the box.

  We were living on an Army base then. It was like being confined to a reservation, and it was the only reason we were quartered along with the whites. That, too, was difficult for Rae. Her relationships with the other wives were tense and uncomfortable for her and for them. She didn’t know how to relate to them, and they quite clearly did not know how to relate to her. Certainly Jackie absorbed some of these tensions, and later on we felt it had affected him.

  The news that Branch Rickey would be leaving the Dodgers at the end of the 1950 season to take over the Pittsburgh Pirates hit me hard. Walter O’Malley, an officer of the corporation, had the first option to buy Mr. Rickey’s stock. As soon as O’Malley took over the presidency of the club, he made it clear that he was anti-Rickey. At the time, I didn’t know whether O’Malley was jealous of the man or down on him because he had brought integration into the game. All I knew in 1950 was that he seemed to become furious whenever he heard the name Rickey. He knew that I felt very deeply about Mr. Rickey, and, consequently, I became the target of his insecurity. I didn’t act like some sorehead who has lost his protector. I didn’t need a protector at this point.

  O’Malley’s attitude toward me was viciously antagonistic. I learned that he had a habit of calling me Mr. Rickey’s prima donna and giving Mr. Rickey a hard time about what kind of season I would have. I also learned that O’Malley and some of the other Dodger stockholders had squeezed Rickey out at the end of 1950. They wouldn’t sign a new contract for him, and they arranged it so he would have to sell his stock.

  My troubles with the Dodger front office in the early fifties—particularly 1951 and 1952—combined with my spirited response on the playing field whenever I felt that either my team or I was being shoved around inflamed the relationship between me and some members of the press.

  There were more than a few sportswriters who were willing to sacrifice principle for a scoop. During the 1951 season, for instance, we were losing a vital game with the Braves and all of us were feeling low. Our outlook didn’t improve when umpire Frank Dascoli called what we saw as a bum decision against the team. Toward the end of the game, with the score tied, we needed to keep them from scoring and going into extra innings. The ball was grounded to me. I threw it to Roy at home. It seemed to us that Roy had the plate blocked and the runner was out. Nevertheless, Dascoli called him safe. Roy jumped up to protest, and Dascoli immediately threw him out of the game. Our whole team was furious. We let the umpires know it as we walked back toward the clubhouse. Preacher Roe stopped at the umpires’ dressing room door and kicked it so hard that he knocked a hole in it. Imagine my astonishment when, that evening, I saw a newspaper with a big page-one headline saying that Jackie Robinson had blown his top and kicked in the door. I called the paper and spoke to the man who had by-lined the story. I told him I could prove the story was a lie and demanded to know how he got this phony information. He hemmed and hawed and finally told me that a private policeman had told him and he didn’t have time to verify it with me because he had to make his deadline.

  I was pretty angry at this lame excuse. The following day the writer ran a tiny story retracting the lie the paper had used to create such a big sensation. Retractions never catch up with headlines.

  The sportswriter who seemed to be doing his best to make me revert to the old cheek-turning, humble Robinson was Dick Young of the New York Daily News. Dick and I have had, for a number of years, a strange relationship. I used to think he was a nice guy personally, and I knew he was a good sportswriter. As time went by, Young became, in my book, a racial bigot. My trouble with Dick began right after 1949 when he first warned me that I should refrain from sounding off because I was offending sportswriters like himself. He pointed out that there were a lot of awards and advantages I might miss out on if I antagonized sportswriters since they have a great deal of power. In his way, I believe that Dick was trying to help me at that time. He genuinely did not underst
and that as much as I liked awards and being popular, these things were not as important to me as my own integrity. When I told Dick this and that I was infinitely more interested in being respected as a man than in being liked, he apparently took it as a personal insult. Although he seemed to stand up for me occasionally in later years, he often seemed to use his column to attack me, and relations between us have often been strained.

  Milton Gross proved to me several times that he was a writer with perspective and a sense of objectivity. Once I suddenly found myself in a hassle with Buzzy Bavasi who had become vice-president and general manager of the club after Branch Rickey left. Walter O’Malley had signed a deal that would mean playing a certain number of games in Jersey City. Our team didn’t like it because, in order to attract just a little more business, we were being subjected to playing in less than major league conditions. A number of players made angry statements about it and the writers placed the most emphasis on mine. The press made the same old, tired comments, condemning me again for sounding off.

  Milt Gross wrote:

  Anybody else may say anything and it’s disregarded. Jackie opens his mouth and everybody rushes to put their feet into it. The tempest evoked by Robinson last week would have been nothing if any other Dodger had said what Jackie did about Walter O’Malley’s Jersey City junket. As a matter of fact, they did. There wasn’t a Dodger in the clubhouse who didn’t pop off as much or more. But it was Robinson who found himself embroiled with a needling newspaperman, exchanging cross words with Bavasi and being falsely accused by another member of the press of wanting to beat up an interviewer as an aftermath of his expression of an honest opinion.

  The sorry conclusion must be that honesty in baseball is no longer a virtue and Jackie’s reward will be that he re-mains a target for the agitators who, unfortunately, include a number of men in my own business.

  Dick Young was responsible for starting another rhubarb with O’Malley. Young printed a report about some young Dodger players who had allegedly discussed me negatively in a few of the Brooklyn drinking spots. Dick was not even on the scene when these conversations supposedly took place, and somebody apparently brought a story to him which he promptly presented to the public. His article indicated that these players were unhappy with me because I was too “aggressive” in protesting plays and that I acted “as though I was running the team.”

  Dick’s article gave O’Malley another opportunity to go around criticizing me. But I knew what O’Malley’s problem was. To put it bluntly, I was one of those “uppity niggers” in O’Malley’s book.

  I responded normally when some newspaper reporters asked me what I thought of churches and synagogues being bombed in the South in protest against the Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation. I said that the people who would bomb a church had to be sick and that our federal government ought to use every resource to prosecute them. The writer interviewing me made me feel very sad when he claimed that Roy Campa-nella had observed that the way to prevent such incidents was for blacks “to stop pressing to get too far too fast.”

  Campy was, after all, a father, just as I was. If I had a room jammed with trophies, awards, and citations, and a child of mine came to me into that room and asked what I had done in defense of black people and decent whites fighting for freedom—and I had to tell that child I had kept quiet, that I had been timid, I would have to mark myself a total failure in the whole business of living.

  Another incident pointing up differences between Campy and me involved the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. I took a stand and said I was tired of having special, Jim Crow living arrangements made for me while white players slept in the air-conditioned Chase Hotel rooms. That made the hotel back down, and they announced that from then on, I could stay with the team. Roy told me he didn’t want to stay at the Chase. He said it was a matter of pride since they hadn’t wanted him in the past.

  I told him that he had no monopoly on pride, that baseball hadn’t wanted him in the past, but that he was in it now. I added that winning a victory over the Chase Hotel prejudice meant we were really becoming a team—members would all be treated equally. Also, now that we had broken the barriers at the Chase, other blacks, not in baseball, who wanted to stay in a decent hotel would begin to find acceptance.

  I’ll never forget Campy’s answer to all of that.

  “I’m no crusader,” he said.

  That was the kind of attitude a Dick Young—and many other whites—approved of. During a conversation in which Dick Young and I were trying to define our differences, Dick said, “The trouble between you and me, Jackie, is that I can go to Campy and all we discuss is baseball. I talk to you and sooner or later we get around to social issues. It just happens I’m not interested in social issues.”

  I told him that I was and added that if I had to stop saying anything to him about race relations or discrimination against black people or injustices in the game, then we’d probably just have to stop any serious discussions.

  “I’m telling you as a friend,” Dick insisted, “that a lot of newspapermen are saying that Campy’s the kind of guy they can like but that your aggressiveness, your wearing your race on your sleeve, makes enemies.”

  “Dick, we might just as well get this straight,” I answered. “I like friends just as much as other people. But if it comes down to the question of having a choice between the friendship of some of these writers and their respect, I’ll take their respect. I know that a lot of them don’t like me because I discuss things that get in the way of their guilt complexes, but I’ll bet you they respect me.”

  “Personally, Jackie,” Dick persisted, “when I talk to Campy, I almost never think of him as a Negro. Any time I talk to you, I’m acutely aware of the fact that you’re a Negro.”

  I tried patiently to explain that I want to be thought of as what I am, that I am proud of my blackness, proud of the accomplishments of black people.

  “If you tell me that when you think of me, you think of a whining, cringing, handkerchief-head standing before you with his hat in his hand expressing eternal gratitude for the fact that you only had nine little digs in yesterday’s story when you could have had ten, that’s one thing,” I replied. “If you think of me as the kind of Negro who’s come to the conclusion that he isn’t going to beg for anything, that he will be reasonable but he damned well is tired of being patient, that’s another thing. I want to be thought of as the latter kind of Negro and if it makes some people uncomfortable, if it makes me the kind of guy they can’t like, that’s tough. That’s the way the ball bounces.”

  I knew that my message didn’t get through to Dick; either that or it was a message he wasn’t willing to accept. I was sorry he felt he had to compare Campy and myself, but I did feel strengthened in my convictions because of the approval I received from the black press which had been in my corner from the very beginning of my career. A. S. “Doc” Young, for instance, who is one of the most brilliant black sportswriters in the country, sized up the Robinson-Campanella situation like this:

  Background for this feud is found in the differences in personalities between these two stars. Campy is a Dale Carnegie disciple who believes in “getting along” at all costs, in being exceedingly grateful for any favor or any deed interpreted as a favor.

  Jackie, on the other hand, is an aggressive individualist who is willing to pay the price and, once having paid it in full, does not believe that effusive thank you’s are a necessary tip.

  Campy believes Jackie owes baseball everything. Jackie knows that baseball was ready to put the skids under him without his knowledge after having lived handsomely on him for years. Jackie knows that baseball never has been overly concerned about its unpaid debts to all the great Negro players who lived from 1887 to 1945, without a mere look-in on organized ball. . . . I like both players and I’m sorry this kind of thing must come up.

  I liked what Doc had to say because I thought he was trying to be fair. He wasn’t tackling Roy or calling him
an Uncle Tom. He wasn’t hitting me as some kind of troublemaker. He was just saying we were two different people with two different points of view. I am glad to say that I never had a personal quarrel with Campy. I have always respected him, and I regard him as a guy worthy of great admiration. Our friendship was one thing that many white writers didn’t want to see.

  Joe Reichler of the Associated Press reported a supposed Campanella remark which he said Roy made early in his career, during an altercation with an umpire in which the fierce Jackie Robinson was involved. The supposed remark was: “I like it up here. Don’t spoil it.” The implication was that Campanella was happy to be in the major leagues after so many years of struggling in the Negro leagues, and he didn’t want anything to jeopardize his chances of remaining there.

  All the attention I was getting from the press seemed to compound O’Malley’s antagonistic attitude toward me. I found out just what kind of person Walter O’Malley was in 1952 when he called me on the carpet for not being able to show up at exhibition games owing to the fact that I had been injured. He asked Rae to come along with me to his office. She had never become involved with matters concerning me and the team except for our own discussions at home. But that day I saw Rae really lose her temper.

  Rae sat there fuming as O’Malley charged me with being unfair to the fans by missing the exhibition games, and while he was getting his complaints in, he indicated that I had no right to complain about being assigned to a separate hotel. A separate hotel had been good enough for me in 1947, hadn’t it?

  That burned me up. I told O’Malley that if he thought I intended to tolerate conditions I had been forced to stand for in the past, he was dead wrong. I added that it seemed to me that if the owners had a little more guts, black players wouldn’t have to be forced to undergo so many indignities. I said that I resented being suspected of pretending to be injured and that my injuries could be easily checked with the trainer. I observed that he seemed more interested in the few extra dollars to be gained out of exhibition games than in protecting the health and strength of his team for the season.