I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson Page 4

  The driver had returned to his seat, assuming, I suppose, that I would obey his order. When he noted that I was not moving, he returned, even more angry. He shouted that if I didn’t move to the rear of the bus he would cause me plenty of trouble. I told him hotly that I couldn’t care less about his causing me trouble. I’d been in trouble all my life, but I knew what my rights were. When we reached the last stop on the post, where we were to get off and transfer to a city bus, the driver jumped out of the bus and rushed off somewhere, returning quickly with his dispatcher and some other drivers. Pointing me out, he cried, “There’s the nigger that’s been causing me trouble.” I put my finger right in his face and warned him that he’d better get off my back, although I didn’t say it exactly in those words. I turned away from him, with my lady companion, to go toward the city bus. We heard the screeching of tires and a military police jeep pulled up. The two military policemen asked a few questions, then, with great politeness, asked if I would be willing to go along with them to talk to their captain. They were enlisted men and they called me “sir” and seemed only interested in doing their duty under the circumstances. I agreed to go see their duty officer. My friend’s wife volunteered to come with me. She was afraid someone was going to try to frame me. I told her that it wouldn’t be necessary for her to get further involved. I was confident that it would be easily established that I had acted well within my rights.

  I was naïve about the elaborate lengths to which racists in the Armed Forces would go to put a vocal black man in his place. My first indication that I might be up against a tougher situation than I thought came when I was interviewed by the duty officer, a Captain Gerald M. Bear. There was a civilian woman with him. I don’t know whether she was his secretary or aide or what. But she was doing all the talking, asking all the questions. They were real, nice, objective questions like, “Don’t you know you’ve got no right sitting up there in the white part of the bus?” It wasn’t bad enough that she was asking that type of question. She wasn’t even pausing long enough to hear my answer. At one point she snapped that one of my replies made no sense. I became very annoyed. In the back of my mind was a serious question as to whether she was the proper person, legally, to question me anyhow. So I replied sharply that if she would let me finish my sentences and quit interrupting, maybe my answers would make sense. At this point, traditional Southern chivalry for wounded white womanhood took over; Captain Bear came out of hibernation to growl that I was apparently an uppity nigger and that I had no right to speak to that lady in that manner. I objected. “She’s asking the questions,” I said. “I feel I have as much right to tell my story as she has to ask questions.” The captain was very annoyed because I wouldn’t back down. He began to rave. I interrupted him, asking, “Captain, tell me, where are you from anyway?” He stormed that that had nothing to do with it, that he wasn’t prejudiced, that back home he owned a laundry, and that he employed a number of blacks—and all the rest of that stuff that bigots talk when confronted with the charge of being bigots.

  As serious as the situation was, I had to laugh. It was so obvious what was happening. I was up against one of those white supremacy characters. Everything would have been all right if I had been a “yassuh boss” type. When the interview was over, the captain ordered an escort to take me back to the hospital. When we arrived there, we were met by a colonel and several military police. There was talk of a court-martial. The colonel advised me that he had been alerted to expect a black officer who had been drunk and disorderly and had been trying to start a riot. It must have been obvious to the colonel that I wasn’t drunk, and when I told him calmly that I had never had a drink in my life, he said that for my own protection I must immediately have a blood test to prove that there was no alcoholic content in my blood. After I did that, I was advised to report to Colonel Bates. The news was not good. He told me there was rumor of a court-martial and recommended giving me leave. He wanted to ease the pressure while we waited to learn if the “limited service” issue had been resolved at the hospital so I could go overseas. Also he felt it would be better if I was not on the scene while the court-martial issue was being settled. He advised me to forget about my problems at Fort Hood, Texas, and suggested a trip to San Francisco.

  In San Francisco after a joyous reunion I found Rae facing herself honestly. She had begun to wonder if she had made her choice to someday marry me without sufficient background of experience and contact with other people. She had a stack of letters from me and almost every week a box of chocolates, but she began to doubt whether we should be tied to each other. Her loneliness and her frustration when all her companions around her were having fun began to work on her. To aggravate matters, Rae’s family received news that her brother, a pilot, had been shot down over Germany. She began to feel that perhaps she owed it to him to become personally involved in the war effort. There was another compelling reason. Money. For the first two years of her college career, Rae had been on a scholarship. Now she was responsible for paying her own tuition. She learned that if she joined the Cadet Corps, a student organization, the government would pay her tuition and give her a small monthly allowance. She would remain in school and in her chosen field of nursing. She would also be helping to make up for the sacrifice of the brother she presumed to be dead. When Rae told me that she was thinking of becoming a Cadet, this aroused unreasonable but definite thoughts in my mind. I’d been around so often when guys in the service were discussing women soldiers. It really wasn’t fair, but GI’s had those conceptions about women in the Armed Forces—and particularly nurses—as being very loose morally. I can honestly say that I never thought of Rae except on the highest level. However, my pride in her being my fiancée and my need for her as the most important person in my life made me stubborn, even adamant. But in my heart I knew we would resolve our problems. I told her of the problems and decision I faced on my return. When Rae got home from work every evening, I was right there waiting. Then things began looking up for her; one day she heard that her brother had been found alive. Rae was happy to forget about going into service.

  There were still clouds on my horizon. I had to report back to duty and face the court-martial. My leave was over. Anyone who knows about the Army court-martial system can tell you that it’s loaded mostly in favor of those bringing the charges. I was really fortunate. In spite of the obvious smell of frame-up in my case, it would have been an easy matter for me to be railroaded into some kind of punishment for simply insisting on my rights. My first break was that the legal officer assigned to defend me was a Southerner who had the decency to admit to me that he didn’t think he could be objective. He recommended a young Michigan officer who did a great job on my behalf. He had a way of rephrasing the same question in so many clever ways that anyone who was lying would have a hard time not betraying himself. It became obvious during the proceedings that the prosecution had rehearsed and schooled witnesses—and had done a bad job of indoctrinating them. My lawyer tricked several of the witnesses into confusing testimony, and luckily there were some members of that court-martial board who had the honesty to realize what was going on. I was acquitted on all charges. There had been another factor which worked in my favor. Some of my black brother officers were determined to help me beat the attempted injustice in my case. They wrote letters to the black press. The Pittsburgh Courier, then one of the country’s most powerful weeklies, gave the matter important publicity. The Army, sensitive to this kind of spotlight, knew that if I was unfairly treated, it would not be a secret.

  The court-martial had caused me to miss going overseas with my outfit. I knew that I would be transferred into some new and strange organization. I was pretty much fed up with the service. So I did something which is very much frowned upon in GI procedure. I sent an airmail special delivery letter to The Adjutant General’s office in Washington, D.C. This was in violation of the standard procedure of going through channels, forwarding any correspondence up through your own company, battal
ion, regiment, and division headquarters. On the way up, such correspondence, if it ever reaches its intended destination, can get marked up with disapproving notations from your superior officers. The disapproving endorsements have great weight with the top brass, which is very likely to turn down any request you make which is not favorable in the eyes of your superiors. I bypassed all that. My letter was timed to reach The Adjutant General’s desk about the same time my court-martial papers got to his desk. I was gambling that he would notice that I had been acquitted in an obvious attempt to frame me, that perhaps the top brass would view me as a potential troublemaker who would be better off in civilian life. I guess someone was really anxious to get rid of me fast. In November, 1944, I was transferred to Camp Breckinridge and received my honorable discharge.

  While waiting for discharge, I ran into a brother named Alexander who, before going into uniform, had been a member of the Kansas City Monarchs. The Monarchs were one of the teams of the professional black baseball world. I saw him one day, throwing ball. The ball got away and I threw it back. I watched him for a while. He was throwing curve balls. I saw the way they broke off. I asked another guy who was catching if I could play with him and catch some of his pitches. Alexander and I got into a conversation, and he told me there was good money in black baseball. He said the Monarchs were looking for players. I was looking for a decent postwar job. So I wrote the Monarchs. After checking me out, they responded rather quickly and accepted me on a tryout basis for spring training. I was ordered to report to Houston. The pay of $400 a month was a financial bonanza for me. My pitcher friend had told the truth about the pay. He had also said that I would enjoy the life of a baseball pro. Well, maybe he enjoyed it. For me, it turned out to be a pretty miserable way to make a buck.

  When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go. When you look at television today or scan the sports pages, and see how many blacks and Latins are starring in the game, it is almost impossible to conceive of those days, less than twenty-five years ago, when world series champs literally meant white champs. That was the way it was, and although there were spirited campaigns to break down the racial barriers in 1944, it appeared that it would be years before segregation in baseball was eliminated.

  Blacks who wanted to play baseball could sign up on black teams only. These teams were poorly financed, and their management and promotion left much to be desired. Travel schedules were unbelievably hectic. Our team played in Kansas City, moved throughout the entire Midwest and sometimes went south and east. On one occasion, we left Kansas City on a bus on a Sunday night, traveled to Philadelphia, reaching there Tuesday morning. We played a doubleheader that night and the next day we were on the road again. This fatiguing travel wouldn’t have been so bad if we could have had decent meals. Finding satisfactory or even passable eating places was almost a daily problem. There was no hotel in many of the places we played. Sometimes there was a hotel for blacks which had no eating facilities. No one even thought of trying to get accommodations in white hotels. Some of the crummy eating joints would not serve us at all. You could never sit down to a relaxed hot meal. You were lucky if they magnanimously permitted you to carry out some greasy hamburgers in a paper bag with a container of coffee. You were really living when you were able to get a plate of cold cuts. You ate on board the team bus or on the road.

  In those days a white ballplayer could look forward to some streak of luck or some reward for hard work to carry him into prominence or even stardom. What had the black player to hope for? What was his future? The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime. I began to wonder why I should dedicate my life to a career where the boundaries for progress were set by racial discrimination. Even more serious was my growing fear that I might lose Rae again. I began to sense in her letters that her patience was thinning. She had been hoping I’d settle down in California to work out our future. The way I was traveling we saw each other rarely. I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel?

  The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  I had never seen Branch Rickey. I had read about him, of course, and realized he was one of the big shots of the game. If I ever thought about him, even vaguely, I probably would have assessed him as one of the powerful clique which was keeping baseball lily-white. If anyone had told me that there was a ghost of a memory in this man’s life which had haunted him for years and that this memory would be a prime cause in Mr. Rickey’s deciding to challenge Jim Crow baseball, I would have thought it all a fantasy. Further, if someone had predicted that Mr. Rickey’s momentous decision would involve me and change the whole course of my life and the course of sports in America, I would have called the predictor insane. Yet all this was to happen.

  II

  The Noble Experiment

  In 1910 Branch Rickey was a coach for Ohio Wesleyan. The team went to South Bend, Indiana, for a game. The hotel management registered the coach and team but refused to assign a room to a black player named Charley Thomas. In those days college ball had a few black players. Mr. Rickey took the manager aside and said he would move the entire team to another hotel unless the black athlete was accepted. The threat was a bluff because he knew the other hotels also would have refused accommodations to a black man. While the hotel manager was thinking about the threat, Mr. Rickey came up with a compromise. He suggested a cot be put in his own room, which he would share with the unwanted guest. The hotel manager wasn’t happy about the idea, but he gave in.

  Years later Branch Rickey told the story of the misery of that black player to whom he had given a place to sleep. He remembered that Thomas couldn’t sleep.

  “He sat on that cot,” Mr. Rickey said, “and was silent for a long time. Then he began to cry, tears he couldn’t hold back. His whole body shook with emotion. I sat and watched him, not knowing what to do until he began tearing at one hand with the other—just as if he were trying to scratch the skin off his hands with his fingernails. I was alarmed. I asked him what he was trying to do to himself.

  “ ‘It’s my hands,’ he sobbed, ‘They’re black. If only they were white, I’d be as good as anybody then, wouldn’t I, Mr. Rickey? If only they were white.’ ”

  “Charley,” Mr. Rickey said, “the day will come when they won’t have to be white.”

  Thirty-five years later, while I was lying awake nights, frustrated, unable to see a future, Mr. Rickey by now the president of the Dodgers was also lying awake at night, trying to make up his mind about a new experiment.

  He had never forgotten the agony of that black athlete. When he became a front office executive in St. Louis, he had fought, behind the scenes, against the custom that consigned black spectators to the Jim Crow section of the Sportsmen’s Park, later to become Busch Memorial Stadium. His pleas to change the rules were in vain. Those in power argued that if blacks were allowed a free choice of seating, white business would suffer.

  Branch Rickey lost that fight, but when he became the boss of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1943, he felt the time for equality in baseball had come. He knew that achieving it would be terribly difficult. There would be deep resentment, determined opposition, and perhaps even racial violence. He was convinced he was morally right, and he shrewdly sensed that making the game a truly national one would have healthy financial results. He took his case before the startled directors of the club, and using persuasive eloquence, he won the first battle in what would be a long and bitter campaign. He was voted permission to make the Brooklyn club the pioneer in bringing blacks into baseball.

  Winning his directors’ a
pproval was almost insignificant in contrast to the task which now lay ahead of the Dodger president. He made certain that word of his plans did not leak out, particularly to the press. Next, he had to find the ideal player for his project, which came to be called “Rickey’s noble experiment.” This player had to be one who could take abuse, name-calling, rejection by fans and sportswriters and by fellow players not only on opposing teams but on his own. He had to be able to stand up in the face of merciless persecution and not retaliate. On the other hand, he had to be a contradiction in human terms; he still had to have spirit. He could not be an “Uncle Tom.” His ability to turn the other cheek had to be predicated on his determination to gain acceptance. Once having proven his ability as player, teammate, and man, he had to be able to cast off humbleness and stand up as a full-fledged participant whose triumph did not carry the poison of bitterness.

  Unknown to most people and certainly to me, after launching a major scouting program, Branch Rickey had picked me as that player. The Rickey talent hunt went beyond national borders. Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and other countries where dark-skinned people lived had been checked out. Mr. Rickey had learned that there were a number of black players, war veterans mainly, who had gone to these countries, despairing of finding an opportunity in their own country. The manhunt had to be camouflaged. If it became known he was looking for a black recruit for the Dodgers, all hell would have broken loose. The gimmick he used as a cover-up was to make the world believe that he was about to establish a new Negro league. In the spring of 1945 he called a press conference and announced that the Dodgers were organizing the United States League, composed of all black teams. This, of course, made blacks and prointegration whites indignant. He was accused of trying to uphold the existing segregation and, at the same time, capitalize on black players. Cleverly, Mr. Rickey replied that his league would be better organized than the current ones. He said its main purpose, eventually, was to be absorbed into the majors. It is ironic that by coming very close to telling the truth, he was able to conceal that truth from the enemies of integrated baseball. Most people assumed that when he spoke of some distant goal of integration, Mr. Rickey was being a hypocrite on this issue as so many of baseball’s leaders had been.