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

  Black players were familiar with this kind of hypocrisy. When I was with the Monarchs, shortly before I met Mr. Rickey, Wendell Smith, then sports editor of the black, weekly Pittsburgh Courier, had arranged for me and two other players from the Negro league to go to a tryout with the Boston Red Sox. The tryout had been brought about because a Boston city councilman had frightened the Red Sox management. Councilman Isadore Muchneck threat-ened to push a bill through banning Sunday baseball unless the Red Sox hired black players. Sam Jethroe of the Cleveland Buckeyes, Marvin Williams of the Philadelphia Stars, and I had been grateful to Wendell for getting us a chance in the Red Sox tryout, and we put our best efforts into it. However, not for one minute did we believe the tryout was sincere. The Boston club officials praised our performance, let us fill out application cards, and said “so long.” We were fairly certain they wouldn’t call us, and we had no intention of calling them.

  Incidents like this made Wendell Smith as cynical as we were. He didn’t accept Branch Rickey’s new league as a genuine project and he frankly told him so. During this conversation, the Dodger boss asked Wendell whether any of the three of us who had gone to Boston was really good major league material. Wendell said I was. I will be forever indebted to Wendell be-cause, without his even knowing it, his recommendation was in the end partly responsible for my career. At the time it started a thorough investigation of my background.

  In August, 1945, at Comiskey Park in Chicago, I was approached by Clyde Sukeforth, the Dodger scout. Blacks have had to learn to protect themselves by being cynical but not cynical enough to slam the door on potential opportunities. We go through life walking a tightrope to prevent too much disillusionment. I was out on the field when Sukeforth called my name and beckoned. He told me the Brown Dodgers were looking for top ballplayers, that Branch Rickey had heard about me and sent him to watch me throw from the hole. He had come at an unfortunate time. I had hurt my shoulder a couple of days before that, and I wouldn’t be doing any throwing for at least a week.

  Sukeforth said he’d like to talk with me anyhow. He asked me to come to see him after the game at the Stevens Hotel.

  Here we go again, I thought. Another time-wasting experience. But Sukeforth looked like a sincere person and I thought I might as well listen. I agreed to meet him that night. When we met, Sukeforth got right to the point. Mr. Rickey wanted to talk to me about the possibility of becoming a Brown Dodger. If I could get a few days off and go to Brooklyn, my fare and expenses would be paid. At first I said that I couldn’t leave my team and go to Brooklyn just like that. Sukeforth wouldn’t take no for an answer. He pointed out that I couldn’t play for a few days anyhow because of my bum arm. Why should my team object?

  I continued to hold out and demanded to know what would happen if the Monarchs fired me. The Dodger scout replied quietly that he didn’t believe that would happen.

  I shrugged and said I’d make the trip. I figured I had nothing to lose.

  Branch Rickey was an impressive-looking man. He had a classic face, an air of command, a deep, booming voice, and a way of cutting through red tape and getting down to basics. He shook my hand vigorously and, after a brief conversation, sprang the first question.

  “You got a girl?” he demanded.

  It was a hell of a question. I had two reactions: why should he be concerned about my relationship with a girl; and, second, while I thought, hoped, and prayed I had a girl, the way things had been going, I was afraid she might have begun to consider me a hopeless case. I explained this to Mr. Rickey and Clyde.

  Mr. Rickey wanted to know all about Rachel. I told him of our hopes and plans.

  “You know, you have a girl,” he said heartily. “When we get through today you may want to call her up because there are times when a man needs a woman by his side.”

  My heart began racing a little faster again as I sat there speculating. First he asked me if I really understood why he had sent for me. I told him what Clyde Sukeforth had told me.

  “That’s what he was supposed to tell you,” Mr. Rickey said. “The truth is you are not a candidate for the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. I’ve sent for you because I’m interested in you as a candidate for the Brooklyn National League Club. I think you can play in the major leagues. How do you feel about it?”

  My reactions seemed like some kind of weird mixture churning in a blender. I was thrilled, scared, and excited. I was incredulous. Most of all, I was speechless.

  “You think you can play for Montreal?” he demanded.

  I got my tongue back. “Yes,” I answered.

  Montreal was the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top farm club. The players who went there and made it had an excellent chance at the big time.

  I was busy reorganizing my thoughts while Mr. Rickey and Clyde Sukeforth discussed me briefly, almost as if I weren’t there. Mr. Rickey was questioning Clyde. Could I make the grade?

  Abruptly, Mr. Rickey swung his swivel chair in my direction. He was a man who conducted himself with great drama. He pointed a finger at me.

  “I know you’re a good ballplayer,” he barked. “What I don’t know is whether you have the guts.”

  I knew it was all too good to be true. Here was a guy questioning my courage. That virtually amounted to him asking me if I was a coward. Mr. Rickey or no Mr. Rickey, that was an insinuation hard to take. I felt the heat coming up into my cheeks.

  Before I could react to what he had said, he leaned forward in his chair and explained.

  I wasn’t just another athlete being hired by a ball club. We were playing for big stakes. This was the reason Branch Rickey’s search had been so exhaustive. The search had spanned the globe and narrowed down to a few candidates, then finally to me. When it looked as though I might be the number-one choice, the investigation of my life, my habits, my reputation, and my character had become an intensified study.

  “I’ve investigated you thoroughly, Robinson,” Mr. Rickey said.

  One of the results of this thorough screening were reports from California athletic circles that I had been a “racial agitator” at UCLA. Mr. Rickey had not accepted these criticisms on face value. He had demanded and received more information and came to the conclusion that, if I had been white, people would have said, “Here’s a guy who’s a contender, a competitor.”

  After that he had some grim words of warning. “We can’t fight our way through this, Robinson. We’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, very few newspapermen. And I’m afraid that many fans will be hostile. We’ll be in a tough position. We can win only if we can convince the world that I’m doing this because you’re a great ballplayer and a fine gentleman.”

  He had me transfixed as he spoke. I could feel his sincerity, and I began to get a sense of how much this major step meant to him. Because of his nature and his passion for justice, he had to do what he was doing. He continued. The rumbling voice, the theatrical gestures, were gone. He was speaking from a deep, quiet strength.

  “So there’s more than just playing,” he said. “I wish it meant only hits, runs, and errors—only the things they put in the box score. Because you know—yes, you would know, Robinson, that a baseball box score is a democratic thing. It doesn’t tell how big you are, what church you attend, what color you are, or how your father voted in the last election. It just tells what kind of baseball player you were on that particular day.”

  I interrupted. “But it’s the box score that really counts—that and that alone, isn’t it?”

  “It’s all that ought to count,” he replied. “But it isn’t. Maybe one of these days it will be all that counts. That is one of the reasons I’ve got you here, Robinson. If you’re a good enough man, we can make this a start in the right direction. But let me tell you, it’s going to take an awful lot of courage.”

  He was back to the crossroads question that made me start to get angry minutes earlier. He asked it slowly and with great care.

  “Have you got the guts to pl
ay the game no matter what happens?”

  “I think I can play the game, Mr. Rickey,” I said.

  The next few minutes were tough. Branch Rickey had to make absolutely sure that I knew what I would face. Beanballs would be thrown at me. I would be called the kind of names which would hurt and infuriate any man. I would be physically attacked. Could I take all of this and control my temper, remain steadfastly loyal to our ultimate aim?

  He knew I would have terrible problems and wanted me to know the extent of them before I agreed to the plan. I was twenty-six years old, and all my life back to the age of eight when a little neighbor girl called me a nigger—I had believed in payback, retaliation. The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity. I looked at Mr. Rickey guardedly, and in that second I was looking at him not as a partner in a great experiment, but as the enemy—a white man. I had a question and it was the age-old one about whether or not you sell your birthright.

  “Mr. Rickey,” I asked, “are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?”

  I never will forget the way he exploded.

  “Robinson,” he said, “I’m looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.”

  After that, Mr. Rickey continued his lecture on the kind of thing I’d be facing.

  He not only told me about it, but he acted out the part of a white player charging into me, blaming me for the “accident” and calling me all kinds of foul racial names. He talked about my race, my parents, in language that was almost unendurable.

  “They’ll taunt and goad you,” Mr. Rickey said. “They’ll do anything to make you react. They’ll try to provoke a race riot in the ball park. This is the way to prove to the public that a Negro should not be allowed in the major league. This is the way to frighten the fans and make them afraid to attend the games.”

  If hundreds of black people wanted to come to the ball park to watch me play and Mr. Rickey tried to discourage them, would I understand that he was doing it because the emotional enthusiasm of my people could harm the experiment? That kind of enthusiasm would be as bad as the emotional opposition of prejudiced white fans.

  Suppose I was at shortstop. Another player comes down from first, stealing, flying in with spikes high, and cuts me on the leg. As I feel the blood running down my leg, the white player laughs in my face.

  “How do you like that, nigger boy?” he sneers.

  Could I turn the other cheek? I didn’t know how I would do it. Yet I knew that I must. I had to do it for so many reasons. For black youth, for my mother, for Rae, for myself. I had already begun to feel I had to do it for Branch Rickey.

  I was offered and agreed to sign later a contract with a $3,500 bonus and $600 a month salary. I was officially a Montreal Royal. I must not tell anyone except Rae and my mother.

  It was almost two months—October 23, 1945—before I was notified to go to Montreal to sign my contract and to meet Mr. Rickey’s son, Branch Rickey, Jr., who was in charge of Brooklyn Dodger farm clubs. The press had been called in. They made a dash for the telephone when Hector Racine, the president of the Montreal club, announced that Jackie Robinson, a shortstop, had been signed to play for Montreal. Having phoned in the big news, the press came back to try to milk more information out of the Dodger officials and me. There was the inevitable question about the reaction of the fans to my being on the team. The Montreal president said he was confident Montreal fans were not racially biased and would judge me on my playing merit. Young Rickey told something about the talent search which had resulted in my being discovered. He added that there would undoubtedly be some reaction from sections of the United States where racial prejudice was rampant.

  “My father and Mr. Racine are not inviting trouble,” young Rickey said, “but they won’t avoid it if it comes. Jack Robinson is a fine type of young man, intelligent and college-bred, and I think he can make it, too.”

  Mr. Rickey’s son continued to point out that some of the Brooklyn organization’s other players, particularly from certain sections of the South, would “steer away from a club with Negro players on its roster.” He added, “Some of them who are with us now may even quit, but they’ll be back in baseball after they work a year or two in a cotton mill.”

  The announcement and young Rickey’s statement got a great deal of press coverage. Although some sportswriters, among them Dan Parker and Red Smith, were encouraging, there were plenty of negative comments.

  Rogers Hornsby, a Texan and retired player, predicted, “Ballplayers on the road live close together. It won’t work.” Fred “Dixie” Walker, a popular outfielder for Brooklyn, was quoted as saying, “As long as he isn’t with the Dodgers, I’m not worried.” Pitcher Bob Feller didn’t see any future for me. “He is tied up in the shoulders,” Feller said. “He couldn’t hit an inside pitch to save his neck. If he were a white man, I doubt if they would even consider him as big league material.”

  Jimmy Powers, sports editor of the New York Daily News, wrote that I would not make the grade in the big leagues “next year or the next.” I was, according to him, a thousand-to-one shot. Jack Horner of North Carolina’s Durham Herald wrote hopefully that I would probably get out of my own accord because I would be so uncomfortable and out of place. Minor League Commissioner W. G. Bramham accused Branch Rickey of being “of the carpetbagger stripe of the white race who, under the guise of helping, is in truth using the Negro for their own self-interest, to retard the race.” Bramham sneered that if the black religious leader Father Divine wasn’t careful, there would soon be a Rickey Temple built in Harlem. Alvin Gardner, president of the Texas League, agreed. “I’m positive you’ll never see any Negro player on any of the teams in organized baseball in the South as long as the Jim Crow laws are in force,” he stated.

  Overnight some of the prejudiced white owners and officials became extremely concerned about the future of the Negro leagues. They mourned because Mr. Rickey was destroying the defenseless black clubs. With some, the issue was genuine. With others, raising the issue helped cast doubt on the wisdom of taking black players from the black clubs into the major leagues.

  The Kansas City Monarchs threatened to sue Rickey. They contended I had a contract with them and was their property. Some major league owners encouraged the Monarchs. These owners wanted to stop blacks from getting into the mainstream of baseball, and some were making money leasing their ball parks to the Jim Crow teams. Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, said that the Dodgers should pay the Monarchs for my services. The threatened suit came to an end suddenly when one of the Monarch owners, who, incidentally, was white, sent a telegram to Mr. Rickey saying he had been misquoted. He wouldn’t dream of doing anything to keep any black player out of the major leagues. I guess the word got around that black fans would not view it kindly if the Jim Crow clubs barred the way for a black player to make the big time.

  III

  Breaking the Color Barrier

  Quite a while before I signed with Montreal, I had agreed to play on an all-star black team for the American National League that planned to go to Venezuela on a barnstorming tour. Rae and I had planned to be married in February. While I was in South America, we both thought it would be a good chance for Rae to begin to fulfill a lifelong dream of traveling. She wanted to go to New York to see another part of the country. She had a fear that once married she would be stuck in California as both our families were. We both had no idea that our destiny would differ significantly from our parents’. She had saved some money and her family gave her another $100. Rae had been a student nurse for five years, and the prospect of seeing New York excited her. She got a job as a hostess in a swank restaurant on Park Avenue. After a couple of months, she quit because of the way the management treated black patrons and employees. They used every kind of device to let black patrons know they weren’t welcome. A black man with a turban on his head could get the best of accommodations because he wasn’t a black American in the eyes of t
he restaurant owner.

  Next, Rachel got a job as a nurse at the Hospital for Joint Diseases and lived with a friend of her mother’s who had a place in Harlem. Even though she was getting a chance to see New York and had the company of her friend Janice, she was lonely. She was earning a pitifully small salary and usually had her meals at a great little restaurant on Seventh Avenue, called Jenny Lou’s. As good as the food was, Rachel and Janice yearned for a home-cooked meal and for the kindness of an invitation to someone’s house for dinner. The lady in whose house Rachel and Janice were staying was well-known and had many friends. But none of them thought about asking these young visitors from out of town to come to dinner. Years later, when she returned to New York as Mrs. Jackie Robinson, some of the same people who had known her before as an insignificant girl named Rachel Isum wanted to do all sorts of things to entertain her. Rae found that quite ironic.

  Rachel purchased part of her trousseau in New York, and I brought the wedding ring home from Latin America. When we were reunited in the early part of 1946, wedding plans were on the agenda. To please Rae’s mother, we agreed to a big church wedding. The ceremony was beautiful and we were most pleased that our dear friend, Reverend Karl Downs, flew in from Texas to perform the ceremony.