Thursday, April 15, 2010

A Reason to Like April 15

On this day 63 years ago, Jack Roosevelt Robinson stepped onto the field for the first time for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was not the first African-American to play professional baseball, that honor goes to Moses Fleetwood Walker, he wasn't even the first in the last century, but he was the first to have the full backing of the organization and the first to stay. His actions cannot be underestimated in their significance or magnitude.

Bud Selig, in his ineptitude, still gives people a choice of whether they should wear number 42 on April 15 in honor of Robinson. According to the reports today everyone will, but there shouldn't even be an option. It should be mandatory.

But, let's also not forget Larry Doby, the first to play in the American League, or Branch Rickey, the man who made it possible. Here is an excerpt from a sermon I wrote on the eve of President Obama's inauguration on this subject:

“Now I’m going to tell you a story about spiritual courage.” Those were the last words spoken by Wesley Branch Rickey. I’m sure that most of us have never heard of Branch Rickey, but I think he’s someone we should know. Rickey was a lifetime baseball man and also a devout Methodist, having been named by his mother for John Wesley. At the age of twenty, in order to help pay his way through school, he became the baseball coach for Ohio Wesleyan University, and it was while he was there that he had an experience that would change him and ultimately this country forever.

In 1903 his team traveled to South Bend, Indiana to play the University of Notre Dame. Rickey’s best player that year was his catcher, Charles Thomas, who was also African-American. When the team got to the hotel to check in the desk clerk informed Rickey that while he and the rest of the team were welcome to stay there, Thomas was not. Thomas suggested that he return to Ohio, but Rickey wouldn’t allow him to leave. Instead Rickey asked the manager if Thomas could stay with him if he wasn’t registered in the hotel? When the manager protested, Rickey threatened to take his entire team elsewhere, and the manager relented. Rickey sent Thomas up to his room, and got the rest of the team settled in.

When he finally made it to the room, Rickey found Thomas sitting on the end of the bed crying and rubbing his hands saying “black skin… black skin. If only I could make ‘em white.” He kept rubbing his hands as if through sheer friction he could remove the color. “Whatever mark that incident left on [Thomas],” Rickey said, “it was not more indelible than the impressions made on me.” While Rickey went onto baseball greatness the memory of Charles Thomas sitting on that bed rubbing his hands never left him and he worked to find the right place and the right person to make sure that such situations might never happen again. In Jack Roosevelt Robinson, Rickey found his man.

Robinson was born in Georgia, the grandson of a former slave, and the fifth child of a sharecropper who deserted the family. He grew up in Southern California where his mother and her desire that her children excel dominated his life. In 1944, after graduating from UCLA, Robinson joined the military as a second lieutenant and was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas. While there, he was forced to stand trial on the charge of insubordination, after refusing to sit at the back of a military bus. He was found not guilty by the military judges, but Robinson said, “It was a small victory, for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home.” This double standard was nothing new to him or to other African-Americans. Earlier, Robinson had watched his older brother win a silver medal in the 1936 Olympics, finishing a half second behind Jesse Owens, and be hailed by the American public only to return to LA and be forced to take a janitorial position, because it was one of the few jobs available to African-American men.

Following his discharge from the army, the Kansas City Monarchs, the best team in the Negro Leagues, offered Robinson a job as a shortstop. Buck O’Neil, whom I had the enormous privilege to meet, was the manager of the Monarchs at the time, and recalls that Robinson had an immediate impact on the team. O’Neil said that they had been going to a particular gas station in Oklahoma and filling up the two 50 gallon tanks on their bus for years, but had never been able to use the restrooms. When they stopped that first time with Jackie, he said he was going to the restroom, but the owner said “Boy, you can’t go to that restroom.” Robinson told them to stop pumping the gas, and told the owner that if he couldn’t use the restroom then they would get gas somewhere else. The owner thought about it, and then replied “Well, you boys can go to the restroom, but don’t stay long.” This then became how the team decided where to fill-up. If they couldn’t use the restrooms, then they wouldn’t get gas. Robinson was not the best player in the Negro Leagues, he didn’t even start for the Monarchs, but he had the unique characteristics of talent and personality that Rickey found attractive.

When Robinson entered Rickey’s office for the first time, Rickey sat him down and for three hours yelled every profanity and expletive at him that he would have to endure, and then told Robinson that if he agreed to play for the Dodgers he would have to pledge not retaliate for three years. “Mr. Rickey, do you want a ballplayer who’s afraid to fight back?” Robinson asked. Rickey responded, “I want a ballplayer with the guts enough not to fight back. You will symbolize a crucial cause. One incident, just one incident, can set it back twenty years.”

Robinson initially broke in with the Montreal Royals, the top farm team of the Dodgers, leading them to the league championship. The next year it was decided that Robinson was ready for the Dodgers, but the Dodgers were not ready for Robinson. A petition saying the Dodgers’ players would rather be traded than play with a black was started by backup catcher Bobby Bragan. At Rickey’s request, Manager Leo Durocher went in and told the players in unconditional terms that if they didn’t want to play for the Dodgers they didn’t have to, there were plenty of other players who would take their positions and the revolt was ended.

On April 15, 1947, 26,623 fans, more than half of whom were African-American, were on hand at Ebbets Field to see Jackie Robinson make his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Ira Glasser, former national executive director of the ACLU, who was there, said it was as if the entire world had changed in one day. Everything that Rickey had warned Robinson about and more happened. Robinson took it all in and did not retaliate. But, Robinson succeeded beyond all expectations, leading The Sporting News, which had opposed integration, to name him their first Rookie of the Year. Jackie Robinson was not the first African-American player in the Major Leagues, that distinction goes to Moses Fleetwood Walker, he was not even the first to play in the 20th century, but he was the first to stay and the first to have the support of the entire organization behind him. As a side-note to history, the Red Sox were the first team to have Robinson try out, but instead of becoming the first team to desegregate they were the last, 12 years later.

Robinson stepped onto that field one year before Truman decided to desegregate the military by executive order, and 7 years before the Supreme Court would make their landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Rickey and Robinson were trying to articulate a dream 20 years before King articulated his. This dream was not the completion of a process, as dreams seldom are. Instead, it was setting the country on a new path, a path we are still on. That day in 1947 marked a milestone, a day in which everything changed and in which nothing would ever be the same.

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