Michael G. Long
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on others.” These are the familiar words engraved on Jackie Robinson’s tombstone in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, not far from where he began his public campaign to redeem the racist soul of America. Robinson’s signature, with its soft curves and loops, appears below the chiseled words, authorizing the wisdom as his own. There’s no citation on the headstone, of course, but the statement comes from the epilogue to I Never Had It Made, Robinson’s final book, a searing account of his life on and beyond the baseball diamond.1
In this same book are those other memorable words, quoted so many times after NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.”2
Published in 1972, I Never Had It Made offers remarkable insight into the frustrations Robinson felt near the end of his life. With diabetes ravaging his body, he was benched, far from the center of action, when he learned about Richard Nixon’s attack on busing for the purpose of desegregating public schools, about Republican plans to slash warfare, and about the brutal response to the uprising at Attica Prison. These were not easy days for someone long accustomed to creating opportunities and forcing results, from a stolen home plate in the World Series to the opening of a bank in Harlem.
Robinson’s voice in I Never Had It Made often reveals fury and frustration, disgust and disappointment, and anger and annoyance. Because Alfred Duckett wrote the text—the book lists the author as “Jackie Robinson as told to Alfred Duckett”—it’s unclear whether the tone throughout is Robinson’s or Duckett’s, though perhaps it belongs to both men, steeped, as they were, in the white backlash of the Nixon era.
It would come as no surprise if the book’s fury, especially over the flag, was solely Robinson’s. In a July 1969 interview with the New York Times, the American icon sounded a similar note. “I wouldn’t fly the flag on the Fourth of July or any other day,” he said. “When I see a car with a flag pasted on it, I figure the guy behind the wheel isn’t my friend.”3
Robinson was chairman of the Freedom National Bank in Harlem at this point, and he believed that the flag had become captive to the conservative movement, with its emphasis on law and order, its opposition to ongoing demands from the civil rights movement, and its support for the Vietnam War. Robinson was not a vocal opponent of the war, but he scoffed at the notion that love of country should translate into uncritical support for the policies of the new president, Richard Nixon.
Robinson’s scorching comments about the flag, in 1969 and in his final book, seem in sharp contrast to the patriotism he displayed in his testimony against Paul Robeson at a 1949 hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee or in his praise of democracy in a fawning 1956 letter to President Eisenhower or even in his defense against Malcolm X’s mocking of America in 1963. But Robinson’s patriotism, formed in the crucible of Jim Crow America, including a racist Fort Riley in Kansas during World War II, was always a volatile mix of praise and criticism, with an extra heavy dose of the latter.
Rachel Robinson was not a fan when she read her husband’s comments about the national anthem in I Never Had It Made; nor was she pleased to learn that more than a few writers cited her husband’s words in an effort to defend and legitimize Kaepernick’s protest. When asked whether Jack—she called him Jack rather than Jackie—would approve of Kaepernick’s knee taking, she said she didn’t think he would, though she quickly added that she could not speak for her deceased husband.
Although Rachel’s opinion might raise a few eyebrows, given Jack’s own statement about not standing for the national anthem, it’s in direct line with her longtime efforts to shape her husband’s legacy in a way that shows him as more than the man who appears in I Never Had It Made.
Rachel has focused particularly on countering claims that her husband was angry on and off the field. After the release of the film 42, she stated that those who think of Jack as angry on the baseball diamond are flat-out wrong. “Sometimes people attribute Jack’s actions to anger,” she said. “When he played, he was assertive. But all too often people equate assertiveness on the part of black males as anger and aggression, and that wasn’t Jack.”4 She made a similar point in the Ken Burns film Jackie Robinson: “He was not an angry black man. He was an athlete who wanted to win.”5 And in 1997, long before the release of either film, she said, “As people discuss Jack, it’s often as a martyr. They overlook the joys he had, the exhilaration of winning, the joys of his children and his home.”6
This book challenges Rachel’s claim that Jack wasn’t angry, and it does not correct the lack of attention to his joyful side. Rachel herself has already done exactly that in Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait—a delightful book that includes stories and reflections that reveal the joyful side of Robinson’s life as a husband, father, friend, athlete, and activist. Sharon Robinson offers a similar perspective in Stealing Home: An Intimate Family Portrait by the Daughter of Jackie Robinson. Sharon’s other books, many of them published by Scholastic, as well as her numerous public comments, have consistently characterized Jackie as a generous father to his children and a favorite father in the family’s former neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut. Like Rachel, Sharon does not suggest Jackie was the perfect father—he had trouble especially when dealing with Jackie Jr.—but her belief that her father created a legacy of love is unwavering.
This book does, however, support Rachel’s other primary goal when advancing her husband’s legacy: to depict Jack as more than the black man who shattered the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947. The esteemed contributors to this volume—filmmakers, writers, journalists, scholars, and activists—add depth and nuance to the Jackie Robinson that our culture has unjustly frozen in 1947: the silent warrior who courageously used nonviolence, the nice young man who turned the other cheek, the polite player whose easy smile has graced countless children’s books ever since.
Although our book does indeed address the legacy of the silent warrior as well as the ways that Robinson transformed Major League Baseball, it does so in a way that deconstructs the self-congratulatory myth that the smiling, easygoing, nonthreatening Jackie Robinson of 1947 is concrete evidence that we have largely overcome “America’s original sin.”
We also dive deep into Robinson’s overlooked legacy in civil rights, politics, and the wider sports world. By exploring his legacy in all its complexity, we show Jackie Robinson not as the one-dimensional figure highlighted in so many annual tributes to his sacrifice in 1947, but as a complicated man who left multiple legacies, on and off the field, that defy easy characterization. Robinson lived such a large life, moving in and out of so many fields, that it would be wrongheaded to force all of his contributions into something called “the Jackie Robinson legacy.”
Legacies are never easy to describe with accuracy and certainty. They’re like moral character—best viewed from many different angles, in historical context, and over a long period. Like studies of character, explorations of legacies also lead to a culminating question: Is there anything that ties the different parts together? In this case, is there a unifying element in the various legacies that Robinson left us? Although the answer to this question will emerge throughout this book, Robinson’s own reflections in the epilogue to I Never Had It Made hint at the answer:
Life owes me nothing. Baseball owes me nothing. But I cannot, as an individual, rejoice in the good things I have been permitted to work for and learn while the humblest of my brothers is down in a deep hole hollering for help and not being heard.
That is why I have devoted and dedicated my life to service. I don’t like to be in debt. And I owe. . . . I still feel I owe till every man can rent and lease and buy according to his money and desires; until every child can have an equal opportunity in youth and manhood; until hunger is not only immoral but illegal; until hatred is recognized as a disease, a scourge, an epidemic, and treated as such; until racism and sexism and narcotics are conquered and until every man can vote and any man can be elected if he qualifies—until that day Jackie Robinson and no one else can say he has it made.7
Robinson’s fervent commitment to serving “the humblest”—those who lacked the privilege he enjoyed, especially poor black people—is the one thread that ties together the many moving parts of his large life. If this becomes clear in the pages ahead, so too will the unfortunate fact that Robinson’s life of service has not yet yielded the results he so aggressively fought for and desperately craved.
Robinson devoted himself to a life of service whose goal was, as he put it, “that day”—a time and place free of poverty, discrimination, and hatred, and full of equal opportunity and enfranchisement. Robinson’s “that day,” like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “beloved community,” was nowhere in sight during his lifetime, and neither is it now: the legacy of Jackie Robinson, like King’s, remains unfulfilled.
Perhaps more troubling to the optimists among us is that we have no reason to suggest that Robinson, like the ever-hopeful King, believed that “that day” would really arrive in human history. Robinson’s eschatology was not nearly as optimistic as King’s.
Nevertheless, you who enter these pages need not abandon all hope, if for no other reason than that an abundance of evidence, presented in this book, reveals that Robinson acted as if “that day” was still worthy of relentless pursuit, even if it was not realizable in human history. At last, then, the legacy of Jackie Robinson remains unfulfilled, and perhaps it will always be so, but it’s still an urgent invitation, or better yet a demand, to pursue the impossible anyway, even unto death.
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Note to the reader: There is a rough chronological order to this book, even though the writings are organized topically, making it possible for you to read them out of order without the threat of missing a coherent biographical narrative. If you wish to read a substantive overview of Robinson’s life as you begin this book, you can find one in Peter Dreier’s chapter on Robinson’s legacy in the wide world of sports. Unlike the other chapters, Dreier’s offers a detailed account of Robinson’s life.