Howard Bryant
One of the great mysteries of the Jackie Robinson story is where it came from: his uncompromising sense of equality; his belief that no one was inherently better than anyone else, and certainly black people were not inferior to anyone; his insistence that he and all of the black people like him were entitled to the rights and courtesies of full citizenship; his insistence on ownership—of his person, of his environment, of his share of the American dream; his position that black people were not making a request to be considered, but were assuming access to an inalienable necessity. One doesn’t ask permission to breathe.
The old stories of his early encounters with racism and his willingness to fight are well documented, from the time he countered the young white girl in Pasadena who called him a nigger by calling her a cracker, only to have her checkmate him with a rhyme (soda cracker’s good to eat, nigger’s only good to beat) to the time with the Kansas City Monarchs when he pulled the hose out of the gas tank from a merchant who would take their money but wouldn’t let the members of the black ballclub use the men’s room. Each reinforced the Robinson traits that would become his hallmark, but less certain was what created it, who instilled it, and how and why it remained when so often others who possessed the same instincts were left on the roadside, permanently broken.
The world Robinson entered was not welcoming to black service or sacrifice abroad. He was born in January 1919, just two and a half months after the armistice. Black American GIs had done their part in World War I, and for their blood black people were expected to return to their place, subservient to whites, unexpected to aspire, and discouraged to consider it an option. Violence was the primary weapon for the discouragement, used to police black aspirations, physically in the present by threat of murder, psychologically in the future by making black people ask if self-determination was worth their lives.
When Robinson was six months old, in July 1919, seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams was stoned by Chicago whites for swimming in a segregated area of Lake Michigan and drowned after being hit. When police refused to arrest the perpetrators, black people protested. After they protested, white Chicagoans killed and burned black homes on the South Side. The Chicago Riots of 1919 the history books would call it, and twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites were killed in a week.
There was Chicago. And Omaha. And Washington, DC. And Knoxville. Incidents varying the same theme: hostile white response to the black presence, for jobs, housing, opportunity. Robinson was in diapers during Red Summer. The summer of 1919, marked by blood, blood shed by blacks killed for aspiring, for doing when Robinson couldn’t yet walk what he would embody once he could. Whites returned home from World War I to a competitive job market and an influx of blacks. Economic anxiety provided an incubator for racism—and murder.
Two years later, whites infamously raided the Greenwood district in Tulsa, known as Black Wall Street. It was not a riot, where two sides resorted to armed conflict, or an insurrection by the people put down by the state. This was a massacre, where whites shot and killed hundreds and burned black aspiration—buildings and flesh—to the ground. By the time Robinson was fourteen, in 1933, the National Football League had made its unofficial ban of black players official, joining baseball as another professional sport unavailable to black athletes. Surrounding Robinson was a specific form of American terrorism with a specific aim: to demoralize a people who had believed they were not given the handout of citizenship but had earned it through loyalty and blood. America was talking to its black people, telling them the American ideal of betterment through hard work, assimilation, did not apply to them—and they were determined to prove it, using arson, terrorism, and murder as primary tools.
The strong figures in his life—his mother Mallie, his sister Willa Mae, his brothers Frank and Mack, his mentor Reverend Karl Downs, and of course his wife Rachel—built in Robinson a strong man, and had his mandate of urgency of owning a piece of the elusive ideal been shared by his country, considered an asset even, perhaps the Robinson family influence would have better explained his foundation. Perhaps it would have even been celebrated as the kindling of his rebelliousness, providing an admirable model for others facing the psychological intimidation and the physical evidence of maimed and killed bodies.
But the mandate was not shared by his country. The country wanted him to be patient, a “credit to his race,” accepting of glacial change as progress. And it was here where the Jackie Robinson narrative would be appropriated, rerouted, detoured along a different, accommodating pathway. He would become synonymous with not ownership, which is taken with pageantry, but advancement, which is granted. He would be recast as one small but outsized piece in the long struggle toward freedom, in the martyr’s path, where the reward of his sacrifice would be enjoyed not by him but by some unknown generation at some undetermined period in the future.
Advancement is the historical path of black people and the preferred narrative of whites, who are afforded a wide berth. They can be deliberate. They can be patient. They need not sacrifice in the short term provided they agree to a covenant of fairness to be delivered at an unspecified date—as long as it’s not today. And they can dole out the platitudes about Robinson’s dignity for they are not threatened with the sharing that comes with ownership, the partnership with power. Robinson and his wife living with a black family on the outskirts of town in spring training was framed as a sacrifice, pitied as an injustice, but not an offense to be immediately remedied. When Robinson integrated eating facilities at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis by taking Rachel to the dining room, refusing the hotel’s directives that he and his wife eat their meals in their room as a condition of allowing him to stay with his own team, the historical framing of that moment placed Robinson as defiant. It placed the moment as triumphant, another subtle step toward equality. It was a victory for advancement.
Ownership is quite different, for it takes the keys to the house of self-determination in real time, without asking, and does not offer points for compromise or patience. Either one is an American or one is not an American, and if one is an American, other Americans are not to be commended for the grand gesture of treating an American as one. When Robinson once played an exhibition in the South, the black fans cheered when they were allowed to sit in the grandstand instead of in the bleachers, the usual “colored seats.” Robinson was infuriated. “Don’t cheer those goddam bastards. Keep your fucking mouths shut. You got it coming. . . . Don’t cheer.”1 Being refunded one’s own money is not a commendable act but an obviously unremarkable one, unless the cultural subtext is that certain people do not deserve to have what is already theirs.
America wanted advancement. Robinson wanted ownership, and whenever it became clear that advancement, with all deliberate speed, would be the preferred route, it was a blow, and their insistence on advancement exposed Robinson to the impatience and anger of his fellow black people, who as the years went by began to blame him for not asking for enough, for the naïveté of asking at all.
Telegraphs to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, sent from his touring of the Deep South, portended the refusal to be lawful on the parts of whites, and their willingness to kill to maintain their racial hierarchy, and were met with caution, which meant that the president of the United States was willing to sacrifice black lives, no one knew who or when or how many, all because America hadn’t yet advanced enough.
Robinson would die before seeing baseball hire a black manager, and it would be seventeen years after his death before baseball would have two black managers working at the same time. The response to the Robinson query was always the same. There were plenty of quality black people who could manage, but it wasn’t time yet. America needed to keep advancing.
Eventually, even the greatest fighters, against the darkening, impossible odds, begin to weary. Punches that once shattered their targets now lose their sting, while the blows they absorb now inflict greater damage, challenging their thresholds of resolve and pain. The dual effect saps them.
The periods of the Jackie Robinson story that have received the least attention have been overlooked not due to them being the least important, but because they are the most difficult to square with the fantasy of the hero narrative, both his and that of his time. When he was a symbol of advancement, safe, unthreatening, he was a hero. When he demanded ownership, unconditional, without permission, he was angry, bitter, agitating.
The dots between Robinson’s heroism and disillusionment never quite connected, and the reason, of course, is that Robinson was never satisfied with mere advancement, even as others applauded his dignity. He did not live with boundless optimism for the future and eventually displayed a certain punched-out nakedness to his disillusionment. His belief in ownership never waned, but his confidence that it was something he could personally experience did.
As the end drew closer, and it became clear that advancement was as good as it was going to get, he let the America that considered him an ally know that it had failed his people and he would not participate in the charade. And these dots did not connect because the people who needed to hear this part of the story had stopped listening. “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot stand for the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world.”2 The most attentive, the ones who could relate, listened, and they continued to listen even after he was gone, but the rest took the legend, as they did with King, and they molded and shaped it into a convenient and comfortingly dishonest blanket that has kept them warm, using his pain to sustain their myth.
Had they followed the story to the end, they would have discovered a poignancy and the true call to action from the boy who fought for his place with his words and his fists, the younger man who carried an Army rifle and promise of a better America, to the young but older man who after a lifetime of needing convincing that America could not live up to its promise finally dropped his gloves and listened.