8 Before the World Failed Him

Sridhar Pappu

Once again, he is alone. Though one might argue that he might have always been here, in this spot, forced to deal with this feeling of estrangement and of emotional distance, of being out of place even when surrounded by others. It was with him as a young black man growing up in Pasadena and on the day he took his place at first base at Ebbets Field on Opening Day 1947, as the first and only Negro player in Major League Baseball. Some part of him must have felt this even in 1960 as he made a choice that would be with him forever—well past his own death. As other African Americans had decided to cast their lot and allegiance to John F. Kennedy for president, he continued to side with the man who he felt was more able, more genuine in bringing about a more equal nation: Richard M. Nixon.

And yet, this is different. On this April day in 1968 in Atlanta, staring out at his surroundings, at the fellow mourners, Jack Roosevelt Robinson has the look of a man unable to share in the comfort one sometimes feels in the collective grief of others. Physical ailments make him seem far older than his age, and one gets the sense he is looking past everyone, or within himself. Maybe it’s both. At the funeral for Martin Luther King Jr., his friend and fellow traveler, Robinson is left to think not only about King, but about his own future and past.

That’s because from the time Robinson walked away from the game that made him an idol to millions, he had fought, even as his health began to fail him, for the ideals he shared with King. They were kindred spirits when it came to the idea of using nonviolence in the service of social change, even as the ranks that believed in this method began to dwindle. Both sought out an integrated America when the disillusioned young turned to black separatism. Each in his own way had aligned themselves with white power brokers, when, in Robinson’s case, he would suffer the ultimate indignity of being called an “Uncle Tom.”1

Now, with King felled in Memphis, Robinson is left with that terrible question all of us face at some point: What did it mean? This fight, this struggle? The years that now seem wasted? He had bloodied himself in fights with all comers: from the establishment ranks of civil rights organizations to the keepers of Camelot to men like Malcolm X. He had begun his life after baseball as the champion of a defined movement with defined goals. Now, though, he had seen a trail of largely unfulfilled promises, with the future he believed he could help usher in one that would never truly come to pass.

In this he is not alone. But in the aftermath of King’s assassination, Robinson himself must be assessing what had been his role, his impact, with his days as a public figure now waning. What did he really achieve? Once he boldly embodied the brave, ambitious belief that fundamental change was coming—and fast. But at some point everything had turned against him and he found that his views no longer had currency, that the great goals of a great cause could never fully be reached. As much as Robinson was part of the civil rights movement, in many ways he was the very embodiment of the civil rights movement—one that began with such bluster but that was unable to recover from stumbles, to reform in a real way so that it might retain the strength to truly last.

Make no mistake: This was Robinson’s fight as much as anyone’s. He didn’t watch it on television or comment on it from afar. He was there, in the thick of it, almost from its beginning to its end. And for a man who had endured so much tragedy in his life, his role in all of this might be the most tragic. Because his life after baseball is ultimately a story of great struggle and sacrifice, of staking everything—his family, his professional aspirations, a quiet existence in suburban Connecticut—for something greater than himself. As he milled around the great dignitaries at the funeral, with Coretta Scott King in mourning with her children, with Jackie Kennedy there to lend her support, his solemn gaze is not merely that of a mourner, but that of a person who knew he had given everything possible, as he had once done as a ballplayer, only to come up far too short. He had not reached home.

* * *

That moment must have seemed so far away from the world that Robinson briskly entered upon exiting from his stage in baseball following the 1956 season. Robinson’s initial foray into the crusade marked a new life for him, one that began almost as soon as he walked away from his old one, and he approached it with the same vigor that he had once done with the game. As with baseball, in this fight he wanted to be more than good. He needed to strive for perfection. He was determined to make clear that his time as Jackie Robinson, the ballplayer, was over. It was time for him to move on, for the world to know him as Jackie Robinson, the man. And he was going to make damn sure his voice would be heard.

“When they say the NAACP is moving too fast, take your time, be patient,” Robinson said in a radio interview not long after his retirement in 1957. “Be patient, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient. And the Civil War’s been over for about ninety-three years. If that isn’t patience, I don’t know what is.”2

This was in response to a question about what some saw was the overaggressiveness of the NAACP, the unfathomable belief held by people that the organization was moving “very, very fast to get the rights of the Negro.” Before the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam and Stokely Carmichael provided a new, angry blueprint for African Americans, Robinson’s statement carried a militant undertone to it. But it needed to be said. And by him. With it, he had given voice to the frustration of so many who had heard the patronizing words of the white establishment, most notably President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who urged a measured resolution to the thing that had cast a shadow over the country since its inception.

In truth, he had been developing this new voice even before his retirement, beginning with June 1956, in a moment that biographer Arnold Rampersad has pointed to as the occasion when Robinson decided publicly that he had to become part of a greater cause. This came with the NAACP awarding him the Spingarn Medal, given each year to one individual who had furthered the cause of equality for African Americans. No athlete had ever won the award. Once again he would take on the responsibility of being first.

“I was so often advised not to press issues,” he told those in attendance at the ceremony, “not to speak up every time I thought there was an injustice. I was often advised to look after the Robinson family and not worry about other people.” He now looked back to ask if “my course had been the proper one.”3

And that was it. Within months of his retirement, there he was, working with the NAACP’s Fight for Freedom Fund, speaking before crowds across the country. Aided by his patient adviser, Franklin H. Williams, he held his own speaking about the nuanced issues facing the country. There was no going back from this. Not that he wanted to.

“There was a time when I erred in being complacent,” he told one crowd. “I was tempted to take advantages I received for granted. Then I realized my responsibility to my race and my country.”4

What Robinson didn’t understand at that moment was what precisely he had taken on and the price he would have to pay—not from those on the outside but from men seeking power as the momentum toward desegregation and racial equality grew. He seemed unaware of the growing discord and resentment building among the leaders of organizations who should have been working in unison with one another, but increasingly were not. But for him it didn’t matter who headed what, who belonged to what. In the end, why should the credit actually matter?

Enter then King, the young pastor whose Southern Christian Leadership Conference had gained traction in its fight against injustice and cruelty, the cause that the NAACP once wholly owned. The two had met before Robinson’s retirement, and as with so many, in Robinson’s story, King, according to one biographer, saw a blueprint: this is how someone could carry on, move forward with courage even as he carried the weight and danger that comes with such a role.

Robinson immediately took to the man. Who wouldn’t? That King and SCLC posed any real threat to Roy Wilkins, first the executive secretary and later the NAACP’s executive director, was not evident to Robinson then. Nor was it readily apparent that the organization that he had raised money and lobbied for itself was bickering within.

If anything, even after such frictions became aware to him, Robinson seemed intent on trying to act as someone who might bridge divides, ones that would dramatically dwarf in comparison with those that came later. He was there at the behest of King in 1961 in the much-maligned Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia. He continued to act in support of the NAACP, though he spoke frankly and openly about his growing disenchantment with Wilkins and others, even before his call for Wilkins to step aside and let the “Young Turks” rise to power.5 This was not about personal feelings or slights or scores, at least not yet. If anyone could live between worlds as he had, in baseball, in life, Robinson could do so now. This was something he could fix so this shared cause might actually move forward.

It could be called hubris. Or naïveté. A more apt description is a well-earned belief in himself and in his own ability to make people listen. As the 1960s began, one could argue that there was perhaps no more powerful African American figure in America. He had a newspaper column. He could speak freely to political figures from both parties. He was part of the unofficial civil rights roundtable at the Manhattan home of Arthur and Marian Logan. He aided Medgar Evers in Mississippi. Once he had desperately wanted to be something more than a baseball player. And now he was.

At the very same time, Robinson was beginning to see his own limits. His efforts to raise the money needed to rebuild the churches he stood in anguish over in Georgia would ultimately fail. He would lose both his newspaper column in the New York Post and his political standing when he sided with Nixon. His public war with the Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. had not sat well with those who were beginning to see him as a traitor to his race. And the grand gesture meant, it seemed, to placate both King and Wilkins would only exacerbate his standing with the latter.

It was supposed to be a happy occasion, honoring his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. In this celebratory dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, Wilkins was plucked to serve as the evening’s “honorary” chair. Yet it was beneath the banner of the SCLC, which would reap the proceeds. As Rampersad recounted, for some time Wilkins had seethed over the press adulation over King and his upstart organization. The NAACP, he believed, through its vast network, had done so much more. But now he would lend his name to an event that helped replenish the coffers of King’s organization. And it was because of the man who had once been his group’s great ambassador, Jackie Robinson.

In some ways that evening foreshadowed the problems Robinson now faced, with his relevancy coming into question. Who was he, some now openly asked, to speak out in an increasingly caustic tone. The growing cacophony was enough for King himself to address it in a speech written by him but read by Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker in his absence.

“There are those, black and white, who have challenged the right of Jackie Robinson to ask these questions,” King through Walker said. “He has the right. He has the right because he is a citizen. He has the right—more rightly—because back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”6

Yet as the decade moved forward, those credentials would increasingly be forgotten, even mocked. With the rise of reactionary forces within the GOP, his idea, however noble, that blacks should not be considered a solitary voting bloc loyal to the Democrats alone seemed increasingly fanciful. Worse, the concept of an integrated society seemed not only antiquated but unwanted. Why, many began to ask, should they try to shoehorn into place with people who would never really want them? If they wanted a better world, they would have to build their own.

Increasingly, of course, they had leaders who were willing to take them there. These were the people they wanted to hear, not Robinson. They certainly had little use for his words that day in September 1963 when he had organized a rally on 125th Street in Harlem in his effort to rebuild Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

In earlier years this would have been Robinson’s moment. He had traveled to Birmingham himself, inspecting the site, his anger undeniable, as he looked at what had been a house of worship until a bomb leveled it, ending the lives of four young girls. Now back north, he sought to help in the best manner he could, to do what he had so many times before.

He had enlisted celebrities and other notables to speak directly to the people. But it had been the very first one, Malcolm X, whom Robinson was now in open war with, that captured the crowd. And as the rally ended and Robinson told them it was time to go, one could hear the increasing chants of “We want Malcolm!” They had little interest in listening to Robinson, much less following his direction. It would take Malcolm X to return to the rally, to tell them it was really over, for everyone to go home.

Everything, it appeared, was coming apart for Robinson and those like him. That November, as their headlong ideological battles invariably played out in the press, Malcolm X wrote to Robinson, claiming, “You have never shown appreciation for the support given you by the Negro masses, but you have a record of being very faithful to your White Benefactors.”7

To this, Robinson had a solid defense, both to his own character and to the white men he worked for and with. The same can’t be said when Malcolm X brought up the idea of Paul Robeson. For years, since that day in 1947 when Robinson testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the fall of Robeson and Robinson’s part in it threatened to undo every good thing that happened since.

By now, most everyone knows the story of what happened to the man, whom Jackie’s friend Harry Belafonte would later describe as “the tallest tree in our forest,” who “stood that strong in our midst in the kind of voice not only for the issues affecting black people but for the issues affecting poor people.”8

But now the government sought to silence that voice. Robeson, with the Cold War building to a fevered pitch, with the Red Scare beginning to ruin the lives of so many deemed to be traitors, had made clear his affection toward the Soviet Union. Worse, he had said that blacks would not fight for the United States should the two great powers come to war. As they would do with authors and academics, actors and directors, HUAC set its sights on questioning the loyalty of the singer, and they would do it with help from baseball’s newest star.

Of course Robinson’s visit to Washington had not been his idea. That notion rested with his father figure, Branch Rickey, the person who had given him the chance to do what no other black man had done in the modern era: play professional baseball. Now the same man who had guided him through Montreal and then on to Brooklyn would help direct Robinson to speak before HUAC in a move that would very quickly ruin Robeson’s life.

The sight is a haunting one. The dashing, handsome black man who had already become a transformative figure now testifying against the words of someone who had made so much possible for those like him. Robinson believed the idea that blacks might not defend their home was, among other things, “silly.”9 Though he would later come to say he had grown appreciative of Robeson, and he would not accept such an invitation in retrospect, he stuck by the sentiment surrounding his testimony. Robeson could speak for himself, but he didn’t have the right to speak for an entire race.

“There are whites who would love to see us refuse to defend our country,” Robinson would write with his ghostwriter Alfred Duckett in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made, “because then we could relinquish our right to be Americans.”10

Robinson would never let go of the idea that somehow civil rights was the bedrock of a patriotic platform, one meant to reach the ideals of a country set forth so long ago, not only here but across the world. As such, he could not understand that his vision of the civil rights movement needed to broaden its scope beyond the arbitrary boundaries, particularly when it came to the very thing that young people black and white now took to the streets against—the Vietnam War.

This was something that King, at great risk to his own standing with other socially progressive Democrats, reluctantly took on. Before his speech in April 1967 at Riverside Church in Manhattan, he had given only a brief glimpse into what he thought of the unjust and ultimately pointless war. Thousands of young men, so many of them black, were boarding planes uncertain of their goals, not knowing whom they were defending and why. It was time for King to make clear his definitive stance on the war and what it meant for the nation.

The speech today ranks perhaps as one of the strongest, most evocative of King’s career. Four years earlier, he spoke of the dream he had for the future. But now he found that our present military conflict ran counter to everything the marches, the speeches, the sit-ins sought to bring about. We were, he said, a country who saw the protection of freedom in military defense as more important than allocating funds to programs that might fundamentally bridge the gap between not only rich and poor, but whites and blacks. Moreover, we had sent men into battle in an arbitrary way, using violence as a wholesale tool against people who didn’t ask for this war and were now subject to its devastation.

“We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village,” King said. “We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation’s only noncommunist political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.”11

Later on, by Robinson’s own accounting, the two spoke at length about these words. Nothing had changed between them, not really. King, he declared in his column, now carried by the New York Amsterdam News, was “still my leader—a man to whose defense I would come at any time he might need me. That is a personal commitment and a public pledge.”

But he had to question the logic of his leader. Robinson simply couldn’t get around the idea of merging the movements. Was King really “advocating a marriage of the civil rights and peace movements—and, if so, would such a marriage be a disastrous alliance”?12

Great men can sometimes have great failings. His failure to see the need for the civil rights and peace movements to work in unison was one of Robinson’s greatest. Like so many actions of the U.S. government that would help define the twentieth century, the war was meant as a blow against communism. And while King had correctly come to see this as propaganda, his friend could not. At the moment when people might have looked to Robinson for his moral leadership, he seemed unmoved to see that the peace movement was very much rooted in morality. If they needed a champion, they could turn elsewhere, to Muhammad Ali.

“I think he’s hurting the morale of a lot of young Negro soldiers over in Vietnam,” Robinson said of Ali. “And the tragedy to me is that Cassius has made millions of dollars off of the American public and now he’s not willing to show his appreciation to a country that’s giving him, in my view, a fantastic opportunity.”13

Two weeks after the 1967 World Series, Robinson spoke with reporters at Boston University’s George Sherman Union. Many things were addressed, including his own acrimonious history with the Red Sox, the last team to integrate in Major League Baseball. Down the hall, within the school’s newspaper quarters, hung a photo of Ali. By now the boxer had famously refused induction into the military, with great cost to his own career. Robinson hadn’t minded Ali calling himself “The Greatest.” But this was something he simply could not accept.

“I don’t think in a country such as ours that you can reject your responsibilities,” Robinson said of the stand that in principle, if not practice, he admired. “Everybody thought Cassius Clay would be a big martyr. It worked out just the opposite. I think he was tremendously misguided in this area.”14

Speaking more broadly, Robinson addressed the violent acts driven by poverty and frustration that had become too prevalent in northern U.S. cities. He had seen it and felt its backlash earlier that summer when he’d been dispatched by Nelson Rockefeller to Buffalo, now dealing with the effects of its own race riot, with well-armed white police and black citizenry at odds with one another. Watching him then, one could see a man lost, his body gaunt, listening to the complaints, growing more and more exasperated as he tried to talk.

“Young people nowadays are learning to hate,” Robinson told those gathered in Boston. “We’ve got to show them that moderate leaders can accomplish something. That’s the problem with Negro leadership today. We’re losing. Kids today are looking for success. They’re looking for achievements. The kids aren’t like we were. They’re not fearful. They’re not afraid of dying.”

At the same time, Robinson’s world was collapsing around him. Diabetes had slowed him, increasingly stripping him of his eyesight, of his freedom of movement, of his relative youth. Jackie Jr. had returned from Vietnam no longer a troubled young man but a dangerous one—to both himself and others. His wife Rachel had found a career of her own. Now, his rhetoric toward both young upstarts and older, established leaders showed the same militancy he had once reserved for those who urged patience.

“I don’t think it was bitterness,” Rachel later said. “I think what he was withdrawing about and maybe being more critical of things was his disappointment that he could no longer be a force in anything. It was enough for him to make it around the house and make it to manage his own life and so it wasn’t bitterness so much as it was disappointment that he hadn’t seen major change.

“He’d seen some change in the society,” she continued, “but not major. There was a lot of work left to do and he couldn’t participate in it. I feel that what he was feeling was that kind of disappointment, both in the country, that we didn’t move faster towards change, and secondly, that he couldn’t participate any longer.”15

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. He couldn’t ever stop trying, no matter the cost. In 1968 he failed, despite his best efforts, in his quest to stop the ascendency of Nixon, now running on a campaign of “law and order,” to the top of the Republican presidential ticket. He would do whatever he could to help drive black votes to his friend and Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey. In his own way, Robinson once again tried to demonstrate that no party should ever believe they could count on your vote. They had to earn your trust or risk being forsaken.

The last months of 1967 and 1968 would mark Robinson’s last real days as a figure in public life and an active civil rights icon. And despite losing King in the midst of them, one saw Robinson reach out to young leaders (largely in athletics) as he never did before. Perhaps because he knew he was at the end of things. He could no longer endure the movement’s physical toll. Now he had to size up the merits of who would come next.

This didn’t start off well. But rarely in history did anything good come from an early-morning call from Howard Cosell. Robinson had stayed away from the boycott now being discussed by some black athletes of the Olympic Games set to take place in October 1968. But with less than a year left before the games, in late 1967, Cosell pressed Robinson for his thoughts. He told the broadcaster he didn’t support the idea. But over the next day, he reconsidered.

In some ways, he had been where these athletes were. He had endured the cruelty of crowds and that of opposing players. It took courage to stay in it. Now he understood it took perhaps greater courage to walk away. We needed African Americans in both professional and amateur sports. Unlike Jesse Owens, the onetime teammate of his brother Mack in the 1936 games, he felt kinship with Tommie Smith, the San Diego State sprinter with a chance to win gold. Robinson saw the true conviction in a man who would sacrifice this chance if it might help the stalled state of racial progress.

“Maybe we, as Negro athletes, have ‘been around’ too long, accepting inequities and indignities and going along with the worn-out promises about how things are going to get better,” Robinson wrote in his column. “If this is the way the youngsters feel, believe me, I can sympathize with their point of view.”16

He then turned to the words of Malcolm X, of all people. Following his death, Robinson remained silent, unwilling to express his final assessment of his onetime antagonist who had questioned his bravery and independence and beliefs in integration. Now, Robinson declared him as a brilliant man, a leader, who once told him, “Jackie, in days to come, your son and my son will not be willing to settle for things we are willing to settle for.”

“I am certain this is correct,” Robinson wrote, “and this is the way it should be.”

This marked a new moment for Robinson. This wasn’t a man in retreat. He still stood firm against those who called for violence. But he understood the impatience. And he was beginning a period of self-reflection of what he had and hadn’t done before his retirement when he was still an All-Star for the Brooklyn Dodgers. What if he had begun to speak out on civil rights while he was playing, knowing that putting out such statements might endanger his livelihood? He was forcing himself, perhaps unfairly, to judge himself and his convictions when that kind of introspection was unnecessary. But it was a much-needed look inward as the man began to assess his legacy.

One certainly saw that in Robinson after the games. No boycott had taken place. But something as powerful, perhaps as emboldening had. In the 200-meter final, Smith did win that gold medal, with his teammate John Carlos winning bronze. The two would be known forever not by the race but by what followed on the victory stand—the two men with their heads down, their black-gloved fists raised in a symbol of Black Power.

One might have expected Robinson, of all people, to castigate the two men and what they had done. Jesse Owens, his brother’s teammate on the 1936 Olympics, certainly had. Robinson had spent years attacking the very concept of Black Power. After the fact, on a television panel, he called Carlos and Smith’s demonstration “the greatest demonstration of personal conviction and pride I’ve ever seen.”17

“I take pride in their proudness in being black,” he said. “What they did had nothing to do with shaming this country.

“Sometimes I wish we had done the very same thing when we were playing ball,” he continued. “If we had stood up, I doubt very seriously that the youngsters would be having the kind of troubles they’re having today.”

He was reaching out. To the youth who had turned away from him. To the new heroes who were desperately needed. In the coming years he would find at least one in Reverend Jesse Jackson, whom he called “a tall, young, brave, Black Moses who can take us some giant steps along the way to that Promised Land of which Dr. King spoke.”18 In Jackson, the man who would later eulogize Robison in 1972, he saw someone who might recharge whatever remained from the 1960s. Jackson, he believed, could do more than lead marches. He offered a “salvation for national decency.” He was someone best suited to rise out of “this deepening pit of polarization between us as a people.”19

This darkened view of America would come toward the end of his life when he wanted to continue to act, but simply couldn’t. He had reached a point, in looking back, disillusioned with what he had done. He had reached a point where many of the people he once rallied had, to a sunken, hardened place where they saw the end goals they believed were coming slip away from them, farther away from where they had been at the start.

“If you’ve been an activist and you label yourself that way,” Rachel said, “you think of yourself that way and then along comes something that you can’t control and it takes away that strength to do it, the ability to do it, to be an activist, you feel hopeless.

“Sometimes there’s a retrenchment that factors into that change and so it was more like that than just being bitter. One of the things he put in his I Never Had It Made was that it was difficult for him to salute the flag. I hated for him to put that in there because I felt it would be misunderstood that he hated the country or whatever. He loved the country but it wasn’t functioning the way he hoped it would.”20

We are forever guilty of seeking simple summary of a movement, of a man. Though Robinson believed that no man’s voice should stand for an entire population, he is maybe the civil rights struggle’s truest avatar. His battles and fights, his moments of reconciliation remind us that the movement can never be defined by a statue or a paragraph or even in a single historical volume. He had been at the center of the movement, and he suffered when it did. He represented the best of intentions and could not be there to help write the next chapter.

Because of this, as with the rest of his contemporaries who passed too soon, we are left with unresolved questions. What would have happened had he not grown sick, or fully understood the toll of the war? Had he lived, he most certainly would have tried his best to stop Ronald Reagan, whom he already viewed as a bigot in the same vein as Barry Goldwater, only smarter. Robinson might have helped Jackson make good on his ambitions, to move forward and advance more complex civil rights initiatives. He might have shed that unfair label of the bitter solider and could have been the steady hand, the older adviser, as young black men and women were elected to office.

Or perhaps it would have been too late. Too late to make up for the missed opportunities, for the infighting, to make the United States understand that it had not made good on the promise just with the passage of Civil Rights Bills in 1964 and 1965. We only know he would have been there, to tell us what had gone wrong or right, speaking his mind as he forged new alliances and called out old allies for their transgressions.

And if we must think of his legacy as one of unmet goals, we must then remember him for the goals themselves. It means not remembering the sullen, darkened Robinson, deep in his thoughts and anguish. It means remembering how he was before the world began to fail him.

Now, there he is, with his young son David, holding him close. He is not a superstar or spokesman. He is a father, one of thousands who’ve come to the capital, a city built by slaves. He is simply a man who at that moment has seen, if only for a moment, the world open in ways that he could have never imagined. Today he sees a way for a better future. He hopes he might help lead us to it. Perhaps he still can.