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jackie robinson
80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson
The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany and broke down historic barriers.
Sep 07, 2025
Eighty years ago this week—on September 8, 1945—a little-known episode in the struggle to challenge racial segregation took place in, of all places, Germany’s Nuremberg Stadium, where Adolf Hitler had previously addressed Nazi Party rallies. It was led by Sam Nahem, a left-wing Jewish pitcher who had a brief career in the major leagues, and included two Negro League stars, Leon Day and Willard Brown, who, like other African Americans, were banned from major league teams.
Their efforts were part of the wider “Double Victory” campaign during the war to beat fascism overseas and racism and anti-Semitism at home.
For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive white activists and sportswriters, labor unions, and radical politicians waged a sustained protest movement to end Jim Crow in baseball. They believed that if they could push the nation’s most popular sport to dismantle its color line, they could make inroads in other facets of American society. They picketed at big league ballparks, wrote letters to team owners and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis demanding tryouts for Black athletes, and interviewed white players and managers, most of whom expressed a willingness to integrate major league rosters. Most white newspapers ignored the Negro Leagues, but black newspapers (and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker) covered their stars and games, including exhibition contests between Black teams and teams comprised of white major leaguers, many of which were won by Negro League players.
Nahem’s parents immigrated to America from Aleppo, Syria in 1912. Born in New York City in 1915, Nahem, one of eight siblings, grew up in a Brooklyn enclave of Syrian Jews. He spoke Arabic before he learned English.
Nahem demonstrated his rebellious streak early on. When he was 13, Nahem reluctantly participated in his Bar Mitzvah ceremony, but refused to continue with Hebrew school classes after that because “it took me away from sports.” To further demonstrate his rebellion, that year he ended his Yom Kippur fast an hour before sundown. Recalling the incident, he called it “my first revolutionary act.”
The next month—on November 12, 1928—Nahem’s father, a well-to-do importer-exporter, traveling on a business trip to Argentina, was one of over 100 passengers who drowned when a British steamship, the Vestris, sank off the Virginia coast. Within a year, the Great Depression had arrived, throwing the country into turmoil. With his father dead, Nahem’s family could have fallen into destitution.
“Fortunately we sued the steamship company and won enough money to live up to our standard until we were grown and mostly out of the house,” Nahem recalled. He remembered how, at age 14, he “used to haul coal from our bin to relatives who had no heat in the bitterly cold winters of New York.” So, despite his family’s own relative comfort, “I was quite aware of the misery all around.” That reality, Nahem remembered, “led to my embracing socialism.”
Education was Nahem’s ticket out of his insular community and into the wider world of sports and politics. In the early 1930s, he enrolled at Brooklyn College. The campus was a hotbed of radicalism. Like a significant number of his classmates, Nahem joined the Communist Party, but he primarily focused his time and energy on sports and his literature classes. He was a star pitcher for Brooklyn College’s baseball team and a highly-regarded fullback on its football team, gaining attention from the New York newspapers and baseball scouts.
Signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1935, after his sophomore year, he spent several years in the minor leagues, where he confronted anti-Semitism among his teammates and other players.
“I was aware I was a Jewish player and different from them. There were very few Jewish players at the time,” Nahem said. (There were only 10 Jews on major league rosters in 1938, Nahem’s rookie year.)
“Many of them came from where they probably had never met a Jewish person. You know, they subscribed to that anti-Semitism that was latent throughout the country. I fought it whenever it appeared.”
Because he was from New York, someone gave him the nickname “Subway Sam” while he played in the minors, and it stuck throughout his baseball career. During the off-seasons, Nahem, a voracious reader, earned a law degree at St. John’s University. He passed the bar in December 1938.
Two months earlier, he made his major league debut on October 2, 1938, the last day of the season. The 22-year old Nahem pitched a complete game to beat the Phillies 7-3 on just six hits. He also got two hits in five at bats and drove in a run.
Despite his stellar start, the Dodgers sent Nahem back to the minors, then traded him to the Cardinals, who assigned him to their minor league team in Houston and brought him up to the big league club the next season. In his first starting assignment for the Cardinals, on April 23, 1941, Nahem pitched a three-hitter, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates 3 to 1. That season, Nahem won five games, lost two, and registered an outstanding 2.98 earned run average.
Despite that performance, the Cardinals sold Nahem to the Philadelphia Phillies before the 1942 season. He made 35 appearances, posting a 1-3 won-loss record and a 4.94 ERA.
Like most radicals in those years, Nahem believed that baseball should be racially integrated. In both the minor and major leagues, he talked to teammates to encourage them to be open-minded.
“I did my political work there,” he told an interviewer years later. “I would take one guy aside if I thought he was amiable in that respect and talk to him, man to man, about the subject. I felt that was the way I could be most effective."
Nahem entered the military in November 1942. He volunteered for the infantry and hoped to see combat in Europe to help defeat Nazism. But he spent his first two years at Fort Totten in New York, where he pitched for the Anti-Aircraft Redlegs of the Eastern Defense Command. In 1943 he set a league record with a 0.85 earned run average, finished second in hitting with a .400 batting average, and played every defensive position except catcher. In September 1944, he and his Ft. Totten team beat the major league Philadelphia Athletics 9-5 in an exhibition game.
Sent overseas in late 1944, Nahem served with an anti-aircraft artillery division based in France. After Germany surrendered in May 1945, the American military expanded its baseball program. Over 200,000 troops, including many professional ballplayers, played on American military teams in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and Britain. Nahem, based in Rheims, France, managed and played for a team that represented the army command in charge of communication and logistics, headquartered in Oise, an administrative department located in the northern part of the country.
The team was called the OISE All-Stars. Besides Nahem, only one other OISE player, Russ Bauers, who had pitched for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had major league experience. The rest of the team was comprised mainly of semi-pro, college, and ex-minor-league players who were so little-known that news stories simply identified them by their hometowns.
Many top Negro League ballplayers were in the military, but they faced segregation, discrimination and humiliation, at home and overseas, assigned to the dirtiest jobs and typically living in separate quarters from white soldiers. Most black soldiers with baseball talent, including Jackie Robinson, were confined to playing on all-black military teams.
Monte Irvin, a Negro League standout who later starred for the New York Giants, recalled: “When I was in the Army I took basic training in the South. I’d been asked to give up everything, including my life, to defend democracy. Yet when I went to town I had to ride in the back of a bus, or not at all on some buses.”
Although the military was segregated during the war, some white and Black soldiers found opportunities to form friendships across the color line, or at least had enough exposure to challenge stereotypes and biases. Despite pervasive racism, some interracial camaraderie developed out of necessity or shared experiences. During the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, for example, a shortage of infantrymen led General Dwight D. Eisenhower to temporarily desegregate units. Black and white soldiers fought alongside each other, and their teamwork on the battlefield was often better than expected. For many, these encounters helped shift opinions when they returned to their normal lives after the war. In addition, civilians in many European countries extended hospitality and friendship to Black Americans, which was the first time they felt welcome and equal among whites.
Defying the military establishment and baseball tradition, Nahem insisted on having African Americans on his team. He recruited Willard Brown, a slugging outfielder with the Kansas City Monarchs, and Leon Day, a star pitcher for the Newark Eagles, both of whom were stationed in France after the war in Europe ended.
In six full seasons before he joined the military, Brown, who grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, led the Negro leagues in hits six times, home runs four times, and RBIs five times, batting between .338 and .379. Brown participated in the Normandy invasion as part of the Quartermaster Corps, hauling ammunition under enemy fire and guarding prisoners.
Day, who grew up in segregated Baltimore, was the Negro League’s best hurler with the exception of Satchel Paige and helped the Monarchs win five pennants. In 1942, he set a Negro League record by striking out 18 Baltimore Elite Giants batters in a one-hit shutout. Day also saw action in the Normandy invasion as part of the 818th Amphibian Battalion. He drove a six-wheel drive amphibious vehicle (known as a duck) that carried supplies ashore.
Nahem’s OISE team won 17 games and lost only one, and reached the European Theater of Operations (ETO) championship, known as the G.I. World Series. The opposing team, the 71st Infantry Red Circlers, represented General George Patton’s 3rd Army. One of Patton’s top officers assigned St. Louis Cardinals All-Star outfielder Harry Walker, a segregationist from Alabama, to assemble a team and pulled strings to get top major league players on its roster—even lending him a plane to bring players to the games. Besides Walker, the Red Circlers included seven other major leaguers, including Cincinnati Reds’ 6-foot-6 inch sidearm pitcher Ewell “the Whip” Blackwell.
The GI World Series took place in September, a few months after the U.S. and Allies had defeated Germany. Few people gave Nahem’s OISE All-Stars much chance to win against the hand-picked Red Circlers.
They played the first two games in Nuremberg. Allied bombing had destroyed the city but somehow spared the stadium, where Hitler spoke to huge rallies of Nazi followers, highlighted in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film, “Triumph of the Will.” The U.S. Army constructed a baseball diamond within the stadium and renamed it Soldiers Field.
On September 2, 1945, Blackwell pitched the Red Circlers to a 9-2 victory in the first game of the best-of-five series in front of 50,000 fans, most of them American soldiers. In the second game, Day held the Red Circlers to one run. Brown drove in the OISE team’s first run, and then Nahem (who was playing first base) doubled in the seventh inning to knock in the go-ahead run. OISE won the game 2-1. Day struck out 10 batters, allowed four hits and walked only two hitters.
The teams flew to OISE’s home field in Rheims for the next two games. The OISE team won the third game, as the New York Times reported, “behind the brilliant pitching of S/Sgt Sam Nahem,” who outdueled Blackwell to win 2-1, scattering four hits and striking out six batters. In the fourth game, the 3rd Army’s Bill Ayers, who had pitched in the minor leagues since 1937, shut out the OISE squad, beating Day by a 5-0 margin.
The teams returned to Nuremberg for the deciding game on September 8. Nahem started for the OISE team, again in front of over 50,000 spectators. After the Red Circlers scored a run and then loaded the bases with one out in the fourth inning, Nahem took himself out and brought in pitcher Bob Keane, who got out of the inning without allowing any more runs and completed the game. The OISE team won the game 2-1. The Sporting News adorned its report on the final game with a photo of Nahem.
Back in France, Brigadier Gen. Charles Thrasher organized a parade and a banquet dinner, with steaks and champagne, for the OISE All-Stars. In Victory Season, about baseball during World War 2, Robert Weintraub noted: “Day and Brown, who would not be allowed to eat with their teammates in many major-league towns, celebrated alongside their fellow soldiers.”
Although major white-owned newspapers, and the wire services, covered the GI World Series, no publication even mentioned the historic presence of two African Americans on the OISE roster. Almost every article simply referred to Day and Brown by name and position, but not by race or their Negro League ties. One exception was Stars & Stripes, the armed forces newspaper, which in one article described Day as “former star hurler for the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League,” and Brown as “former Kansas City Monarchs outfielder,” hinting at their barrier-breaking significance.
If there were any protests among the white players, or among the fans—or if any of the 71st Division’s officers raised objections to having African American players on the opposing team—they were ignored by reporters.
It isn’t known if Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey was aware of this triumph over baseball segregation in the military. But in October 1945, a month after the OISE team won the GI World Series, Rickey announced that Jackie Robinson had signed a contract with the Dodgers. In April 1947, Robinson became the first African American player in the modern major leagues.
On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which mandated the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces, including equality of treatment and opportunity regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin.
After the war, Nahem returned to Brooklyn and played baseball on weekends for a top-flight semi-pro team, the Brooklyn Bushwicks, who often played and beat the best Negro League teams and sometimes even defeated teams comprised of major league All-Stars. In October 1946, Nahem captained the Bushwicks team that represented the U.S. at the Inter-American Tournament in Venezuela. Nahem led the team to the championship, including winning the final game over Cuba. He remained in Venezuela to play for Navegantes del Magallanes, a racially integrated team in the professional winter league, pitching 14 consecutive complete games to set a league record that still stands today.
In 1948, Nahem got a second fling in the majors, but he lasted only one season with the Phillies. In one game, he threw an errant pitch that almost hit Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ African American rookie catcher.
“He had come up that year and had been thrown at a lot, although there was absolutely no reason why I would throw at him,” Nahem later explained. “A ball escaped me, which was not unusual, and went toward his head. He got up and gave me such a glare. I felt so badly about it I felt like yelling to him, ‘Roy, please, I really didn’t mean it. I belong to the NAACP.”
Nahem pitched his last major league game on September 11, 1948. In his four partial seasons in the majors, he logged a 10–8 won-loss record and a 4.69 ERA. After leaving the Phillies, Nahem pitched briefly in the Puerto Rican League, then rejoined the Bushwicks for the 1949 season.
Nahem worked briefly as a law clerk but was never enthusiastic about pursuing a legal career. He took jobs as a door-to-door salesman and as a longshoreman unloading banana boats on the New York docks. The FBI kept tabs on Nahem, as it did with many leftists during the 1950s Red Scare. Agents would show up at his workplaces and tell his bosses that he was a Communist. He lost several jobs as a result.
To escape the Cold War witch-hunting, and to start life anew, Nahem, his wife Elsie, and their children moved to the San Francisco area in 1955. Nahem got a job at the Chevron fertilizer plant in Richmond, owned by the giant Standard Oil Corporation. During most of his 25 years at Chevron, he worked a grueling schedule — two weeks on midnight shift, two weeks on day shift, then two weeks on swing shift. He left the Communist Party in 1957, but he remained an activist. He served as head of the local safety committee for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union at the Richmond plant. Nahem was often offered management positions, but he refused to take them, preferring to remain loyal to his coworkers and his union. As late as 1961, the FBI kept Nahem under surveillance, according to his FBI file.
In 1969, he lead a strike among Chevron workers that attracted support from the Berkeley campus radicals. Nahem died in 2004 at 88.
Upon his release from the military, Day returned to the Newark Eagles, leading the Negro Leagues that season in wins, strikeouts, and complete games. Alongside other WW2 veterans Larry Doby, Monte Irvin, and Max Manning, he lead the team to the 1946 Negro League World Series. Day spent two years playing in the Mexican League for better pay, then spent the 1949 season with the Baltimore Elite Giants, helping them win the Negro World Series.
Day spent the rest of his baseball career in the minor leagues. In 1951, when he was 34 and well past his prime, he pitched for the Toronto Maple Leafs of the Triple-A International League. He retired in 1955 at age 39, then found work as a bartender and security guard. Day was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on March 7, 1995, but he had been admitted to St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore with a heart condition a few days earlier and died on March 14, at aged 78, and thus unable to attend his induction in Cooperstown. (Negro League players were banned from the Hall of Fame until 1971).
After the war, a few months after Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier, the American League’s St. Louis Browns signed Brown for the 1947 season. Despite becoming the first Black player in the league to hit a home run, he was a bust, batting only .179 in 21 games. The Browns let him go and he returned to the Monarchs for the 1948 season. For the next decade, he played in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and in minor and independent leagues. When his playing days ended, Brown retired to Houston. He suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for several years and died in 1996 at age 81. He was elected posthumously to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.
Understandably, most Americans know about Jackie Robinson’s feats inside and outside of baseball. Almost forgotten are the Jewish Communist who had been an average major league pitcher and two Negro League superstars who were banned from major league baseball during their peak years. They, too, played a part in the crusade to battle racial injustice.
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Don't Believe the Sanitized History of Jackie Robinson--He Was a Radical
It was Robinson's strong patriotism that led him to challenge America to live up to its ideals. He felt an obligation to use his fame to challenge the society's racial injustice.
Apr 16, 2022
In our new book, "Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America," Rob Elias and I profile the many iconoclasts, dissenters and mavericks who defied baseball's and society's establishment.
In the past decade, athletes have become more outspoken on issues of racism, homophobia, sexism, American militarism, immigrant rights and other issues. They all stand on Robinson's shoulders.
But none took as many risks--and had as big an impact--as Jackie Robinson. Though Robinson was a fierce competitor, an outstanding athlete and a deeply religious man, the aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over is that he was also a radical.
The sanitized version of the Jackie Robinson story goes something like this: He was a remarkable athlete who, with his unusual level of self-control, was the perfect person to break baseball's color line. In the face of jeers and taunts, he was able to put his head down and let his play do the talking, becoming a symbol of the promise of a racially integrated society.
With this April 15 marking the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking baseball's color line, Major League Baseball will celebrate the occasion with great fanfare--with tributes, movies, TV specials, museum exhibits and symposia.
I wonder, however, about the extent to which these celebrations will downplay his activism during and after his playing career. Will they delve into the forces arrayed against Robinson--the players, fans, reporters, politicians and baseball executives who scorned his outspoken views on race? Will any Jackie Robinson Day events mention that, toward the end of his life, he wrote that he had become so disillusioned with the country's racial progress that he couldn't stand for the flag and sing the national anthem?
Laying the groundwork
Robinson was a rebel before he broke baseball's color line.
When he was a soldier during World War II, his superiors sought to keep him out of officer candidate school. He persevered and became a second lieutenant. But in 1944, while assigned to a training camp at Fort Hood in Texas, he refused to move to the back of an army bus when the white driver ordered him to do so.
Robinson faced trumped-up charges of insubordination, disturbing the peace, drunkenness, conduct unbecoming an officer and refusing to obey the orders of a superior officer. Voting by secret ballot, the nine military judges--only one of them Black--found Robinson not guilty. In November, he was honorably discharged from the Army.
Describing the ordeal, Robinson later wrote, "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."
Three years later, Robinson would suit up for the Dodgers.
His arrival didn't occur in a vacuum. It marked the culmination of more than a decade of protests to desegregate the national pastime. It was a political victory brought about by a persistent and progressive movement that confronted powerful business interests that were reluctant--even opposed--to bring about change.
Beginning in the 1930s, the movement mobilized a broad coalition of organizations--the Black press, civil rights groups, the Communist Party, progressive white activists, left-wing unions and radical politicians--that waged a sustained campaign to integrate baseball.
Biting his tongue, biding his time
This protest movement set the stage for Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey to sign Robinson to a contract in 1945. Robinson spent the 1946 season with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' top farm club, where he led the team to the minor league championship. The following season, he was brought up to the big leagues.
Robinson promised Rickey that--at least during his rookie year--he wouldn't respond to the verbal barbs from fans, managers and other players he would face on a daily basis.
His first test took place a week after he joined the Dodgers, during a game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Phillies manager Ben Chapman called Robinson the n-word and shouted, "Go back to the cotton field where you belong."
Though Robinson seethed with anger, he kept his promise to Rickey, enduring the abuse without retaliating.
But after that first year, he increasingly spoke out against racial injustice in speeches, interviews and his regular newspaper columns for The Pittsburgh Courier, New York Post and the New York Amsterdam News.
Many sportswriters and most other players--including some of his fellow Black players--balked at the way Robinson talked about race. They thought he was too angry, too vocal.
Syndicated sports columnist Dick Young of the New York Daily News griped that when he talked to Robinson's Black teammate Roy Campanella, they stuck to baseball. But when he spoke with Robinson, "sooner or later we get around to social issues."
A 1953 article in Sport magazine titled "Why They Boo Jackie Robinson" described the second baseman as "combative," "emotional" and "calculating," as well as a "pop-off," a "whiner," a "showboat" and a "troublemaker." A Cleveland paper called Robinson a "rabble-rouser" who was on a "soapbox." The Sporting News headlined one story "Robinson Should Be a Player, Not a Crusader." Other writers and players called him a "loudmouth," a "sorehead" and worse.
Nonetheless, Robinson's relentless advocacy got the attention of the country's civil rights leaders.
In 1956, the NAACP gave him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. He was the first athlete to receive that award. In his acceptance speech, he explained that although many people had warned him "not to speak up every time I thought there was an injustice," he would continue to do so.
'A freedom rider before the Freedom Rides'
After Robinson hung up his cleats in 1957, he stayed true to his word, becoming a constant presence on picket lines and at civil rights rallies.
That same year, he publicly urged President Dwight Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students seeking to desegregate its public schools. In 1960, impressed with the resilience and courage of the college students engaging in sit-ins at Southern lunch counters, he agreed to raise bail money for the students stuck in jail cells.
Robinson initially supported the 1960 presidential campaign of Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat and staunch ally of the civil rights movement. But when John F. Kennedy won the party's nomination, Robinson--worried that JFK would be beholden to Southern Democrats who opposed integration--he endorsed Republican Richard Nixon. He quickly regretted that decision after Nixon refused to campaign in Harlem or speak out against the arrest of Martin Luther King Jr. in rural Georgia. Three weeks before Election Day, Robinson said that "Nixon doesn't deserve to win."
In February 1962, Robinson traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to speak at a rally organized by NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Later that year, at King's request, Robinson traveled to Albany, Georgia, to draw media attention to three Black churches that had been burned to the ground by segregationists. He then led a fundraising campaign that collected $50,000 to rebuild the churches.
In 1963 he devoted considerable time and travel to support King's voter registration efforts in the South. He also traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, as part of King's campaign to dismantle segregation in that city.
"His presence in the South was very important to us," recalled Wyatt Tee Walker, chief of staff of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King called Robinson "a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides."
Robinson also consistently criticized police brutality. In August 1968, three Black Panthers in New York City were arrested and charged with assaulting a white police officer. At their hearing two weeks later, about 150 white men, including off-duty police officers, stormed the courthouse and attacked 10 Panthers and two white supporters. When he learned that the police had made no arrests of the white rioters, Robinson was outraged.
"The Black Panthers seek self-determination, protection of the Black community, decent housing and employment and express opposition to police abuse," Robinson said during a press conference at the Black Panthers' headquarters.
He challenged banks for discriminating against Black neighborhoods and condemned slumlords who preyed on Black families.
And Robinson wasn't done holding Major League Baseball to account, either. He refused to participate in a 1969 Old Timers game because he didn't see "genuine interest in breaking the barriers that deny access to managerial and front office positions." At his final public appearance, throwing the ceremonial first pitch before Game 2 of the 1972 World Series, Robinson observed, "I'm going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball."
No major league team had a Black manager until Frank Robinson was hired by the Cleveland Indians in 1975, three years after Jackie Robinson's death. The absence of Black managers and front-office executives is an issue that MLB still grapples with today.
Athlete activism, then and now
Athletes still face backlash for speaking out. When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick protested racism by refusing to stand during the national anthem, then-President Donald Trump said that athletes who followed Kaepernick's example "shouldn't be in the country."
In 2018, after NBA star LeBron James spoke about a racial slur that had been graffitied on his home and criticized Trump, Fox News' Laura Ingraham suggested that he "shut up and dribble."
Even so, in the past decade, athletes have become more outspoken on issues of racism, homophobia, sexism, American militarism, immigrant rights and other issues. They all stand on Robinson's shoulders.
It was Robinson's strong patriotism that led him to challenge America to live up to its ideals. He felt an obligation to use his fame to challenge the society's racial injustice. However, during his last few years--before he died of a heart attack in 1972 at age 53--he grew increasingly disillusioned with the pace of racial progress.
In his 1972 memoir, "I Never Had It Made," he wrote: "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a Black man in a white world."
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Rachel Robinson, First Lady of Baseball, Turns 99
Rachel Robinson was not only Jackie's partner, she is also a feminist and civil rights crusader.
Jul 21, 2021
Much of what Americans know about Rachel Robinson--who turned 99 on July 19--is what they've seen in the two major Hollywood films about Jackie. She was portrayed by Ruby Dee in the 1950 film, The Jackie Robinson Story, and by Nicole Beharie in the 2013 hit movie, 42. Both films depict Rachel as Jackie's supporter, cheerleader, and helpmate, the person who comforted him when he faced abuse, and encouraged him when he was feeling discouraged.
Within and outside the baseball world, Rachel has been, in her own right, a pioneer for social justice, using her celebrity as a platform to fight for a more equal society.
This is all true, but it is an incomplete picture of this remarkable woman. Rachel Robinson was not only Jackie's partner, she is also a feminist and civil rights crusader. Within and outside the baseball world, Rachel has been, in her own right, a pioneer for social justice, using her celebrity as a platform to fight for a more equal society.
There's a wonderful scene in Ken Burns' 2016 documentary, Jackie Robinson, where Barack and Michelle Obama explain the important role that Rachel played in her husband's success on and off the baseball field.
"I think anytime you're involved in an endeavor that involves enormous stress, finding yourself questioned in terms of whether you should be where you are, to be able to go back and have refuge with someone who you know loves you and you know has your back, that's priceless," the then-President says. Michelle Obama adds: "There's nothing more important than family--than a real partnership. Which is probably what made him such a great man."
One-upped, the president nods in agreement, with a knowing smile on his face. Michelle completes her thought: "It's a sign of his character that he chose a woman who was his equal. I don't think you would've had Jackie Robinson without Rachel."
Only 50 when Jackie died in 1972 she has kept alive her husband's legacy as both an athlete and activist, including his commitment to pushing Major League Baseball to hire more people of color as managers and as executives.
In 1997, the 50th anniversary of Jackie's triumph in breaking baseball's color line, Major League Baseball announced that every team would retire Jackie's number (42) and then celebrated April 15 (the day in 1947 when Jackie played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers) by having every player wear that number.
But while the country was celebrating Jackie's accomplishments, Rachel made sure that the celebration did not divert attention from ongoing problems. "Racism is still with us and the struggle is still on," she said at the time.
When a Los Angeles Times reporter asked her if Jackie would be pleased with the status of race relations, Rachel didn't pull her punches. She said:
"No, I think he'd be very disturbed about it. We're seeing a great deal of divisiveness, a lot of hatred, a lot of tension between ethnic groups, and I think he'd be disappointed."
Thanks in part to her efforts, most of today's Major League players, managers, and executives know that they stand on the shoulders of those, like Jackie, who came before and opened doors for them. But, as Rachel observed, the progress has been limited.
In 2016, when she was 94, Rachel participated in the publicity efforts for Burns' four-hour documentary, which looks at Jackie's life through her eyes. She didn't shy away from criticizing baseball.
"There is a lot more that needs to be done, and that can be done, in terms of the hiring, the promotion," she said at one event. "We're talking about very few [black] coaches, very few managers."
In fact, the number of Black major league players athletes on major league rosters has declined precipitously--from 18.7 percent in 1981 to 7.8 percent last season. Only two of MLB's 30 managers are Black--the Astros' Dusty Baker and the Dodgers' Dave Roberts. Ken Williams, the Chicago White Sox's Executive Vice President, is the lone Black person in charge of baseball operations for any major league club. In February, MLB hired Michael Hill--a Black former minor league player and most recently the general manager for the Miami Marlins--as senior vice president of on-field operations.
In 2014, the Baseball Reliquary inducted Rachel into its Shrine of the Eternals, an alternative Hall of Fame that celebrates baseball's rebels and renegades. By doing so, the group (which is coincidentally based in Pasadena, Jackie's hometown) was acknowledging that although she didn't own a team, cover the game as a reporter, or play the game herself, she was one of the most important woman in baseball history.
Three years later, in 2017, the Baseball Hall of Fame selected her as the fourth recipient of the Buck O'Neil Lifetime Achievement Award, created to honor individuals who have enhanced baseball's positive impact on society. That makes her and Jackie, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962, the only husband-and-wife couple enshrined in the Cooperstown memorial.
In April, the Dodgers unveiled the first phase of a new multi-million dollar baseball complex at Gonzales Park in inner-city Compton, including a baseball field named for Rachel Robinson.
Rachel has received honorary degrees from 12 universities and received numerous awards, including the Candace Award for Distinguished Service from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Equitable Life Black Achiever's Award and the Associated Black Charities Black History Makers Award. She has been invited to the White House by five presidents.
Rachel Isum was born in 1922, when African Americans comprised only four percent of Los Angeles' population. At the time, Los Angeles still had restrictive covenants, prohibiting the sale of houses to African Americans in certain neighborhoods. To get around that obstacle, Rachel's parents--Charles and Zellee--arranged for a light-skinned black man to buy a house on 36th Place on LA's predominantly white west side and then re-sell it to them. This was a risky and courageous thing to do at a time when the Ku Klux Klan had a significant presence in LA.
Rachel faced bigotry on a regular basis. For example, when she and her friends went to the movies, they were regularly directed to the balcony in the movie theater.
Rachel's father had served in World War One. On his last day of active service, he was gassed, leaving him permanently disabled and with a chronic heart condition. By the time Rachel was in high school, her father had to quit his job as a bookbinder for the Los Angeles Times, where he'd worked for 25 years.
As a result, Rachel's mother had to support the family. She took classes in baking and cake decorating and had her own business catering luncheons and dinner parties for wealthy families in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Hollywood.
Rachel worked, too. She helped her mother with her catering business, worked on Saturdays at the concession stand in the public library, and sewed baby clothes for the National Youth Administration, part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program.
Rachel graduated from Manual Arts High School in June 1940. That fall, she entered UCLA's highly selective and competitive five-year nursing program. In 1940, only five percent of all women--and less than two percent of black women--earned a college degree. But Rachel didn't let those odds get in her way.
She met Jackie in 1941 when they were both students at UCLA. They were introduced by Ray Bartlett, one of Jackie's friends from Pasadena who also went to UCLA.
Jackie was already a multi-sport campus hero by the time he met Rachel. For their first date, Jackie took Rachel to a Bruin football dinner at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA.
"I thought he'd be arrogant," Rachel later recalled. But she was mistaken. "When I met Jack, he was so humble, so thoughtful--and handsome," she said. "I thought, 'I'm glad I was wrong!'"
Much of their courtship took place at Kerckhoff Hall, the student union, where the small number of UCLA's African American students gathered in-between classes. Rachel and Jackie got engaged later that year.
While at UCLA, Rachel lived at home and commuted to the campus each day.
She also worked at night. This was during World War Two, and local industries were hiring women to do what had previously been considered "men's" jobs.
Rachel was hired as a riveter at the Lockheed Aircraft factory in LA, where they made airplanes for the war effort. She worked the night shift, drove to UCLA at dawn, changed clothes in the parking lot, and then went to class.
Rachel and Jackie promised their parents that they wouldn't get married until Rachel had completed her degree. She earned her nursing degree in June 1945. They were married the following February.
By then, Jackie had already served in the military (where he was court-martialed, and acquitted, for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus near a military base in Texas), played in the Negro Leagues, and signed a contract to play with the Dodgers' minor league team in Montreal.
Two weeks after their marriage, Rachel and Jackie left for spring training in Daytona, Florida with the Montreal Royals. Burns' documentary portrays, through Rachel's voice, the ordeal they faced dealing with the Southern Jim Crow system, including the segregated trains, buses, restaurants, and stadiums, and the hostility of many white Southerners.
To get to Daytona, they flew from LA to New Orleans. At the New Orleans airport, they were told they were being "bumped" from the plane to Florida. Jackie protested this obvious racist act to the airline attendant behind the counter.
For the next 11 years--until Jackie retired from Major League Baseball in 1957--Rachel and Jackie together endured the humiliations and bigotry, and celebrated the triumphs and accolades, of being civil rights pioneers.
Meanwhile, Rachel escaped to the Ladies Room. But there were two Ladies Rooms in the airport, right next to each other. One said "Colored Women." The other said "White Women." Rachel went into the one that said "White Women." People stared at her, but nobody stopped her.
Nine years before Rosa Parks triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rachel Robinson had performed her first act of civil disobedience.
For the next 11 years--until Jackie retired from Major League Baseball in 1957--Rachel and Jackie together endured the humiliations and bigotry, and celebrated the triumphs and accolades, of being civil rights pioneers.
Roger Wilkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wrote this about Rachel:
"She was not simply the dutiful little wife. She was Jack's co-pioneer. She had to live through the death threats, endure the vile screams of the fans and watch her husband get knocked down by pitch after pitch. And because he was under the strictest discipline not to fight, spike, curse or spit back, she was the one who had to absorb everything he brought home. She was beautiful and wise and replenished his strength and courage."
In addition, she was primarily responsible for raising their three children--Jackie Junior, Sharon, and David.
While Jackie played for the Dodgers, they first lived in Brooklyn, and then in Long Island. Then they tried to buy a home in suburban Purchase, New York. After Rachel offered the asking price, the house was taken off the market, and she knew why.
In 1955, they found a plot of land they liked in Stamford, Connecticut and built a new home in that suburban community. When the news had spread that the Robinsons had bought the property, several families on the block sold their homes.
The Robinsons settled in, made friends, became active in the community. But they couldn't escape the racism.
When a white friend attempted to sponsor Jackie at the local country club, he was rejected by a majority vote. Jackie was already a bona fide national celebrity who had won the MVP award, but the white country clubbers didn't think he was good enough to play golf with them.
After Jackie retired from baseball in 1957, he began a new career in business, and expanded his involvement with the NAACP, SNCC, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and other civil rights groups, participating in protest rallies, going to the South to support the student-led sit-ins, including raising money for their bail.
Meanwhile, Rachel decided to resume her professional career. This was five years before Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique, ignited the women's movement. Rachel was an early feminist.
Jackie was upset by Rachel's decision to go back to school and back to work, but Rachel insisted that it was something she needed to do. Eventually, Jackie came around.
In 1959--at age 37--Rachel was admitted to the graduate program in psychiatric nursing at New York University.
After earning her master's degree, Rachel worked as a nurse-therapist and researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Rachel has continued to be an outspoken activist for social justice.
In 1965, she was hired as a professor at Yale's School of Nursing and as the nursing director at the Connecticut Mental Health Center.
When Rachel was teaching at Yale, the university asked her to join its board of trustees. Rachel said no. She told Yale: "Not unless you put another black or another woman on the board. You won't get a two-fer from me."
While working full-time, Rachel remained deeply involved in her children's education and in community activities. Beginning in 1963, Jackie and Rachel hosted their legendary jazz concerts at their home as fundraisers for jailed civil rights activists. The performers included some of the most iconic names in music, including Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Gerry Mulligan, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Rachel taught at Yale and ran the state mental health center for seven years, until 1972, the year that Jackie died at age 53 of diabetes and heart disease.
After Jackie's death, she took charge of running the Jackie Robinson Development Corporation. During her ten years as its president, it built more than 1,300 units of affordable housing.
In 1973, she created the Jackie Robinson Foundation. The foundation has provided scholarships to 1,450 college students. Each one gets $6,000 a year for four years, plus mentoring, summer jobs and internships. Most of these students are the first in their families to attend college. Most are students of color. They have a remarkable graduation rate of 97 percent. They've gone to Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, UCLA, and many other colleges.
Next year, the foundation will open the Jackie Robinson Museum in New York, one of Rachel's long-time dreams.
Like Jackie, she has enormous physical courage and moral integrity.
In 1997, for her 75th birthday, Rachel and a dozen family members climbed to 10,000 feet on Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.
Often called the First Lady of baseball because of her resilience, courage, and remarkable achievements during Jackie's lifetime and in the 49 years since his passing. Rachel has continued to be an outspoken activist for social justice.
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