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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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America's Greatest Athletes Are Standing Up, Calling This Country To Change
Despite unprecedented, multiracial demonstrations across the country protesting police violence against African Americans, the horrors keep on coming.
Sep 01, 2020
The greatest athletes in America are standing up for justice at a critical time.
Despite unprecedented, multiracial demonstrations across the country protesting police violence against African Americans, the horrors keep on coming.
Last week, Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back by a policeman in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the anger has grown, some of the protests have been marred by vandalism and looting. Now armed right-wing militia groups are escalating the tensions. In Kenosha, two demonstrators were murdered and one wounded by a 17-year-old Trump supporter illegally wielding an assault weapon.
It is into this cauldron that the professional basketball players of the NBA stood up, forcing a suspension of the playoffs, to support the call for justice. Their example was picked up by others--the WNBA, baseball players, tennis champions like Naomi Osaka and more.
This takes courage. Great athletes are taught to focus on their sport and to ignore their power in the culture. Owners, agents, managers and fans see them as entertainment, not as citizens or leaders.
Yet the very God-given gifts, discipline and skills that make a great athlete contribute to their capacity for leadership. In the Old Testament, little David honed his skill with a sling. When an oppressive horde led by a giant named Goliath threatened the Hebrew people, David stepped up, hurling the stone that slew the giant and saved his people.
Now America's greatest athletes are standing up, calling this country to change. They know that they will face criticism and abuse. They know that they could be risking their careers and livelihood.
When LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh and the Miami Heat players stood up in response to the death of Trayvon Martin, Americans across the country took notice. The same is true now as the current athletes focus on Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake and the others they name.
They know the risks, but they also know that when they leave the court or playing field and return to their families, they are just another Black person to the police, and must worry about how to protect their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, or even themselves. Both Sterling Brown of the Milwaukee Bucks and Thabo Sefolosha of the Houston Rockets were victims of police lawlessness.
Here the example and leadership of LeBron James has been critical. Athletes across the world look up to him. When LeBron uses his platform to speak out--even in the face of insults from the president and others--he sets a tone and an example for others. In my opinion, he uses his gifts and platform so responsibly because it is his way of thanking God by serving others.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used his gifts and platform to change the culture. Today, athletes are using their commitment to call this country to its senses.
Great athletes have often been pacesetters. When Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson stood up to racially biased and arbitrary social mores, he impacted the culture. When Joe Lewis defeated Max Schmeling, he pummeled the entire Nazi theory and racist ideology. When Jesse Owens became the world's fastest man at the Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler wouldn't shake his hand, but when Owens came home, he told me President Roosevelt wouldn't shake his hand either. Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier in baseball and bore the physical and psychological scars from doing it.
At the height of his career, Muhammad Ali, became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and paid the price of years stolen from his career. Every athlete should be grateful to Curt Flood for ending the reserve clause and gaining athletes the right to free agency to negotiate the best deal they could. Colin Kaepernick launched his nonviolent campaign against police killing of Black people four years ago that has cost him his career.
The athletes had to stop business as usual to gain attention. They have been in intense meetings figuring out how they can most be effective. They understand that the murders can't go on; the system must change. They are calling on others to join them. They are putting their time and their resources on the line. They've now convinced NBA owners to turn their arenas into polling places where people might vote safely.
Their actions have already had effect. It is too easy for cynical politicians and entrenched interests to turn attention from the injustice to the excesses that mar those protesting it. The players have forced our attention back to the injustice and to the core demand that Black Lives Matter. For that, they deserve our respect and our support.
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Saturday's Celebration of Jackie Robinson Should Remind Us of the Importance of Political Protest
This Saturday, April 15, while every Major League Baseball team will be celebrating the 70th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's achievement of breaking baseball's color line, many Americans will be protesting in the streets as part of Tax Day.
Apr 15, 2017
This Saturday, April 15, while every Major League Baseball team will be celebrating the 70th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's achievement of breaking baseball's color line, many Americans will be protesting in the streets as part of Tax Day.
Were he alive today, Robinson would understand the connection. He recognized that his trailblazing accomplishment was not only the triumph of one man but also the result of a protest movement. During and after his playing days, Robinson was an activist and a vocal critic of corporate America's mistreatment of African Americans and of racism in general.
On April 15, 1947, Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, ending baseball's segregation. In 1997, the 50th anniversary of his rookie season, Major League Baseball retired Robinson's number--42--for all teams. Now, every player on every team wears that number once a year, on the anniversary of Robinson's first game. This Saturday, the Los Angeles Dodgers will also unveil a statue of Robinson prior to their game against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Participants in Saturday's Tax Day March in Washington, D.C., and parallel marches in over 100 cities, will be protesting President Donald Trump's decision not to release his tax returns and to demand changes to the country's economic system, which organizers say favors the rich at the expense of the poor.
In today's America - with a president who was elected and is governing by appealing to racism - it is important to learn the real lessons of Robinson's achievement. And at a time when racial tensions are flaring in America's communities, politics, and workplaces, Robinson's story serves as a reminder of the nation's best impulses--and its worst.
It is difficult today to summon the excitement that greeted Robinson's accomplishment. The dignity with which Robinson handled his encounters with racism--including verbal and physical abuse on the field and in hotels, restaurants, trains, and elsewhere--drew public attention to the issue, stirred the consciences of many white Americans, and gave black Americans a tremendous boost of pride and self-confidence. As Americans readjusted to life after returning from World War II, Robinson's success on the baseball diamond was a symbol of the promise of a racially integrated society. He did more than change the way baseball is played and who plays it. His actions on and off the diamond helped pave the way for America to confront its racial hypocrisy.
Most books, articles, and films (including the 2013 Hollywood movie "42") portray the dismantling of baseball's apartheid system as the tale of one man, Robinson, who triumphed over adversity -- a lone trailblazer who broke baseball's color line on his athletic merits -- with a helping hand from Dodgers president Branch Rickey, the shrewd strategist who recruited Robinson and orchestrated his transition from the Negro Leagues to the all-white Major Leagues, battling the sport's, and society's, bigotry.
We may prefer our heroes to be rugged individualists, but the reality doesn't conform to the popular myth. The truth is that Robinson's achievement was a political victory brought about by a social protest movement.
That story has been told in two outstanding books, Jules Tygiel's Baseball's Great Experiment (1983) and Chris Lamb's Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (2012). As they recount, Rickey's plan came after more than a decade of effort by black and left-wing journalists and activists to desegregate the national pastime.
Beginning in the 1930s, the Negro press, civil rights groups, the Communist Party, progressive white activists, and radical politicians waged a sustained campaign to integrate baseball. It was part of a broader movement to eliminate discrimination in housing, jobs, and other sectors of society. It included protests against segregation within the military, mobilizing for a federal anti-lynching law, marches to open up defense jobs to blacks during World War II, and boycotts against stores that refused to hire African Americans under the banner "don't shop where you can't work." The movement accelerated after the war, when returning black veterans expected that America would open up opportunities for African Americans.
Reporters for African-American papers (especially Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Fay Young of the Chicago Defender, Joe Bostic of the People's Voice in New York, and Sam Lacy of the Baltimore Afro-American), and Lester Rodney, sports editor of the Communist paper, the Daily Worker, took the lead in pushing baseball's establishment to hire black players. They published open letters to owners, polled white managers and players (some of whom were threatened by the prospect of losing their jobs to blacks, but most of whom said that they had no objections to playing with African Americans), brought black players to unscheduled tryouts at spring training centers, and kept the issue before the public. Several white journalists for mainstream papers joined the chorus for baseball integration. (In the film "42," Smith is depicted as Robinson's traveling companion and the ghost-writer for Robinson's newspaper column during his rookie season, ignoring Smith's key role as an agitator and leader of the long crusade to integrate baseball before Robinson became a household name).
Progressive unions and civil rights groups picketed outside Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field in New York City, and Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field in Chicago. They gathered more than a million signatures on petitions, demanding that baseball tear down the color barrier erected by team owners and Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis. In July 1940, the Trade Union Athletic Association held an "End Jim Crow in Baseball" demonstration at the New York World's Fair. The next year, liberal unions sent a delegation to meet with Landis to demand that major league baseball recruit black players. In December 1943, Paul Robeson, the prominent black actor, singer, and activist, addressed baseball's owners at their annual winter meeting in New York, urging them to integrate their teams. Under orders from Landis, they ignored Robeson and didn't ask him a single question.
In 1945, Isadore Muchnick, a progressive member of the Boston City Council, threatened to deny the Red Sox a permit to play on Sundays unless the team considered hiring black players. Working with several black sportswriters, Muchnick persuaded the reluctant Red Sox general manager, Eddie Collins, to give three Negro League players--Robinson, Sam Jethroe, and Marvin Williams--a tryout at Fenway Park in April of that year. The Red Sox had no intention of signing any of the players, nor did the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago White Sox, who orchestrated similar bogus auditions. But the public pressure and media publicity helped raise awareness and furthered the cause.
Other politicians were allies in the crusade. Running for re-election to the New York City Council in 1945, Ben Davis -- an African-American former college football star, and a Communist -- distributed a leaflet with the photos of two blacks, a dead soldier and a baseball player. "Good enough to die for his country," it said, "but not good enough for organized baseball." That year, the New York State legislature passed the Quinn-Ives Act, which banned discrimination in hiring, and soon formed a committee to investigate discriminatory hiring practices, including one that focused on baseball. In short order, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's established a Committee on Baseball to push the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers to sign black players. Left-wing Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented Harlem, called for an investigation of baseball's racist practices.
This protest movement set the stage for Robinson's entrance into the major leagues in 1947. At the time, America was a deeply segregated nation. The previous year, at least six African Americans were lynched in the South. Restrictive covenants were still legal, barring blacks (and Jews) from buying homes in many neighborhoods--not just in the South. Only a handful of blacks were enrolled in the nation's predominantly white colleges and universities. There were only two blacks in Congress. No big city had a black mayor.
The grandson of a slave and the son of a sharecropper, Robinson was fourteen months old in 1920 when his mother moved her five children from Cairo, Georgia, to Pasadena, a wealthy, conservative Los Angeles suburb. During Robinson's youth, black residents, who represented a small proportion of the city's population, were treated like second-class citizens. Blacks were allowed to swim in the municipal pool only on Tuesdays (the day the water was changed) and could use the YMCA only one day a week.
Robinson learned at an early age that athletic success did not guarantee social or political acceptance. When his older brother Mack returned from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin with a silver medal in track, he got no hero's welcome. The only job the college-educated Mack would find was as a street sweeper and ditch digger.
Rickey had long wanted to hire black players, both for moral reasons and because he believed it would increase ticket sales among the growing number of African Americans moving to the big cities. He knew that if the experiment failed, the cause of baseball integration would be set back for many years. Rickey's scouts identified Robinson--who was playing for the Negro League's Kansas City Monarchs after leaving the army--as a potential barrier-breaker.
Robinson's background and personal characteristics played a role in Rickey's decision to select him out of the Negro Leagues to break the sport's color barrier. He could have chosen Negro League stars, like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, with greater experience and name recognition as a baseball player, but he wanted someone who could be, in today's terms, a role model. Although Pasadena was deeply segregated, Robinson had lived among and formed friendships with whites growing up there and while attending Pasadena Junior College and UCLA. He was UCLA's first four-sport athlete (football, basketball, track, and baseball), twice led the Pacific Coast League in scoring in basketball, won the NCAA broad jump championship, and was a football All-American. He was well-educated, articulate, and considered one of the greatest all-around athletes in the nation's history.
Ricky knew that Robinson had a hot temper and strong political views. In 1944, while assigned to a training camp at Fort Hood in segregated Texas, Robinson, a second lieutenant, refused to move to the back of an army bus when the white driver ordered him to do so, even though buses had been officially desegregated on military bases. He was court martialed for his insubordination, tried, acquitted, transferred to another military base, and honorably discharged four months later.
But Rickey calculated that Robinson could handle the emotional pressure while helping the Dodgers on the field. Robinson promised Rickey that for at least a year he would not respond to the inevitable verbal barbs and even physical abuse.
In October 1945, Rickey announced that Robinson had signed a contract with the Dodgers. He sent Robinson to the Dodgers' minor-league team in Montreal for the 1946 season, then brought him up to the Brooklyn team on opening day, April 15, 1947.
Rickey could not count on the other team owners or most major league players (many of whom came from southern or small-town backgrounds) to support his plan. But the Robinson experiment succeeded--on the field and at the box office. Within a few years, the Dodgers had hired other black players--pitchers Don Newcombe and Joe Black, catcher Roy Campanella, infielder Jim Gilliam, and Cuban outfielder Sandy Amoros--who helped turn the 1950s Dodgers into one of the greatest teams in baseball history.
Robinson, who spent his entire major league career (1947 to 1956) with the Dodgers, was voted Rookie of the Year in 1947 and Most Valuable Player in 1949, when he won the National League batting title with a .342 batting average. An outstanding base runner and base stealer, with a .311 lifetime batting average, he led the Dodgers to six pennants and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962.
Robinson recognized that the dismantling of baseball's color line was a triumph of both a man and a movement. During and after his playing days, he joined the civil rights crusade, speaking out--in speeches, interviews, and his column--against racial injustice. In 1949, testifying before Congress, he said: "I'm not fooled because I've had a chance open to very few Negro Americans."
Robinson viewed his sports celebrity as a platform from which to challenge American racism. Many sportswriters and most other players--including some of his fellow black players, content simply to be playing in the majors--considered Robinson too angry and vocal about racism in baseball and society.
When Robinson retired from baseball in 1956, no team offered him a position as a coach, manager, or executive. Instead, he became an executive with the Chock Full o' Nuts restaurant chain and an advocate for integrating corporate America. He lent his name and prestige to several business ventures, including a construction company and a black-owned bank in Harlem. He got involved in these business activities primarily to help address the shortage of affordable housing and the persistent redlining (lending discrimination against blacks) by white-owned banks. Both the construction company and the bank later fell on hard times and dimmed Robinson's confidence in black capitalism as a strategy for racial integration.
In 1960, Robinson supported Hubert Humphrey, the liberal Senator and civil rights stalwart from Minnesota, in his campaign for president. When John Kennedy won the Democratic nomination, however, Robinson shocked his liberal fans by endorsing Richard Nixon. Robinson believed that Nixon had a better track record than JFK on civil rights issues, but by the end of the campaign--especially after Nixon refused to make an appearance in Harlem--he regretted his choice.
During the 1960s, Robinson was a constant presence at civil rights rallies and picket lines, and chaired the NAACP's fundraising drive.
Martin Luther King Jr. once told Newcombe, "You'll never know what you and Jackie and Roy [Campanella] did to make it possible to do my job."
Angered by the GOP's opposition to civil rights legislation, he supported Humphrey over Nixon in 1968. But he became increasingly frustrated by the pace of change.
"I cannot possibly believe," he wrote in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made, published shortly before he died of a heart attack at age 53 in 1972, "that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare."
In 1952, five years after Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, only six of major league baseball's 16 teams had a black player. It was not until 1959 that the last holdout, the Boston Red Sox, brought an African American onto its roster.
The black players who followed Robinson shattered the stereotype -- once widespread among many team owners, sportswriters, and white fans -- that there weren't many African Americans "qualified" to play at the major league level. Between 1949 and 1960, black players won 8 out of 12 Rookie of the Year awards, and 9 out of 12 Most Valuable Player awards in the National League, which was much more integrated than the American League. Many former Negro League players, including Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Newcombe were perennial All-Stars.
But academic studies conducted from the 1960s through the 1990s uncovered persistent discrimination. For example, teams were likely to favor a weak-hitting white player over a weak-hitting black player to be a benchwarmer or a utility man. And even the best black players had fewer and less lucrative commercial endorsements than their white counterparts.
In the 16 years he lived after his retirement in 1956, Robinson pushed baseball to hire blacks as managers and executives. He even refused an invitation to participate in the 1969 Old Timers game because he did not yet 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 Two of the 1972 World Series, shortly before he died, Robinson accepted a plaque honoring the 25th anniversary of his MLB debut, then 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. The majors' first black general manager--the Atlanta Braves' Bill Lucas--wasn't hired until 1977.
But as Robinson's widow Rachel said last year: "There is a lot more that needs to be done and can be done" in terms of hiring and promoting people of color as managers and top executives in Major League Baseball.
Last season, players of color represented 38.5 percent of Major League rosters, according to a report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida. Black athletes represented only 8.3 percent of Major League players--a dramatic decline from the peak of 27 percent in 1975, and less than half the 19 percent of 1995. Their shrinking proportion is due primarily to the growing number of Latino (28.5 percent) and Asian (1.7 percent) players, including many foreign-born athletes (27.5 percent), now populating Major League rosters.
There are also sociological and economic reasons for the decline of black ball players. The semi-pro, sandlot, and industrial teams that once thrived in black communities, serving as feeders to the Negro Leagues and then the Major Leagues, have disappeared. Basketball and football have replaced baseball as the most popular sports in black communities, where funding for public school baseball teams and neighborhood playgrounds with baseball fields has declined. Major League teams more actively recruit young players from Latin America, who are typically cheaper to hire than black Americans, as Adrian Burgos, in Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (2007) and Rob Ruck, in Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (2012) document.
On opening day this month, 27 of MLB's 30 managers were white. There are only two black managers (Dave Roberts of the Dodgers and Dusty Baker of the Nationals) and one Latino manager (the White Sox' Rick Renteria). This is a big drop from the 10 managers of color who took the field in 2009.
Two people of color own Major League teams--Arturo Moreno, a Latino, who has owned the Los Angeles Angels since 2003, and basketball great Earvin "Magic" Johnson, who is part of the group that purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012. As the TIDES report documents, there are few African Americans, Latinos, or Asians among MLB teams' top management, including only four general managers.
Like baseball, American society -- including our workplaces, Congress and other legislative bodies, schools, friendships, and even families -- is more integrated than it was in Robinson's day. But there is still an ongoing debate about the magnitude of racial progress, as measured by persistent residential segregation, a significantly higher poverty rate among blacks than whites, ongoing racial discrimination by banks and landlords, and widespread racism within our criminal justice and prison systems.
As Robinson understood, these inequities cannot be solved by individual effort alone. It also requires grassroots activism and protest to attain changes in government policy and business practices.
Traditionally, pro baseball players have been conservative and cautious, but Trump's hostile rhetoric toward immigrants, African Americans, and Muslims has inspired a number of them to speak out.
In January, Houston Astros pitcher Collin McHugh criticized Trump after the president attacked civil rights pioneer and congressman John Lewis, claiming that he represented a "crime infested" district in Atlanta that is "in horrible shape and falling apart." McHugh said, "I live right in the heart of downtown, in District 5. It's a great place to live. I've been there for seven or eight years, I've lived in the metro area pretty much my whole life, and I don't like to see anybody talk bad about it."
That same month, Oakland A's pitcher Sean Doolittle condemned Trump's executive order banning Syrian refugees seeking sanctuary in this country. "These refugees are fleeing civil wars, terrorism, religious persecution, and are thoroughly vetted for 2yrs," he tweeted. "A refugee ban is a bad idea. ... It feels un-American. And also immoral." In February, Cardinals outfielder Dexter Fowler, whose wife is from Iran, told ESPN that he opposed Trump's proposed travel ban from Muslim-majority nations, "Anytime you're not able to see family, it's unfortunate," Fowler said.
On election night, Dodgers pitcher Brandon McCarthy tweeted: "Tonight's result affects me none because I'm rich, white and male. Yet, it'll be a long time until I'm able to sleep peacefully." Two months after Trump's inauguration, McCarthy was back on Twitter poking fun at Trump's campaign pledge to "drain the swamp" of corporate and Wall Street influence-peddlers. "Was the 'swamp' Goldman Sachs itself?" McCarthy tweeted, referring to the powerful investment bank that has provided top officials in Trump's administration.
As we confront the reactionary initiatives from the Trump White House and the Republican Congress, Jackie Robinson's legacy is to remind us of the unfinished agenda of the civil rights revolution and of the important role that protest movements play in moving the country closer to its ideals.
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Mahmoud Abbas, the Jackie Robinson of Palestine
Sep 24, 2011
On Friday, Mahmoud Abbas - backed by more than 80% of Palestinian public opinion in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem - formally requested full United Nations membership for Palestine.
The logic of turning to the UN is straightforward: the U.S.-sponsored "peace process" - bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians under U.S. auspices - has failed, because a key premise of that process was that the U.S. government could bring the Israeli government to the table for a serious negotiation that would produce real Israeli compromise necessary for a solution. That premise has turned out to be spectacularly false.
The U.S. hasn't been able to bring the Israeli government to the table for a serious negotiation, not because it would be theoretically impossible to do so, but because "domestic political constraints" - the "Israel lobby" - have prevented the U.S. from exerting effective pressure on the Israeli government to move. Therefore, if the world wants to see resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict anytime soon, it has to wrest control of the issue from Washington. And that's why moving the arena to the United Nations makes perfect sense.
Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy summed it up in the New York Times: "The U.S. cannot lead on an issue that it is so boxed in on by its domestic politics," Levy said. "And therefore, with the region in such rapid upheaval and the two-state solution dying, as long as the U.S. is paralyzed, others are going to have to step up."
In his address to the United Nations on Wednesday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy directly challenged U.S. control of the Israel-Palestine issue, explicitly stating French support for upgrading the Palestinians' status at the UN to nonmember observer state and implying that U.S. efforts have totally failed.
You might think: who cares? What is France compared to the U.S.? And in a one-on-one confrontation, you might be right. But this is not a one-on-one confrontation. This is the U.S. against Turkey and Egypt and the Arab and Muslim worlds and most of Latin America and Africa and Asia. And so for France to throw its weight to the other side is potentially a very big deal. It opens up a broader path for the Palestinians - and the Egyptians and the Turks and everyone else - to contest U.S.-Israeli policy in Europe. And there is no question that there are many levers on the U.S. and Israeli governments in Europe that have not been used.
In September 2010, Israel became a member of the OECD. Turkey could have vetoed Israel's membership, but it didn't. At the time, if Turkey had decided to take this stand, it might have been isolated. But the world has changed since September 2010; if Israel applied for OECD membership today, the outcome might be different.
In December 2010, a group of 26 former EU leaders called for EU sanctions on Israel for settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In response, Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign affairs chief, wrote that the EU's response to Israeli settlement expansion would remain unchanged for the time being. What will happen in the future? The pressure to follow up European words with European action will increase.
U.N. membership for Palestine - even nonmember observer state status - could broaden the path to the prosecution of Israeli officials at the International Criminal Court for the policies of the occupation. It could enable Palestine to join the Law of the Sea Treaty as a means to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza. There are many levers to pursue. But the potential of these levers will depend greatly on governments and public opinion in Europe and elsewhere.
And this is the context - what will Europe and the others do? - in which the diplomatic strategy pursued by the Palestinian leadership makes perfect sense. In recent years, the Palestinian leadership has pursued a "no excuses" policy: not to give the U.S. and Israel any excuse for blocking Palestinian national aspirations, neither by failing to condemn violence, nor by failing to cooperate on issues of security.
This policy has been controversial among Palestinians. Many have basically said: Israel is hitting us - stealing our land, shooting and imprisoning our children - and you're not hitting back; instead, you are cooperating with Israel and the U.S. to prevent others from hitting back.
What's being tested now is this: what is the diplomatic and political fruit of the "no excuses" policy? It certainly hasn't been movement in the Israeli government position; it certainly hasn't been movement in the U.S. government position. But it could be movement in world opinion, it could be movement by European governments, it could be movement by other governments. It could result in greatly increased political, legal, and economic pressure on the Israeli government to end the occupation.
Venezuela is probably going to support the Palestinians as much as it can no matter what. Probably U.S. policy will defer to Tel Aviv for the foreseeable future. But for other countries - like France - what they are going to do is much more of a jump ball. What will they do to stand up to the U.S.? Will they support EU sanctions on Israeli settlement expansion? Will they support Palestine's admission to the Law of the Sea Treaty? Will they support the prosecution of Israeli officials for war crimes at the International Criminal Court?
When Branch Rickey recruited Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, they made a bargain. If Robinson would maintain discipline, standing strong against efforts to provoke him into retaliation with racist taunts and assaults, Rickey would stand strong in fighting efforts to keep Robinson from playing. Mahmoud Abbas has held up the Jackie Robinson side of the bargain. The question now is whether the "international community" will hold up the Branch Rickey side of the bargain.
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Can Barack Obama Become the Jackie Robinson of the American Presidency?
May 16, 2008
Sixty-one years ago, a truly great athlete broke the color line in America's "National Pastime," which still resides near the core of our culture.
Now the question of whether Barack Obama can do the same for the American presidency has moved to center stage.
Simply put, Jackie Robinson was one of history's most gifted all-around athletes. He mastered five major sports -- football, baseball, basketball, tennis and track. As a complete performer, he may have been surpassed in the Twentieth Century only by the great Jim Thorpe.
It's hard to overstate the importance of Robinson's 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In his first game, he went hitless in three at-bats. But he went on that season to become baseball's first Rookie of the Year. In a big league career that lasted through the 1956 season, he was voted into six All-Star games, played in six World Series, and was once chosen the league's Most Valuable Player.
Robinson was an excellent hitter, a superb fielder and a uniquely daring and successful base runner. He is still universally ranked among the greatest to ever play the game. He was exciting to watch -- especially when he stole home -- and gave baseball an entirely new dimension that had nothing to do with race.
Would the impact of his breaking the Big League color line have been diminished if he had not been such an astonishingly good athlete?
Absolutely. A mediocre career would have rendered Jackie Robinson's name a footnote, rather than the towering monument it remains today. The astonishing quality of his performance greatly accelerated the integration of all professional sports.
So now we must ask: how good is Barack Obama?
There are certain things he seems to share with Robinson. In the contract he signed with the Dodgers, Robinson was obliged to quietly absorb all the racial insults his teammates, the opposing teams and the public could throw at him. This he did with amazing grace.
When later he was free to speak out, he did so with eloquence and effect. He aligned himself with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Though later in life he worked for Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon, the quality of his career and his character served to mute much of the racial polarization that could have made the integration of baseball an ugly failure.
In the long run, Jackie Robinson's career became monumental because it transcended the issue of race.
Linking Obama with Robinson may seem stereotypical. But in the coming campaign, only one thing is certain: no stone will be left unthrown. Whether we want it or not, we are about to be shown just how deep the racial divide still cuts.
When confronted with Jeremiah Wright, Obama displayed remarkable skill. He has absorbed much of the testing brought on by Hillary Clinton. He's indicated he may be willing to reach out to Ralph Nader, and to other diverse constituencies, without which he cannot win.
Clearly Obama is a uniquely gifted speaker. He has thus far run an effective, well-organized campaign, raised big money from a wide range of sources, and sustained a straight face before a thoroughly bought, seriously deranged corporate media.
Obama now must face the Rovian swift-boating thugs of the mainstream GOP. He and his family will be horrifically tested. Does anyone doubt this will be the ugliest campaign in US history?
There are some things working in Obama's favor. Future historians may well note this as the turning point not only for an old way of doing politics, but for the age of white male leadership.
Given the total bust of the Bush Republicans, it's no accident this is the first election in which both a female and a person of color have had a chance to win. What about the Bush presidency would incline the electorate to go for another white guy?
Ironically, this inclination toward a gender/racial shift may have doomed the candidacy of John Edwards. He was clearly shafted by the corporate media, which wanted nothing to do with his populist message, and which was fixated from the start on a Clinton/Obama, white female/black male confrontation.
His southern accent and appeal to white male voters was widely assumed to be a trump card. But Edwards's campaign was haunted by the tainted legacy of failed and/or polarizing southern presidents, ranging from Johnson, Carter and Clinton to the southern Californians Nixon and Reagan, all culminating in the utterly catastrophic Texas Bushes.
History may record that in its anger and frustration, the American people finally turned toward a different blend of race and gender.
They may also see in Obama what Robinson's coach Leo Durocher saw in integrating baseball. In a legendary locker-room rant, Durocher ripped into some of his Dodger players for their blatant racism.
But then he yelled that Robinson would "make us all rich" by bringing millions of new customers to the ballparks.
Durocher could not have been more right. By virtue of both his demographics and his skill, Jackie Robinson took major league baseball into a whole new world of public excitement, acceptance and prosperity.
In a globalized millennium, Americans must also realize that a person of color in the White House could be essential to restoring our declining fortunes, dumped so deeply in the hole by those endless wars of testosterone and greed. The indicators are everywhere that the good will squandered by the Bush catastrophe could be at least partly restored with a demonstration of this nation's willingness to accept a new kind of leadership.
But Barack Obama cannot be ordinary, or even just really good. To win the presidency, he will have to be as even-tempered and controlled as Jackie Robinson. But he'll also have to be as daring and skilled a candidate as Robinson was an athlete, especially when it comes to the on-going attempts by the GOP to rig the processes of voter registration and electronic vote counting.
And if he does get to the White House, just a well-meaning effort won't cut it. A middling presidency is not enough.
In terms of war, the economy, the environment, energy, infrastructure, education, health care, corporate domination, election protection, and so much more, the United States is essentially in ruins. We have been sunk into a crisis on par with the ones that faced Washington, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.
To truly succeed, Barack Obama -- in concert with all of us -- will need a combination of daring and ability that hasn't really been invented yet.
Sortof like Jackie Robinson stealing home, transforming the game of baseball, transcending the issue of race -- and much, much more.
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