BOOKS: Robinson, Race, and Brooklyn

Barack Obama’s election last fall to the presidency of the United States is generally regarded as a culmination of the civil-rights movement in this country. Looking backward toward the beginnings of that movement, the eye falls on events in New York City just after the end of World War II and particularly on the career of Jackie Robinson. A whole lot has been written about Robinson; a recent look at SABR’s Baseball Index shows 1,296 books and articles containing significant material about Robinson.1

It’s an intimidating number, and I haven’t even begun to read all of those books and articles. In fact, it would be silly to say I’ve even tried. What I will do here is explore the various writings about Robinson that have passed through my library over the sixty years since a copy of his My Own Story turned up.2 My treatment will be biased; I’m a lifelong New York Giants fan, for whom Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers were always “the enemy.”

Jackie Robinson was undoubtedly a more complex human being than the mythic figure he has become. Even such serious academic historians as Eliot Gorn and Warren Goldstein seem to oversimplify his case in the following statement from A Brief History of American Sports.

For if the Jackie Robinson saga was a sports-world version of the early stage of the Civil Rights movement—restrained, self-sacrificing, aiming for justice and reconciliation, idealizing integration—the story of Muhammad Ali is just as powerfully rooted in the Black Power and black separatist movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.3

Jackie never seemed restrained, particularly on the basepaths, to this Giants fan: He was a menace. I suspect that Gerald Early’s characterization of Robinson as “a complicated and admittedly often disturbing and unappealing man” is the truer one. Early’s essay “Jackie Robinson, Amiri Baraka, Paul Robeson, and a Note on Politics, Sports, and the Black Intellectual” from Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture is well worth reading for its portrait of Robinson, for its summary of Baraka’s views (for Baraka, Robinson was “the Frank- enstein’s monster of American racial pathology”),4 and for his mention that Martin Duberman’s “exhaustive” biography of Paul Robeson5 contains material on Robinson. Another essay on Robinson appears in Early’s The Culture of Bruising, in which he compares Robinson and Willie Mays.6

Jackie Robinson in his autobiographies tended more and more to acknowledge his own complexity. I used to own a paperback copy of the 1948 My Own Story (as told to Wendell Smith), undoubtedly given to me then by some rabid Dodger fan. I never would have bought it myself. Now I’m glad I have read it, even though it minimizes (but does not erase) the difficulties Robinson encountered through his first year in the majors. The mood of Robinson’s Baseball Has Done It (edited by Charles Dexter), interviews with African American major leaguers, is both combative and celebratory, as the title suggests.7 The title of Robinson’s 1972 autobiography, I Never Had It Made, suggests an emphasis on conflict.8 There’s an edition from Ecco Press currently available in bookstores.

It’s no coincidence that some of the best books ever written on the subject of baseball have Jackie Robinson as their subject. Roger Kahn’s solemn and operatic The Boys of Summer seems as vivid and substantial now as it did when published in 1971.9 The boys of summer are the Jackie Robinson Dodgers, and “the dominant truth of the Jackie Robinson Dodgers was integration.”10 Robinson himself “bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him more strong.”11 Robinson’s own ruin involved both the death of his first son and his own physical disintegration. Kahn finds himself shocked “to realize I was slowing my own pace so as not to walk too quickly for Jackie Robinson.”12 Quite probably the best academic study of any aspect of baseball is Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, available in a Vintage paperback.13 Tygiel sets Robinson’s career in the contexts of the Negro Leagues, Major League Baseball, and American culture at large. Several essays on Robinson, ancillary to Baseball’s Great Experiment, are gathered in Tygiel’s Extra Bases.14 Kahn’s Memories of Summer contains more material on Robinson.15

Over the years Robinson’s life has been the subject of several biographies. Arnold Rampersad’s Jackie Robinson: A Biography is thorough, exhaustive, comprehensive, and well written.16 It will prove one of the essential works on Robinson. Rampersad was well prepared to write Robinson’s life, having produced fulsome biographies of black intellectual and literary figures W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes, the latter in two volumes. In addition, Rampersad helped Arthur Ashe with his autobiography Days of Grace, so he was already familiar with the intersection of sport and race.17 Finally, the Robinson family was enthusiastic about his writing the biography, and family papers and family members were available to him. Jackie’s family is a particularly strong presence in the book, as they were in his life.

Of the book’s seventeen chapters, two deal with his college career and the sports he participated in there and seven deal with his baseball career—one on the Negro Leagues, one on his year with Montreal, and five on his seasons with the Dodgers. The five other chapters probably constitute the largest amount of space devoted to a baseball player’s life subsequent to his playing days. The reason for this is the way Rampersad chooses to present Robinson, not simply as a baseball player but, as the author puts it, “someone chosen for a great task.”18 Late in the book Rampersad gets it all into a single sentence. “In 1947, black and handsome, athletically gifted but also cool and astute in his play, stoically enduring insult and injury, Robinson had revolutionized the image of the black man in America.”19 Rampersad’s Robinson is Martin Luther King’s Robinson. King calls Robinson “a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”20 Like few other ballplayers—perhaps only Babe Ruth—Jackie Robin- son has significance far beyond his ball playing, and Rampersad keeps his focus on this.

Robinson’s daughter Sharon has published Stealing Home (HarperCollins, 1996), a memoir of the Robinson family, focusing on their lives beyond his ball playing.21 She subordinates Robinson the ballplayer to his life’s mission, “which began with integrating Major League baseball [and] continued in other areas after he retired.”22 Sharon Robinson speaks of her father as being more interested in public service and the civil-rights movement than in his various business enterprises.

She spends very little time on Robinson’s baseball career. Stealing Home is a family story, about being black and growing up with a celebrity father in the 1950s and 1960s. There is, however, a memorable passage in which Sharon Robinson reveals her sense of the importance of her father’s pioneering in baseball. On their property in Stamford, Connecticut was a lake on which the children and their friends would skate during the winter. It was Jackie’s job to “test the ice.” Armed with a shovel and broomstick, he would slowly make his way to the deepest part of the pond. Watching him, his daughter senses his bravery. “He was as brave then as when he entered baseball, a feat it took me years to appreciate. It dawned on me only gradually what it meant for him to break the baseball color line, the courage it took for him to enter uncharted, and dangerous, waters. He had to feel his way along an uncleared path like a blind man tapping for clues. That was Jackie Robinson. And that was my dad—big, heavy, out there alone on the lake, tapping his way along so the ice would be safe for us.”23

Though these two books are clearly the place to begin, there are several other biographies of Robinson that reward reading. Arthur Mann’s The Jackie Robinson Story24 is particularly interesting, because it was written so close to the events themselves, by a participant in at least some of them. The book’s thesis is that Robinson’s triumph is “not a triumph of Negro or white. It was a triumph of baseball.”25 Baseball itself is the hero of Mann’s story. Mann writes of Reese and Robinson that “this was the Branch Rickey dream come true, and the only thing he ever tried to prove: that real baseball playing transcends all theories of class, race, religion, color, and politics. The play is indeed the thing, and success on the sporting field has to spring from skill alone and the amalgamation of all skills for the good of the team.”26

Carl Rowan’s 1960 biography of Robinson, Wait Till Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson, takes another tack entirely, its title surely ironic. The book’s authors are listed as “Carl T. Rowan with Jackie Robinson,” and many passages in the book are in Jackie and Rachel’s own words. Writing at the start of the civil-rights movement, Rowan concludes that “future generations will remember [Robinson] not as the baserunner who worried pitchers to their doom, but as the proud crusader against pompous bigots and timid sentinels of the status quo—another symbol of a new Negro American.”27

Race continues to be prominent in two biographies published in the 1980s, Harvey Frommer’s Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier28 and Maury Allen’s Jackie Robinson: A Life Remembered.29 Though largely superseded by Rampersad and, in Frommer’s case, by Lee Lowenfish’s Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman,30 both books are still valuable because they make extensive use of interviews. Allen’s book, particularly, is full of quoted material from interviews. A third biography, David Falkner’s Great Time Coming, focuses on the public Robinson, as Falkner was denied access to the family and archival material, and has the distinction of being the first biography to look extensively at Robin- son’s life after his retirement from baseball.31

Scott Simon’s Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball 32 addresses Robinson’s first season with the Dodgers. The focus is on the tribulations Robinson experienced leading up to and during that first year. Simon puts Robinson’s difficulty quite simply: for him, the baseball diamond was “not simply a playing field” but a kind of war zone where the fight for racial equality occurred.33 Robinson’s story as Simon presents it is “a heroic American legend,” Robinson himself, blind and dying at age 53, “a martyr for the cause of racial integration.”34 Distinguished by its brevity, Simon’s book is the second volume of Turning Points, a series featuring “preeminent writers offering fresh, personal perspectives on the defining events of our time.”35 Simon acknowledges predecessors in his enterprise “with much more complete volumes,” mainly Rampersad and Tygiel.36 He confesses in his epilogue that “there is no need for a new chronicle about Jackie Robinson’s arrival in major league baseball. But it has been my privilege to try to tell one.”37 Nevertheless, his version is as readable as it is brief.

Something of an anomaly among these books is Joseph Dorinson and Joram Warmund’s Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream.38 Dorinson and Warmund have edited a selection of papers from a 1997 academic conference on the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University commemorating Robinson’s major-league debut fifty years earlier, but their interest goes beyond the strictly academic. They describe the collection as a “heady mix of journalism, scholarship, and memory,” its authors as “scholars, sportswriters, journalists, ballplayers, and baseball fans.”39 These many voices “describe conditions prior to Robinson’s arrival, offer new perspectives on the events surrounding the integration of baseball, present reminiscences of the era, explore the impact of his breakthrough, and assess how far African-Americans have traveled in Robinson’s wake.”40 It’s a nice complement to Rampersad’s monumental biography, its many authors sometimes happily disagreeing.

Perhaps the most interesting section for SABRites is “Measuring the Impact on Baseball.” This section begins with an essay by David Shiner arguing that Robinson’s appearance “challenged the dominant conception of offensive strategy in white baseball at the time.”41 He brought over from the Negro Leagues a style of play that combined speed and power. Samuel Regalado’s essay shows how the player pool expanded enormously after Robinson’s appearance, including not only African Americans, but players from Central and South America.42 Finally, Lee Lowenfish’s essay details the machinations among the Dodgers’ owners that enabled baseball’s expansion to proceed.43

Robinson’s life, though, is inextricably tied to the history of the city of Brooklyn, and it’s not just that his body is buried there. Frederic Roberts’s essay “A Myth Grows in Brooklyn: Urban Death, Resurrection, and the Brooklyn Dodgers” engagingly considers the meanings of the connectedness of the team and the city.44 Several novels do this as well. Every Dodger fan should have a copy of Philip Goldberg’s This Is Next Year, a chronicle of Brooklyn in 1955, on his or her bookshelf. Ballantine Books published a paperback edition in 1991.45 Jay Neugeboren’s Sam’s Legacy is, among other things, a portrait of Brooklyn in the early 1970s with its “changing neighborhoods.”46 The Dodgers are a faint but unmistakable presence in the book, and the nature of “race” a major theme. The protagonist in the course of the novel has to emotionally adjust to the fact that his father has left Brooklyn to retire in—take a wild guess!—Los Angeles. So far as I know, the only edition of this book is the 1974 hardcover from Holt, Rinehart and Winston. For a scary look at Brooklyn in the 1980s, try Thomas Boyle’s crime novel Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.47 The Dodgers are still a presence, in fact more of a presence than in Sam’s Legacy. In Only the Dead Know Brooklyn, the subjects of race, gentrification, and the Dodgers are embodied in the figure of a psychotic killer, an albino African American who wears a Brooklyn Dodgers warm-up jacket and tells people he is the illegitimate son of Jackie Robinson. Penguin published a paperback of this book in 1986. Frederic Roberts gives it considerable attention in his essay mentioned above. The borough and the ballclub both evoke plenty of memories. Perhaps the most fervent collection of these ballclub reflections is Peter Golenbock’s Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers.48  Golenbock’s book contains plenty of talk from Dodger players, other employees, journalists, and fans. A complement to Golenbock’s book is Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer’s It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.49 Coffee table-sized, this book offers both memories and photographs of the borough and its inhabitants (dozens were interviewed) during those years. Though Robinson and the Dodgers are a comparatively small part of this experience, Robinson made Brooklyn “a special kind of place.”50 It evokes much nostalgia, but the notion that Brooklyn is a changing place is also present.

Two more recent books depict what it was like to be a Dodger fan and a Dodger. Thomas Oliphant in Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers describes what it was like to root for the Dodgers while growing up in a family devoted to liberal causes, particularly integration.51 Oliphant combines his own and others’ memories of Jackie Robinson’s arrival in Brooklyn and the team’s subsequent addition of other African American players. “It helped,” he says, “that Brooklyn itself was for that time the most tolerant and diverse place in America.”52 Carl Erskine calls his memoir of his time pitching in Brooklyn What I Learned from Jackie Robinson.53 Erskine is concerned to acknowledge that Robinson’s quest for racial equality extended to equality for all people, including Erskine’s Down-syndrome son Jimmy. Erskine concludes that “we all benefited from Jackie, and he helped us all understand ourselves and each other better. He had helped his race, but he helped mine more.”54

Here is Erskine on living in Brooklyn in the 1950s: “It was like living in a small town. Brooklyn had been that ephemeral middle ground. It was rural in aspects—beach-filled with crisp, clean, ocean breezes—and also had a strong cultural base.”55 Brooklyn, through these eyes, seems a little too good to be true, and in fact the borough was changing rapidly during these years, as both Oliphant and others interviewed by the Frommers notice. Relying on human memory is not always a good way to discover what happened. Henry Fetter, for instance, looks at National League attendance figures during Robinson’s rookie season and finds that Robinson’s presence had no discernible effect, despite the memories of many. This makes Fetter wonder about the idea “that Brooklyn provided a fortuitously welcome setting for this tale of racial tolerance.”56 Eschewing individual memory is also a focus for Jonathan Eig in his Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season.57 “I have tried in these pages not to imagine what Jackie Robinson went through in 1947,” he writes. “I have tried at every turn to present verifiable facts. The facts speak for themselves, and I think they speak much more powerfully than the myths that have come to cloud Robinson’s story.”58

Three books on Robinson and the Dodgers published in the late 1990s deserve special mention. Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait is an extraordinary picture book with an accompanying text by Robinson’s wife Rachel.59 The text itself seems rather thin, but there are many useful details. For instance, after they moved to Stamford, Connecticut, the Robinsons named their dog after supposed mentor Branch Rickey. This would suggest a relatively complicated relationship with the Mahatma. The pictures, though, are the more interesting part of the book. There’s one of Robinson leaving the Brooklyn clubhouse, looking very old. In the background a cat looks up at him. There are wonderful pictures with political implications: Robinson shaking hands with President Eisenhower at a formal dinner in 1953; later, Robinson sitting at a lunch counter with Malcolm X.

Carl E. Prince’s Brooklyn’s Dodgers is also a useful academic book, published in 1996 by Oxford University Press.60 Subtitled The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, it attempts to show how the team embodied many of the social and political concerns of the day. It’s an intriguing effort to see a major-league team in its cultural context. Then there’s Jules Tygiel’s The Jackie Robinson Reader, published in 1997 by Dutton.61 Though much of the material will initially seem familiar to the SABRite, Tygiel’s stated concern is to make of the anthology “an alternative biography of Robinson.”62 While there are excerpts from the usual books—Kahn’s and Tygiel’s, for instance—there’s also a good deal of material collected from newspapers and magazines, and this makes the book especially valuable.

Tygiel’s anthology also reminds me again of all the books about Robinson and the Dodgers I haven’t read, but a Giants fan needs to keep a certain distance. I’m always comforted by the fact that when the Dodgers no longer wanted Robinson’s services they traded him to the Giants. To my mind, this is evidence that Giants owner Horace Stoneham was no dummy. As he said in a letter to Robinson, “I can’t help thinking it would have been fun to have had you on our side for a year or two.”63 And to this Giants fan it seems no more heretical than Leo Durocher’s sudden transfer from the Dodgers to the Giants during the 1948 season, or hated Giant Sal Maglie’s appearance as a Dodger pitching mainstay in 1956.

A few books covering the 1972 baseball season commemorate Jackie Robinson in the year of his death. Roger Angell’s Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion contains just a page on Robinson, but most of it needs to be quoted here. Angell remembers a scene from some twenty years before, one that convinced him that “we had asked [Robinson] to do too much for us.”

It was something that had happened during an insignificant weekday game between the Giants and the Dodgers back in the nineteen-fifties. Robinson, by then an established star, was playing third base that afternoon, and during the game something happened that drove him suddenly and totally mad. I was sitting close to him, just behind third, but I had no idea what brought on the outburst. It might have been a remark from the stands or from one of the dugouts; it was nothing that happened on the field. Without warning, Robinson began shouting imprecations, obscenities, curses. His voice was piercing, his face distorted with passion. The players on both teams looked at each other, uncomprehending. The Giants third-base coach walked over to murmur a question, and Robinson directed his screams at him. The umpire at third did the same thing, and then turned away with a puzzled, embarrassed shrug. In time, the outburst stopped, and the game went on.64

Clearly, Jackie Robinson’s psyche suffered as much, if not more, than his body did from the stress.

Joel Oppenheimer’s book on rooting for the 1972 New York Mets, The Wrong Season,65 concludes with a eulogy of Robinson. At its end, Oppenheimer remembers Robinson the baseball player: “We will talk about the stance, the bat held high, the head looming, and the ball bouncing off the wall in deep left center, and the crazy garbage truck run, the pigeon toes . . . and in a world where he was clean, and where, yes, Dixie Walker was clean too, with his long-bred hatred, and the point for both was to score the runs and make the flashing play.”66 The point for Oppenheimer? “For sure . . . Jackie deserved better than us.” In an extraordinary time, an extraordinary man, Jackie Robinson.

LEVERETT T. SMITH JR., a member of SABR since 1973, is author of “The American Dream and the National Game” (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975). Since the mid-1990s he has reviewed books for the Bibliography Committee Newsletter.

 

Author’s note

Parts of this article appeared originally in SABR’s Bibliography Committee Newsletter, July 1997.

 

Notes

1. The Baseball Index, Society for American Baseball Research, baseballindex.org/.

2. Jackie Robinson and Wendell Smith, My Own Story (New York: Greenberg, 1948).

3. Eliot Gorn and Warren Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 218.

4. Gerald Early, “Jackie Robinson, Amiri Baraka, Paul Robeson, and a Note on Politics, Sports, and the Black Intellectual,” in Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (New York: Ecco Press, 1989), 208–14.

5. Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988).

6. Early, The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture (New York: Ecco Press, 1994), 146–54.

7. Robinson, Baseball Has Done It, ed. Charles Dexter (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964).

8. Robinson, I Never Had It Made (1972; New York: Ecco Press, 1995).

9. Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

10. Kahn, xvi.

11. Kahn, xix.

12. Kahn, 402.

13. Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Vintage, 1984).

14. Tygiel, Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

15. Kahn, Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art and Writing about It a Game (New York: Hyperion, 1997).

16. Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1997).

17. Arthur Ashe and Rampersad, Days of Grace: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1993).

18. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1997), 155.

19. Rampersad, 391.

20. Rampersad, 7.

21. Sharon Robinson, Stealing Home: An Intimate Family Portrait by the Daughter of Jackie Robinson (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

22. Sharon Robinson, 23.

23. Sharon Robinson, 45.

24. Arthur Mann, The Jackie Robinson Story (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1956).

25. Mann, 154.

26. Mann, 218.

27. Carl Rowan, with Jackie Robinson, Wait Till Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson (New York: Random House, 1960), 339.

28. Harvey Frommer, Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier (New York: Macmillan, 1982).

29. Maury Allen, Jackie Robinson: A Life Remembered (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987).

30. Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

31. David Falkner, Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robinson, from Baseball to Birmingham (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

32. Scott Simon, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002),

33. Simon, 3.

34. Simon, 4.

35. Simon, 9.

36. Simon, 164.

37. Simon, 151.

38. Joseph Dorinson and Joram Warmund, Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).

39. Dorinson and Warmund, xii, xi.

40. Dorinson and Warmund, xxi.

41. David Shiner, “Jackie Robinson and the Third Age of Modern Baseball,” in Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream, 149.

42. Samuel O, Regalado, “Jackie Robinson and the Emancipation of Latin American Baseball Players,” in Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream, 157.

43. Lee Lowenfish, “The Two Titans and the Mystery Man: Branch Rickey, Walter O’Malley, and John L. Smith as Brooklyn Dodgers Partners, 1944–1950,” in Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream, 165.

44. Frederic Roberts, “A Myth Grows in Brooklyn: Urban Death, Resurrection, and the Brooklyn Dodgers,” in Baseball History (summer 1987): 4–26.

45. Philip Goldberg, This Is Next Year (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).

46. Jay Neugeboren, Sam’s Legacy: A Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974).

47. Thomas Boyle, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn (New York: Penguin, 1986).

48. Peter Golenbock, Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers (New York: Putnam, 1984).

49. Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer, It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993).

50. Frommer and Frommer, 15.

51. Thomas Oliphant, Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

52. Oliphant, 55.

53. Carl Erskine, What I Learned from Jackie Robinson: A Teammate’s Reflections On and Off the Field (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005).

54. Erskine, 147.

55. Erskine, 126.

56. Dorinson and Warmund, Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream, 188.

57. Jonathan Eig, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

58. Eig, 281.

59. Rachel Robinson and Lee Daniels, Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996).

60. Carl Prince, Brooklyn’s Dodgers: The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, 1947–1957 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

61. Jules Tygiel, The Jackie Robinson Reader: Perspectives on an American Hero (New York: Dutton, 1997).

62. Tygiel, vii.

63. Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography, 308.

64. Roger Angell, Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), 51.

65. Joel Oppenheimer, The Wrong Season (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973).

66. Oppenheimer, 157.