Cold Warrior: The Jackie Robinson Story

In the typical telling of the Jackie Robinson life story there are two acts. The leading figures in both acts are White men. Act I is the run-up to White baseball: Pasadena, UCLA, the United States Army, the Kansas City Monarchs, the scouting of Clyde Sukeforth. This Act concludes in Branch Rickey’s Ebbets Field office in 1946, golden light filtering through Venetian blinds, as Mr. Rickey opens the door to Organized Baseball. The venerated moment is the famous turn-the-other-cheek conversation in which Mr. Rickey, not Jackie Robinson, sets the terms for the drama to come.

Act II is the entry into White baseball. This narrative sends Robinson to segregated Florida for spring training with the Montreal Royals, a season in the International League, the 1947 spring training Dodgers protest, and, finally, the call-up to Brooklyn. Robinson is defined by his silence in the face of his White racist teammates and his White racist competitors. The salvific moment in this Act is Pee Wee Reese’s mythic embrace of Jackie, signaling Robinson’s acceptance in the White man’s game. Reese, not Robinson, steals the scene.1

Baseball’s petition of Jack Roosevelt Robinson is nearly biblical. Since April 15, 1997, baseball asks each player to put on his number 42. On that day, baseball offers up each home run, each daring act on the basepaths as a living prayer to its suffering servant, as the prophet Isaiah wrote, “wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities.” For us.

A movie centered on that redemptive story would be well worth the price of the popcorn. It would speak of Organized Baseball’s deliverance from its stubborn past through Robinson’s strength of character, his redoubtable will, his relentless insistence on the Right Thing, his perseverance despite the breakdowns of time, racism, and age. It would recast each 94-mph fastball aimed at his ear as another doomed pharisaic examination, refuted by the parable of a 90-foot charge from third to home. It would be undiluted and true.

In short, about him.

Spike Lee understood this in 1989, when he wore the Brooklyn 42 in Do the Right Thing. In a country where White people rarely confront race and privilege outside the context of violence, Jackie Robinson is the right thing.

The Jackie Robinson Story does not understand this. At every key moment, a White person is the cause, Jackie the effect. Once he reaches the major leagues, something no Black man had accomplished in the twentieth century, it is Branch Rickey, the hundredth-something White man to run a major-league club, at the film’s active center. The passive voice is relegated to Robinson.

This essay proposes to understand Jackie Robinson—and Hollywood’s attempt in 1950 to redefine him in The Jackie Robinson Story—on his terms, by taking him at his word. “I admit freely that I think, live, and breathe black first and foremost,” he wrote.2

No wonder he never had it made.

Context: Television and Paul Robeson

The making of The Jackie Robinson Story in 1950 is a story of timing amid baseball’s transformation from national pastime to nationwide media phenomenon. In 1949, Robinson hit .342 and stole 37 bases, both league-leading. The Dodgers won a thrilling pennant race on the season’s final day. Robinson was the National League’s Most Valuable Player and, for the first time, an All-Star.

At season’s end, he would become a TV star. Nineteen forty-nine was the first year that every existing television network had the opportunity to broadcast the World Series. Local stations able to access a national feed could show the games live, too.3 Major-league baseball was no longer the province of New York. The World Series now belonged to the world.

In St. Louis, newspaper ads promised shoppers at Baldwin Piano Company “WORLD SERIES TELEVISION VALUES!”4 In upstate New York, Chappell’s department store urged Syracusans to “See the World Series on your own set!”5 The Associated Press reported 20 million people watched the World Series and declared 1949 “the year television became a national institution.”6

Venues otherwise empty in the daylight hours used the Series broadcast to build crowds. The art-deco Fox Theatre in Brooklyn interrupted showings of Jimmy Cagney’s White Heat to open its doors at 9:15 A.M. for those who wished to watch the games on “our own big screen… for the first time in any theatre.”7 Tavern owner Sam Atkins in New York opened at 11 A.M. and set drink minimums: “We don’t allow people not to drink. It’s either drink or get out for the World Series.”8

It wasn’t just the sets and the venues that were new. The Dodgers’ Game One lineup was one-third Black, a World Series first. Robinson, Campanella, and Don Newcombe showed America something it had never seen, in any field of endeavor. Facilitated by new technology, and accompanied by the delights of tavern pours, movie theater popcorn, and the shared experiences they make possible, the country saw Black men and White men working together.

Hollywood judged they wanted to see more.

But more of what, exactly?

In a 1997 essay, Gerald Early, a distinguished professor and director of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and an authority on Robinson, gave his answer to that question.9 Early argued The Jackie Robinson Story marked a turning point in American cinema—the first time White America recognized a Black man as a movie hero.

“Films of a given era or epoch,” Early wrote, “no matter how ineptly made or far-fetched or how seemingly removed from reality, are about what is on a society’s mind at the time, a dramatization of that society’s fears and hopes, its obsessions and conventions.”10 Early argued that Robinson the movie character was a new prototype, an aspiring Black hero “trying to make it on merit in a sometimes hostile, sometimes concerned, white society that doubts his ability.”11

If Robinson was a pop culture prototype, he was by no means alone. Campanella, Newcombe, and Larry Doby joined Robinson in the 1949 All-Star Game, the first time four Black players participated in the Mid-Summer Classic. Minor-league baseball, likewise, was undergoing its own dramatic racial transformation.12

1949 also was a breakthrough year in movies and music. A spate of feature films featuring Black leads confronting racial discrimination, the so-called “Negro Problem” films, all released that year.13 The be-bop of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and other Black artists pushed aside the wartime big band sounds.14 Billboard created its first rhythm and blues chart in 1949. Antecedents of the rock-n-roll explosion—Louis Jordan’s jump blues, John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen,” Paul Williams’ “The Hucklebuck,” and the doo-wop of the Orioles— dominated the original charts.15

Everyone, though, was merely catching up to Paul Robeson.

Robeson owned every stage he inhabited: son of a fugitive slave, Phi Beta Kappa, four-sport letterman, valedictorian at Rutgers, and graduate of Columbia University law school. He changed the way theater audiences understood Shakespeare and O’Neill. His baritone performance in the London staging of Showboat, as well as MGM’s 1936 film version, made “Ol’ Man River” a twentieth-century standard. His concerts packed theater halls on two continents.16

As Robeson became a citizen of the world, he adopted the world’s causes. He championed the Spanish loyalists and spoke up against Nazism years before the United States entered World War II.17 He fought for integration in baseball two years before Robinson signed with the Dodgers, taking a meeting with Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1943.18 Appreciative of the Soviet Union’s war against fascism and hopeful of the egalitarian promise of communism, he learned Russian and moved to Moscow.

Unwilling or unable, he never squared Marxist thought with Stalinist reality. That proved his undoing. His indifference, hostility even, to the “red scare” that gripped America in the late 1940s meant few Americans were surprised when, in April 1949, it was reported that he had assured attendees at a Paris conference that Black Americans would never take up arms against the Russians.19

It mattered not that Robeson protested he never said such a thing.20 American politicians took full advantage. They turned a rare racial triple play off Robeson’s slow roller, exploiting White fears of Red barbarians at the gate and a Black insurrection within.

Having injected the supervirus of race— specifically, the ancient variant of rebellion—into the global pandemic of communism, American politicians turned to manufacturing the cure. On July 8, 1949, the Associated Press reported that Georgia Democrat John Wood, new chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee, had invited a panel of “leading Negroes” to testify before his committee: “I think the principal purpose is to give the lie to the statements of Robeson that American Negroes wouldn’t fight in case of a war against Russia.”21

The witnesses included Lester Granger, executive secretary of the National Urban League; Charles Johnson, a sociologist from Fisk University in Nashville; and the Rev. Sandy Ray, of Brooklyn.22 Sociologists and ministers of the gospel were not going to give Wood the press attention he sought. For that, he needed a cleanup hitter: Jackie Robinson.

“It might give the American people an idea how the Negroes stand,” Wood said, “in the event of a war we hope will not develop.”23

The next day, Robinson tried testifying from the Dodger clubhouse. “Paul speaks only for himself,” Robinson told reporters.24

It didn’t work. Wood wanted Robinson on his home field.

For a week, the parties danced about. Mail encouraging Robinson in every direction poured into the Dodger clubhouse. Wood opened his hearings.25 Jackie kept playing. Nine days later, having beaten the Reds of Cincinnati, Mr. Robinson went to Washington.

Spoiler Alert: Robinson Before the House Un-American Activities Committee

Jackie and Rachel Robinson flew together from New York to Washington on July 18, 1949. Photographers posed them in front of the bronze “House Un-American Activities Committee” sign in the Cannon House Office Building as the “Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups” began.26

The Robinsons, political neophytes, were already known to their government.27 The Federal Bureau of Investigation had monitored Robinson’s political affiliations since Rickey signed him, linking him to various groups and causes the Bureau believed to be communist.28 Whether Wood sought to use this information to accuse Robinson is unknown. It didn’t matter. From a witness’s standpoint, one either appeared and satisfied the committee, typically by ratting on a friend, or one was labeled a communist himself. Once labeled, your popular and commercial viability was at an end.

Robinson’s appearance and testimony, however reluctant, suggested he understood the rules of this game, too. He could not have followed them more scrupulously.29

“There’s been a terrific lot of misunderstanding on this subject of communism among the Negroes in this country,” Robinson said, “and it’s bound to hurt my people. Negroes were stirred up long before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the Party has disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then, as well.”30

Robinson’s testimony linking the paranoia of the Red scare to the fate of the Black man was a work of art. The New York Times printed it in full. No other media outlet even noted it. They wrote what Robinson said next: “I’ve been asked to express my views on Paul Robeson’s statement in Paris to the effect that American Negroes would refuse to fight in any war against Russia because we love Russia so much. I haven’t any comment to make on that statement except that if Mr. Robeson actually made it, it sounds very silly to me.

“I can’t speak for 15 million people any more than any other one person can, but I know that I’ve got too much invested for my wife and child and myself in the future of this country, and I and other Americans of many races and faiths have too much invested in our country’s welfare, for any of us to throw it away because of a siren song sung in bass.”31

It wasn’t much, a couple lines buried in an earnest twelve-minute statement. But it did the job. And it’s virtually all anyone read the next day in the metropolitan dailies.32

New York Daily News: “Jackie Hits a Double—P. Robeson, Jim Crow.”33

Los Angeles Times: “Jackie Robinson Brands Robeson Claims ‘Silly.’ ”34

Miami Herald: “Jackie Robinson Calls Robeson Song Off-Key.”35

Spokane Spokesman-Review: “Infielder Gives Lie to Robeson.”36

Knoxville News-Sentinel: “Robinson Says Race Doesn’t Need Commies.”37

Press outlets on the margins, those that had championed Robinson’s journey and might have appreciated his larger message, also bit on the Robeson news hook—and took Robinson to task.

“Jackie Robinson fell into a trap of defilement,” editorialized the Daily Worker, press organ of the American Communist Party. “The net effect of Robinson’s playing ball with the Ku Kluxers of the Un-American Committee was to help them against his own people and his country.”38

“Frankly, the main idea of these hearings was to get Jackie Robinson to testify,” wrote the Pittsburgh Courier. “The Committee was banking on the publicity Jackie Robinson would get for the idea that Negroes are generally loyal.”39

Robinson would have to defend his testimony for as long as he played. “Because of baseball,” he wrote upon his retirement, “I was able to speak on behalf of Negro Americans before the House Un-American Activities Committee and rebuke Paul Robeson for saying most of us Negroes would not fight for our country in a war against Russia.”40

Nearer the end, Robinson re-examined his participation.

“I have grown wiser and closer to painful truths about America’s destructiveness,” he wrote in his 1971 autobiography. “And I do have increased respect for Paul Robeson, who, over a span of that twenty years, sacrificed himself, his career, and the wealth and comfort he once enjoyed because, I believe, he was sincerely trying to help his people.”41

It was too late. America long since had purged Robeson from its future.

Jackie Robinson had helped.

“Now you can fight back”

Congressman Wood wasn’t the only impresario searching for a leading man in 1949. Hollywood wanted a movie. More, it wanted a sequel.42

Film creatives had recognized the artistic and commercial potential in a Robinson biopic from Jackie’s big-league arrival in 1947. Robinson, himself, had sold the film rights to Jackie Robinson: My Own Story, an instant biography ghostwritten in 1949 by Wendell Smith of Pittsburgh’s Courier. Robinson’s newly hired financial advisor, Martin Stone, took one look at the deal and got Jackie out of it.43

Separately, a moderately successful Hollywood screenwriter named Lawrence Taylor was shopping a script to studios with Jackie as the central character. “Two of the big studios were interested,” Taylor told Ebony magazine in 1951, “if the story could be changed to show a white man teaching Robinson to be a great ball player. Of course, that was out of the question.”44

 

A publicity photo from The Jackie Robinson Story, featuring Robinson and co-star Ruby Dee.

 

On the heels of Robinson’s breakthrough popularity in 1949, however, Hollywood was newly intrigued. Taylor sold his script to producer William Heneman whose obscure British studio, Eagle Lion, agreed to make the film.

Word of Taylor’s script traveled east to Brooklyn. In the Ebbets Field office where he had so famously scripted Jackie Robinson’s entrance into White baseball—and his own role in the same—Branch Rickey appreciated the risk posed by a feature film offering a different narrative. Furious, Mr. Rickey took steps to protect himself. He put his longtime aide—and biographer—Arthur Mann on the case.45

“I went out to Los Angeles in mid-January with the picture in my pocket,” said Mann. “This was in the form of a directive wherein the Brooklyn club and Branch Rickey were protected against misuse or abuse of the situation. This was necessary because never before had a baseball club extended the right to film such a player-situation, added to which the right to portray the part of Branch Rickey.”46 Put differently: Hollywood tried to meddle with Brooklyn Dodger property; Branch Rickey, the great emancipator, would have none of it.47

Eight months after the HUAC hearings, five months after the World Series, The Jackie Robinson Story began shooting in Hollywood, starring Jackie Robinson as himself. The White press immediately greeted news of the film with skepticism.

“Most often, in telling a story about Negroes, the film people allow sentiment to run away with common sense,” wrote Hollywood in Focus columnist William Mooring. “To patronize the Negro is to enlarge racial differences between blacks and whites.”48

Mr. Mooring ought not to have worried.

Eighty minutes long, with 49 scenes, The Jackie Robinson Story is a soap opera, a series of bite-size vignettes, capable of being learned each morning by a rookie actor and filmed in an absurd three-week production schedule.

That’s not how the Hollywood trade press treated it. They gave every indication of a blockbuster in the making. Studio-leaked falsehoods.49 Behindthe-scenes juicy bits from production.50 Knowing observations from columnists on the inside. “Robinson wears success well,” one whispered, “he realizes that he, as a man, has been favored by fortune.”51

Fortune did not favor the Jackie Robinson portrayed on the screen. Denials of coaching applications, subtly racist slights at UCLA, the hardships of Negro League ball, Robinson’s brother’s employment as a street-sweeper despite an Olympic silver medal fill the first two-thirds of the film.52 Despite their frequency, these vignettes were merely stones skimming the pond, racism without racists. They failed to bring the audience face-to-face with the responsible parties.

That happened only twice in the film.

The first occurred when Robinson and his Negro League team take an overnight bus ride. When they stop at a roadside diner, Jackie’s teammates send him, the rookie, inside to buy dinner for them all. The scene is not violent, but it is accurate. Jackie meets Jim Crow face to face in the dishonest denials of service and the brushoff of the White patrons. The direction of the action is genuinely uncertain until a cook appears with an offer of sandwiches to go.

But that’s it. In the next scene, Clyde Sukeforth appears out of nowhere and offers Robinson a train ride to Brooklyn. We never again see the Negro League team.53 The Robinson-Rickey meeting scene is faithfully told, albeit with Rickey as the protagonist, and Act II is underway.

The second confrontation grew from Robinson’s International League season with the Montreal Royals. Two White men in the grandstands strike up a conversation with a third, who identifies as a Brooklynite acquaintance of Rickey’s.

“Tell Rickey you spoke with a couple of friends of his n_____ ballplayer.”54

“Yeah, friends,” the other says, making a throat-cutting sign with his thumb, “we’re gonna call on Robinson after the game is over.”

In the next scene, the “friends” approach Jackie and Rachel Robinson at the ballpark gate. Their demeanor and body language suggest they mean physical harm. Robinson hears Rickey’s disembodied voice, “you can’t fight back” and, voila, two Whites arrive to hustle the Robinsons to the team bus, and the “friends” scatter.

There is one other moment in the film: a montage of racial taunts, in which minor-league fans and opponents say ugly things to no one in particular, but presumably to Robinson, such as “gimme a shine,” “sambo,” and “liver lips.” But this montage stands alone. It is bracketed by a comic relief scene and an unconcerned Rickey scheming in his office with the president of the International League. Whatever the taunts are, they don’t seem connected to anything else in the picture, except perhaps the racial awareness of Jackie’s minor-league manager.

And then they are over.

That is the archetypal metaphor for The Jackie Robinson Story. The discrimination Robinson experiences is undersold, genuine but gentle. When confronted directly, Robinson prevails—but only with a helping White hand.55 White coaches give him a prized baseball glove, Whites with big hearts admit him to college, Whites scout him, sign him, manage him, and mentor him. Whites tell him when he can and can’t fight against racism.

The only scenes in which a willful Jackie Robinson runs counter to this motif are on the basepaths in the ballgame scenes. Daring and claiming, Robinson does not so much overcome racism in these moments, as outfox and outrun it. There are no White coaches giving the steal sign. Robinson steals home when he decides home is to be stolen.56

If The Jackie Robinson Story gave us nothing more than that, they would be gifts to cherish. One could watch 80 minutes of Robinson at his most daring. Alas, the filmmakers had other ideas. In the final scenes, having clinched the 1947 National League pennant, Rickey inexplicably appears in the Dodger dugout to congratulate Robinson, and the movie’s message comes into focus.

“By the way, Mr. Rickey,” Robinson says, “there’s something bothering me. About that invitation to Washington, do you really think I should go?”

There has been no prior discussion of an invitation to Washington in the movie. There does not have to be. Every theater patron knows.

“Yes, Jackie, I do,” Rickey says. “To the Senate, to the House of Representatives, to the American people. You’ve earned the right to speak. They want you to speak, about things on your mind, about a threat to peace that’s on everybody’s mind, Jackie. Now you can fight back.”

Swelling music. An exterior of the Capitol dome. Robinson at a table, dressed in a business suit, reading from a script, five sentences from his 1949 testimony.

Except, it’s not.

Below is the film’s depiction of Robinson’s HUAC testimony, side by side against the historical record. Note how The Jackie Robinson Story edits the story Robinson told.

 

 

Actual Robinson said nothing of the Cold War in his testimony.57 Movie Robinson speaks of little else. The talk of democracy, of fighting for it, of letting it be taken from us, the splicing of the 1947 pennant to the 1949 testimony, were mere Hollywood artifices. So, too, was the unspoken suggestion against the film’s persistent can-do-ism that systemic racism was unreal and that Robinson had nothing to say on the subject. He did:

The white public should start toward real understanding by appreciating that every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he’s going to use every bit of intelligence, such as he has, to stop it. This has got nothing to do with what Communists may or may not be trying to do.

And white people must realize that the more a Negro hates communism because it opposes democracy, the more he is going to hate any other influence that kills off democracy in this country—and that goes for racial discrimination in the Army, and segregation on trains and buses, and job discrimination because of religious beliefs or color or place of birth.58

But Jackie Robinson—son of sharecroppers, court-martialed by the Army for refusing to give up a bus seat, denied his most productive years in the major leagues—did not get to tell that story in The Jackie Robinson Story. Mann’s reworked script whitewashed it out.

One may well conclude Robinson knew the truth behind Hollywood’s fiction.59 As his character finishes his “testimony,” we see Robinson’s image half-dissolve into that of the Statue of Liberty. He looks into the camera. Everything he actually said about race has been edited out. That which he didn’t say about the Cold War has been added in.

The camera lingers on him, one, maybe, two seconds too long.

He shifts his jaw to the right. He is pensive and uncertain.

“Certainly not a good film”

Gerald Early said it best in 1997: “The Jackie Robinson Story is certainly not a good film.”60 Many films are not good. They can be under-budgeted, hastily shot, or sloppily written. They can skip central aspects of the subject’s life and rearrange others to fit their narratives. These are all characteristics of The Jackie Robinson Story. As Early wrote, they make the film “a white-washed version of Robinson’s life as most Hollywood biopics are white-washed versions of their subjects.”

Contemporary White critics, no doubt relieved by the film’s light touch on racial matters, were more kind. Kate Cameron of the New York Daily News gave the film 3 ½ stars. “His innate courage shines through this picture,” Cameron wrote of Robinson, “and it is that quality that gives the film biography its special appeal to the heart of the beholder.”61 Jane Corby of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote Robinson “doesn’t act in The Jackie Robinson Story, he’s just natural.”62

Louella Parsons, known as William Randolph Hearst’s Hollywood hatchet-woman, gushed, “I don’t know when a picture has left me with such a good feeling and real pride in being an American as The Jackie Robinson Story.”63 And no less than Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “Mr. Robeson does his people great harm in trying to line them up on the Communist side of the political picture. Jackie Robinson helped them greatly by his forthright statements.”64

Robinson’s old allies would have none of the whitewashing. The Daily Worker called the movie “not only misleading but dangerous.” The film “tried to rob progressives, Negro and white, of the history of their struggle against Jimcrow, to use Jackie Robinson against the unity that won him his place in baseball, and to report this story, with a brave air, yet all the while not only distorting it but lagging behind the real struggles against Jimcrow.”65

The singular fault in The Jackie Robinson Story has nothing, however, to do with filmmaking or criticism of it. The Jackie Robinson Story is a bad movie because it isn’t Jackie Robinson’s story.66 It denies him himself. His Blackness. The terror he knew for it. The beauty that shone for it. The heartache and joy he experienced because of it. The heights he reached because, and in spite, of it.

The Jackie Robinson Story is a bad hero movie because the hero does not fight his fight. In the end, a Black man is hired out, made a means to White persons’ ends.67 The film sends Jackie Robinson on an errand for a White status quo.68

But this is the final irony of a picture rich with irony. Its subject matter remains Jack Roosevelt Robinson. He is why the film endures. He is why this essay was written. He is why any reader has read this far. No matter the film’s flaws, it is timeless because Robinson is timeless.

But timelessness is not the same as importance. The film’s significance is in our hands. It is up to us to decide, more than 70 years later, whether The Jackie Robinson Story continues to stand for the proposition that the sublimation of Black personhood is not too great a burden to bear against White self-interest and a nationalist agenda, or whether it can be relegated to the dustbin of history.69

“It isn’t a perfect America and it isn’t run right,” Robinson wrote, “but it still belongs to us.”70

An imperfect America can make The Jackie Robinson Story a period piece. All we need do is stop sending Robinson out there on our errands.

For as long as we do, The Jackie Robinson Story will forever be a bad movie, no matter the number we wear.

TOM LEE is a recovering Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and attorney in Nashville, where he is member-in-charge of the Nashville office of Frost Brown Todd LLC, one of the country’s largest law firms. He graduated Order of the Coif from Vanderbilt University School of Law, where he was executive editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review. Tom is a member of the Grantland Rice-Fred Russell Chapter of SABR, where he has presented on Jackie Robinson’s political engagement as a mirror for understanding America’s shifting political landscape in the 1960s. Like Robinson, Tom is a lifelong United Methodist; he preaches in Tennessee churches as a lay speaker. A frequent contributor to the Bitter Southerner and other publications, this is Tom’s first book chapter for SABR.

 

Notes

1 For a sport rich in iconography, the Reese embrace of Robinson has a unique place. A 2007 New York Times op/ed claimed the embrace likely never happened. Stuart Miller, “Breaking the Truth Barrier,” New York Times, April 14, 2007 (accessed June 6, 2021, at https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/opinion/14miller.html). Roger Kahn, writing in his 80s, slammed Miller as “an obscure journalist” and flatly asserted, based on his own numerous interviews with Reese, the embrace occurred in Cincinnati in 1947, as Reese sought to silence the taunts of his fellow Kentuckians. Roger Kahn, Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball (New York: Rodale 2014), 272. A 2013 ESPN analysis, published to coincide with the release of the movie 42, concluded the embrace occurred, but likely in Boston in 1948, not Cincinnati in 1947. Brian Cronin, “Did Reese really embrace Robinson in ’47?,” espn.com, April 13, 2013 (accessed November 22, 2021, at https://www.espn.com/blog/playbook/fandom/post/_/id/20917/did-reese-really-embrace-robinson-in-47). Jimmy Breslin wrote of Rachel Robinson’s reaction at the 2005 dedication of a statue in Brooklyn commemorating Reese’s embrace of Robinson. “She hated it. If there was one thing she and her husband despised, it was being patronized by whites.” Jimmy Breslin, Branch Rickey (New York: Viking 2011), 120.

2 Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made (New York: Ecco Press, 1995), 168.

3 Ben Gross, “Looking and Listening,” New York Daily News, September 15, 1949: 23C.

4 Advertisement, St. Louis Globe-Democrat (October 2, 1949): 3.

5 Advertisement, Syracuse Post-Standard (September 18, 1949).

6 Wayne Oliver, “Television Top Gift to Way of Life in ’49,” Tennessean (Nashville), December 27, 1949: 15. By comparison, only 9.6 million Americans watched the 2020 World Series. “2020 World Series draws 9.6 million viewers, an all-time low,” Los Angeles Times (October 28, 2020)(accessed June 6, 2021, at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-10-28/dodgers-win-but-the-2020world-series-is-the-least-watched-ever).

7 Suzanne Spellen, “Walkabout: Brooklyn’s Fox Theatre,” Brownstoner.com (accessed June 6, 2021, at https://www.brownstoner.com/history/walkabout-brook-12/).

8 United Press, “Man Who Brought Back Nickel Beer Set To Collect On World Series Television,” Hartford Courant, October 5, 1949): 20.

9 Gerald Early, “Jackie Robinson and the Hollywood Integration Film,” in Glenn Stout and Dick Johnson, Jackie Robinson: Between the Baselines (Stroud, United Kingdom: Woodford Publishing, 1997), 99-102.

10 Early, 99.

11 Early, 101.

12 Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment (New York: Oxford, 2008), 269-84.

13 The best-known film of this genre, Home of the Brave, examined the crippling injuries of a Black World War II veteran through the lens of the racism he experienced within his Army unit. Early argues in his essay that Robinson was “the obvious inspiration” for Home of the Brave. Early, 102; see generally “The Negro Problem Pictures of 1949,” Black Classic Movies (accessed June 6, 2021, at https://www.blackclassicmovies.com/the-negro-problem-pictures-of-1949/).

14 Early, 100.

15 “From Race Music to Rhythm and Blues,” The Urban Daily (accessed March 17, 2021, at https://theurbandaily.com/816655/from-race-music-to-rhythm-blues/).

16 See generally Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York, Knopf, 1989).

17 Duberman, 241, 282-96.

18 Robeson was more provocative than successful. Following Robeson’s presentation, Landis famously told the owners, “Each club is entirely free to employ Negro players to any extent it pleases and the matter is solely for each club’s decision without any restriction whatsoever.” John Drebinger, “Owners Hear Robeson; Organized Baseball Urged to Admit Negro Players—Up To Each Club, Landis Replies,” New York Times, December 4, 1943: 17. Recent history has more fully captured Landis’ influence on maintaining baseball’s color line.

19 A French journalist attending the conference quoted Robeson to have said that the wealth of America had been built “on the backs of the white workers from Europe…and on the backs of millions of blacks…. And we are resolved to share it equally among our children. And we shall not put up with any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong. We shall not make war on anyone. We shall not make war on the Soviet Union.”

Instead, the Associated Press reported Robeson said this:

“We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share in its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels.… It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.…”

Duberman, 456-57.

20 “[N]o one seemed to be listening: his corrective remarks were not widely reprinted.” Duberman, at 467.

21 Associated Press, “Negro Baseball Star Will Give Lie to Robeson,” Binghamton Press, July 8, 1949: 12.

22 Associated Press, “Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Called to Tell Off Robeson,” Los Angeles Mirror-News, July 8. 1949: 10.

23 Associated Press, “Leading Negroes Refute Robinson,” Central New Jersey Home News, July 8, 1949: 5.

24 Associated Press, “He’d Fight Russia for U.S., Says Bums’ Jackie Robinson,” Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, July 9, 1949: 5.

25 Associated Press, “Few U.S. Negroes Are Communists, Committee Told,” Troy Times Record, July 13, 1949: 11.

26 See, e.g., “Noted Baseball Star Called,” Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington) July 19, 1949: 2.

27 The American Communist Party made no secret of its interest in integrating organized baseball. For a thorough treatment, see Henry D. Fetter, “The Party Line and the Color Line: The American Communist Party, the “Daily Worker,” and Jackie Robinson,” Journal of Sport History 28, no. 3 (2001): 375-402; Tygiel, 36. Also, see generally Peter Dreier, “Before Jackie Robinson: Baseball’s Civil Rights Movement” in Jackie: Perspectives on 42, Bill Nowlin and Glen Sparks, eds. (SABR 2021).

28 The FBI tracked Robinson’s political activities from his presence at the opening of a Harlem office of the International Workers Order in 1946, to his plans to lead a march on Washington in 1966 to protest the shooting of University of Mississippi student James Meredith. Much of the file—though not the data—appears to have been gathered after Robinson’s baseball career, while he was fundraising for the NAACP, given a 1958 memorandum referencing the “Suspected Communist Infiltration of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” at https://vault.fbi.gov/Jack%20Roosevelt%20%28Jackie%29%20Robinson. Accessed March 23, 2021 (search “Jackie Robinson”).

29 The New York Times printed Robinson’s HUAC testimony in full the next day. “Text of Jackie Robinson’s Statement to House Unit,” New York Times, July 19, 1949: 14 (hereinafter cited as “Robinson HUAC Testimony.”)

30 In Rickey & Robinson, Roger Kahn recounted an exchange with Robinson about this portion of the HUAC testimony. “‘A profound statement,’ I said to him years later. ‘For a second baseman,’ said Jackie Robinson.” Roger Kahn, Rickey & Robinson (New York: Rodale Press, 2015), 83.

31 Robinson HUAC Testimony.

32 A notable exception was The Sporting News. Its July 27 front page story, “Jackie, Under Oath, Says I Want Dough,” chose to emphasize an offhand joke Robinson made as he began his testimony: “It isn’t very pleasant for me to find myself in the middle of a public argument that has nothing to do with the standing of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the pennant race—or even the pay raise I am going to ask Mr. Branch Rickey for next year.” The publication’s coverage of Robinson’s testimony regarding Robeson didn’t begin until the story’s 13^th paragraph. The Sporting News, July 27, 1949): 1.

33 Ruth Montgomery, “Jackie Hits a Double—P. Robeson, Jim Crow,” New York Daily News, July 19, 1949: 2C.

34 Associated Press, “Jackie Robinson Brands Robeson Claim ‘Silly,’” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 1949: 1.

35 United Press, “Jackie Robinson Calls Robeson Song Off-Key,” Miami Herald, July 19, 1949: 1.

36 Associated Press, “Infielder Gives Lie to Robeson,” Spokesman-Review, July 19, 1949: 2.

37 Associated Press, “Robinson Says Race Doesn’t Need Commies,” Knoxville News-Sentinel, July 19, 1949: 6.

38 Fetter, 393.

39 Lem Graves, “Leaders Question Cause of Loyalty Probe Within Race,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 23, 1949: 2. The NAACP also wrote Chairman Wood that it “failed to see the necessity” of the HUAC hearings. “See No Need for Hearings—NAACP,” New York Age, July 16, 1949.

40 Jackie Robinson, “Why I’m Quitting Baseball,” Look (January 22, 1957): 92.

41 Robinson gave his decision to testify lengthy treatment in his autobiography. “I thought Robeson, although deeply dedicated to his people, was also strongly influenced by his attraction to Soviet Russia and the Communist cause. I wasn’t about to knock him for being a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. That was his right. But I was afraid that Robeson’s statement might discredit blacks in the eyes of whites. If his statement meant that all black people—not just some blacks—would refuse to defend America, then it seemed to me that he had been guilty of too sweeping an assumption. I was black and he wasn’t speaking for me.” Robinson, I Never Had It Made, 83.

42 Athlete biopics, especially about baseball, were common movie fare in the postwar era. See generally James J. Donahue, “Review, The Baseball Film in Postwar America: A Critical Study,” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, vol. 21. no. 1, (Fall 2012), 158.

43 Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 223.

44 Rampersad, 223.

45 Rampersad, 224.

46 Frank Eck, “Drama-Packed ‘Jackie Robinson Story’ Sticks to the Facts,” The Sporting News, May 10, 1950: 9.

47 Mann stayed in Hollywood through shooting of the film. He wedged his way into the Eagle Lion production so thoroughly, he eventually took a co-writer’s credit with Taylor on the final production. The Jackie Robinson Story, film credits.

48 William H. Mooring, “Jackie Robinson’s Story,” Tidings, (Los Angeles), March 10, 1950: 24.

49 An oft-reprinted early item claimed Lena Horne was “reported being sought” to play Rachel Robinson, see, e.g., Hollywood Citizen News, January 9, 1950: 17. The part eventually went to Ruby Dee.

50 One columnist claimed Jackie gained 25 pounds in two weeks of studio work “mainly because of the gallons of ice cream he consumed between scenes.” Frank Neill, INS, “Jackie Robinson’s Movie Viewed As ‘Hit,’” Cumberland (Maryland) Evening Times, March 28, 1950: 5.

51 Darr Smith, Los Angeles Daily News, February 27, 1950: 19.

52 Not all the disappointments Robinson experienced are portrayed in the film. In keeping with the movie’s patriotic message, there is no mention of the Army bus driver who ordered Lt. Jackie Robinson to move to the rear of a military bus in 1944—or of the young lieutenant’s courageous refusal, court martial, and acquittal. See John Vernon, “Jackie Robinson, Meet Jim Crow,” Prologue, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring 2008), accessed April 3, 2021, at https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/spring/robinson.html; Breslin, Branch Rickey, 17-26 (reprinting witness statements from Lt. Jackie Robinson’s 1944 court-martial hearing).

53 The only further mention of Robinson’s teammates—or any other Black ballplayers—is when Rickey asks Robinson whether he had a contract with the ballclub. T.Y. Baird, the owner of the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945, claimed that Rickey induced Robinson to breach a contract with the Negro National League club. See, e.g., Associated Press, “Monarchs Head Assails Signing,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 23, 1945: 28). Negro League contracts were rare. No evidence of a written Robinson contract with the Monarchs has ever surfaced, nor has any evidence that the Dodgers organization compensated the Monarchs for signing Robinson. For a broader discussion of the business conflicts, see Duke Goldman, “1933-1962: The Business Meetings of Negro League Baseball, 1933-1962” in Steve Weingarten and Bill Nowlin, eds., Baseball’s Business: The Winter Meetings, Volume 2: 1958-2016 ((Phoenix: SABR, 2017), 390-458.

54 It is the only use of the n-word in the film.

55 Robinson seemed to understand the paradox. “It isn’t even right to say I broke the color line,” Roger Kahn quotes him from a 1952 interview. “Mr. Rickey did. I played ball. Mr. Rickey made it possible for me to play ball.” Kahn, Rickey & Robinson, 173-74.

56 Robinson stole home 19 times in his career. No one in the 65 years since his retirement has stolen more. https://www.baseball-almanac.com/recbooks/rb_stbah.shtml. For a recount of all 31 times Robinson attempted a steal of home, see Bill Nowlin, “Jackie Robinson’s Steals of Home,” in Bill Nowlin and Glen Sparks, eds., Jackie: Perspectives on 42 (SABR 2021), 230.

57 “The fact that the film severely edited Robinson’s remarks suggests that systemic racism had no place in Story’s narrative.” Lisa Doris Alexander, “The Jackie Robinson Story vs. The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson vs. 42: Hollywood Representations of Jackie Robinson’s Legacy,” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, vol. 24.1-2 (Fall-Spring 2015), 90.

58 Robinson HUAC Testimony. “Highlighting this portion of Robinson’s testimony, which reads as quite frustrated and angry, would not have been in line with the stoic version of Robinson portrayed in the film; it would have complicated the us vs. them Cold War rhetoric that was prevalent at the time and would run counter to the “individual acts of discrimination” definition of racism the film projects.” Alexander, 91.

59 To whatever extent Robinson couldn’t articulate his unease in 1950, he had found his voice a generation later. “As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.” Robinson, I Never Had It Made, xxiv.

60 Jackie had arrived at that judgment 25 years earlier. “Later, I realized it had been made too quickly, that it was budgeted too low, and that, if it had been made later in my career, it could have been done much better.” Robinson, I Never Had It Made, 88.

61 Kate Cameron, “Jackie Robinson Story Touches the Heart,” New York Daily News, May 17, 1950: 78.

62 Jane Corby, “Screenings,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 17, 1950: 12.

63 Louella O. Parsons, International News Services, San Francisco Examiner, May 6, 1950: 7.

64 Eleanor Roosevelt, My Day, (November 2, 1949), quoted in Duberman, at p. 482 n.60.

65 Henry D. Fetter, “The Party Line and the Color Line: The American Communist Party, the ‘Daily Worker’, and Jackie Robinson,” Journal of Sport History 28, no. 3 (2001): 375-402.

66 Major League Baseball historian John Thorn once said, “I can think of no man having a more difficult road ahead of him than Jackie Robinson did in 1947.” Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns, Sixth Inning, quoted by Fetter, 392.

67 “When the suggestion was recently made that the committee should investigate the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, which is beginning to raise its ugly head again in various parts of the country, [Wood] remarked jovially, brushing the idea of an investigation aside as absurd, that the Ku Klux Klan ‘is an old American tradition, like that of illegal whiskey-selling.’” Robert E. Cushman, “Civil Liberties in the Atomic Age,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 249 (1947): 62.

68 White critics also praised the movie’s “realism.” In The Sporting News’ review, Eck wrote little about Robinson. Eck focused on Mann’s script and actor Minor Watson’s portrayal of Rickey. “When BR sees the movie,” Eck gushed, “he might even be surprised. It’s as close to the real thing as any ‘life story’ to ever come out of Hollywood.” Eck, 9; see also Fetter, 393.

69 Robinson understood the racial politics at play. “There are whites who would love to see us refuse to defend our country because then we could relinquish our right to be Americans.” Robinson, 83-84.

70 Robinson, 84.