No one can doubt the immense courage shown by Jackie Robinson when he took his position at first base at Ebbets Field on Tuesday afternoon, April 15, 1947. The first play of the game was a groundball to third base, a throw across the diamond to Robinson at first base, and the first putout of the game.

It wasn’t just the one moment, of course, but the ongoing import of what his presence on the field meant. Robinson was the first Black American to play what was then defined as major-league baseball at a time when baseball was dominant in American culture – truly the national pastime, but an institution that had been segregated by race.

Challenges to racism have always been fraught with peril. A generation later, Rev. Martin Luther King was shot and killed as he stood on a hotel-room balcony in Memphis. He was one among many who have lost their lives in the struggle for civil rights. More than 50 years later, and nearly 75 years after Robinson’s debut, Black citizens of the United States still suffer discrimination and obstacles and still find their very lives more in danger than do many of their fellow Americans.

To be a pioneer in 1947 required bravery. In some respects, baseball led the way to a more integrated society. Even after Jackie Robinson’s debut, however, it took 12 more years before every one of the 16 teams in the American and National Leagues integrated. Robinson had by then completed his 10-year Hall of Fame playing career. The six-time All-Star with a lifetime batting average of .309 and an on-base percentage of .409 has baseball statistics that rightly place him in Cooperstown. He won the first Rookie of the Year Award and, two years later, the National League Most Valuable Player honor. Robinson played on six pennant winners and in the World Series in 1955.

Perhaps it is true that celebrating Jackie Robinson’s courageous role in integration can sometimes reduce him to a symbol, and oversimplify his grappling with the complex racial issues of his day, allowing him to become a convenient and self-congratulatory icon celebrated by Major League Baseball today. But, in fact, he was – and remains – an important symbol, and a very meaningful and inspirational one. Certainly, there are myths related to Jackie Robinson. That comes with legend.

There is no question that there was another side to his breaking the color barrier, to be followed by Larry Doby and others. There was gain, but there was loss as well: the vibrant Negro Leagues lasted only a very few more years after that.

Our thought in assembling this book was not to take a particular tack, or drive any narrative, but simply to collect a number of articles and essays that appreciate various aspects of the life and accomplishments of Jackie Robinson.

Almost all of the articles in this book were written for the book. Some 54 members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) took time out as SABR begins to turn 50 and contributed their work as authors and editors to bring together a book appreciating the career and the life of this exceptional man.

The summer of 1960 was a special season for me. As a young lad I got my first glimpse of the legendary Jackie Robinson during a political tour. He was campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Richard Milhous Nixon. As a brash, up-and-coming little league player, I knew everything about this icon and the impact that the now-retired Jackie Robinson had had on breaking baseball’s color barrier back in 1947. I copied his pigeon-toed style of running and tried holding my bat high above my big head, with my potato-chip-flat chest to emulate his batting stance. And now #42 was coming to my town to give a campaign speech on behalf of a presidential candidate.

Lucky for me, Municipal Stadium, home of the Kansas City A’s, was only five blocks from where I sorted and traded baseball cards and stuffed them in my Roi-Tan cigar box, under the bed. I attended a lot of ball games, but I never got to see this great athlete play in person. Unfortunately, teams in the American League, like the A’s, never hosted National League clubs like the Brooklyn Dodgers. To take this opportunity and to see Robinson in the flesh would be the ultimate, ever-lasting thrill for me.

I asked my father to take me downtown to see Mr. Robinson speak on behalf of tricky Dicky. My pleading request was met with a puzzled and concerned look from my father. Years later I discovered that my father was a Democrat. Reluctantly he took me to the Music Hall auditorium, fulfilling my Robinson fantasy. With the exception of Mr. Robinson, my father and I appeared to be the only Black folks in the Hall. We overcame the uninvited stares – nothing would keep me for seeing this man among men, whom I had read so much about.

As my father and I sat in the balcony and it seemed like an eternity, as each speaker strolled to the podium to deliver promises that even a 10-year kid knew they would not keep. Needless to say, each speaker struck out with me.

Finally, the man of the hour appeared. Sitting on the edge of my seat, I took in his high-pitched voice, his salty gray hair, his chubby belly, his eloquent delivery and his professional demeanor, as I stared in awe. I remember little of what Robinson said, but recalled how professional and sincere his presentation seemed.

It took a lot of prodding to get my Democratic father to chauffeur me to the event, but he knew, like many of us, the impact this Barrier Breaker has had towards the socialization of races through the integration of our National Pastime. I knew from that day forth Mr. Jackie Robinson would become my role model for sports and beyond. For these reasons, and many others, I chose to honor number 42, Jackie Robinson, as part of my website, www.LarryLester42.com.

In February 1933 – when Jackie Robinson was 14 years old – Heywood Broun, a syndicated columnist at the New York World-Telegram, addressed the annual dinner of the all-White New York Baseball Writers Association. If Black athletes were good enough to represent the United States at the 1932 Olympic Games, Broun said, “it seems a little silly that they cannot participate in a game between the Chicago White Sox and St. Louis Browns.” There was no formal rule prohibiting Blacks from playing in the major leagues, he said, but instead a “tacit agreement” among owners. “Why, in the name of fair play and gate receipts should professional baseball be so exclusive?”1

That same month, Jimmy Powers, a popular columnist for the New York Daily News, the nation’s largest-circulation newspaper, interviewed baseball executives and players, asking if they’d object to having Black players on their teams. NL President John Heydler, Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, and star players Herb Pennock, Lou Gehrig, and Frankie Frisch, told Powers they didn’t object. Only New York Giants manager John McGraw – who, ironically, had tried to hire a Black player (posing as a Cherokee Indian) when he managed the Baltimore Orioles in 1901 – told Powers he’d opposed the idea. In his February 8, 1933, column, Powers predicted that Blacks would eventually play major-league baseball. “I base this upon the fact that the ball player of today is more liberal than yesterday’s leather-necked, tobacco-chewing sharpshooter from the cross roads.”2

Later that month, Chester Washington, sports editor of the influential Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, coordinated a four-month series reporting the views of major-league owners, managers, and players about baseball segregation. It began with an interview with Heydler, who said, “I do not recall one instance where baseball has allowed either race, creed, or color to enter into the question of the selection of its players.”3 The paper quoted Philadelphia Phillies President Gerry Nugent: “Baseball caters to all races and creeds. … It is the national game and is played by all groups. Therefore, I see no objections to negro players in the big leagues.” Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis refused to respond to the Courier, but his assistant Leslie O’Connor said there was no rule against Black players. Hiring decisions were made by owners, not the commissioner, he said.

The saga of how Robinson broke baseball’s color line in 1947 has been told many times in books, newspaper and magazine articles, and Hollywood films. It is typically told as the tale of two trailblazers – Robinson, the combative athlete, and Dodgers President and general manager Branch Rickey, the shrewd strategist – battling baseball’s, and society’s, bigotry.

The Jackie Robinson Story, released in 1950 at the height of the Cold War, five years before the Montgomery bus boycott, celebrated Robinson’s feat as evidence that America was a land of opportunity where anyone could succeed if he had the talent and will. The movie opens with the narrator saying, “This is a story of a boy and his dream. But more than that, it’s a story of an American boy and a dream that is truly American.” Rickey is portrayed as a benevolent do-gooder who, for moral and religious reasons, believes he has a responsibility to break baseball’s color barrier. The 2013 film 42 spun a similar story. It depicts Pittsburgh Courier reporter Wendell Smith as Robinson’s traveling companion and the ghostwriter for his newspaper column during his rookie season, but ignores Smith’s key role as a leader of the long crusade to integrate baseball before Robinson became a household name.

Most books and articles about this saga ignore or downplay the true story of how baseball’s apartheid system was dismantled. Rickey’s plan came to fruition only after more than a decade of protest to desegregate the national pastime. It was a political victory brought about by a progressive movement.

Throughout the Great Depression – from 1929 to 1941 — millions of workers, consumers, students, and farmers engaged in massive protests over economic hardship. This reflected the nation’s mood, a combination of anger and fear. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 election as president, with 57 percent of the vote, added an element of hope. For most Americans, New Deal reforms – including Social Security, the minimum wage, workers’ right to unionize, subsidies to troubled farmers, a massive government-funded jobs program, and stronger regulation of banks and other businesses – offered welcome relief to the suffering. In 1936, they re-elected FDR with 61 percent of the vote.

But some viewed FDR’s program as halfway measures that didn’t challenge the problem’s root causes. The collapse of America’s economy radicalized millions of Americans. Because the Depression imposed even greater hardships on Blacks than Whites, Black Americans were more open than most Whites to radical ideas.

At the time, America was deeply segregated. Black Americans, 10 percent of America’s population, were relegated to second-class status and denied basic civil and political rights in the South and elsewhere. The subjugation of Negroes, wrote sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, was “the most glaring conflict in the American conscience and greatest unsolved task for American democracy.”4

In the 1930s and 1940s, civil-rights activists fought against discrimination in housing and jobs, mobilized for a federal anti-lynching law, protested against segregation within the military, marched to open up defense jobs to Blacks during World War II, challenged police brutality and restrictive covenants that barred Blacks from certain neighborhoods, and boycotted stores that refused to hire African-Americans. The movement accelerated after the war, when returning Black veterans expected that America would open up opportunities for Black citizens.

As part of that movement, the Negro press, civil-rights groups, progressive White activists and unions, the Communist Party, and radical politicians waged a sustained campaign to integrate baseball. The coalition included unlikely allies who disagreed about political ideology but found common ground in challenging baseball’s Jim Crow system. 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.5

A few White journalists for mainstream papers, including Broun (a socialist) and Powers, joined the crusade. They reminded readers that two Black athletes – Jesse Owens and Mack Robinson (Jackie’s older brother) – had embarrassed Hitler in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin by defeating Germany’s White track stars, and that White and Black Americans alike cheered Joe Louis after he knocked out German Max Schmeling (whom Hitler touted as evidence of White Aryan superiority) in the first round at Yankee Stadium before a crowd of 70,043 in 1938.

With a few exceptions, during the 1930s and 1940s sportswriters for White-owned newspapers ignored the Negro Leagues and the burgeoning protest movement against baseball’s color line. In contrast, readers of the nation’s Black papers were well-informed about these players and the protests. These papers did more than report; they were advocates for civil rights in society and baseball.

Their reporters – especially Smith and Washington of the Pittsburgh Courier, Fay Young of the Chicago Defender, Joe Bostic of the People’s Voice in New York, Sam Lacy and Art Carter of the Baltimore Afro-American, Mabray “Doc” Kountze of Cleveland’s Call and Post, and Dan Burley of New York’s Amsterdam News – took the lead in pushing baseball’s establishment to hire Black players. They were joined by Lester Rodney, sports editor of the Communist Daily Worker. They published open letters to owners, polled White managers and players, brought Black players to unscheduled tryouts at spring-training centers, and kept the issue before the public.

For Smith, the matter was personal. In 1933, as a 19-year-old, he pitched his American Legion club in Detroit to a 1-0 victory in the playoffs. A scout for the Detroit Tigers told him, “I wish I could sign you, too, but I can’t,” because of his race. Those words “broke me up,” Smith recalled. “It was then I made a vow that I would dedicate myself to do something on behalf of the Negro ballplayers. That was one of the reasons I became a sportswriter.”6

Thanks to Smith, the Courier – with the largest circulation of any Black newspaper, growing from 46,000 readers in 1933 to over 250,000 in 1945 – became the leading voice against baseball’s racial divide. Smith expanded the Courier’s efforts to protest segregation in baseball and other sports. In his first column on the issue, on May 14, 1938, Smith criticized Black Americans for spending their hard-earned money on teams that prohibited Black players. “We know they don’t want us, but we keep giving them our money.” He also criticized Black Americans for not patronizing the Negro League teams, putting them in constant financial jeopardy.7 Smith was echoing the civil-rights movement’s demand to boycott businesses that refused to hire or show respect for Black Americans.

In 1939 Smith interviewed National League President Ford Frick, who claimed that major-league teams didn’t employ Black athletes because White fans would not accept them. He also noted that Black players wouldn’t be allowed to travel with their teams during spring training or in certain major-league cities because Southern hotels, restaurants, and trains would not accept them – a reality that, Frick said, would undermine team spirit.

Frick’s comments inspired Smith to interview eight managers and 40 National League players, which he published in a series entitled “What Big Leaguers Think of Negro League Baseball Players” between July and September 1939. Among the managers, only the Giants’ Bill Terry said Blacks should be barred from major-league teams. Dodgers manager Leo Durocher told Smith: “I’ve seen plenty of colored boys who could make the grade in the majors. Hell, I’ve seen a million. I’ve played against SOME colored boys out on the coast who could play in any big league that ever existed.” He added: “I certainly would use a Negro ball player if the bosses said it was all right.”8 Other managers and players agreed with Durocher’s view, expressing hope that Black players would one day play in the majors.9

The Negro papers extolled the talents of Black players as equal to their White counterparts. As evidence, they pointed to the outcomes of exhibition games between Negro teams and White players. On October 20, 1934, for example, the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs beat a team of major leaguers, which included the St. Louis Cardinals’ ace pitcher Dizzy Dean. A week later, Satchel Paige and the Pittsburgh Crawfords defeated the same contingent of major leaguers. In 1938 Dean told the Courier that Paige was “the pitcher with the greatest stuff I ever see.”10 In 1939 Dean – who grew up in rural Arkansas – told Smith that Paige, Josh Gibson, and Oscar Charleston were among the best players he’d ever seen. “I have played against a Negro all-star team that was so good we didn’t think we had a chance,” he said.11

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Communist Party – although never approaching 100,000 members – had a disproportionate influence in progressive and liberal circles. The CP took strong stands for unions and women’s equality and against racism, anti-Semitism, and emerging fascism in Europe. It sent organizers to the South to organize sharecroppers and tenant farmers and was active in campaigns against lynching, police brutality, and Jim Crow laws. The CP led campaigns to stop landlords from evicting tenants and to push for unemployment benefits. In Harlem, it helped launch the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, urging consumers to boycott stores that refused to hire Black employees.12 Prominent Black Americans, including Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes, were attracted to the CP.

In 1938 the American Youth Congress, a group led by CP activists, passed a resolution censuring baseball for excluding Black players. In 1939 New York State Senator Charles Perry, who represented Harlem, introduced a resolution that condemned baseball for discriminating against Black ballplayers. In 1940 sports editors from New York area college newspapers, many of them influenced by radical ideas, adopted a similar resolution. A story in the Daily Worker in 1940 proclaimed: “The campaign for the admission of Negro players to the major leagues has now become a national issue, drawing support from tens of thousands of fans and fair-minded Americans who have the best interest of the game at heart. … There is now the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball, which is growing rapidly and which has just launched a campaign to end this evil. … The magnificent talents of the Negro would be a tonic to the game, enriching it beyond measure.”13

Unions played an important part in this crusade. The New York Trade Union Athletic Association, a coalition of progressive unions, organized an “end Jim Crow in baseball” day of protest at the 1940 World’s Fair.14 Unions and civil-rights groups picketed outside Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field in New York, and Comiskey Park and Wrigley Field in Chicago. The speakers included Congressman Vito Marcantonio of New York and Richard Moore of the left-wing National Negro Congress. Over several years, these activists gathered more than a million signatures on petitions, demanding that baseball tear down the color barrier. In 1943 similar pickets occurred outside Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, where the minor-league Angels played.15 Angels President Pants Rowland wanted to give tryouts to several Black players. He and Philip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, the parent team, met with William Patterson, a civil-rights lawyer and Communist Party member. But Wrigley nixed the tryout idea, saying he favored integration but “I don’t think the time is now.”16

No White journalist played a more central role in baseball’s civil-rights movement than the Daily Worker’s Lester Rodney. Born in 1911, he was radicalized by his family’s own hardships and by the enormous suffering he witnessed during the Depression.

He first encountered the Daily Worker while attending New York University. He agreed with its political perspective but was appalled by its failure to take sports seriously. The paper occasionally wrote about union-sponsored and industrial baseball leagues, but not professional sports. He wrote a letter to the paper’s editor, criticizing its sports coverage. “You guys are focusing on the things that are wrong in sports. And there’s plenty that’s wrong. But you wind up painting a picture of professional athletes being wage slaves with no joy, no elan – and that’s just wrong. Of course there’s exploitation, but … the professional baseball player still swells with joy when his team wins. … (T) hat’s not fake.” The paper hired him and soon made him its first sports editor. He served in the capacity from 1936 to 1958, when he quit the Communist Party.

Durocher once told Rodney: “For a fucking Communist, you sure know your baseball.”17 For a dozen years, Rodney was one of the few White sportswriters to cover the Negro Leagues and to protest baseball segregation. One of his editorials attacked “every rotten Jim Crow excuse offered by the magnates for this flagrant discrimination.”18 “Paige Beats Big Leaguers: Negro Team Wins 3-1 Before 30,000 Fans in Chicago,” declared a 1942 headline, typical of the Daily Worker’s advocacy journalism.19

According to Rodney, the paper “had an influence far in excess of its circulation, partly because a lot of our readership was trade union people” and because it was “on the desk of every other newspaper” in New York.20

In a 1936 interview with Rodney, Frick insisted that there was no prohibition against Black players in the majors and, echoing Landis, said that owners had the responsibility for signing players. Some baseball executives told Rodney that there were no Black players good enough to play in the majors. Others blamed the fans, insisting that they wouldn’t stand for having Black players on their favorite teams. Or they’d blame the players, insisting that they’d rebel if the owners hired Black players to be their teammates.

Like Smith and other sympathetic reporters, Rodney shot down the argument that most players and managers opposed baseball integration. A typical Daily Worker story, from July 19, 1939, was headlined: “Big Leaguers Rip Jim Crow.” It quoted Cincinnati Reds manager Bill McKechnie, who said that “I’d use Negroes if I were given permission.” Reds star pitcher Bucky Walters declared them “some of the best players I’ve ever seen.” Johnny Van der Meer, another pitching ace, said: “I don’t see why they’re banned.” Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio told Rodney that Satchel Paige was the best pitcher he ever faced.21

Rodney had great rapport with the players. Between 1937 and 1939, he even recruited two progressive players – Yankees third baseman Red Rolfe and Cubs first baseman Ripper Collins – to write for the Daily Worker. They wrote about baseball, not politics, but, according to Irwin Silber, Rodney’s biographer, “the fact that a major-league ballplayer would be willing to write for the Daily Worker signified a degree of legitimacy for the Communist Party – or at least its newspaper – that could hardly have been imagined a few years earlier.”22

According to Rodney, “Readers loved it, of course, but the really fascinating thing was the next day after a story would come out. I’d go into the dressing room before the game – and just picture this – there are the Yankees – the New York Yankees – sitting around the dressing room reading the Daily Worker. If Colonel Ruppert [the Yankees owner] had walked in, he would have had a heart attack.” And there was “not a word of red-baiting” of Rolfe or Collins by their teammates.23

Rodney interviewed Negro players to challenge the myth that they preferred playing in the Negro Leagues to breaking into the majors. In an interview with Rodney, Paige observed: “We’ve been playing a team of major-league all stars after the regular season in California for four years and they haven’t beaten us yet. … Must be a few men who don’t want us to play big league ball. The players are okay and the crowds are with us.”24

For Rodney, reporting and advocacy were intertwined. In 1941 he and sportswriters for Negro newspapers, including Smith, sent telegrams to team owners asking them to give tryouts to Black players. In 1942 the Chicago White Sox reluctantly invited the Negro League pitcher Nate Moreland and UCLA’s All-American football star Jackie Robinson to attend a tryout camp in Pasadena. Manager Jimmy Dykes raved about Robinson: “He’s worth $50,000 of anybody’s money. He stole everything but my infielders’ gloves.” But the two ballplayers never heard from the White Sox again.

In response to Rodney’s telegram, the Pittsburgh Pirates invited Negro League players Roy Campanella, Sammy Hughes, and David Barnhill to a tryout. But as Campanella, later a Hall of Fame catcher with the Dodgers, recalled in his 1959 autobiography It’s Good to Be Alive, the invitation letter from Pirates owner William Benswanger “contained so many buts that I was discouraged even before I finished reading the letter.”25 Benswanger canceled the tryout.

Despite his strong opposition to communism, Smith acknowledged Rodney’s role on behalf of baseball integration. In an August 20, 1939, letter to Rodney in the Daily Worker, Smith wrote that he wanted to “congratulate you and the Daily Worker for the way you have joined with us in the current series concerning Negro Players in the major leagues, as well as all your past great efforts in this aspect.” He expressed the hope of further collaboration.26

After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, this coalition escalated its campaign to integrate baseball.

Some African-Americans had mixed feelings about supporting the war effort when they faced such blatant discrimination at home. When he was drafted, Nate Moreland, a Negro League pitcher, complained: “I can play in Mexico, but I have to fight for America, where I can’t play.” Activists carried picket signs at Yankee Stadium, asking, “If we are able to stop bullets, why not balls?”27 An editorial in the New Negro World in May 1942 reflected similar frustrations:

“If my nation cannot outlaw lynching, if the uniform [of the Army] will not bring me the respect of the people that I serve, if the freedom of America will not protect me as a human being when I cry in the wilderness of ingratitude; then I declare before both God and man … TO HELL WITH PEARL HARBOR.”28

A month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States entered the war, James Thompson, a cafeteria worker in Kansas, coined the phrase “Double Victory” in a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier.

“The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in so-called democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression, slavery and tyranny,” Thompson wrote. “If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict, then let we colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory. The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”29

Black leaders and newspapers enthusiastically supported the “Double V” campaign. Cumberland “Cum” Posey, owner of the Negro League’s Homestead Grays, suggested, in his weekly Courier column “Posey’s Points,” that every Negro League player wear a Double V symbol on its uniform.

Throughout the war years, Smith, Rodney, and other progressive sportswriters voiced their outrage about the hypocrisy of baseball’s establishment.30

In an open letter to Landis published in the Daily Worker in May 1942, Rodney wrote: “Negro soldiers and sailors are among those beloved heroes of the American people who have already died for the preservation of this country and everything this country stands for – yes, including the great game of baseball. You, the self-proclaimed ‘Czar’ of baseball, are the man responsible for keeping Jim Crow in our National Pastime. You are the one refusing to say the word which would do more to justify baseball’s existence in this year of war than any other single thing.”

In a July 1942 column, Smith wrote that “big league baseball is perpetuating the very things thousands of Americans are overseas fighting to end, namely, racial discrimination and segregation.” The next year, he called on President Roosevelt to adopt a “Fair Employment Practice Policy” for major-league baseball similar to the one he’d adopted in war industries and governmental agencies.

In June 1942, large locals of several major unions – including the United Auto Workers and the National Maritime Union, as well as the New York Industrial Union Council of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) – sent resolutions to Landis demanding an end to baseball segregation. The union leaders told Landis’s secretary, Leslie O’Connor, that unless he let them address the owners’ meeting, they would take the issue to the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), the federal agency created by FDR in 1941 to investigate discrimination in the defense industry and other sectors.31 Landis and the owners refused to meet with them.

The unions’ protest made headlines in both Negro and White newspapers across the country. The stories mostly focused on Landis’s refusal to meet with them, but just getting the issue in the news helped them build public support for their cause.32 The movement gained an important ally when Chicago’s Catholic bishop, Bernard Shiel, announced he would urge Landis to support integration.33 In July 1942, Landis summoned Durocher to a meeting in Chicago, and rebuked him for his comments claiming that baseball banned Black players. Landis issued a statement claiming that “there is no baseball rule – formal, informal, or otherwise – that says a ball player must be white.”34 Most newspapers took Landis at his word, but the Black papers and the Daily Worker called him a hypocrite.

That December, 10 CIO leaders went to the baseball executives’ winter meetings in Chicago to demand that major-league teams recruit Black players, but Landis again refused to meet with them.35 Only Chicago Cubs owner Phil Wrigley broke ranks. After the official meeting ended, he invited union leaders to his office and told them he favored integration and revealed that, contrary to his fellow owners’ claims, there was, in fact, a “gentlemen’s agreement” among them to keep Blacks out of major-league baseball. “There are men in high places,” he told them, “who don’t want to see it.”36 Frustrated by the lack of progress, in February 1943 a broad coalition of unions, left-wing groups, religious and civil-rights organizations, including the Urban League and the NAACP, met in Chicago and adopted a resolution demanding the integration of baseball, to send to Landis, team owners, and President Roosevelt.37

Smith spent much of 1943 lambasting Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith for his outspoken opposition to allowing Blacks in the majors. Griffith insisted that Blacks should focus on improving their own leagues. Smith recognized that Griffith was profiting handsomely by renting his ballpark to Negro League teams. He was also angered that during World War II Griffith signed foreign-born ballplayers, including many Latin Americans, instead of Black athletes to replace White players. Griffith “has so many foreigners on his team it is necessary to have an interpreter,” Smith wrote.38

In December 1943 Smith asked Landis to meet with the publishers of leading Black newspapers at the owners’ December meeting. Landis agreed, pressured in part by a resolution sponsored by a New York City Council member demanding that the major leagues recruit Black players. This was the first time that representatives of the Black community met directly with baseball’s establishment.

Smith brought seven newspapermen along, as well as Paul Robeson, the Black actor, singer, activist, and former All-American athlete at Rutgers. Landis began the meeting by insisting that he wanted it “clearly understood that there is no rule, nor to my knowledge, has there ever been, formal or informal, or any understanding, written or unwritten, subterranean or sub-anything, against the hiring of Negroes in the major leagues.”39

Then Landis introduced Robeson, who gave an impassioned 20-minute appeal, referencing his experience in college and professional football and his current work as an actor, dispelling the idea that desegregation creates chaos. “They said that America never would stand for my playing Othello with a white cast, but it is the triumph of my life,” he declared. “The time has come when you must change your attitude toward Negroes. … Because baseball is a national game, it is up to baseball to see that discrimination does not become an American pattern. And it should do this this year.”40

The owners gave him a rousing applause, but Landis had instructed them to ask him no questions.

Landis next introduced John Sengstacke, president of the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association and the publisher of the Chicago Defender. Sengstacke called the ban against Black players “un-American” and “undemocratic.” Then Ira Lewis, president of the Courier, told the owners it was simply untrue that major-league players would refuse to play against Black athletes, based on Smith’s many interviews. He also noted that Black players could compete with White players at the same level, reminding the owners that Black teams had defeated teams of major leaguers in various exhibition games.41

None of the baseball owners and executives asked the Black publishers any questions. After the meeting ended, they issued an official statement repeating Landis’s claims.

In 1944 Smith wrote several sympathetic stories to help publicize the court-martial of a Black soldier at Fort Hood, Texas – a former UCLA four-sport athlete – for refusing to go to the back of a military bus. The soldier was Jackie Robinson, who befriended Smith and was grateful for his support.

In early 1945, a few months after Landis died, baseball’s owners selected Albert “Happy” Chandler as the next baseball commissioner. As governor and then senator from Kentucky, Chandler echoed the segregationist views of most White Kentuckians. So when Pittsburgh Courier reporter Ric Roberts asked Chandler about allowing Blacks in the big leagues, he was surprised to hear Chandler say that he didn’t think it was fair to perpetuate the ban and that teams should hire players to win ballgames “whatever their origin or race.”42 Baseball’s integration crusaders felt that even if Chandler wasn’t an ally, he wouldn’t be an implacable obstacle as Landis had been.

On April 6, 1945, as the war was winding down, Black sportswriter Joe Bostic of the People’s Voice appeared unannounced at the Dodgers’ Bear Mountain, New York, training camp with Negro League stars Terris McDuffie and Dave Thomas and pressured Rickey into giving them tryouts. The next day, Rickey and manager Durocher watched the two athletes perform, but determined that they were not major-league caliber. Moreover, Rickey was furious. He wanted to bring Black players into major-league baseball, but he wanted to do it on his terms and his timetable. He didn’t want the public to think that he was being pressured into it. “I am more for your cause than anybody else you know,” he told Bostic, “but you are making a mistake using force. You are defeating your own aims.” But the ploy made the news. The New York Times ran a story headlined: “Two Negroes Are Tried Out by Dodgers but They Fail to Impress President Rickey.”43

With many progressive unions and civil-rights groups, a large Black population, and three major-league teams, New York City was the center of the movement to end Jim Crow in baseball. On Opening Day of 1944, for example, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a demonstration outside Yankee Stadium to enlighten fans and castigate the owners of the game’s most powerful franchise. Several New York politicians were allies of the campaign to integrate baseball. Running for re-election as a Communist to the New York City Council in 1945, Ben Davis – an African-American who starred on the football field for Amherst College before earning a law degree at Harvard – 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.”44

In March of 1945, the New York State Legislature passed, and Republican Gov. Thomas E. Dewey signed, 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 established a Committee on Baseball to push the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers to sign Black players. Rickey met with LaGuardia but didn’t reveal his plan. Left-wing Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented Harlem, called for the US Commerce Department to investigate baseball’s racist practices.

The baseball establishment was feeling the heat. Sam Lacy, a reporter for the Afro-American, wrote to all of the owners suggesting that they set up an integration committee. To deflect the problem and avoid bad publicity, the owners reluctantly agreed to study the issue of discrimination. Rickey (representing the NL) agreed to serve on the committee along with Yankees President Larry MacPhail (representing the AL), Lacy, and Philadelphia Judge Joseph H. Rainey, an African-American. But, according to Lacy, “MacPhail always found a way to be too busy for us,” and the full committee never met. Rickey told Lacy that he would work to integrate baseball on his own.45

Rickey wasn’t pleased with this pressure, which he knew was partly orchestrated by Communists and other radicals.

Rickey’s White scouts, unfamiliar with the Negro Leagues, couldn’t help him find the Black player he wanted to be baseball’s trailblazer. Instead, Rickey had subscriptions to the major Negro newspapers, which published Negro League box scores, statistics, and schedules, and whose sportswriters gave accounts of its best players. In 1945 Rickey gave his scouts a list of players to follow, pretending that he was interested in starting his own all-Black baseball league to compete with the existing Negro Leagues.

Rickey’s search for the right player was inadvertently aided by Isadore Muchnick, a progressive Jewish member of the Boston City Council. In 1945 Muchnick was determined to push the Boston Red Sox to hire Black players. But owner Tom Yawkey was among baseball’s strongest opponents of integration. Muchnick threatened to deny the Red Sox a permit needed to play on Sundays unless the team considered hiring Black players. Working with Smith and White sportswriter Dave Egan of the Boston Record, Muchnick persuaded reluctant general manager Eddie Collins to give three Negro League players – Robinson, Sam Jethroe, and Marvin Williams – a tryout at Fenway Park on April 16.

Robinson had already endured the earlier bogus tryout with the White Sox four years earlier in Pasadena. He was skeptical about the Red Sox’ motives now, He and the other two players performed well. Robinson, the most impressive of the three, hit line drives to all fields. “Bang, bang, bang; he rattled it,” Muchnick recalled. “Jackie hit balls over the fence and against the wall,” echoed Jethroe. “What a ballplayer,” said Hugh Duffy, the Red Sox’ chief scout and onetime outstanding hitter. “Too bad he’s the wrong color.”46

The Red Sox, Pirates, and White Sox had no intention of signing any of the Black players from the tryouts. But the public pressure and media publicity helped raise awareness and furthered the cause. And it helped give Rickey, who did want to hire Black players, a sense of urgency that if he wanted to be baseball’s racial pioneer, he needed to act quickly.

After the phony Fenway Park tryout, Smith headed to Brooklyn to tell Rickey about Robinson’s superlative performance. Smith was convinced that among major-league owners, Rickey was the desegregation campaign’s strongest ally. The meeting cemented the relationship between the two men. Smith kept offering Rickey the names of Black ballplayers, but gave Robinson his strongest endorsement.

If Bill Veeck – who voted several times for Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party candidate for president – had his way, major-league baseball would have integrated five years before Robinson signed with the Dodgers. In 1942, when he owned the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers, the 28-year old Veeck learned that the Philadelphia Phillies were bankrupt and for sale. He quietly found investors, including CIO unions, then made a deal with the Phillies’ owner, Gerry Nugent, to buy the team.47 As he left for Philadelphia to seal the deal, he ran into John Carmichael, a Chicago Daily News sports columnist. He told Carmichael, “I’m going to Philadelphia. I’m going to buy the Phillies. And do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put a whole Black team on the field.”48

Veeck believed that recruiting Negro Leagues stars could turn the lowly Phillies into a winning team and demonstrate that Black players were of major-league caliber. But hours before leaving for Philadelphia, Veeck made the mistake of informing Landis about his intentions. Veeck later recounted: “I got on the train feeling I had not only a Major League ball club but I was almost a virtual cinch to win the pennant next year.” Before he had even reached Nugent’s office the next day, Veeck learned that the NL had taken over the Phillies the night before and was seeking a new owner. Veeck was not on their list. As Veeck recounted in his 1962 autobiography, Landis and Frick had orchestrated a quick sale of the Phillies to another buyer.49

Despite this setback, Veeck continued to participate in baseball’s civil-rights movement. In the early 1940s, as owner of the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers, Veeck sat in the “colored” section of the stands during the team’s spring training in Ocala, Florida. The local sheriff and mayor showed up, ordered him to move, and threatened to arrest him for violating Florida’s Jim Crow laws. Veeck refused and threatened to pull the team’s lucrative spring-training program. The local officials left him alone after that.50 In 1947, shortly after Robinson joined the Dodgers, Veeck, who then owned the Cleveland Indians, hired Larry Doby as the AL’s first Black player and moved the team’s spring-training venue from Florida to Arizona.

A little-known episode in the battle to integrate baseball took place in the US military in Europe, led by Sam Nahem, a right-handed pitcher who embraced left-wing politics.51 Nahem pitched for Brooklyn College’s baseball team and played fullback on its football team. At the time, Brooklyn College was a center of political activism, and Nahem began participating in Communist Party activities there. Between 1938 and 1941, Nahem pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, and Philadelphia Phillies and earned a law degree at St. John’s University in the offseasons.

Like most radicals of that era, Nahem believed that baseball should be racially integrated. He talked to some of his teammates to encourage them to be more 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.”52

During World War II, many professional players were in the military, so the quality of play on military bases was excellent. After Germany surrendered in May 1945, the military expanded its baseball program. That year, over 200,000 troops played on military teams in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and Britain.

Many top Negro League ballplayers were in the military, but they faced segregation, discrimination, and humiliation. 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.”53 Most Black soldiers with baseball talent were confined to playing on all-Black teams.

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. There, 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. He also finished second in hitting with a .400 batting average and played every defensive position except catcher. In September 1944, his Fort Totten team beat the Philadelphia Athletics 9-5 in an exhibition game. Nahem pitched six innings, gave up only two runs and five hits, and slugged two homers, accounting for seven of his team’s runs.

Sent overseas in late 1944, Nahem served with an antiaircraft artillery division. From his base in Rheims, he was assigned to run two baseball leagues in France, while also managing and playing for his own team, the Overseas Invasion Service Expedition (OISE) All-Stars, which represented the army command in charge of communication and logistics. The team was made up mainly of semipro, college, and ex-minor-league players. Besides Nahem, only one other OISE player, Russ Bauers, who had compiled a 29-29 won-loss record with the Pirates between 1936 and 1941, had major-league experience.

Defying the military establishment and baseball tradition, Nahem insisted on having African-Americans on his team. He recruited Willard Brown, a slugging outfielder for the Kansas City Monarchs and Leon Day, a star pitcher for the Newark Eagles.

Nahem’s OISE team won 17 games and lost only one, attracting as many as 10,000 fans to its games, reaching the finals against the 71st Infantry Red Circlers, representing General George Patton’s Third Army. One of Patton’s top officers assigned St. Louis Cardinals All-Star outfielder Harry Walker to assemble a team. Besides Walker, the Red Circlers included seven other major leaguers, including the Cincinnati Reds’ 6-foot-6 inch side-arm pitcher Ewell “The Whip” Blackwell.

Few people gave Nahem’s OISE All-Stars much chance to win the European Theater of Operations (ETO) championship, known as the GI World Series. It took place in September, a few months after the defeat of Germany.

They played the first two games in Nuremberg, Germany, in the same stadium where Hitler had addressed Nazi Party rallies. Allied bombing had destroyed the city but somehow spared the stadium. The US Army laid out a baseball diamond and renamed the stadium 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’s team 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 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.54 In the fourth game, the Third Army’s Bill Ayers, who had pitched in the minor leagues since 1937, shut out the OISE squad, beating Day, 5-0.

The teams returned to Nuremberg for the deciding game on September 8, 1945. Nahem started for the OISE team 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 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.55

Back in France, Brig. Gen. Charles Thrasher organized a parade and a banquet dinner, with steaks and champagne, for the OISE All-Stars. As historian Robert Weintraub has noted: “Day and Brown, who would not be allowed to eat with their teammates in many major-league towns, celebrated alongside their fellow soldiers.”56

One of the intriguing aspects of this episode is that, despite the fact that both major-league baseball and the American military were racially segregated, no major newspaper even mentioned the historic presence of two African-Americans on the OISE roster. 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. For example, an Associated Press story about the fourth game simply referred to “pitcher Leon Day of Newark.”

Although Rickey knew Nahem when he played for the St. Louis Cardinals, it isn’t known if Rickey was aware of Nahem’s triumph over baseball segregation in the military. But in October 1945, a month after Nahem pitched his integrated team to victory in the European military championship, Rickey announced that Robinson had signed a contract with the Dodgers.

The protest movement for baseball integration had set the stage for Robinson’s entrance into the major leagues.

PETER DREIER is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and founding chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. He has written or coauthored five books, including “The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame” (Nation Books), “Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century” (University Press of Kansas), and “We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style” (The New Press). His next book, coauthored with Robert Elias, “Baseball Rebels: The Reformers and Radicals Who Shook Up the Game and Changed America,” will be published in 2022. He writes for the Los Angeles Times, American Prospect, The Nation, Talking Points Memo, and other publications, mostly about politics but occasionally about baseball. He has written profiles of pitchers Sam Nahem and Joe Black for the SABR Biography Project.

Notes

Jackie Robinson in his UCLA track uniform. (UCLA LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)

Once he got to the major leagues, it didn’t take long for Jackie Robinson to establish his credentials as a Hall of Fame baseball player.

He was named Rookie of the Year in 1947, and MVP two years later. His skill at baseball belied a tremendous athleticism. In fact, in the years leading up to American involvement in World War II, he had distinguished himself in several sports.

Thousands had filled stadiums to watch Robinson’s athletic prowess as an amateur in Southern California – not in baseball, though. Although Robinson lettered in baseball at UCLA, it was probably the weakest of the four sports in which he excelled. Rather, they’d file into the Rose Bowl or the Coliseum to watch him play football. Robinson was also a national champion long jumper, and played basketball in college as well.

But he went on to be a trailblazer for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the year after two college teammates integrated pro football. When it came to pro sports, major-league baseball was king. The NBA didn’t exist, and the NFL at the time was still regarded in many ways as a fly-by-night, pass-the-hat league, dwarfed in popularity by the college game. Race aside, Robinson could have gone professional in any sport. He was, as Newspaper Enterprise Association sportswriter Don Sanders called him, “the best all-around athlete on the coast.”1

Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia, in 1919, but his family moved to Southern California a little more than a year later. He attended John Muir Technical High School in Pasadena, where he participated in the glee club in addition to four sports: football, baseball, basketball, and track, competing in what was then called the broad jump but is more frequently called the long jump.

In baseball, Robinson played shortstop at Muir – except for one year when he played catcher to fill a need – and, largely on the strength of his skills, in 1935 the team received an invitation to the celebrated Pomona Tournament, an enormous event, with an appearance by Governor Frank Merriam, comedian Joe E. Brown as the banquet speaker, and Mickey Rooney throwing out the first pitch of the championship game. It was the first time a team with African-American players was allowed to participate. (However, while his White teammates were able to find lodging, Robinson had to return home to Pasadena nightly.) Robinson stole a tournament-high 11 bases.2

Muir returned to the tournament the following year and ended up facing another future Hall of Famer: Ted Williams and San Diego Hoover High School. In that game, Robinson had three hits and stole home, but Hoover won 8-7, as Williams hit a 450-foot home run.3 Robinson received additional accolades in the fall of 1936, when he won the junior singles title of the Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament.4

When Robinson came to Pasadena Junior College, after graduating from Muir, he might have been best known as the younger brother of Mack Robinson, who’d won the Silver Medal in the 200-meter dash, finishing second to Jesse Owens, at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Jackie Robinson would soon prove himself in his own right. In his autobiography I Never Had It Made, Robinson recalled competing in the broad jump in Pomona one morning, setting a record, and then driving to Glendale for an afternoon baseball game, where he played shortstop as Pasadena won the championship.5 Duke Snider, who grew up in Compton (among his high-school friends was future NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle), recalled watching Robinson play a game in Pasadena, leave the field during a game to go to the nearby track, compete in the broad jump – still in his baseball uniform – and return to the ballgame.6

In his second year at Pasadena, Robinson scored 131 points on the gridiron and gained more than 1,500 yards – drawing thousands of fans to junior-college games – and set a juco record in the broad jump and was all-conference in basketball. His baseball performance was almost an afterthought, but he batted .417.7

Robinson had his pick of colleges to attend after Pasadena, but he ended up staying close to home, going to UCLA. (No doubt a factor was the Bruins hiring a new coach, longtime assistant Babe Horrell, a Pasadena native.) Upon Robinson’s arrival at UCLA, it was treated as almost a sure thing that he’d start on the football team. “Pasadena and Westwood faithfuls pin great hopes on Jackie and predict great things on his passing and elusive running that have made him the greatest open field runner in junior college circles,” the UCLA Daily Bruin wrote in its 1939 registration edition.8 Running backs Robinson, Woody Strode, and Kenny Washington were referred to as the Gold Dust Trio.9

It didn’t take long for Robinson to live up to his reputation. After just four games, the Daily Bruin touted him as “the toe-dancing tornado!” and said he was better than the old Galloping Ghost himself, Red Grange.10 And that was before Robinson led the Bruins to a 16-6 win over Oregon, catching a 66-yard touchdown pass from Washington and running 83 yards for another score, prompting Ducks coach Tex Oliver to say, “You need mechanized cavalry to stop him. He runs as fast at three-quarter speed as the average player does at top speed, and he still has that extra quarter to draw upon.”11

The season culminated in a game against Southern California that drew more than 103,000 fans – then a record for a college football game – to the Coliseum. With a bid to the Rose Bowl on the line, the teams battled to a scoreless tie, as a late drive by the Bruins stalled, leaving them, as the campus paper said, “Two yards from the Rose Bowl!”12 USC got the bowl bid, but the Bruins still finished 6-0-4 – their first undefeated season – and were voted seventh in the Associated Press poll.

Originally, it was thought Robinson would concentrate on baseball in the spring, forgoing basketball and track (his Olympic aspirations came to a halt with the onset of World War II, leading to the cancellation of the 1940 Games), but it was announced shortly after the basketball team started practice that Robinson would be part of it.13 Robinson scored 148 points in 12 games, good enough to lead the Southern Division of the Pacific Coast Conference. However, he opted not to participate in track at UCLA in 1940, a move that coach Harry Trotter said altered the balance of power in the league.14

A week after the basketball season ended, Robinson was playing in an exhibition for the baseball team, where he got four straight hits and stole four bases, including home. “The game had marked the first time Robinson has stepped on a diamond since last August,” Johnny Beckler wrote in the Daily Bruin. “And the amazing rapidity at which he got his batting and fielding eye speaks well enough for his ability as a baseballer.”15

Jackie Robinson playing football for UCLA in 1939. (UCLA LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS)

Jackie Robinson’s UCLA college yearbook page, 1939. (COURTESY OF BRYAN STEVERSON)

In the fall of 1944, Jackie Robinson’s life was at a crossroads. A few days after Thanksgiving, he was honorably discharged from the US Army, where he’d made headlines for refusing to move to the back of a military bus. Dismissed from his barracks at Fort Hood, Texas, he found himself with no job, no prospects, and no particular plans for the future. So he decided to pay a visit to an old friend – and before he knew it, Robinson stumbled into a new job as head coach of a college basketball team.

Robinson spent the winter of 1944-45 as the basketball coach of Samuel Huston College, a tiny Historically Black College (HBCU) in Austin, Texas. In a life where seemingly every moment was assiduously documented, Robinson’s stint as a college coach is perhaps the least known aspect of his biography. For one thing, basketball ranks a clear fourth on the list of sports in which Robinson achieved fame, after baseball, football, and track. For another, the tiny school where he coached, Sam Huston, no longer exists in that form, having been absorbed into another Austin HBCU, Tillotson College, as part of a 1952 merger. (The resulting school, Huston-Tillotson University, occupies the former campus of Tillotson College.)

Whatever scant records once existed were lost in the merger, and Austin newspapers in 1945 pointedly ignored athletic contests involving the tiny Black school with a shoestring budget. Few important people in Robinson’s life were around to remember the time – his fiancée, Rachel Isum, was then living in California – and Jackie himself rarely discussed the experience. As far as this author can determine, no substantive quotes or reminiscences by Robinson about his time as a basketball coach have survived. All in all, these circumstances combine to make the first half of 1945 the most recondite and difficult-to-research period of Jackie Robinson’s life.

One thing is for certain: Robinson owed his position at Sam Huston to Karl Downs, his childhood pastor and the closest thing to a father figure Robinson had in his life. The two had first met in 1938, when Downs, a tall, wiry young Texan, became the pastor at Scott United Methodist Church, which the Robinson family attended. At 25, Downs was just six years older than Robinson, and he enacted a number of programs intended to make the church more appealing to young people. “Those of us who had been indifferent church members began to feel an excitement in belonging,” Robinson later wrote.1

Downs appears to have viewed Robinson, then a young ne’er-do-well and budding gang member, as someone who could achieve great things with the proper mentorship, and he endeavored to take the teenager under his wing. “Karl Downs had the ability to communicate with you spiritually, and at the same time he was fun to be with,” Robinson wrote. “Most important, he knew how to listen. Often when I was deeply concerned about personal crises, I went to him.” Before long, Robinson was teaching Sunday school at the church, and he and Downs became close friends, spending time playing golf and other sports together.2 “He was a quiet, sweet man, someone you could talk to,” Rachel Robinson said of Downs. “Karl was the father that Jack didn’t have. Jack was so close to him. He kept saying that Karl changed his life.”3

By 1944, six years later, both men had come a long way from their days at the church in Pasadena. Robinson was now an Army veteran and a famous former athlete. Downs was now the president of Sam Huston College, a tiny Black college in Austin from which he himself had graduated a decade earlier. During his time as a soldier at Fort Hood, Robinson was a frequent presence at Downs’s Austin home, making the 90-minute trip to visit almost every weekend.4 “He’d just come down and have dinner with the president,” Harold “Pea Vine” Adanandus, the college’s athletic trainer, recalled. “And we didn’t know it at the time, but the president was also recruiting Jackie to coach the basketball team.”5

Samuel Huston College, founded in 1876, was not named after the famous Texan hero Sam Houston, but rather after an Iowa farmer who had once donated $9,000 to the school. Since being named school president in 1943, Downs had set about modernizing and expanding the struggling college, which always seemed to be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.6 Downs enlarged its campus, tripled enrollment from 222 to 659, and brought in a series of prominent speakers and performers including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Duke Ellington. 7

Downs didn’t have a lot of money to funnel into improving the athletic department, but he did have one thing: a close friendship with one of the greatest college athletes of all time. Robinson, of course, had famously starred in four sports at UCLA, including basketball, in which he twice led the conference in scoring.8 Downs persuaded him to become Sam Huston’s director of athletics, a job that also included coaching the basketball team. “There was very little money involved, but I knew that Karl would have done anything for me, so I couldn’t turn him down,” Robinson wrote in his memoir, I Never Had It Made.9 Recalled one of Downs’s associates: “Bringing Jackie Robinson to campus was vintage Karl Downs. Nothing like that ever happened before Karl came.”10

The players and staff of the Sam Huston Dragons were thrilled with the last-minute news. “We didn’t know who our basketball coach was going to be,” Adanandus, the athletic trainer, said. “Just before the season started, he came in and went right to work.” Robinson took the job more seriously than any of his predecessors had. He instituted a physical fitness program (the school’s first) and put his own impressive collection of athletic medals on display to serve as an inspiration of sorts. “We were one of the few teams that ran at that time,” said one of the players, Roland Harden. “He got out there with us and actually showed us what to do and was a better player than anybody on our team. Or anybody we played, really. And he was a gentleman. He required us to wear suits and ties when we got off the bus.”11 Another player, D.C. Clements, recalled that Robinson “was a disciplinarian coach. He believed we should be students first and athletes second. If you cut a class or anything like that, he would put you off the team or give you some laps. He was a great coach and a great teacher.”12

With the hands-on Robinson playing in the team’s practices himself, it was obvious to everyone that the 26-year-old coach was a far better player than any of his students. “He liked to play around the basket, rebounding and all that,” Adanandus recalled. “He was tough around the basket. He was just an exceptional athlete, and you could tell he still wanted to play. He wanted to play, but he’d have to sit on the bench when we were playing those college teams.” However, Robinson was free to play as a member of the team in non-intercollegiate games – mainly scrimmages and exhibitions against nearby military teams. “We won all of [the games] when Jackie played,” Adanandus said. “We were undefeated with Jackie. Any time the team seemed to be getting behind, Jackie would have to go in.”13

The Dragons, as members of the Southwestern Athletic Conference, played an official schedule that mostly featured other HBCUs, including Prairie View College in Texas and Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Their exact won-lost record has been lost to history. Observers remember the Dragons winning relatively few games, but they did manage one memorable highlight: a 61-59 upset of the defending league champion, Bishop College. Robinson, with his intense competitiveness and famously fiery temper, proved to be an intimidating force when dealing with referees. “I saw him go after officials when we were playing,” Harden said. “He didn’t get ejected, but he would go to the breaking point.”14

Late in the season, the Dragons embarked on an extended road trip, spending a month playing games across Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. (“He would write to Rachel every day,” Harden remembered.15) When the team got home, an intriguing offer was waiting for Robinson. “Upon our return from the tour, we met up in Jackie’s office, and he was sorting his mail,” Adanandus said. “He had received a letter from the Kansas City Monarchs. He showed me the letter, and they wanted him to play ball. They offered him a $500 bonus and $250 a month. He asked me, ‘Vine, what would you do?’ I said, ‘Well, Jackie, I didn’t even know you played any baseball.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I play a little.’”16

He was about to play a lot more. Robinson submitted his resignation to Downs, and at the end of March he reported to the Monarchs’ training camp in Houston. He performed impeccably during his brief stint in the Negro Leagues, and on August 28, he had his now-legendary meeting with Branch Rickey at Ebbets Field. In a mere six months, Robinson had gone from coaching basketball at an obscure Southern college to signing a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers.17

After leaving Austin, Robinson made a point of keeping in touch with his former players. “We used to hear from him a lot after he left,” Clements said. “He was always sending us a letter or a card, advising us and encouraging us to continue in school.”18 Although in his later years Robinson rarely mentioned his time as a coach, he never forgot the little college that had given him his first paying job in sports. In 1968 he was named to Huston-Tillotson’s board of directors, a position he would hold until his death.19 The school buildings where he worked in 1945 are now long gone, demolished to make room for Interstate 35 and its frontage roads. The former site of Sam Huston College is currently occupied by the Lucky Lady Bingo Parlor.20

The Rev. Karl Downs, meanwhile, continued to be a vital presence in Robinson’s life after Jackie left his employ. When Jackie and Rachel got married in 1946, Downs traveled to California to perform the ceremony. When the Dodgers held a Jackie Robinson Day at Ebbets Field during their next to last home game of 1947, Downs was there to help pay tribute to his friend.21

A few months later, however, tragedy struck. Suffering from an unknown stomach ailment, Downs was rushed into emergency surgery at Austin’s segregated Brackenridge Hospital on February 26, 1948. “Rather than returning his Black patient to the operating room or to a recovery room to be closely watched, the doctor in charge let him go to the segregated ward, where he died,” Robinson wrote. “We believe Karl would not have died if he had received proper care.” Downs’s death at the shockingly young age of 35 affected Robinson enormously, and he still seemed devastated by the tragedy decades later. “It was hard to believe that God had taken the life of a man with such a promising future,” he wrote in his 1972 memoir. “Karl Downs ranked with Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in ability and dedication, and had he lived he would have developed into one of the front line leaders on the national scene.”22

ERIC ENDERS is a freelance writer, editor, and former research librarian at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown. He is the author of a dozen books, including Ballparks: A Journey Through the Fields of the Past, Present, and Future and Mexican-American Baseball in El Paso. His writing on baseball has also appeared in the New York Times, MLB’s World Series programs, and numerous SABR publications. A native of El Paso, Texas, he was inducted into the El Paso Baseball Hall of Fame in 2016.

Notes

1 Jackie Robinson and Alfred Duckett, I Never Had It Made (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 8.

2 Robinson and Duckett, 8-9.

3 John Maher, “Huston College President Guided Jackie Robinson Down Historic Path,” Austin American-Statesman, August 24, 2013. statesman.com/article/20130824/SPORTS/308249735.

4 Eric Enders, “A Legacy Remembered: 50 Years After Jackie Robinson Shattered Baseball’s Color Barrier, Central Texans Recall His Time Here as a Basketball Coach,” Austin American-Statesman, April 15, 1997.

5 Harold “Pea Vine” Adanandus, telephone interview, March 1997.

6 Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Life (New York: Random House, 2011), 114.

7 Garner Roberts, “Abilene Man Mentor to Jackie Robinson,” Abilene Reporter-News, February 25, 2008. web.archive.org/web/20100316221705/ http://www.reporternews.com/news/2008/feb/25/no-headline—jackie_robinson-karl_downs/.

8 “UCLA Celebrates Jackie Robinson Day,” uclabruins.com, April 15, 2014. uclabruins.com/news/2014/4/15/209467368.aspx.

9 Robinson and Duckett, 69.

10 Rampersad, 114.

11 Jeff Miller, “Jackie Robinson’s Forgotten Season as a College Basketball Coach,” Bleacher Report, April 15, 2014. bleacherreport.com/articles/2004424-jackie-robin-sons-forgotten-season-as-a-college-basketball-coach.

12 D.C. Clements, telephone interview, March 1997.

13 Harold “Pea Vine” Adanandus, telephone interview, March 1997.

14 “Jackie Robinson’s Forgotten Season as a College Basketball Coach.”

15 Ken Herman, “What It Was Like Playing Basketball for Jackie Robinson,” Austin American-Statesman, September 3, 2016. statesman.com/news/20160903/herman-what-it-was-like-playing-basketball-for-jackie-robinson.

16 Enders.

17 Rampersad,114.

18 D.C. Clements, telephone interview, March 1997.

19 Maher.

20 “Jackie Robinson’s Forgotten Season as a College Basketball Coach.”

21 Maher.

22 Robinson and Duckett, 69.

All-Star Football Game program, 1941. (COURTESY OF BRYAN STEVERSON)

“There but for the grace of God” is an expression used when someone avoids a very serious situation, possibly life-threatening, and gives credit to the Almighty.1 In the life of Jack Roosevelt Robinson, this thankfulness applied on December 7, 1941.

After a disappointing 1940 football season in which the UCLA Bruins won only one game, and against the advice of coaches and family, the 22-year-old Robinson withdrew from the university in the spring of 1941. One semester short of graduating, he was given an “honorable dismissal.”2

Upon leaving UCLA, Robinson, after also starring for the Bruins in basketball, track, and baseball, became the subject of high praise from the press. As UCLA’s first four-sport letterman, a columnist labeled him as “the greatest colored athlete of all time,” comparing him to such great Black athletes “as Jesse Owens, Paul Robeson, Jack Johnson, and Joe Lewis.” Some even compared him to Red Grange, football’s famous “Galloping Ghost,” and the outstanding Native American athlete Jim Thorpe.3

After UCLA, Robinson went to work for the National Youth Administration as an assistant athletic director.4 The camp was in Atascadero, California, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He played baseball and counseled troubled youths. The youngsters craved attention and the understanding and discipline Robinson could instill. For Robinson, it was a satisfying experience.5 The NYA was a New Deal program that closed in 1943.6

On August 28 Robinson played in the eighth annual College All-Star Game, against the NFL champion Chicago Bears at Soldier Field in Chicago. In addition to a national television audience, the game was witnessed by more than 98,000 spectators. Halfback Tom Harmon from the University of Michigan (father of future UCLA quarterback and actor Mark Harmon) received the most votes, over 1.4 million, in a nationwide poll with fellow halfback Robinson receiving more than 750,000 votes.7 As the All-Stars lost to the Bears, 37-13, Robinson caught a 36-yard pass from Boston College’s Charlie O’Rourke for a touchdown8 and Robinson became the first Black player to score a touchdown in the annual game. Bears defensive end Dick Plasman gave the former UCLA running back high praise, describing Robinson as “the fastest man I’ve ever seen in uniform, and further, the only time I was worried about the game was when Robinson was in there.”9

During this time, Robinson’s mother, Mallie, was facing financial difficult times, and he felt a need to help. The youngest of five children, Jackie was especially close to his mother. He joined the professional Los Angeles Bulldogs of the Pacific Coast Professional Football League. The Bulldogs were an integrated team as were the league’s Hollywood Bears, who had Robinson’s former UCLA Black teammates, All-American halfback Kenny Washington and end Woody Strode, on their roster. Soon Robinson was signed by the Honolulu Bears of the semipro Hawaii Senior Football League. Joining him on the island team was his close friend and Pasadena Junior College and UCLA teammate Ray Bartlett. Both men worked construction jobs during the day and earned $100 a game playing for the Bears.10

By early December, Robinson was homesick and wanted to leave Hawaii. On Friday, December 5, the star halfback said farewell to Bartlett and others as he boarded the passenger liner Lurline for the trip back home. Two days later, on Sunday, December 7, while the ship was en route to San Francisco, the Japanese attacked the Pearl Harbor military base. Robinson was playing cards with other men on the ship at the time. To their surprise, the ship’s crew had been directed to paint all of its windows black. Very soon thereafter, the captain ordered everyone up on deck, giving them the news of the attack. The United States became enmeshed in World War II.

The Lurline moved carefully and stealthily through the night of December 7, sailing in and out of what would have been its regular sea lane. Robinson remained on emotional edge until the California coastline came into view.11

Homesick and realizing semipro football and construction jobs had a limited future, Robinson sought another job.12 He found employment at Lockheed Aircraft in Los Angeles, then on March 23, 1943, was drafted into the US Army.13

Regarding his return, Robinson said he, in fact, had two bookings to leave Hawaii. One was the early December booking, which he accepted, and the other was on January 2. Homesickness prompted his selection of the December 5 date. He could arrive in California in time to sign up to play once again with the Bulldogs.14

What would have happened had Robinson chosen the January 2 departure from Hawaii? The December attack on Pearl Harbor took more than 2,400 American military and civilian lives. Another 1,000 were wounded.15 What would Robinson’s fate have been on that horrific Sunday? Is it possible he could have been one of the casualties?

As for his December 5 departure, what if Japanese submarines lurking off the coast had sunk the Lurline thinking it was a troop transport? What would baseball and the nation have lost?

Some, including sports journalist and author, Howard Cosell, consider Robinson the greatest American athlete of all time.16 Some historians, among them Doris Kearns Goodwin,17 George Will,18 David Halberstam,19 Tom Brokaw,20 and Ken Burns,21 have called Robinson one of the greatest Americans of the twentieth century.

In an interview with television host Larry King, Dr. Martin Luther King described Robinson, not himself, as “the founder of the modern civil rights movement.”22

Jackie Robinson was a change agent in American history.

There but for the grace of God, the nation on December 7, 1941, almost lost a role model and true national hero.

Jackie Robinson, United States Army. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

The course of history can flip on a dime, the course of one’s life often defined by a series of watershed flash-points. Some we control; others are thrust upon us.

On December 7, 1941, Jackie Robinson was two days into his journey from a sleepy American naval port in Honolulu called Pearl Harbor. As a flume of smoke bellowed in the distance, the Second World War had come to America and found Jackie Robinson. Almost.

Jackie Robinson’s World War II experience tells us a lot about the man Branch Rickey chose to wear the aspirations of an entire race on his broad shoulders. Jack Roosevelt Robinson brought his unique leadership qualities to the service where he displayed an aversion to intolerance and willingness to confront it. Robinson’s experience in the military portends his ability to rouse change. He was at the center of a battle on two fronts, the fight to win a war, and the fight for first-class citizenship. The racism he encountered in the service displayed, prepared, and ushered Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn for a larger calling.

Uncle Sam called upon Robinson for his ability to galvanize morale; Jim Crow then thwarted the notion. Instead, Robinson etched his name into the American storybook as the protagonist in Rickey’s audacious beta test in equal opportunity.

Robinson was a national sensation on the football field at UCLA as part of the Gold Dust Trio at UCLA and wanted to follow in his brother Mack’s footsteps on the track before war canceled the 1940 Olympics. The top scorer on the basketball team played a little baseball too. Exhausted, Robinson hit .097.

Said Robinson in his 1972 autobiography: “I was convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a job. … I was living in an academic and athletic dream world.”1

The trepidation that led him to leave UCLA was well-founded.2

In August 1941, Robinson starred in the College All-Star game and scored a touchdown against the NFL champion Chicago Bears in front of 98,200 fans at Soldier Field. Fay Young of the Chicago Defender couldn’t help but see connection between the gridiron and the prospect of impending war:

The game ought to make the United States Army and Navy wake up. Every time a Negro is qualified to join a particular branch of service there is a cry that Negro and whites can’t do this or that together. … [T]he Bears played against Robinson and marveled at his ability.3

He found himself in Hawaii because the only offer he could find was to play semipro football in Honolulu on Wednesdays and Saturdays for a $100 stipend and a job, blocks from Pearl Harbor. An ankle injury may have saved his life.4

“I arranged for ship passage and left Honolulu on December 5, 1941,” recalled Robinson, “two days before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The day of the bombing we were on the ship playing poker, and we saw the members of the crew painting all the ship windows black. The captain summoned everyone on deck. He told us that Pearl Harbor had been bombed and that our country had declared war on Japan.”5

He first bristled when the captain told everyone to put on a life jacket. Then reality set in. His hands trembled in disbelief. A lone target for Japanese bombers, the Lurline juked and jived on the vast waters of the Pacific with the desperation of a running back. Relieved, Jackie Robinson stepped ashore in California.6

“When we arrived home,” remembered Robinson, “I knew realistically that I wouldn’t be there long. Being drafted was an immediate possibility, and like all men in those days I was willing to do my part.”7

On April 3, 1942, Robinson was inducted into the United States Army. His personnel file tells a lot about who Jackie Robinson was as a man. Asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime, Robinson stated “yes,” in his own hand:8

Pasadena, California. Blocking sidewalk 1939 fight was on the corner where a group of colored were watching fight between a white a colored fellow. I was arrested along with some others but was the only on[e] taken in. Case never came before court because of nature of offense.9

Rather than omit the arrest, he chose to disclose the incident. Even a 23-year-old Robinson had a clear sense of moral fortitude. It tells a lot about being Black in America. He was among the lucky ones, recalling that only his notoriety prevented him from becoming a statistic.

On April 10, Pvt. Robinson found himself on the vast steppes of Fort Riley, Kansas, at the Cavalry Replacement Training Center, though his wife, Rachel, said Jack was never comfortable in the saddle or with a gun.10 Robinson, ever the dogged competitor, grabbed an M1 rifle and qualified as an “expert marksman” on the rifle range, a demonstration of his remarkable athletic talent.

Robinson spent the better part of a year distinguishing himself while training with the segregated cavalry and was promoted to corporal in March. Military brass, however, had no intention of sending Black troops into combat in 1942.

A college man, Robinson was obviously more than qualified to be an officer. Three months after applying to Officer Candidate School, he had heard nothing. Later, he called the slight his first lesson on the fate of a Black man in a Jim Crow army.11

“It seems to me,” wrote Charles Hamilton Houston in a memo to the War Department,” that the Army would wake up to the fact that it cannot keep on treating trained intelligent Negroes as if they were zombies.”12

The racism that permeated every aspect of American society was rampant in the service. Secretary of War Henry L. Stinson opined that Blacks weren’t fit for leadership roles and integration would be detrimental to morale.13 The most egregious problems of race came across the desk of Judge William Hastie, civilian aide for Negro affairs at the War Department, and his deputy, Truman K. Gibson. It was often an academic exercise in futility. Military hierarchy was more concerned with damage control than enacting meaningful change. Black troops were largely consigned to segregated bases and relegated to support roles. In 1943 Hastie resigned in frustration.14

Said Gibson in 2001:

… [W]e constantly just put out the fires. … It was frustrating, at the time because these instances were happening every day, somewhere. … [Y]ou put out the brush fires, but you don’t put out the fire.15

Robinson reflected on his experience in the service thus: “I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home.” His sentiment evoked the Pittsburgh Courier’s Double-V campaign started in 1942. 16

“The ‘four freedoms’ cannot be enjoyed under Jim-Crow influences,” wrote Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis Sr., alluding to President Roosevelt’s famous declaration. The Double-V campaign said a fifth, beside speech, worship, want, and fear should include freedom from racism.17

Luckily for Robinson, Joe Louis – who had the ear of Gibson – also found himself stationed at Fort Riley. The man who passed the baton to Robinson as the torch bearer for Black America also helped pave the way. Robinson and Louis bonded over a mutual love for sport. The Brown Bomber even gave Jack boxing lessons.

It was a fortuitous association.

Now friends, Robinson aired his frustration to Louis about not being commissioned as an officer. Louis placed a call to Gibson, who applied pressure in Washington. In January of 1942, Robinson and a handful of Black candidates were accepted into OCS.18

While quieter than Robinson, Louis was not naïve to the injustices perpetrated on men of color. He just had a different countenance. Louis noted that the Army had problems, but “Hitler was not going to fix them.” He went about things in a more diplomatic fashion than Robinson, who even at the tender age of 24 had an inner fire that was especially fueled by matters of injustice. “Jackie didn’t bite his tongue for nothing,” said Louis of Robinson. “I just don’t have guts, you might call it, to say what he says. … But you need a lot of different types to make the world better.”19

Wrote Robinson in his first autobiography, published with Wendell Smith in 1948:

I sincerely believe it was his worth and understanding, plus his conduct in the ring, that paved the way for the black man in professional sports. My love for Joe Louis goes much beyond what he did in the ring, even his desire to right an injustice. …20

“His arrival,” noted Rachel Robinson, “brought some much-needed power to the Black soldiers and gave Jack an opportunity to form an alliance and work with his longtime hero.”21 Shortly after becoming an officer, Robinson directed his men in a variety show for Black troops as part of the Brown Bomber War Bond Rally that raised over $500,000.22

An apocryphal story by many accounts has Louis saving Robinson from “court-martial, prison and given the lawless nature of race relations in those days, possibly even death,” according to Gibson, after he knocked out the teeth of an officer who called him a n—-r.23

Wendell Smith had a different recollection in the Pittsburgh Courier:

Controversy followed him there. He became embroiled with some MP’s because according to Robinson, they had roughed up a Negro woman passenger on a bus trip while trying to force her to sit in the back. Jack was almost court martialed. … Only the intervention of Joe Louis saved Jackie from a long sentence. Louis appealed to Washington on Jackie’s behalf.24

Apparently a case of champagne showed up in the provost marshal’s office along with some shiny new uniforms from Louis and all was forgiven.

Jackie Robinson, Cavalryman, #14. (COURTESY OF FORT RILEY)

Jackie Robinson in cavalry. (COURTESY OF FORT RILEY)

JOSHUA M. CASPER is a journalist and author from Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hofstra University, he has returned to his passion, documenting the cross-section of history, culture, and sport. Mr. Casper, once a marketing and communication consultant, is published in the United States and abroad, writing about topics ranging from Prince of Wales to the Canyon of Heroes and, of course, Jackie Robinson. He is a passionate fan of the New York Mets and a SABR member, and his work can be found at joshuamcasper.wordpress.com.

Jackie Robinson with the Kansas City Monarchs, October 23, 1945 (COURTESY OF RACHEL ROBINSON AND THE ESTATE OF JACKIE ROBINSON)

A brief and often forgotten chapter in the legendary life of Jackie Robinson was the five months he spent as the Negro Leagues batting star for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945. This era is nestled between his discharge from the US Army in late 1944 and his signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers in August of 1945.

With Robinson’s breaking of baseball’s color barrier, inaugurating a new era in the history of sports in America, there followed the perhaps inevitable but also unfortunate demise of the Negro Leagues. An institution since 1920, the Negro Leagues became a shell of their former selves after Robinson and other African-Americans began to receive new opportunities in the major leagues. Robinson bridged the gap between the old and the new, embodying the hopes and dreams African-Americans had since the infancy of the game itself. While major-league baseball talent became more based on skill without the disqualifying element of skin color excluding many, not every player of color would have a new opportunity. However, the landmark event of desegregation, celebrated yearly in the major leagues, may not have happened if not for this brief time when Robinson was propelled to national fame by the Negro Leagues.

“That’s the side of the story that’s not often told,” said Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. “We don’t get Jackie Robinson if not for the Negro Leagues and the Kansas City Monarchs. And that story really has never been expounded on.”1 This article is an attempt to highlight that forgotten story, although for a game-by-game account of that year, see Aaron Stilley’s excellent blog, “Jackie with the Monarchs: Reliving the 1945 Kansas City Monarchs Season.”2 This article will focus on the growing media coverage of Jackie from the ex-UCLA star to a disgruntled player at a Boston “tryout” to a Negro League phenom.

Robinson had been a standout athlete at UCLA in basketball, football, track, and baseball before enlisting in the US Army in 1942. Robinson was “one of thousands of Blacks thrust into the Jim Crow South during World War II,” wrote Jules Tygiel.3 In July of 1944, Robinson was a second lieutenant in the 761st Tank Battalion at Fort Hood, Texas. When he refused to move to the back of the bus (the “colored” area), he was brought before a court-martial. Robinson was exonerated, but the trial itself revealed deep-seated racism, even by those who were representing him. Robinson was honorably discharged in November 1944. “It was a small victory,” Robinson wrote of the trial, “for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home.”4

“Had the court-martial of Jackie Robinson been an isolated incident,” wrote Tygiel, “it would be little more than a curious episode in the life of a great athlete. His humiliating confrontations with discrimination, however, were typical of the experience of the Black soldier; and his rebellion against Jim Crow attitudes was just one of the many instances in which Blacks, recruited to fight a war against racism in Europe, began to resist the dictates of segregation in America.”5 That rebellion against segregation was just beginning, however, and Robinson became a chief figure in the growing calls for civil rights. At this point, though, Robinson was “a man still moving largely in the dark,” in the words of Arnold Rampersad, and “was still drifting, drifting, still largely at the mercy of fate and the whims and wishes of whites.”6

He would not drift for long. “While waiting for discharge,” Robinson remembered at Camp Breckinridge in Kentucky, “I ran into a brother named [Ted] Alexander who, before going into uniform, had been a member of the Kansas City Monarchs.”7 The pair struck up a conversation, and Robinson learned that the Monarchs were looking for players. He wrote to the Monarchs and was invited for a tryout at their spring-training facility in Houston, Texas. In the meantime, Robinson used his blazing speed as a running back for the Los Angeles Bulldogs, an independent professional football team, and a short stint coaching basketball at Samuel Huston College8 in Austin, Texas.

The Kansas City Call, a Black newspaper, hailed Robinson as the “prize freshman” on the 1945 Monarchs.9 Robinson made the team and a long season awaited. The Monarchs were known for playing anybody anywhere at any time, even bringing their own portable lighting system with them to take advantage of the evenings. The exhibition season began in Houston on Easter Sunday, April 1, against a group of minor-league all-stars. Robinson went 1-for-7 in his professional baseball debut and “starred afield,” contributing to “three snappy double plays.”10 The game ended in a 4-4 tie after 14 innings. The team traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, on April 8 to take on the Black Barons in a Sunday doubleheader. Robinson went 2-for-4 in the opener and drove in the first two Monarchs runs as they won the first game, 7-0. They were shut out, 2-0, in the nightcap. The Monarchs played Birmingham twice more before both moved on to Atlanta on April 11.11

“Players have to make the jump between cities in uncomfortable buses,” Robinson remembered about the hardships of the Negro Leagues, “and then play in games while half asleep and very tired. When players are able to get a night’s sleep, the hotels are usually of the cheapest kind. The rooms are dingy and dirty, and the rest rooms in such bad condition that the players are unable to use them.”12

The Atlanta Journal Constitution previewed the event with the headline, “Ex-UCLA Gridder to Play Here.” “(The Monarchs) feel that Robinson will plug the open gap they need to win the American League Pennant,” the paper reported.13 There was a special seating section for White fans who wished to attend and all wounded veterans, no matter their skin color, were admitted free.14 The game was played at Ponce De Leon Park, famous for two trees that were in play in center field. Birmingham won, 5-2, and the Monarchs went on to play the Memphis Red Sox in Memphis and then Little Rock, Arkansas.15

However, Robinson was not with the team. Instead, he was in Boston for a scheduled “tryout” with the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on April 12. Robinson was joined by fellow Negro Leaguers Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams under the supervision of Red Sox scouts and manager Joe Cronin.16 Wendell Smith, sports editor of the African-American Pittsburgh Courier, was responsible for setting up the tryout, although behind the scenes was Boston City Councilman Isadore H.Y. Muchnick. Muchnick pressured both the Red Sox and the Boston Braves to sign a Black player, threatening to challenge the city ordinance allowing games on Sunday if they did not do so. He had received a promise in writing from both John Quinn and Eddie Collins, general managers of the Braves and Red Sox respectively, confirming that they were receptive to a tryout of Negro League players.

The scheduled tryout on April 12 was canceled, however, for unknown reasons. It seems it would have been the perfect time to hold such a trial, given that the Red Sox and Braves were to play that afternoon at 3 P.M. in their annual spring City Series.17 By late afternoon, news had already spread of the sudden death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Red Sox-Braves games were called off for both Friday and Saturday (April 13-14).18 Some sources have claimed the traumatic event caused the canceling of the tryout, but that doesn’t explain April 12, as Roosevelt died around 4:35 P.M.19 Even with the cancellation on Friday, the Braves and Red Sox still held practice at their own parks as they prepared for the start of the season on April 17.20 As newspaper space was devoted to articles about the late president and the new one, Harry S. Truman, the tryout became something of an afterthought.

The Red Sox and Braves resumed on Sunday, April 15, and 13,000 turned out to see the final exhibition game. Boston Globe writer Melville Webb wrote, “The Negro players did not have their tryout at Fenway yesterday. They will have a session at the Yawkey yard this morning.”21 This was the first mention of the trio in that paper.

The White councilman Muchnick and the Black sportswriter Wendell Smith both sounded off in the Courier about the delays. “They are not fooling me,” Muchnick griped. “Collins and Quinn are giving us the run-around. They promised me that they had no desire to bar Negro players and yet they ‘run out’ every time every time I try to pin them down. These boys came here for a tryout and if they don’t get one it will simply be another mark against the undemocratic practices of major league owners and officials. We are not going to stop fighting, no matter how much they duck and hide and try to evade the facts.”22

Smith set the scenario in historical context and compared himself and Muchnick to the White and Black American Revolutionary heroes Paul Revere and Crispus Attucks. “I am here in the cradle of democracy,” Smith wrote, “here in staid old Boston, where Revere rode and Attucks died, trying to break down some of the barriers and wipe out some of the intolerance they fought to obliterate more than 170 years ago. … We have been here almost a week now, but all our appeals for fair consideration and an opportunity have been in vain. Neither John Quinn of the Braves, nor Eddie Collins of the Red Sox, have displayed so much as a semblance of that indomitable spirit we anticipated here in the shadow of Bunker Hill. … Our fight has not gone unnoticed. We have won compatriots here in Boston who assure us that the ‘Spirit of ’76’ still lives.”23

“We can consider ourselves pioneers,” Robinson told Smith. “Even if they don’t accept us, we are at least doing our part and, if possible, making the way easier for those who follow. Some day some Negro player or players will get a break.”24 Writing later in his autobiography, Robinson said, “Not for one minute did we believe the tryout was sincere.”25

Robinson and others impressed in the tryout, but none of them received a major-league opportunity with the Red Sox. Cronin claimed years later that it was out of fear of sending the players to their minor-league affiliate in Louisville, where they would face harsh treatment. It was better, he thought, to keep separate White and Black leagues. Clif Keane of the Boston Globe was also there that day and over 30 years later claimed he heard someone yell from the stands, “Get those niggers off the field!” Keane believed the culprit was Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, Collins, or Cronin. Others who were there said they didn’t even hear the slur. If it was said, neither Robinson nor any of the players or Wendell Smith ever mentioned it.

Willie Bea Harmon in the April 27 edition of the African-American Kansas City Call said the tryout was “a little sweat, a train ride at the expense of the Courier and a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how good they looked. That statement might lead one to believe that nothing was gained from the three donning Red Sox suits and working out.” Harmon felt otherwise, however, when the long-term goal was taken into consideration. “Every time a colored player dons a suit in one of the major league camps he breaks down one of the bars that keeps him from playing on major league teams.”26 The Pittsburgh Courier on April 21 allowed space on its front page for both the tryout at Fenway Park and President Roosevelt’s funeral. It hailed Roosevelt as “the best friend the Negro has had in the White House since Abraham Lincoln.”27 There would be no “friends” for them in the Red Sox front office, however.

Robinson’s rise was not going to be in Boston. While the supposed racial slur was probably a fabrication, the Red Sox were the last major-league team to integrate, 12 years after Robinson joined the Dodgers. “No different than the curved streets in its city,” wrote Howard Bryant, “the Red Sox lacked a clear-cut moral direction on race; against this, the combined pioneering spirit of Isadore Muchnick and Jackie Robinson never stood a chance.”28

Robinson’s time had not yet come, and baseball’s unofficial color barrier would continue for a few more months. World War II was over even sooner, and the US Army, which had once brought Robinson to a court-martial over his refusal to move to the back of a bus, began returning its GIs home into a new postwar America.

The next known spring game Robinson appeared in was played on April 22 at Pelican Stadium in New Orleans against the Cincinnati-Indianapolis Clowns. The Monarchs shut down the Clowns, 4-0, as Robinson “clouted an inside-the-park homer in the second inning and rapped out another single as well as showing up well afield and base running,” wrote the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “The former UCLA grid star retired in the seventh inning with an injured finger.”29 The Monarchs continued to play the Clowns for the rest of the month.

“We were fortunate in getting a player of Robinson’s ability,” Monarchs manager Frank Duncan told Oklahoma City’s Daily Oklahoman. “This boy can do everything expecting of an outstanding player. He is a polished, all-around performer and takes a good cut at the ball at the plate.”30 While in Houston, the human side of Robinson and other Monarchs were visible as they visited two area high schools. “The Kansas City Monarch players are always ready to oblige youngsters of today,” the New York Amsterdam News wrote, “and will do everything possible to influence high school boys to play the diamond game. There’s a real spirit in the club this year and it’s mainly due to Jackie Robinson, former grid great at UCLA who is doing a grand job of shortstopping for the Monarchs.”31

The Monarchs concluded their spring training with the Clowns in Houston, Waco, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Oklahoma City. They defeated the Chicago American Giants, 6-2, on the Negro American League’s Opening Day, May 6. Robinson, batting third, knocked in one of those runs with a double. Attendance estimates at Ruppert Stadium (at other times known as Blues Stadium, Muehlebach, and Municipal Stadium) were between 12,000 and 15,000. Probably a bigger story, however, was Robinson’s new “flame,” described by the Pittsburgh Courier: “Jack (The Rabbit) Robinson is carrying a flaming torch for a young lady now attending a California college.”32 No doubt, this was the future Rachel Robinson.

The Monarchs played a Memorial Day doubleheader vs. Chicago on May 30. They rallied for a 4-2 win in the opener, which featured Satchel Paige on the mound. The Monarchs were shut out in the second game, but Robinson had a perfect day at bat in the twin bill. He “doubled, singled and tripled in the second [game]. In the first, he walked three times and on his fourth trip to the plate singled,” wrote the Kansas City Call.33

As June rolled around, Robinson was receiving more attention from the press around the country. He was hailed as the “newest rookie sensation in Negro baseball,” wrote the Evening Star in Washington, where the Monarchs played the Homestead Grays. Robinson “presently is taking his place with colored baseball’s top shortstops and is a spectacular distance hitter.”34 He was batting .326 in early June, according to some accounts, and was labeled a “sensational shortstop.”35

“Right now,” manager Duncan said, “Robinson is just about the best infielder in Negro baseball and should improve with more games under his belt.”36 As the Monarchs came east for a long road trip, mainstream news was naturally highlighting Paige’s arrival, but young Robinson was also mentioned by the New York Amsterdam News. “The colorful Monarchs, rated one of baseball’s great clubs, are bringing besides Paige, the game’s No. 1 attraction, one of the sport’s most valuable additions in years, in the person of Jackie Robinson, stellar shortstop. … On his showing to date with the Monarchs, he appears headed for stardom, and at the rate he is developing, may become one of the all-time great Race shortstops.”37 The Washington Post highlighted Robinson’s talents in a preview of a doubleheader at Griffith Stadium on June 24 against the Homestead Grays: “Robinson is not only shaping up as a consistent hitter with tremendous power, but also is fitting neatly into the shortfield despite his big game. The big fellow is amazingly agile, is a smooth and graceful defensive man and has one of the best throwing arms in baseball.”38 Robinson doubled and scored in the first inning to give the Monarchs an early lead in the opener and finished the contest 4-for-4. However, Paige was rocked by the Grays and the game turned into a laugher, 11-3. The Grays kept up their hitting in the second game, winning 10-6, but Robinson finished 7-for-7 in the twin bill, reportedly tying a record by Showboat Thomas in 1943. Monarchs third baseman Herb Souell went 7-for-9 and the duo accounted for 14 of the team’s 21 hits. Perhaps even more impressive was the crowd of 18,000 or more who turned out in their Sunday best.39

The summer was heating up but the first half of the season was cooling down. The upstart Cleveland Buckeyes and their star hitter Sam Jethroe, who was with Robinson at the Boston tryout, clinched the league’s first-half championship. They were in Kansas City for doubleheaders on July 1 and 4, after which the first half concluded. The Monarchs lost both sets of doubleheaders.40 Robinson launched two home runs in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on July 7 to beat Birmingham.41

Wendell Smith of the Courier compared the best shortstops in the Negro American League: Jud Wilson of Birmingham, batting .359 with two home runs; Avelino Cañizares, the “Cuban Wonder,” of Cleveland (.344, 3); and Robinson (.350, 2). “So, there you are,” Smith concluded, “three young shortstops in Negro baseball who certainly should be given a chance to play in the major leagues.”42 Bill Burk of the Chester (Pennsylvania) Times wrote that the Monarchs with Robinson had “a drawing card that someday may compare to that of the immortal Satchel. The sensational infielder of the Monarchs is a colored boy. If he were white the Lloyd Park (of the local Lloyd A.C. team) would be filled two hours before game time with major league scouts, managers, and owners, all trying to sign him up to a contract. As it is he is rapidly assuming his spot among the greats of his own race – Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard.”43

The Monarchs were in Detroit on July 22 to take on Memphis in a doubleheader. The first game was scoreless until the sixth, when Robinson knocked in a run with a perfect squeeze bunt. He then stole second and third and scored on a dropped throw to the plate. Over 25,000 fans packed Briggs Stadium to see the Monarchs sweep the doubleheader.44

The annual East-West Game, filled with all-star talent of the Negro Leagues, was held in Chicago on July 29. Robinson batted second for the West behind teammate Jesse Williams and went 0-for-5 in a forgettable performance. The West won, 9-6, and Robinson ended the game with a slick defensive play on a grounder.45

In early August the Monarchs went on a road trip to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, Boston, and New York City. In New York, 19,000 came out to Yankee Stadium to see Paige strike out eight and beat the Black Yankees, 4-1. Robinson went 2-for-3 in the dominating outing by Paige.46 The Monarchs brought their portable lights to Boston for a game against a naval team on August 13. The much-hyped Paige failed to show due to car issues, but William “Sheep” Johnson of the African-American Boston Chronicle noted the fine work of Robinson in the 11-1 win, even emphasizing in caps the failure of the Red Sox not to have signed the phenom.47

Jackie gave the fans thrill after thrill by his brilliant fielding, base running and hitting. His drag bunt, his delayed steal of third, and his stealing home with the opposing pitcher, looking right down his throat, unable to do anything about it, were his three sensational plays. Jackie proved why he is the talk of the country. He acts like a Big Leaguer, hits like a big leaguer, thinks like a big leaguer, throws like a big leaguer, and he fields like a big leaguer at shortstop. In fact HE IS A BIG LEAGUER AND AS THE COLONEL FROM THE BOSTON RECORD (Dave Egan) SAYS ‘THE RED SOX COULD USE HIM RIGHT NOW AND PERHAPS GIVE THE BOSTON FANS A REAL BIG LEAGUE CLUB.48

Not that the game would have received a lot of press coverage anyway, but people were closely following news reports on the imminent surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. The Boston Globe’s headline in the evening edition on August 14 finalized it: “JAPS SURRENDER.” The Monarchs stayed a few more days on the East Coast before settling for a tie in a game in Washington on August 16 before rushing to catch a train for Ohio.49 The Monarchs had games against the Clowns in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Memphis. Robinson injured his shoulder and saw only limited action, or maybe none at all. The team then traveled to Chicago for a series August 24-27 against the Giants. The Monarchs were swept in the four-game series, but that matters little from the perspective of history. The baseball world was forever changed on August 24, 1945.

Clyde Sukeforth was a baseball lifer, having caught for Brooklyn in the 1920s and ’30s, then managing in the minor leagues before being promoted in 1943 to the Dodgers major-league coaching staff. In 1945 his main job was finding players for the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers team in the new United States League that Dodgers President Branch Rickey was establishing for Black players. Jules Tygiel wrote, “The Dodger president’s true design for this new entity remains unclear. Its primary function was to allow the Dodgers to search for Black players, but Rickey also attempted to create a viable league that would compete with the Negro National and American circuits. Through the United States League, Ricky played both ends against the middle, attempting to gain a slice of the profits from Jim Crow baseball, while simultaneously spearheading the cause of integration.”50

Sukeforth met Robinson at Comiskey Park on August 24, informing him of Rickey’s interest. This led to the duo traveling to Brooklyn to meet Rickey in his office. At that momentous session the color barrier of the national pastime was forever ripped apart. Robinson returned briefly to the Monarchs, being asked by Rickey to remain silent of their historic agreement until November. “I went to the management of the Kansas City club to get permission to play up until September 21 in exhibition games and then go home, as I was tired,” Robinson remembered. “I was told I would have to play all the games or none. I was left with no other alternative than to leave the ball club.”51 Robinson would spend 1946 with the Dodgers’ Triple-A affiliate in Montreal before making his way to the major leagues with Brooklyn.

Negro League statistics are often problematic. Seamheads lists Robinson batting .384 with the Monarchs, while Baseball-Reference credits him at .414. The Center for Negro League Baseball Research records him batting .345 in 41 games. Nevertheless, no matter what the actual statistics were, we see a picture of the rising star who would one day change the game forever. The Monarchs finished a disappointing third in the standings, but Jackie Robinson’s road to transforming the game went through Kansas City.

BOB LeMOINE is a librarian and adjunct professor in New Hampshire. A lifelong Red Sox fan, Bob has contributed to several SABR projects and was co-editor of two SABR books: Boston’s First Nine: the 1871-75 Boston Red Stockings, and The Glorious Beaneaters of the 1890s.

Sources

In addition to the sources listed in the Notes, the author depended on contributions from the following persons and sources:

Baseball-Reference.com

Bill Nowlin

Seamheads.com

Stout, Glenn. “Tryout and Fallout: Race, Jackie Robinson, and the Red Sox,” Massachusetts Historical Review Vol 6 (2004): 11-37.

Notes

1 Gregorian Vahe, “Before Changing History, Jackie Robinson’s Path Was Paved by Time with KC Monarchs,” Kansas City Star, January 31, 2019.

2 The blog can be found at jwtm1945.blogspot.com.

3 Jules Tygiel, “The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson,” American Heritage 35, No. 5 (1984). Retrieved November 2, 2019. americanheritage.com/court-martial-jackie-robinson.

4 Jackie Robinson, Baseball Has Done It (Brooklyn, New York: lg Pub, 2005), 49.

5 Tygiel.

6 Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A Biography, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997), 112.

7 Jackie Robinson, I Never Had it Made (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 23; Other sources list Hilton Smith, not Alexander, as the person Robinson met, suggesting that Robinson’s memory of the meeting was incorrect.

8 Samuel Huston College, now known as Huston-Tillotson University, is a historically back private institution, not to be confused with Texas’s Sam Houston State University.

9 “Monarchs Ready for Training,” Kansas City Call, March 16, 1945.

10 “Kansas City Battles All-Stars to Tie in 14-Inning Tilt,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 7, 1945: 12.

11 “Birmingham, Monarchs, Split Two Sunday Tilts,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 14, 1945: 12.

12 Jackie Robinson, “What’s Wrong with Negro Baseball?” Ebony 3 No 8 (1948): 17.

13 Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 10, 1945: 12.

14 “Black Barons Play Monarchs,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 11, 1945: 9.

15 Aaron Stilley, “A Loss to the Black Barons in Atlanta,” an entry in his blog “Jackie with the Monarchs: Reliving the 1945 Kansas City Monarchs Season.” Retrieved November 3, 2019. jwtm1945.blogspot.com/2010/04/loss-to-Black-barons-in-atlanta.html.

16 Though the Red Sox had also failed to sign Jethroe at the tryout, he later became National League Rookie of the Year for the Boston Braves in 1950. See Bill Nowlin, “Sam Jethroe,” SABR BioProject, sabr.org/bioproj/person/5f1c7cf9.

17 Boston Globe, April 12, 1945: 19.

18 “School Sports, Baseball, Road Race Are Off,” Boston Globe, April 13, 1945: 7.

19 “Suffers Fatal Stroke at Palm Springs,” Boston Globe, April 13, 1945: 1.

20 Melville Webb, “Boston Ball Clubs Call Off Two Games,” Boston Globe, April 14, 1945: 4.

21 Melville Webb, “13,000 See Red Sox Top Braves in Charity Game,” Boston Globe, April 16, 1945: 13.

22 Wendell Smith, “Quinn and Collins ‘Hide’; Councilman Continues Fight,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 21, 1945: 12.

23 Wendell Smith, “‘Smitty’s’ Sports Spurts,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 21, 1945: 12.

24 Smith, “Quinn and Collins ‘Hide.’” 25 Robinson, I Never Had It Made, 29.

26 The article is quoted by Aaron Stilley in his April 16, 2010, blog entry “Tryout with the Red Sox.” Retrieved December 1, 2019. jwtm1945.blogspot.com/2010/04/tryout-with-boston-red-sox.html.

27 “Roosevelt Mourned as Best Friend of Race Since Lincoln and Willkie,” Pittsburgh Courier, April 21, 1945: 1.

28 Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 40.

29 “Monarchs Defeat Clowns in Negro Baseball, 4-0,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 23, 1945: 12.

30 “Monarchs Bring UCLA Ace Here,” Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City), May 1, 1945: 12.

31 The article is quoted by Aaron Stilley in his April 29, 2010, blog entry, “Exhibition Tour with Clowns Continues with Win in Houston.” Retrieved December 4, 2019. jwtm1945.blogspot.com/2010/04/exhibition-tour-with-clowns-continues.html.

32 “Negro League President to Pitch First Ball Tuesday,” Journal Times (Racine, Wisconsin), May 28, 1945: 12; Wendell Smith, “The Sports Beat,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 19, 1945: 12.

33 Cited in Stilley’s blog entry on May 30, 2010, “Satchel Makes First ’45 Appearance & Jackie Is Perfect at the Plate.”

34 “Newest Negro Diamond Star Makes D.C. Debut,” Washington Evening Star, June 20, 1945: 17.

35 Hitting vs. Pitching at Dell Thursday, The Tennessean (Nashville), June 6, 1945: 11.

36 “Monarchs Boast New Star in Jackie Robinson,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, June 12, 1945: 18.

37 New York Amsterdam News, June 16, 1945. Cited in Stilley’s blog entry June 17, 2010, “Monarchs Invade Yankee Stadium, Take On Philly Stars.” Jwtm1945.blogspot.com/2010/06/monarchs-invade-yankee-stadium-take-on.html.

38 “Monarchs Feature Paige, Robinson in Double-Header,” Washington Post, June 23, 1945: 8.

39 “18,000 Watch Grays Blast Satchel Paige,” Washington Post, June 25, 1945: 9; “Grays Beat Kansas City in Twin Bill,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 30, 1945: 12. The Courier said the crowd was over 20,000 and that game one was a 12-3 final.

40 “Monarchs in 4 Losses,” Kansas City Call, July 6, 1945. Cited in Stilley’s blog entry July 4, 2010, “First Half Ends With Two More Losses to Buckeyes.” jwtm1945.blogspot.com/2010/07/first-half-ends-with-two-more-losses-to.html.

41 “Monarchs Win Saturday Tilt,” Kansas City Call, July 13, 1945.

42 Wendell Smith, “The Sports Beat,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 14, 1945: 12.

43 Bill Burk, “Sports Shorts,” Delaware County Times (Chester, Pennsylvania), July 14, 1945: 9.

44 “Kansas City Wins Two Games in Detroit Before 25,286 Fans,” Pittsburgh Courier, July 28, 1945: 12.

45 Edward Prell, “West’s Negro All-Stars Win 3d in Row, 9-6,” Chicago Tribune, July 30, 1945: 17.

46 Haskell Cohen, “Satchel Sparkles as Kansas City Triumphs,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 18, 1945: 12.

47 “Monarchs Win, 11-1, Without ‘Satchel’ Paige,” Boston Globe, August 14, 1945: 4.

48 William “Sheep” Johnson, “Sports Shots,” Boston Chronicle, August 25, 1945. Cited in Stilley blog entry “Monarchs Triumph in First Ever Night Game at Braves Field,” August 13, 2010. jwtm1945.blogspot.com/2010/08/monarchs-triumph-in-first-ever-night.html.

49 “Memphis and Monarchs Win in Capitol,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 25, 1945: 12.

50 Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 57.

51 Robinson, “What’s Wrong with Negro Baseball?” 22.

Anyone unfortunate enough to attend a seminar or professional meeting is likely familiar with the game “Two Truths and a Lie.” The premise of the game is that in a roomful of more or less strangers, each person will make three statements about himself or herself, and that only two of those statements will be true. The person playing or the group of other invitees then engage in trying to guess which two of the statements are true and which is the lie.

A politician might make an unlikely choice for “Two Truths and a Lie.” But in regard to Jackie Robinson’s relationship with Commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler, the subject of our hypothetical game is indeed a politician. A US senator, a state governor, and an oft-frustrated presidential hopeful, Chandler spent many more years representing political constituents than serving the game of baseball. His career planted him exactly at the turning of racial eras, in both baseball and American society at large. As such, his subsequent statements and assertions are particularly charged, and determining which are (more or less) true and which are of his own invention gives a unique window into Jackie Robinson’s courageous work in integrating baseball, and to the role of the game’s power brokers in assisting or hindering his work.

But here are three key statements Chandler made again and again in discussing his relationship with Robinson and his role in integrating baseball:

1. Chandler and Branch Rickey attended a meeting of major-league owners at which integration was discussed and voted down 15 to 1.

2. Rickey sought Chandler’s approval and support before deciding to call up Robinson – which Chandler unequivocally granted.

3. Chandler lost his job as the commissioner because of his support of Robinson and integration.

Two were more or less accurate. One was not.

*****

Understanding Chandler’s role in the promotion of Robinson and the integration of baseball does require some backward review. Chandler was the second commissioner of baseball, after Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis died. Landis was widely revered for saving the sport in the wake of the Black Sox gambling scandal, and he ruled the game with an iron fist.1

It was a very poorly kept secret that the color barrier of the era was being protected by Commissioner Landis. Indeed, it was such a badly kept secret that Dodgers manager Leo Durocher talked to journalists about wanting to sign Black players in 1942, but being stopped by the unwritten rule of segregation. Landis immediately called Durocher to his office, privately dressed him down, and then publicly advised that there was not, nor had there ever been any rule against signing Black players, and that owners were free to sign whomever they pleased.2

Bill Veeck often told the story of trying to purchase the Phillies in 1944, with full intention of stocking the team with Black players, only for Landis to lead an effort to rebuff him.3 While that story may or may not have been true, a fair number of disinterested observers indicated that Landis was indeed keeping the color barrier intact in baseball.

Landis died in November 1944, and Chandler was elected as his successor at the owners’ meeting of April 24, 1945. Chandler had been the governor of Kentucky, where Jim Crow laws regulated intermarriage, public education, railroad cars, railroad waiting rooms, streetcars, circuses and shows, and residence in apartment buildings, among other areas. There was not a great deal of optimism in regard to the potential that Chandler would go against baseball’s longstanding policy of segregation.

A group of African-American journalists went to see the newly selected commissioner, who surprised them all by declaiming, “If a Black boy can make it on Okinawa and Guadalcanal, hell, he can make it in baseball.”4 Of course, even a new politician would be slick enough to tell people what they wanted to hear. But Chandler affirmed his statement again, saying, “Once I tell you something, brother, I never change. You can count on me.”5

Chandler’s words would soon be tested.

*****

The way Chandler told the story, in January of 1947 baseball owners met at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. A steering committee report of AL and NL owners had been commissioned in 1946 and that report was distributed and reviewed. The report was anti-integration. Chandler told a reporter in the mid-1980s, “I presided over the meeting. They discussed the Robinson situation expressly for a couple hours and then took a vote. They voted 15 to 1 not to let him play. Rickey was the only fella that cast a vote in favor of bringing Robinson to the major leagues. Well, that was advice to me and advice to Mr. Rickey. But I didn’t ask for it, and I didn’t feel like I had to take it.”6

Rickey had talked about the meeting back in 1948. He told an audience at Wilberforce University in Ohio that the meeting (which he dated to August 1946 and placed in Chicago) had followed soon after the authorship of a secret report from Yankees owner Larry MacPhail on integration. Rickey said the copies of the report were gathered up after the 15-to-1 vote, but added, “I’d like to see the color of the man’s eyes who would deny [the report].”7

Plenty did deny it in 1948, including MacPhail, Phillies owner Bob Carpenter, and Senators owner Clark Griffith.8 Given Rickey’s reputation for needing a moral windmill against which he could tilt, it was presumed that he had invented the story. Chandler didn’t tell it himself for years, although he included an account of the meeting in a February 1970 letter to The Sporting News publisher C.C. Johnson Spink.9 He discussed it at greater length in both the 1987 interview cited above and his 1989 autobiography.10

Funny enough, though, the paper trail, which Rickey had discounted as a source of confirmation, ended up supporting Chandler’s story. A copy of the report ended up in Chandler’s own papers, and the document, borrowing heavily from a report Larry MacPhail had presented to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in New York City, did indeed come from the direction indicated by Chandler and Rickey.

“The individual action of any one club may exert tremendous pressures upon the whole structure of professional baseball,” the report warned, “and could conceivably result in lessening the value of several major league franchises.”11

Warning for Rickey and Chandler indeed.

While there is no indication that a vote was ever taken or that any vote taken had any purpose beyond indicating to Rickey (and perhaps Chandler) exactly how contrary to the majority view their own sentiments stood, the rest of the story holds up. And at this point, the issues surrounding a vote should be considered in light of the rest of the story. Two National Baseball Hall of Fame members, in separate accounts made decades apart, confirmed the existence of the report and its contents (and in the case of Rickey’s 1948 discussion, he even quoted from the report), and even explained why copies of the report apparently hadn’t survived, only for Chandler’s papers to end up including the report itself. In 1948 they were essentially publicly called liars by other interested parties, who denied the existence of the report.

We now know that the report existed, that Rickey and Chandler were both right about what it said, and that the report itself was ultimately produced to bear them out. If there was even an advisory vote in support of the report or in opposition to integration, considering that Robinson had already been signed by Rickey and would soon be transferred from Montreal to Brooklyn, the real purpose was clearly to try to intimidate or impose a “majority” viewpoint on Rickey and/or Chandler.

*****

The second of the three events is far less certain to have occurred, as there is no “smoking gun” document, and Rickey apparently didn’t feel burdened to discuss it in public. But a close examination of Rickey’s own behavior and modus operandi in springing the decision to integrate baseball gives the episode at least the ring of truth.

In numerous occasions from 1965 to 1989, Chandler discussed a meeting with Rickey at the cabin behind his home in Woodford County, Kentucky, shortly after the meeting with the 15-to-1 vote. This cabin was Chandler’s de-facto office and would indeed have been a reasonable spot for such a meeting.

The details varied from story to story. The 1965 recounting lacked many details, as Chandler told The Sporting News, “Branch Rickey came to me in 1946 and told me he had a Negro ball player. I told Branch I didn’t care what color the boy was so long as (Branch) thought the boy could play ball. I was 100 percent behind Jackie.”12 It is worth noting that Rickey was still very much alive in early 1965 and remained a cantankerous force who could easily have disputed the account, which was published in the so-called Bible of Baseball.

In 1970 Chandler wrote, “I made the decision for Rickey to bring Robinson from Montreal to Brooklyn … at my cabin on the backside of my country place at Versailles and I told Rickey that I would protect Robinson in every possible way.”13

By Chandler’s telling in 1972, Rickey had come to see him and told him he knew that he could not proceed with integration without Chandler’s support. Chandler asked if Robinson could play and that was then affirmed, and he explained, “[T]hen and there I decided that I didn’t want it on my conscience that I had deprived anyone of a chance to play.”14

As the years passed, the story grew. In 1987 Chandler again reiterated that Rickey had come to the cabin, that they talked for about an hour, that Rickey stated that he would proceed only with Chandler’s support. Chandler then recalled telling Rickey, “I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to have to meet my maker someday. If he asks me why I didn’t let this boy play and I say it’s because he’s Black, that might not be a satisfactory answer. So you bring him in and I’ll approve the transfer.”15

That is essentially the same version Chandler told in his 1989 autobiography, albeit with yet a few more self-serving details. While the exact conversation differs from account to account, the common threads were that Rickey came to see Chandler at the cabin in Versailles, Kentucky, that they discussed Robinson’s impending promotion, that Chandler assured Rickey of his cooperation and thus supported his direction.

All of this said, as one historian notes, “[T]here is no evidence that the 1947 meeting between Chandler and Rickey ever occurred.”16 The same author notes, “Moreover, the meeting as described by Chandler would not have fit Rickey’s behavior pattern.”17 On this point, the otherwise thorough scholar could be mistaken.

The story of Rickey’s decision to integrate baseball is full of meetings in which Rickey revealed some element of his plan to integrate the game, sought outside cooperation, and left the individual with the sincere belief that he had made some great contribution. Dodgers financier George V. McLaughlin experienced such a meeting.18 Red Barber famously shared his own story of such a meeting.19 Dodgers reliever Clyde King had yet another story of such a meeting.20

Rickey’s daughter Jane Jones told one author, “Dad would say to someone, ‘You’re the only person I’ve told this to, and I don’t want you to repeat it to another soul,’ and then he’d proceed to say the same thing three different times on the same day to three different people – and they’d all wind up thinking that they were the only one.”21

The meeting with Chandler feels like another Rickey production. This time, though, the time-line was set forth by Chandler himself, Rickey had signed Robinson, and he had played successfully for the Montreal farm team. Rickey didn’t meet with Chandler for assurance of his path with Robinson. He met with Chandler to seek his approval and support, understanding that he could have gotten along at loggerheads with Chandler just as he could have with McLaughlin or Barber or King. But if Rickey, the man known as “The Mahatma” for his extreme gift of gab and flattery, could appeal to the better angels of Chandler’s nature, he could win another supporter of the Jackie Robinson experiment.

That support was far from meaningless. Chandler did back Robinson in many small ways – from sending word to minor-league opponents to curb racist behavior to working to curb racist banter from Phillies manager Ben Chapman to condemning the Cardinals’ alleged strike22 to assigning a friend to shadow and protect Robinson,23 Chandler was firmly in Robinson’s corner. Some have discounted some of these acts, accusing Chandler of enhancing his own credentials in an act of mythology. Robinson himself wrote the former commissioner in 1956, “I will never forget your part in the so-called Rickey experiment.”24

While there is no proof of a late 1946/early 1947 meeting at Chandler’s cabin, there’s plenty of context in Rickey’s behavior and in Chandler’s discussions of the meeting to believe that something very like what Rickey depicted did indeed occur, and was significant in securing Chandler’s support.

*****

That said, not all of Chandler’s stories hold up to scrutiny. Chandler loved to tell the story of how supporting Robinson cost him his job as the commissioner of baseball. “I never regretted my decision to let Robinson play, but it probably cost me my job,” Chandler told The Sporting News in 1972.25 The vast majority of evidence, contemporary and otherwise, shows this to be something between and embellishment and an outright fiction.

Granted, in late 1950, when Chandler was essentially maneuvered out of his job as commissioner, baseball still was very much in a conservative place on racial integration. Only a dozen African American players had seen major-league action in the four seasons of integration, and just five teams had integrated.26 But integration was far from the only way that Chandler conflicted with many team owners.

Chandler’s handling of a gambling scandal with Durocher ended up shocking the baseball world. Chandler also had Cardinals owner Fred Saigh investigated during his tenure.27 While Saigh ended up going to prison for tax evasion, he undoubtedly did not appreciate Chandler’s attention. On several other occasions, Chandler made unpopular decisions involving bonus signees or transactions, including voiding the sale of Yankees first baseman Dick Wakefield. Chandler said months after his resignation, “I would still be commissioner today if I had not ruled against the Yankees in the Dick Wakefield case in 1950.”28

Perhaps more important than individual scandals was that Chandler was fully determined to be his own conscience as baseball’s grand ruler. He negotiated the first deal to televise the All-Star Game and the World Series. He established a players pension fund, and he angered the owners by discussing the potential impact of the Korean War on baseball without consulting them. The final word might belong to Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, who noted that Happy Chandler was “the players’ commissioner, the fans’ commissioner, the press and radio commissioner – everybody’s commissioner but the men who pay him.”29

For his part, Chandler always blamed baseball’s rule change to a requirement of a three-quarters vote to maintain the job. In the winter of 1950, owners actually voted 9 to 7 to approve a new contract for Chandler, but being shy of three-quarters, Chandler doubtlessly saw the writing on the wall and resigned soon thereafter. “If Jesus Christ were baseball commissioner, I’m not sure he could carry twelve votes,” he bitterly noted.30

Perhaps not. Chandler was certainly far from perfect,31 but his political acumen and raconteur’s tendency to embellish shouldn’t hurt the acceptance of his role in the Robinson drama. Certainly, every detail of his supposed adventures doesn’t hold up, but in the case of the secret report and vote, the cabin meeting, and the mythical loss of his job due to Robinson, as singer Meat Loaf famously observed, two out of three ain’t bad.

JOE COX has written or contributed to 10 sports books. His most recent solo offering, A Fine Team Man: Jackie Robinson and the Lives He Touched, was published by Lyons Press in 2019. Joe practices law and lives near Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he’s looking forward to being able to return to rooting on the Class-A Bowling Green Hot Rods.

Notes

1 Landis’s rise to power and government of baseball are discussed in many places, including Jerome Holtzman, The Commissioners: Baseball’s Midlife Crisis (New York: Total Sports, 1998), 24-45.

2 The public aspects of the story are well-documented, including “Majors Can Sign Negroes – Landis,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 17, 1942: 9.

3 Bill Veeck with Ed Linn, Veeck as in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), 170-71.

4 Murray Polner, Branch Rickey: A Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007), 174.

5 Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 43.

6 Jeffrey Marx, “Happy’s Vote of Confidence” Sports Heritage, May-June 1987: 23-24.

7 Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 449-50.

8 Lowenfish, 451.

9 The letter to Spink, dated February 13, 1970, is included in the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s file on Happy Chandler. It states in relevant part, “In fact, in the Winter before Rickey brought Robinson from Montreal to Brooklyn at an informal meeting of the owners held in New York, the vote was 15-1 not to allow Robinson to play.”

10 Happy Chandler with Vance H. Trimble, Heroes, Plain Folks, and Skunks: The Life and Times of Happy Chandler (Chicago: Bonus Books, 1989), 226-27.

11 The author viewed the report within the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s integration file and the quotes are taken verbatim from the document itself.

12 Bob Addie, “Happy Pessimistic Over Game, Proud of Its Strides Under Him,” The Sporting News, February 6, 1965: 22.

13 The Spink letter discussed in Note 9.

14 Associated Press, “Chandler Recalls Historic Step” Syracuse Post-Standard, October 25, 1972: 31.

15 Marx, 24.

16 John Paul Hill, “Commissioner A.B. ‘Happy’ Chandler and the Integration of Major League Baseball: A Reassessment,” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 19.1 (Fall 2010): 38.

17 Hill: 38.

18 As recounted by Rickey himself in Jackie Robinson, Baseball Has Done It (Brooklyn: IG Publishing, 2005), 52.

19 Red Barber and Robert Creamer, Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 266-70.

20 David Falkner, Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robinson from Baseball to Birmingham (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 151.

21 Falkner, 151.

22 Hill: 39-41.

23 Chandler, 230.

24 Marx, 25, includes an image of the copy of the letter.

25 “Black Pioneer Jackie Robinson Dead,” The Sporting News, November 11, 1972: 35.

26 In addition to the Dodgers, the other teams were the Indians, Browns, Giants, and Braves.

27 Hill: 43-44.

28 “Wakefield Ruling Cost Job, Chandler Declares,” The Sporting News, August 15, 1951: 7.

29 Harold Kaese, “Chandler’s Dismissal Defeat for Old Guard; Closed Ballot Decisive,” Boston Globe, March 13, 1951: 18.

30 Chandler, 238.

31 Despite his work with Robinson, Chandler’s final legacy is complicated by an embarrassing racist statement he rendered in a meeting of the trustees of the University of Kentucky near the end of his long life. For more details on the Robinson/Chandler connection, see Chapter 3 of my book: Joe Cox, A Fine Team Man: Jackie Robinson and the Lives He Touched (Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2019).