Some years ago, I picked up a lobby card for the 1950 movie “The Jackie Robinson Story” at auction. The card showed a smiling Robinson, Ruby Dee as his wife Rachel, along with other actors playing Branch Rickey and the Montreal Royals manager.
They were all arm in arm, prancing freely and delightfully in a place without hostility. At least, that’s what the lobby card tried to portray in a movie produced three years after Robinson made it to the Brooklyn Dodgers. But we all know that Robinson and his family were not living a carefree life on or off the field. I’m sure they were living well off his salary, but not peacefully in a world that saw them as lesser.
I thought about that lobby card this week when I went to see the latest movie of Jackie Robinson’s life, “42.” That movie felt more like a sanitized version of the antagonism that greeted him – I haven’t seen the first movie but I’m sure it was even more so – as he became the first African American to play in the big leagues.
Kudos to Rickey for having the guts to defy the societal norms (and Harrison Ford for portraying him superbly), but much more goes to the man who went through it all and survived with his head (and dignity) intact.
As I sat there watching the movie, I kept wondering how the grown (and some presumably smart) people who terrorized Jackson – and by extension people who looked like him – would think that life would always be the way it was, that their “way of life” would never ever change. “Way of life” always changes, all you have to do is look back on the country’s history and see the constant ripping of what was thought to be for always and forever – most of it for the good.
But racial prejudice had been so ingrained in the American psyche that people resisted with might and fear against the change that Robinson was forging in 1947, that stretched into a civil rights movement of full-fledged defiance in the 1960s, and settled in both comfortably and uncomfortably today.
Change is constant, and Robinson knew it when his protractors did not. He was the smart one, turning the other check on the field but not off it:
“I had to fight hard against loneliness, abuse and the knowledge that any mistake I made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there,” he is quoted as saying in his autobiography. “Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.”
The folks who bedeviled Robinson – like the Phillies manager, other players and white spectators – thought they were doing what was right. Raised and spoon-fed on racial prejudice, they could not fathom that black people were their equals, even in the face of people like Robinson who were better.
The people of Jackie Robinson’s America were on the wrong side of history, and unfortunately, so are many today (which I realize when one of them stumbles onto my blog post about my distaste for Nazi memorabilia). In baseball, Robinson and Rickey proved that. The unfortunate part of “barring the door” to black ballplayers was denial of countless other Negro Leaguers who had gotten too old to play the game they loved but were excellent at it.
One of those men was a pitcher named Terris McDuffie, a photograph of whom I bought at auction a few years ago. The photo showed a smiling McDuffie posing in mid-throw. He was one of two Negro Leaguers who showed up with sportswriter Joseph Bostic in 1945 for a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey gave them a tryout – both were near the end of their careers at the time – but turned them down. After his baseball career ended, McDuffie drove a cab in New York in the 1960s.
Before Robinson retired from baseball in 1956, he had become more than a hero to African Americans. His play on the field guaranteed that: He won the pennant for the Dodgers in 1947, and was named Rookie of the Year that same year. He was the Most Valuable Player in the National League in 1949. Along with the movie, Robinson was the face on the packages of many products, including Wheaties, which he endorsed in the 1950s but didn’t get his face on the box until decades later.
And his popularity has not waned. A recent article in Antiques and Auction News told of how Jackie Robinson memorabilia is the most collectible among sports figures. Among the most valuable, according to the article, are items from his high school years in Pasadena, CA., and his rookie and other baseball cards.
The movie “42” does great justice to Robinson, but it also brings to the forefront another person who was just as significant: Wendell Smith, sportswriter for the African American-owned Pittsburgh Courier who was the chronicler of Robinson’s first year as a Dodger. Smith was the one who recommended Robinson to Rickey. A ball player who was turned down as a teenager for the Major Leagues because he was black, he’s a story in himself.
I enjoyed the movie for its telling of the history of a man who survived in a culture whose norms made no sense.
“I cannot stand and sing the anthem,” he is quoted as writing near the end of his life ( he died in 1972). “I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”
You can watch the 1950 movie on YouTube.
