This Sunday, April 15, Major League Baseball will celebrate
Jackie Robinson Day by commemorating the 60th anniversary of the
breaking of the game’s color barrier. In my hometown of Stamford,
CT, where he spent the last twelve years of his life, there is a
statue of Robinson which calls to mind the annual jazz festivals he
held at his home to raise money for civil rights causes and the
dignity of the man himself.
Much has been written of Robinson’s storied career and the
obstacles he faced with much courage throughout his life in
baseball. Often ignored — in the manner of a particularly annoying
relative — are his political views. Why is this? Because, although
he was aligned with many of the giants of the civil rights
movement, he was his own man. A man whose beliefs spoke to what
many today would consider some inconvenient truths.
John Roosevelt Robinson was, in the most literal sense, a
Rockefeller Republican whose party affiliation should be a reminder
that it was the Democrats of the South, the Dixiecrats, who stood
in the Congressional doorway of racial integration. He was an
anti-Communist and an ardent capitalist who believed\ that, given the chance, racial equality might
be advanced through hard work:
How much more effective our demands for a piece of the
action would be if we were negotiating from the strength of our own
self reliance rather than stating our case in the role of a beggar
or someone out for charity. We live in a materialistic society in
which money doesn’t only talk — it
screams.
Echoing Martin Luther King he once wrote, “We ask for nothing
special, we ask only that we be permitted to live as you live, and
as our nation’s Constitution provides.” This desire to achieve
equality through conventional means often put him at loggerheads
with the more radical figures of the movement. An extremely wise
man of foresight, he was derided for
comments like “Stokely Carmichael’s version of Black
Power can only get us more George Wallaces elected to office.”
He thought Malcolm X a talented man with a message of promise
but disdained his philosophy of hate. He castigated him for
suggesting that blacks like U.N. Ambassador Ralph Bunche had “sold
out,” saying, “Malcolm is very militant on Harlem street corners
where militancy is not dangerous,” but that he lacked
“one-twentieth of the integrity and leadership” of a man like
Bunche.
And, in a quote you’re not likely to read every day, he later
chastised his friend King for his opposition to the Vietnam War
saying, “Why is it, Martin, that you seem to ignore the blood which
is upon [Communist] hands and to speak only of the ‘guilt’ of the
United States?”
One of his most notorious clashes came with Paul Robeson, the
famous black activist, athlete, and basso profundo who was a
well-known devotee of Josef Stalin, which earned him the Lenin
Peace Prize in 1952. In 1949 he declared before a leftist audience
in Paris: “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war
on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a
country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our
people to the full dignity of mankind.”
After Robeson became a target of those who recognized the threat
posed to the U.S. by Soviet Communism, Jackie Robinson testified
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities where he
predicted (correctly, of course) that blacks would, “do their best
to help their country win the war against Russia or any other enemy
that threatened us.” Although later in life he wrote that he
regretted it, he honed in on Robeson almost poetically:
I can’t speak for any 15,000,000 people any more than
any other one person can, but I know that I’ve got too much
invested for my wife and child and myself in the future of this
country, and I and other Americans of many races and faiths have
too much invested in our country’s welfare, for any of us to throw
it away because of a siren song sung in bass.
For this Robinson has, of course, been tagged with the trite and
predictable Uncle Tom label. Yet he was just as passionate in
decrying Jim Crow as he was the Communists, but he was wise enough
to see that this country afforded the opportunity for the defeat of
the former. At the same hearing he continued:
But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop fighting
race discrimination in this country until we’ve got it licked. It
means that we’re going to fight it all the harder because our stake
in the future is so big. We can win our fight without the
Communists and we don’t want their help.
Too many modern black athletes admire Robinson, but do not worship
him as they do the more radical Muhammad Ali. Malcolm X
said,
“Cassius Clay is our hero. He’s the first real black sports hero.
Jackie Robinson is a white man’s hero.” On Sunday, contrary to
those who find it easier to hate than to love, all America will
celebrate her hero.
