JACKIE ROBINSON: A Biography
By Arnold Rampersad
Knopf, 512 pages, $27.50
This year, the 50th anniversary of the integration of major-league baseball, prompted a flurry of stock-taking. Baseball formally commemorated the occasion-and itself-by dedicating the 1997 season to the memory of its first black player, Jackie Robinson. In sports and news pages alike, pundits celebrated just how far America has come, on and off the playing fields, in its struggle with the quandary of race. Mostly the papers carried the good news: In the decades following Robinson’s trailblazing debut, professional sports franchises have become thoroughly integrated. A new, expanding class of black millionaires has sprung up, and graceful, extraordinary figures such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods have achieved a degree of celebrity and wealth that virtually transcends race. The journeys of Robinson and those who came after him have become woven into the cherished American mythology of social and material progress.
Yet if Robinson were here today, he might be dismayed at how the legacy of his work has been squandered-by rich, self-centered athletes, by the slow desegregation of the managerial ranks, but most importantly, in society at large, where affirmative action withers, police brutality blooms and the very idea that informed Robinson’s career-social integration-has come under attack not just by whites but by blacks too.
Arnold Rampersad’s painstakingly researched “Jackie Robinson: A Biography” traces not just the glorious athletic career of the Brooklyn Dodgers star, but his political trajectory, too, and finds a profoundly selfless figure whose life work still resounds with urgent lessons 25 years after his death in 1972. Reconstructing Robinson’s life from the inside out, through access to Robinson’s private letters, interviews with his widow, Rachel, and with his closest associates, Rampersad presents a portrait of a figure whose impact reached beyond sports into the most crucial areas of American life.
Robinson’s life has been covered before, most notably in his own fine autobio-graphy, “I Never Had It Made,” as well as in Roger Kahn’s “The Boys of Summer,” but never, perhaps, has his life been rendered with such depth and unsparing detail. Rampersad, who is Woodrow Wilson professor of literature at Princeton University, divides the biography into three parts: Robinson’s formative years in Pasadena, Calif., and at UCLA; his days in the Negro Leagues and his spectacular, risky entry into the major leagues with the Dodgers; and his politically active years beyond baseball. What distinguishes Rampersad’s work from others that have come before it is that he largely refrains from drawing big conclusions about Robinson’s admittedly remarkable life. Although Robinson was, as Dodger baseball announcer Reyd Barber, once said, “the biggest attraction in baseball since Babe Ruth,” Rampersad mostly allows Robinson’s story–a string of hard-won victories and unrelenting battles against the most petty and the most monstrous forms of racism–to speak for itself.
The victories were impressive–a batting championship, induction into the Hall of Fame on his first ballot–but they were counterbalanced by insults and indignities he faced daily: racist treatment while serving in the Army, segregated hotels in the Jim Crow South, getting bumped from airplanes to make room for white travelers and having pitches thrown at his head. Many of these tales are not new, but by the end we come away seeing a man who paid a terrible price for his achievements, and it is difficult not to see in his fierce perseverance a model that still bears emulation today.
“What he was going through would have brought many another man to explosions of rage and perhaps even patterns of psychopathology, and it did not leave Robinson utterly unscathed,” Rampersad writes. And this was a struggle that Robinson endured mostly alone, with stoical calm when he most needed it. As Rampersad puts it: “(P)eople perhaps underestimated or undervalued the depth of feeling he had dammed up in (his) early years in order to serve the greater cause of freedom and social equality.” Robinson’s struggles were not the stuff of mythology, but very real and very painful, which makes the squandering of the gifts he bestowed on black and white America all the more tragic.
Rampersad finds much of the source of Robinson’s amazing fortitude in his mother, Mallie McGriff Robinson, who transplanted the family from Georgia to the comparative enlightenment of Pasadena in 1920. Mallie, a domestic, held the family together after Jack’s father left home, and Mallie would later savor her son’s induction into baseball’s Hall of Fame. In Pasadena, where the strictures of Jim Crow were far looser than in Georgia, Robinson’s precociousness as an athlete and the advantage of integrated school athletics formed an outlook that he kept throughout life. “After the democracy he had known as a boy among boys and girls in Pasadena, nothing could convince Robinson that Jim Crow in any sport–or in any other aspect of American life, for that matter–was right or natural,” Rampersad writes. It was perhaps from this source that Robinson’s bitter but perfectly understandable explosions against racist slights, perceived or real, issued.
Weaving Robinson’s story into the political and social climate of post-war America, Rampersad writes that “Jack’s success on the field made him more than a passive symbol of integration. . . .” Robinson’s saga affected a generation. Among those Rampersad calls on for such recollections is writer Roger Wilkins, who was 15 the year Robinson made his debut with the Dodgers:
” `(Robinson) brought pride and the certain knowledge that on a fair playing field, when there were rules and whites could not cheat and lie and steal, not only were they not supermen but we could beat ’em. . . . If he failed, we failed. . . . And this man, in a very personal sense, became a permanent part of my spirit and the spirit of a generation of black kids like me because of the way he faced his ordeal.’ “
As Rampersad makes clear, it was nearly superhuman for a man of Robinson’s pride and powerful sense of right and wrong to absorb, without protest, the punishment he did. But Robinson’s eyes were on the prize.
After baseball, Rampersad writes, Robinson used the platform of his celebrity to express the political agenda he had so long kept to himself. And he did so with exacting skill and eloquence. Of the civil rights struggle, Robinson wrote in 1957, when the movement was still in its infancy, that there “is, indeed, a fight for survival, not alone for the Negro, but for the nation.” Yet Robinson’s views had a complexity that often confounded even his supporters. He once chided black leaders, ” `Too many of our professional men achieve a certain amount of success and then forget the trials of their childhood,’ ” and he dallied in conservative Republican politics, working for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in New York and supporting Richard Nixon against John Kennedy. Yet his actions–an attempt to create a black bank so Harlemites could move out of the ghetto, another stab at creating a country club that would admit whites and blacks–bespoke Robinson’s questing for an integrated society.
Today’s revisionist thinkers who have abandoned integration, as well as pie-eyed believers in the American Dream, would do well to pick up this book. Although Rampersad keeps his distance from Robinson, the accumulated details of his subject’s life build a compelling portrait of an athlete who looked beyond the end of his baseball bat, clearly understood his place in the dangerous political swirl of American racial politics, and decided to give himself to his people, and to America, when he decided to “walk point” in America’s long march against racism.
