Oh, we think we do. Sure, Major League Baseball honors him each year on April 15, the day Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. His number, 42, is retired and celebrated by baseball fans. As Jonathan Eig writes in one of the essays in 42 Today: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (Washington Mews Books; $27.95; hardback; 239 pages), “We all know the story. We’ve all seen the movie.”
Eig is being facetious, of course. There is plenty we do not know — or, in some cases, want to know — about Robinson. A collection of 13 essays, edited by Michael G. Long, provides some necessary context. Long has written about Robinson before, including in his 2008 book, First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson and 2017’s Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography. He has also edited 2013’s Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life After Baseball.
In 42 Today, Long also goes beyond home plate, pulling together a collection of authors who cast Robinson in a different light. The essays Long presents are thought-provoking and compelling.
Howard Bryant comes out swinging in the first essay, discussing the key difference between advancement and ownership in the context of racial acceptance. Advancement meant that Robinson should be patient, “a credit to his race,” and “accepting of glacial change as progress.” As Bryant points out, advancement was the preferred narrative of whites. “(Blacks) need not sacrifice in the short term provided they agree to a covenant of fairness to be delivered at an unspecified date — as long as it’s not today.”
Ownership, Bryant writes, is much different and uncomfortable to some. “It takes the keys to the house of self-determination in real time, without asking, and does not offer points for compromise or patience.”
America wanted advancement, but Robinson wanted ownership. Simple as that. Achieving it was not so simple, and even today, that seems to be complicated. Bryant, who has written books about Hank Aaron (The Last Hero), Black athletes (The Heritage) drugs in baseball (Juicing the Game) and injustice (Full Dissidence), provides a powerful start to this book.
But as Long writes in the introduction, the essays are presented in such a way that readers can skip chapters or read them out of order and still appreciate the writing.
Don’t do that. Read this book straight through.
Eig recounts an awkward telephone conversation he had with Robinson’s widow, Rachel, as he contemplated a book about Jackie. Eig, a meticulous researcher whose ability to unearth gems is comparable to Robert Caro’s writings about politics, wanted to get more information about the often-told story of Robinson’s teammate, Pee Wee Reese. The Dodgers’ captain was a Kentucky native who, in the middle of the baseball diamond, put his arm around Robinson in Cincinnati to silence hecklers, a gesture that said, Robinson was not Black, he was a Dodger.
Marvelous story. But as Eig interviewed Rachel Robinson, he could sense “frustration in her voice” and received short, curt answers to his questions.
Eig finally apologized for wasting Rachel’s time and asked if he did something wrong.
“Well yes,” she told Eig. “You assumed that Jack made it because Pee Wee helped. I’m tired of people assuming that he needed the help of a white man to succeed.”
Advancement versus ownership again. It hits home.
Rachel Robinson went on to debunk the myth — which is unsettling to me because I have a small bronze statue depicting that alleged gesture -- saying that it never happened. Rachel Robinson even attended an unveiling of a similar statue in Brooklyn, but said it never happened.
Why attend, Eig wanted to know.
“She sighed as if to say it was complicated,” Eig wrote. “I would never understand.”
Eig went on to write Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season, in 2007.
This book also shows what Robinson meant to the civil rights movement and his political views He endorsed Richard Nixon for president in 1960, and while he certainly agreed with the sentiments of Martin Luther King Jr., Robinson was at odds with how to achieve them.
Gerald Early, professor of modern letters at in the African and African American Studies department at Washington University in St. Louis, examines Robinson’s alignment with the GOP in his essay, “The Dilemma of the Black Republic.” Early notes that in 1960, Nixon’s stance on civil rights was stronger than those of his Democratic opponent for president, John F. Kennedy.
Early added that Robinson had disagreements with Black radicals (Malcolm X) and Black liberals (Rep. Adam Clayton Powell), and “was at war” with Republican conservatives like Sen. Barry Goldwater. Robinson would face backlash from both extremes, with Malcolm X describing him in a way that made him “a tool of the white power structure” and “a sold-out Uncle Tom.”
As Yohuru Williams notes in the essay “I’ve Got to Be Me,” Robinson opposed enforced separatism and enforced segregation.
“The first freedom for all people is freedom of choice,” Robinson said.
Or, as Peter Dreier noted in his essay, “The First Jock for Justice,” Robinson “viewed himself as much an activist as an athlete.”
To the American public, Robinson represented two distinct personalities. Chris Lamb writes in his essay, “The White Media Missed It,” that to Black America, Robinson changed what it was like to be a Black American, a man “willing to sacrifice his life for the cause of racial equality and equal justice.” To white America, Lamb asserts, Robinson was a Black baseball player.
Nothing more. Robinson was rarely interviewed by white sportswriters early in his career, and Lamb notes they made no attempt to put his story in historical or sociological context, Lamb writes.
Or maybe it was the editors in charge that put the muzzle on those kinds of stories. In The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn wrote about an encounter he had with Eddie Stanky. Kahn, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, had filed a story in which Stanky had heard some racial epithets tossed in Robinson’s direction but said, “I heard nothing out of line.”
When Kahn filed a story about the exchange, it did not run, with a note from the night sports editor: “Herald Tribune will not be a sounding board for Jackie Robinson. Write baseball, not race relations. Story killed.”
That was sometime in 1952 — five years after Robinson broke the color line.
For all of his groundbreaking work for civil rights, Robinson “was not a vocal champion” for gender equality. Amira Rose Davis, an assistant professor of history and African American history at Penn State University, has directed two conferences on sports and the LGBTQ experience. Davis notes that through the years, Robinson “displayed a tension” in the belief in traditional gender roles and a more progressive stance on women’s employment and autonomy.
Credit Rachel Robinson for changing her husband’s outlook.
There are so many different angles to explore in 42 Today. Readers will find themselves challenged to think out of the box, which is a good thing. Progress will never occur without courageous, bold and well-thought-out stances.
Kevin Merida, a senior vice president at ESPN and editor-in-chief of The Undefeated, urges readers of 42 Today to remember that Robinson’s struggles were not in vain. Even though Robinson was discouraged with the lack of advancement for Black athletes — and Blacks in general — he had the courage to speak out about what was wrong, no matter how uncomfortable it made his listeners.
“Jackie Robinson deserves to be remembered and assessed as the courageous complex man he was,” Merida write in the book’s afterword. “And not as a character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
Robinson would probably say today that the goals he aspired to achieve have yet to be realized. History’s wheels can turn slowly, and even 74 years after Robinson stepped on the infield at Ebbets Field, there is still a great deal of work to be done.
“Sometimes,” Eig writes, “you can see history right in front of your eyes if you pay attention.”
That is the point of 42 Today. The history is there. It’s time to pay attention.