The Real Story of Baseball's Integration That You Won't See in 42
The new film ignores the broad-based movement that helped make Jackie
Robinson's arrival in baseball possible, as well as the first black
major-leaguer's own activism.
Peter Dreier Apr 11 2013, 2:38 PM ET
WB
One of America's most iconic and inspiring storiesJackie Robinson breaking
baseball's color line in 1947is retold in the film 42, which opens nationally
this weekend. Even if you're not a baseball fan, the film will tug at your
heart and have you rooting for Robinson to overcome the racist obstacles put in
his way. It is an uplifting tale of courage and determination that is hard to
resist, even though you know the outcome before the movie begins.
But despite bravura performances by relatively unknown Chadwick Boseman as
Robinson and superstar Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey (the Brooklyn Dodgers'
general manager who recruited Robinson and orchestrated his transition from the
Negro Leagues to the all-white Major Leagues), the film strikes out as history,
because it ignores the true story of how baseball's apartheid system was
dismantled.
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The film portrays baseball's integration as the tale of two
trailblazersRobinson, the combative athlete and Rickey, the shrewd
strategistbattling baseball's, and society's, bigotry. But the truth is that
it was a political victory brought about by a social protest movement. As an
activist himself, Robinson would likely have been disappointed by a film that
ignored the centrality of the broader civil rights struggle.
That story has been told in two outstanding books, Jules Tygiel's Baseball's
Great Experiment (1983) and Chris Lamb's Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters
and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (2012). As they recount, Rickey's
plan came after more than a decade of effort by black and left-wing journalists
and activists to desegregate the national pastime. Beginning in the 1930s, the
Negro press, civil rights groups, the Communist Party, progressive white
activists, and radical politicians waged a sustained campaign to integrate
baseball. It was part of a broader movement to eliminate discrimination in
housing, jobs, and other sectors of society. It included protests against
segregation within the military, mobilizing for a federal anti-lynching law,
marches to open up defense jobs to blacks during World War II, and boycotts
against stores that refused to hire African Americans under the banner "don't
shop where you can't work." The movement accelerated after the war, when
returning black veterans expected that America would open up opportunities for
African Americans.
Robinson broke into baseball when America was a deeply segregated nation. In
1946, at least six African Americans were lynched in the South. Restrictive
covenants were still legal, barring blacks (and Jews) from buying homes in many
neighborhoodsnot just in the South. Only a handful of blacks were enrolled in
the nation's predominantly white colleges and universities. There were only two
blacks in Congress. No big city had a black mayor.
Martin Luther King Jr. once told Dodgers star Don Newcombe, another former
Negro Leaguer, "You'll never know what you and Jackie and Roy [Campanella] did
to make it possible to do my job."
It is difficult today to summon the excitement that greeted Robinson's
achievement. The dignity with which Robinson handled his encounters with
racismincluding verbal and physical abuse on the field and in hotels,
restaurants, trains, and elsewheredrew public attention to the issue, stirred
the consciences of many white Americans, and gave black Americans a tremendous
boost of pride and self-confidence. Martin Luther King Jr. once told Dodgers
star Don Newcombe, another former Negro Leaguer, "You'll never know what you
and Jackie and Roy [Campanella] did to make it possible to do my job."
Jackie Robinson, right, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Solipsis)
Robinson, who spent his entire major league career (1947 to 1956) with the
Dodgers, was voted Rookie of the Year in 1947 and Most Valuable Player in 1949,
when he won the National League batting title with a .342 batting average. An
outstanding base runner and base stealer, with a .311 lifetime batting average,
he led the Dodgers to six pennants and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962.
* * *
42 is the fourth Hollywood film about Robinson. All of them suffer from what
might be called movement myopia. We may prefer our heroes to be rugged
individualists, but the reality doesn't conform to the myth embedded in
Hollywood's version of the Robinson story.
In The Jackie Robinson Story, released in 1950, Robinson played himself and the
fabulous Ruby Dee portrayed his wife Rachel. Produced at the height of the Cold
War, five years before the Montgomery bus boycott, the film 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."
In 1990 TNT released a made-for-TV movie, The Court Martial of Jackie Robinson,
starring Andre Braugher, which focused on Robinson's battles with racism as a
soldier during World War II. In 1944, while assigned to a training camp at
Fort Hood in segregated Texas, Robinson, a second lieutenant, refused to move
to the back of an army bus when the white driver ordered him to do so, even
though buses had been officially desegregated on military bases. He was court
martialed for his insubordination, tried, acquitted, transferred to another
military base, and honorably discharged four months later. By depicting
Robinson as a rebellious figure who chafed at the blatant racism he faced, the
film foreshadows the traits he would have to initially suppress once he reached
the majors.
HBO's The Soul of the Game, released in 1996, focused on the hopes and then the
frustrations of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, the two greatest players in the
Negro Leagues, whom Branch Rickey passed up to integrate the majors in favor of
Robinson, played by Blair Underwood. Rickey had long wanted to hire black
players, both for moral reasons and because he believed it would increase
ticket sales among the growing number of African Americans moving to the big
cities. He knew that if the experiment failed, the cause of baseball
integration would be set back for many years. Rickey's scouts identified
Robinsonwho was playing for the Negro League's Kansas City Monarchs after
leaving the armyas a potential barrier-breaker. Rickey could have chosen other
Negro League players with greater talent or more name recognition, but he
wanted someone who could be, in today's terms, a role model. Robinson was
young, articulate and well educated. His mother moved the family from Georgia
to Pasadena, California in 1920 when Robinson was 14 months ago. Pasadena was
deeply segregated, but Robinson lived among and formed friendships with whites
growing up there and while attending Pasadena Junior College and UCLA. He was
UCLA's first four-sport athlete (football, basketball, track, and baseball),
twice led the Pacific Coast League in scoring in basketball, won the NCAA broad
jump championship, and was a football All-American. Rickey knew that Robinson
had a hot temper and strong political views, but he calculated that Robinson
could handle the emotional pressure while helping the Dodgers on the field.
Robinson promised Rickey that, for at least his rookie year, he would not
respond to the inevitable verbal barbs and even physical abuse he would face on
a daily basis.
In 1997, America celebrated Robinson with a proliferation of conferences,
museum exhibits, plays, and books. Major League Baseball retired Robinson's
number42for all teams. President Bill Clinton appeared with Rachel Robinson
at Shea Stadium to venerate her late husband.
But the next Hollywood movie about Robinson didn't arrive until this year's 42,
written and directed by Brian Helgeland (screenwriter of L.A. Confidential and
Mystic River), under the auspices of Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures.
The real story of baseball's integration has plenty of drama and could have
easily been incorporated into the film.
* * *
Starting in the 1930s, reporters for African-American papers (especially
Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, Fay Young of the Chicago Defender, Joe
Bostic of the People's Voice in New York, and Sam Lacy of the Baltimore
Afro-American), and Lester Rodney, sports editor of the Communist paper, the
Daily Worker, took the lead in pushing baseball's establishment to hire black
players. They published open letters to owners, polled white managers and
players (some of whom were threatened by the prospect of losing their jobs to
blacks, but most of whom said that they had no objections to playing with
African Americans), brought black players to unscheduled tryouts at spring
training centers, and kept the issue before the public. Several white
journalists for mainstream papers joined the chorus for baseball integration.
Progressive unions and civil rights groups picketed outside Yankee Stadium the
Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field in New York City, and Comiskey Park and Wrigley
Field in Chicago. They gathered more than a million signatures on petitions,
demanding that baseball tear down the color barrier erected by team owners and
Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis. In July 1940, the Trade Union Athletic
Association held an "End Jim Crow in Baseball" demonstration at the New York
World's Fair. The next year, liberal unions sent a delegation to meet with
Landis to demand that major league baseball recruit black players. In December
1943, Paul Robeson, the prominent black actor, singer, and activist, addressed
baseball's owners at their annual winter meeting in New York, urging them to
integrate their teams. Under orders from Landis, they ignored Robeson and
didn't ask him a single question.
National Endowment for the Humanities
In 1945, Isadore Muchnick, a progressive member of the Boston City Council,
threatened to deny the Red Sox a permit to play on Sundays unless the team
considered hiring black players. Working with several black sportswriters,
Muchnick persuaded the reluctant Red Sox general manager, Eddie Collins, to
give three Negro League playersRobinson, Sam Jethroe, and Marvin Williamsa
tryout at Fenway Park in April of that year. The Sox had no intention of
signing any of the players, nor did the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago White
Sox, who orchestrated similar bogus auditions. But the public pressure and
media publicity helped raise awareness and furthered the cause.
Other politicians were allies in the crusade. Running for re-election to the
New York City Council in 1945, Ben Davisan African-American former college
football star, and a Communistdistributed 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." That year, the
New York State legislature passed 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's established a Committee
on Baseball to push the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers to sign black players.
Left-wing Congressman Vito Marcantonio, who represented Harlem, called for an
investigation of baseball's racist practices.
This protest movement set the stage for Robinson's entrance into the major
leagues. In October 1945, Rickey announced that Robinson had signed a contract
with the Dodgers. He sent Robinson to the Dodgers' minor-league team in
Montreal for the 1946 season, then brought him up to the Brooklyn team on
opening day, April 15, 1947.
The Robinson experiment succeededon the field and at the box office. Within a
few years, the Dodgers had hired other black playerspitchers Don Newcombe and
Joe Black, catcher Roy Campanella, infielder Jim Gilliam, and Cuban outfielder
Sandy Amoroswho helped turn the 1950s Dodgers into one of the greatest teams
in baseball history.
* * *
Viewers of 42 will see no evidence of the movement that made Robinson'sand the
Dodgers'success possible. For example, Andrew Holland plays Pittsburgh Courier
reporter Wendell Smith, but he's depicted as Robinson's traveling companion and
the ghost-writer for Robinson's newspaper column during his rookie season. The
film ignores Smith's key role as an agitator and leader of the long crusade to
integrate baseball before Robinson became a household name.
Robinson recognized that the dismantling of baseball's color line was a triumph
of both a man and a movement. During and after his playing days, he joined the
civil rights crusade, speaking outin speeches, interviews, and his
columnagainst racial injustice. In 1949, testifying before Congress, he said:
"I'm not fooled because I've had a chance open to very few Negro Americans."
Robinson viewed his sports celebrity as a platform from which to challenge
American racism. Many sportswriters and most other playersincluding some of
his fellow black players, content simply to be playing in the majorsconsidered
Robinson too angry and vocal about racism in baseball and society.
Robinson viewed his sports celebrity as a platform from which to challenge
American racism. Many sportswriters and other playersincluding some of his
fellow black playersconsidered Robinson too angry and vocal about racism.
When Robinson retired from baseball in 1956, no team offered him a position as
a coach, manager, or executive. Instead, he became an executive with the Chock
Full o' Nuts restaurant chain and an advocate for integrating corporate
America. He lent his name and prestige to several business ventures, including
a construction company and a black-owned bank in Harlem. He got involved in
these business activities primarily to help address the shortage of affordable
housing and the persistent redlining (lending discrimination against blacks) by
white-owned banks. Both the construction company and the bank later fell on
hard times and dimmed Robinson's confidence in black capitalism as a strategy
for racial integration.
In 1960, Robinson supported Hubert Humphrey, the liberal Senator and civil
rights stalwart from Minnesota, in his campaign for president. When John
Kennedy won the Democratic nomination, however, Robinson shocked his liberal
fans by endorsing Richard Nixon. Robinson believed that Nixon had a better
track record than JFK on civil rights issues, but by the end of the
campaignespecially after Nixon refused to make an appearance in Harlemhe
regretted his choice.
During the 1960s, Robinson was a constant presence at civil rights rallies and
picket lines, and chaired the NAACP's fundraising drive. Angered by the GOP's
opposition to civil rights legislation, he supported Humphrey over Nixon in
1968. But he became increasingly frustrated by the pace of change.
"I cannot possibly believe," he wrote in his autobiography, I Never Had It
Made, published shortly before he died of a heart attack at age 53 in 1972,
"that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry,
inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live
in slums or barely exist on welfare."
In 1952, five years after Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, only six of
major league baseball's 16 teams had a black player. It was not until 1959 that
the last holdout, the Boston Red Sox, brought an African American onto its
roster. The black players who followed Robinson shattered the stereotypeonce
widespread among many team owners, sportswriters, and white fansthat there
weren't many African Americans "qualified" to play at the major league level.
Between 1949 and 1960, black players won 8 out of 12 Rookie of the Year awards,
and 9 out of 12 Most Valuable Player awards in the National League, which was
much more integrated than the American League. Many former Negro League
players, including Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Don Newcombe, and Ernie Banks,
were perennial All-Stars.
But academic studies conducted from the 1960s through the 1990s uncovered
persistent discrimination. For example, teams were likely to favor a
weak-hitting white player over a weak-hitting black player to be a benchwarmer
or a utility man. And even the best black players had fewer and less lucrative
commercial endorsements than their white counterparts.
In the 16 years he lived after his retirement in 1956, Robinson pushed baseball
to hire blacks as managers and executives and even refused an invitation to
participate in the 1969 Old Timers game because he did not yet see "genuine
interest in breaking the barriers that deny access to managerial and front
office positions." No major league team had a black manager until Frank
Robinson was hired by the Cleveland Indians in 1975. The majors' first black
general managerthe Atlanta Braves' Bill Lucaswasn't hired until 1977.
* * *
Last season, players of color represented 38.2 percent of majo- league rosters,
according to a report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the
University of Central Florida. Black athletes represented only 8.8 percent of
major-league playersa dramatic decline from the peak of 27 percent in 1975,
and less than half the 19 percent in 1995. One quarter of last season's
African-Americans players were clustered on three teamsthe Yankees, Angels,
and Dodgers. Their shrinking proportion is due primarily to the growing number
of Latino (27.3%) and Asian (1.9%) players, including many foreign-born
athletes, now populating major league rosters.
But there are also sociological and economic reasons for the decline of black
ballplayers. The semi-pro, sandlot, and industrial teams that once thrived in
black communities, serving as feeders to the Negro Leagues and then the major
leagues, have disappeared. Basketball and football have replaced baseball as
the most popular sports in black communities, where funding for public school
baseball teams and neighborhood playgrounds with baseball fields has declined.
Major league teams more actively recruit young players from Latin America, who
are typically cheaper to hire than black Americans, as Adrian Burgos, in
Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line (2007) and Rob
Ruck, in Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game
(2012) document.
Among today's 30 teams, there are only four managers of colorthree blacks (the
Reds' Dusty Baker, the Astros' Bo Porter, and the Rangers' Ron Washington) and
one Latino (the Braves' Fredi Gonzalez). (Two of last season's Latino
managersthe Indians' Manny Acta, and Ozzie Guillen of the Marlinswere fired).
One Latino (Ruben Amaro Jr. of the Phillies) and one African American (Michael
Hill of the Marlins) serve as general managers. (White Sox GM Ken Williams, an
African American, was promoted to executive VP during the off-season.) Arturo
Moreno, a Latino, has owned the Los Angeles Angels since 2003. Basketball great
Earvin "Magic" Johnson, part of the new group that purchased the Los Angeles
Dodgers last year, is the first African-American owner of a major league team.
Like baseball, American societyincluding our workplaces, Congress and other
legislative bodies, friendships, and even familiesis more integrated than it
was in Robinson's day. But there is still an ongoing debate about the magnitude
of racial progress, as measured by persistent residential segregation, a
significantly higher poverty rate among blacks than whites, and widespread
racism within our criminal justice and prison systems.
As Robinson understood, these inequities cannot be solved by individual effort
alone. It also requires grassroots activism and protest to attain changes in
government policy and business practices. 42, misses an opportunity to recap
this important lesson. Robinson's legacy is to remind us of the unfinished
agenda of the civil rights revolution and of the important role that movements
play in moving the country closer to its ideals.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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