This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated April 7, 2023
Major League Baseball began the 2023 season just over a week ago and the Mets and Yankees have been in action. The Mets home opener took place Thursday April 6 at Citi Field, where fans entering through the main entrance behind home plate, make their way through the Jackie Robinson Rotunda, which honors the trailblazing ballplayer and civil rights icon.
Jackie Robinson played his entire major league career for the Dodgers in Brooklyn, and he is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in a portion of the Brooklyn-Queens graveyard that is right near the border between the two boroughs, and within view of the Jackie Robinson Parkway that bears his name.
April 15 is Jackie Robinson Day around Major League Baseball, in honor of his first game with the Dodgers when he broke the color barrier in the then-segregated national pastime, but where was Jackie at this time in April of 1947, in the week before his historic first game? He, and the entire Brooklyn Dodgers team he had been promoted to, as well as the minor league Montreal Royals team he had played with the year before, were in Cuba.
With Robinson joining the big league club in 1947, Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey worried that holding spring training in the deep south on Florida, would be deeply problematic. Rickey had witnessed racial confrontations the year before when Robinson was with the triple-A Montreal Royals in Daytona Beach the year before. The thought was that playing in an integrated country would avoid those issues in advance of the regular season, that would inevitably have its own matters to contend with.
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
~Jackie Robinson
However, when the players arrived in Havana that spring, Robinson, as well as the other black players for the minor league Royals, were segregated, booked to stay in a different hotel than the white players. Robinson was livid, telling the team’s traveling secretary, “I thought we left Florida… so we could get away from Jim Crow. So, what the devil is this business of segregating the Negro players in a colored nation?” After it was explained that this was Rickey’s idea, Robinson said, “I’ll go along with Mr. Rickey’s judgment. He’s been right so far.”
Segregating the players in this way was likely intended to ease the white players into playing alongside black teammates, but it did not make a difference. Southerner Dixie Walker started a petition to keep Jackie Robinson off the club, which several white players signed onto.
Dodgers’ manager Leo Durocher learned of it and exploded in front of the entire team. He later recalled, “I told them what they could do with their petition, and I don’t think I got much back talk on it I told the players that Robinson was going to open the season with us come hell or high water, and if they didn’t like it they could leave now and we’d trade them or get rid of them some other way. Nobody moved.” Rickey also confronted these players and agreed that anyone who wanted to leave Brooklyn, would be accommodated. The petition died and nobody left, though Dixie Walker was eventually traded after the season, as per his request.
A week into April, the Dodgers broke camp in Cuba and headed back to Brooklyn to begin their 1947 campaign. Opening day was in Ebbets Field on Tuesday, April 15, with Jackie Robinson becoming the first African American to play in the majors in the modern era. This event 76 years ago may seem like ancient history, but we are not that far removed from it. Jackie’s wife, Rachel, now 100 years old, is still with us. She was influential in the creation of the Jackie Robinson Museum, which opened seven months ago and is just a short subway ride away, located at 75 Varick Street in Manhattan.
It seems that lately, for all the progress we have made, in some respects we are taking steps backward. In Florida, the state in which Branch Rickey was concerned about racial confrontations in 1947, an elementary school just reversed course on showing students the Disney movie about Ruby Bridges, now 68, who was a first grader who famously integrated an all-white New Orleans school in 1960. The school acted in response to a white parent who felt this would teach children that white people hate black people. Governor DeSantis of Florida has set the tone with his ban on college-level classes on African American studies.
We cannot and should not shield our kids from our history, even the ugliest parts of it. Jackie Robinson famously said, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” His life was incredibly important and had a tremendous impact on many other lives during his lifetime, and it continues to today, but only as long as we teach it to each successive generation.
