Jackie Robinson is a Hall of Famer because of his exploits on the diamond, but that's not why kids study him in school. He was the first black player to suit up for a Major League Baseball team; as such he endured endless slings and arrows and helped make sports a fulcrum for racial equality. His milestone resonates well beyond the field of play. So it makes sense that the most intriguing facets of Robinson's life have very little to do with baseball, and that the richest material of his story comes from his life away from the game.
Watching the new four-hour Ken Burns film Jackie Robinson, which airs Monday and Tuesday on KERA (and hits DVD Tuesday), you're struck foremost by the complexity of Robinson's post-retirement life. Once he he was enshrined as an icon, he became a tireless worker for civil rights. Yet he often struggled to connect to a rapidly changing sense of African-American aspiration.
After he left baseball Robinson became an executive for the Chock Full o'Nuts coffee company. He campaigned for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election but grew dismayed when Nixon refused to help get Martin Luther King out of prison after a protest arrest. Robinson became a Rockefeller Republican, a staunch integrationist at a time when his political party was lurching southbound and to the right. Meanwhile, the militant Black Power movement was taking flight.
While Malcolm X and then the Black Panthers gained prominence, Robinson kept fighting for integration and against separation. For his troubles he was called an Uncle Tom, and worse.
As Robinson biographer Arnold Rampersad wrote, "The revolution that Robinson had helped to set in motion now demanded a new image. Gone was the ideal of patient suffering; gone, too, was the underlying ideal of an integrated American in which justice would prevail for all. The new black man cared little for stoicism, and less for integration. Instead, power was the great goal; and justice seemed to demand an element of retribution, or revenge."
For all his dalliances with different Republican leaders, Burns says, Robinson remained rock steady in his goals. Integration now, integration tomorrow, integration forever.
"When you see someone who is almost heroically consistent, it can seem like he's changing and tacking this way and that way," says Burns, who made the film with his daughter, Sarah Burns, and with David McMahon. "He's not. He's being the same person. It's the times that are changing."
Robinson was nothing if not consistent. He entered the public consciousness as the ultimate intergrationist, a pioneer who demanded equal treatment, and he stuck to his guns.
In the film, Robinson's daughter Sharon tells an anecdote that reflects her father's attitude toward those changing times. Like many black teens in the '60s, Sharon was enamored of the charismatic Black Panthers leader Huey P. Newton. She got the famous poster of Newton sitting on a makeshift throne, beret on his head, spear in one hand, rifle in the other. Robinson saw it, and his reaction was swift: "Not in my house. Get that poster off my wall." Down goes Huey. Robinson had no interest in raising a militant.
Robinson was nothing if not consistent. He entered the public consciousness as the ultimate intergrationist, a pioneer who demanded equal treatment, and he stuck to his guns. As Burns points out, when Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Martin Luther King, Jr. was still a junior at Morehouse College. Rosa Parks was still a decade from giving up her bus seat. The Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which ordered the integration of public schools, was still seven years away.
In short, Robinson was well ahead of the times. And then, just like that, a new generation viewed him as behind the times. By 1972, after years of failing health, he was dead, just as the heady '60s were morphing into the disillusioned '70s.
If Robinson has a parallel in literature, it's the novelist Ralph Ellison (also the subject of a Rampersad biography). Celebrated for his 1952 novel Invisible Man, Ellison also carried the flag of integration, and cringed at the rhetoric of black power. As younger writers like James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones thrived in the '60s, Ellison, too, was castigated as an Uncle Tom. Society's shifting ideological currents can be cruel.
Today, Robinson is a nationally recognized hero. Major League Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson Day every April 15. His No. 42 is the only number retired by an entire professional sports league.
What the new film shows so persuasively is that such heroism is rarely simple. Robinson survived one trial by fire when he broke the color line, then had another waiting for him on the other side.
Jackie Robinson 8 p.m. Mon. and Tues, KERA-TV (Ch. 13)
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