Two Pioneers by Robert C. Cottrell

Author:Robert C. Cottrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

9

The Signing of Jackie Robinson

Discussion regarding segregation in organized baseball gathered momentum by August 1945 during the heat of the major league pennant races, following a series of “behind closed door” sessions and the picketing of major league ballparks. New York mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia set up a biracial committee headed by Charles Evans Hughes Jr., the former U.S. solicitor general, to examine the issue. Yankees president Larry MacPhail represented the American League, and Dodgers president and general manager Branch Rickey, the National League, while former judges, educators, a minister, and New York Times sportswriter Arthur Daley also sat on the committee. The mayor referred to baseball as America’s national game and noted that many ballplayers were themselves the children of immigrants. Committee member MacPhail admitted that if the Negro leagues collapsed, the Yankees would lose income from black teams playing at Yankee Stadium and in top minor league parks in Newark, Kansas City, and Norfolk.

A report circulated in mid-August that Kansas City Monarchs shortstop Jackie Robinson had agreed to coach football at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas. Robinson denied the report. He indicated instead that he might play for the Pacific Coast Professional Football League, a rival of the National Football League, which maintained Jim Crow standards of its own. Founded in 1940, the PCPFL featured Kenny Washington, who, playing alongside Robinson in the backfield, had been an All-American halfback at UCLA. Robinson had played for the semipro Los Angeles Bulldogs in 1941. But as Pittsburgh Courier columnist Wendell Smith continued his campaign to integrate organized baseball, Robinson received a call from Brooklyn Dodgers scout Clyde Sukeforth, who indicated that Branch Rickey wanted to meet with him. A strong sense of morality evidently drove Rickey, who had been a longtime baseball executive with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Dodgers. Rickey often spoke of his experience over forty years earlier when a black catcher on his Ohio Wesleyan University team had not been allowed to enter a hotel in South Bend, Indiana. Rickey encountered the young man crying and tearing at his hands that evening. “It’s my skin, Mr. Rickey,” the player said. “If I could pull it off, I’d be just like everybody else.”1 By all accounts, Rickey never forgot that incident. While a young manager with the St. Louis Browns, he had been quoted in a 1915 article, “Rickey Claims Base Ball Is Moral Guide”; there, he extolled baseball as “the great American sport.”2

Back in 1943, Rickey had broached the subject of hiring black players with George V. McLaughlin, president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, which held a mortgage on the Dodgers. After McLaughlin expressed his approval, Rickey next went to the Dodgers board of directors, who unanimously agreed to his plan and promised to remain mum about it. Talk of Rickey’s involvement with the segregated United States League was always a subterfuge, albeit one unknown to Gus Greenlee and other league founders. Rickey recognized the obstacles confronting him, such as the discriminatory practices still afflicting St.

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