Know his name: Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier

There was no baseball on Jackie Robinson Day this year, but the television show Jeopardy marked the occasion by slipping a gimme question into the $1,000 slot of the category “Unique College Courses.”

“One of the topics covered in a Major League Baseball course at Arizona State is this player who broke the color barrier in 1947,” host Alex Trebek read.

A college student representing USC buzzed in. “Who is Babe Ruth?”

Jesus wept. Fortunately, a student from Yale recovered the fumble: “Who is Jackie Robinson?”

Whether or not we care about baseball, we should have some idea.

New York newspapers barely mentioned Robinson in their accounts of that April 15, 1947, game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Braves at Ebbets Field; they played it safe and wrote strictly about the play.

Robinson was 0 for 3, then in the seventh inning he reached base after laying down a bunt that was misplayed by the opposing first baseman, who charged in to field the ball and wheeled to throw to the second baseman covering first. His throw hit Robinson in the shoulder and bounced into right field; the Dodger rookie rounded first and took second without breaking stride.

A pitch or two later Robinson scored what turned out to be the game’s winning run when Pete Reiser doubled down the right field line. For the New York writers, Reiser was the story of the day; it was left to black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender to observe the historic nature of the event.

You can argue the American civil rights movement started with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. The Board of Education in 1954, or trace it back to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) or even Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on the first day of 1863. You could say Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a bus was the beginning, or point to the 1953 appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Or you could argue it started with Robinson’s taking the field.

Robinson’s impact on the game was not merely sociological. From the beginning, he introduced a black aesthetic — the Negro League’s style of play — into baseball’s major leagues. His syncopated dance off third base, his willingness to gamble when the stakes were right, upset baseball conventions and led to a rethinking of the game’s conventional wisdom.

He was an electric base runner who stole whenever he could, not just when circumstances dictated that he should. To those used to the stolid, home-run-dominated baseball of the 1930s and ’40s, he could seem reckless and wild. The logic of Robinson’s style was like the logic of jazz, not always discernible to those deaf to the nuances of the game.

Robinson’s athleticism compensated for a relative lack of baseball experience. His swing was hardly classic. He was an instinctive player, with an intelligence that challenged the pat assumptions baseball people reverently called The Book — decades before statisticians like Bill James were able to prove its fallacies. Robinson’s play was a critique of and a challenge to the old brand of baseball, just as his blackness was a challenge to the old social order.

Robinson was a harbinger of an important shift in American life — a burgeoning black culture, long checked by legal and social stricture, was to burst forth and dominate the mainstream.

Robinson and Elvis Presley both “played black.” Both brought black style into the mainstream. Both were demonized as polluters before they were lionized as cultural heroes. It is unlikely either of them realized the magnitude of what they were doing as they were doing it.

It is mildly surprising Robinson turned out to be such a quality player, one who probably would have been elected to the Hall of Fame even if he hadn’t been a pioneer who broke the color line. He was hardly the best player the Negro League had to offer, but when Branch Rickey began scouting for a man to challenge baseball’s apartheid, he wasn’t necessarily looking for a star.

He was looking for a certain kind of man.

And Robinson, a former UCLA football and basketball star then playing for the Kansas City Monarchs, had qualities Rickey sought. He was a college graduate who had played on mixed-race teams in college, had been an Army officer, and was still in his 20s, having been born in 1919.

On the other hand, Robinson was combative; he had barely escaped an Army court-martial for insubordination for “using vile and vulgar language” to a captain investigating Robinson’s refusal to move to the back of a civilian bus.

Legend has it that Rickey asked Robinson if he could “turn the other cheek,” if he had “the guts not to fight back.” That putative exchange has become part of American cultural lore, and for the first three seasons he was under contract to the Dodgers (one with minor-league Montreal and two in Brooklyn), Robinson maintained an outward passivity unnatural to his character. He absorbed the taunts and some physical punishment, retaliating only with his bat, glove and spectacular base running.

Like most legends, Robinson’s story can be made to serve all kinds of different purposes. Often it is reduced to a Horatio Alger homily: Robinson was given a break by Rickey and made the most of it, succeeding not only for himself but for the generations of black athletes who would eventually come to dominate America’s playing fields.

But Robinson was a complex man, as prickly as he was courageous, and there was a bitterness to him that should not be ignored. He left baseball disappointed in 1957, and his “as told to” autobiography — finished as he lay dying in 1972 — was fittingly titled I Never Had It Made.

In the book’s foreword, Robinson wrote of his first World Series appearance on Sept. 30, 1947: There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was, but then again. … As I write this 25 years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Jackie Robinson may have died disappointed in us; his spirit might be disappointed yet. What progress we make is fitful and pitifully out of proportion to our self-congratulations. We should at least know his name.