Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Burns’ ‘Jackie Robinson’ offers complex look at American icon
“History is not what was, but what is,” says Ken Burns, offering a variation on William Faulkner’s quote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The famed documentary filmmaker finds this to be especially true in his latest, “Jackie Robinson,” which airs today and Tuesday on PBS.
“Jackie Robinson’s story is the history of race relations in the 20th century,” says Burns. “Unfortunately, in the 21st century, almost all the tropes of race are happening now.”
Of course, Robinson breaking baseball’s color line in 1947 is one of America’s most inspiring moments, but Burns’ film goes beyond the best-known parts of the tale, which was retold most recently in the movie “42.”
Burns thinks that for far too long Robinson has been “kind of a mythological figure. He’s sort of encrusted with the barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia.” The film’s intention, he says, is to provide a more complex exami-
nation of his life. And with “Robinson,” Burns gets to do something he doesn’t often get to do in his documentaries: Tell “an extraordinary love story.”
At 93, Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, retains the same fire that people associate with her husband during his playing days. (Baseball fans still marvel at the clip of him stealing home in the 1955 World Series.)
“We were deeply in love,” she says about Jackie, who died in 1972 at 53.
“He was not only handsome, but he had the most beautiful smile,” she remembers. “I think I fell in love with him on that first day.”
The couple agreed they wouldn’t get married until after she finished college and he had a job. The job came when Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager, recruited him in 1945 to become the first African-American player in the all-white major leagues. Along with the job, Rickey asked him to face a storm of racial hostility.
As we know, Robinson weathered it valiantly. But due to the color line, Robinson didn’t become a major leaguer until the relative older age (for an athlete) of 28, and he retired before the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958. That would have brought him back to nearby Pasadena, where his mother had moved the family from rural Georgia when he was a young boy.
He grew up in the shadow of the Rose Bowl, where he would eventually play college football for Pasadena Junior College. (Sorry, UCLA fans, he never made it there as a Bruin. In those days, the team shared the L.A. Coliseum with USC.)
Though the Robinson family had escaped the Jim Crow South, they still faced bigotry in Pasadena. The community was segregated in its own way, says Burns. Non-whites were only allowed to swim in the public pool one day a week, and the city’s white residents were “assured it would be drained afterwards.”
“There were crosses burned on the Robinsons’ yard, and the neighbors would call the police whenever Jackie roller-skated by,” he says. “It was really, really tough, and they got by hand to mouth.”
Athletics gave Robinson a path to an education. Many believe baseball was only his fourth-best sport after football, basketball and track, but while many cheered him on the field, he couldn’t get away from the racial epithets directed toward him.
As Burns points out, Robinson began fighting for Rachel Robinson, wife of the late Jackie Robinson. civil rights long before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — who was still in college in 1947 — Brown versus Board of Education, lunch-counter protests and Rosa Parks.
In 1944, while a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Robinson refused a driver’s order to go to the back of a bus. After the driver complained, he was arrested and court-martialed. Though acquitted — “He knew his rights,” says Burns — it was only one of many ordeals Robinson faced throughout his life.
Most of the documentary’s second episode deals with Robinson’s post-baseball life, the part of the story most people don’t know much about.
“He was the most important black person in America, and he’s goes into the South to support Dr. King, to black churches that have been burned and speaking out to advance an agenda of equality,” says Burns. “His relentless and single-mindedness in the pursuit of civil rights is very, very impressive.”
Robinson’s legacy, however, is complicated. In the late ’60s when the civil rights movement began changing and some within the movement advocated violence, he found himself being criticized by other African Americans. While calling himself a political independent, he often supported Republican candidates, including Richard Nixon in the 1960s. But as Burns observes, it had been known as the party of Lincoln when Robinson grew up.
Robinson also lashed out at Muhammed Ali for refusing the draft. “It was very understandable,” says Burns, “in the context of his son having gone to Vietnam very early on and coming back a heroin addict.”
Jackie Robinson Jr. would turn his life around, but sadly he died in a car crash a year before his father succumbed to diabetes and heart disease. Many, though, would chalk up the baseball icon’s early death to the stress of having to hold so much in for so long.
“I think it’s important to understand that in the middle of his heroic story of forbearance, tolerance and turning the other cheek, what was going on inside him was a violent version of the exact opposite,” says Burns “And because you see his missteps, as well as his great strengths, that makes for interesting storytelling.”
Rachel Robinson says many people approached her about doing a documentary about her husband, but Burns was the first to put together “the standards we needed.”
She says she is heartened by the renewed interest in Robinson. “I’m getting so much mail from young children about things they have seen recently, and wanting to know what they should do about the problems in America.”
Rachel — who met Jackie in 1941 at UCLA while studying nursing and who also dealt with the same discrimination — says she is pleased that people are speaking out now. “The victims of segregation have learned to present themselves in a way that other people can begin to understand the impact of discrimination.”
For the documentary, Burns pursued President Barack Obama and the first lady Michelle Obama and eventually made the interview happen. It’s evident in the way they light up when talking about him how highly they regard Robinson.
“It’s a sign of his character that he chose a woman who was his equal,” the first lady says.
“I think it’s really important to understand that had not Jackie and Rachel gone through the door, then I don’t think we would have Michelle and Barack Obama,” says Burns, who hopes that the documentary contributes to the national discussion about race.
He and Harvard professor and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. have been holding discussions around the country on the subject called “The American Fault Line: Race and the American Ideal.”
“The great glory of history is the fact that it doesn’t have the acid of the provocativeness of the present,” says the documentarian. “So it’s a table around which we can still have a civil discourse, even though were talking on the same things.”