The Revolutionaries : Just 50 Years Ago, When Baseball Was Lily White Along Came Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson

Fifty years ago Monday, baseball took the first tentative step in a sociological revolution.

The war in the Pacific had ended less than two weeks earlier, touching off parties from sea to shining sea. America was still celebrating the peace when Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, arrived for work on a Monday morning, about to embark on a great experiment that carried with it no guarantees.

From the time he arrived in Brooklyn four years earlier, Rickey had been intrigued with the integration of baseball. He had been permanently affected by an episode in 1904, when he coached baseball at Ohio Wesleyan University and one of his players, Charles Thomas, was refused a room at a hotel in South Bend, Ind., because he was black. Outraged, Rickey ordered a cot in his own room for the player.

Rickey recalled watching Thomas sobbing. “He rubbed one great hand over the other with all the power of his body, muttering, ‘Black skin, black skin. If only I could make ‘em white.’ He kept rubbing and rubbing, as though he would remove the blackness by sheer friction.”

There had been no black player in organized baseball since Moses Fleetwood Walker who played 42 games for Toledo in 1884. It was an unwritten law that non-whites would not be welcomed. Rickey never quite understood it. “How can you call it an All-American sport if you exclude black Americans?” he wrote. If he ever had the opportunity, he thought, he would not exclude them.

When he took over operation of the Dodgers during World War II, Rickey decided to move ahead with his plan. He sent scouts to evaluate players in the Negro Leagues on the pretext of organizing a team of black players for Brooklyn. That was the premise when Clyde Sukeforth showed up to watch the Kansas City Monarchs and their shortstop, Jack Roosevelt Robinson.

Robinson had been a four-sport star at UCLA, a lieutenant in the Army, and one of eight players Dodgers scouts had identified as the best Negro League prospects. Among the others were Josh Gibson, Roy Campanella, Buck Leonard and Cool Papa Bell, all now in the Hall of Fame. Finally, Rickey’s most trusted aides settled on Robinson, who had batted .387 in 47 games.

The young man had all the tools that scouts look for--hitting, fielding, running, throwing and hitting with power. Rickey, however, was looking for one more quality--an inner strength to sustain a man who be the first of his race in modern organized baseball.

There was no great rush to support Rickey’s revolutionary idea, no collective attack of conscience by that generation of owners. There had been brief, inconclusive overtures to black players by Bill Veeck and Clark Griffith, but Rickey set out on this adventure pretty much alone. Late in his life, then-commissioner Happy Chandler recalled support for the move coming primarily from two sources--Rickey and himself.

In fact, Rickey’s move was not entirely altruistic. He had identified blacks as a new source of player talent and a new population of potential customers, and he simply decided to mine both of them.

But for this to work, he had to have the right man. He knew that Robinson could play. He needed to know more. There had been a court martial incident in the Army when Robinson--12 years before Rosa Parks--refused to move to the back of a bus. He was acquitted but the incident left Rickey wondering if Robinson was too hot-tempered to endure what was ahead. He was about to find out, once and for all.

“Mr. Rickey called me and said the Monarchs were playing in Chicago on Friday night at Comiskey Park,” Sukeforth recalled. “He said, ‘I want you to see the game and pay attention to this fellow Robinson.”’ Sukeforth was on the next train. “I followed orders,” he said.

When the scout got to the game, though, Robinson was not playing. “He was hurt,” Sukeforth said. “He had fallen on his shoulder and was going to be out a couple of days.”

Sukeforth was not deterred. He had to be in Toledo for a doubleheader on Sunday and invited Robinson to meet him there. The two men talked for a while and that night Robinson accompanied Sukeforth back to Brooklyn. “I knew Mr. Rickey wanted to talk to him,” he said.

On Monday, Aug. 28, 1945, the two men arrived at the Dodgers offices in downtown Brooklyn. Rickey was waiting. “I introduced them and after that I didn’t say a word,” the taciturn scout from Maine recalled.

Back in California, Robinson’s fiancee waited to hear about the meeting. “It was all very vague and secretive and Jackie didn’t know what to expect,” Rachel Robinson said. “Neither did I, really.”

Rickey had his own agenda all planned out, though. Sukeforth remembered it this way:

“Mr. Rickey began by saying, ‘All my life, I’ve been looking for a great colored ballplayer. I have reason to believe you’re that man. But I need more than a great player. I need a man who will take more abuse than any man has ever had to take.”’

It soon became clear that Rickey was not talking about organizing a team of black players. He was talking about integrating organized baseball.

Sukeforth said the 26-year-old Robinson listened quietly, drawing it all in.

For three hours, the men met, sizing each other up. Some accounts suggest that they had encountered each other before, perhaps as early as June of that year. The August meeting, however, would be the decisive one.

According to the account in the recently published “Branch Rickey’s Little Blue Book; Wit and Strategy from Baseball’s Last Wise Man,” the Dodgers’ boss “alternately chastised and cajoled, threatened and reassured,” Robinson.

At one point during the meeting, Rickey read aloud from Giovanni Papini’s “The Life of Christ.” The passage dealt with turning the other cheek, something Rickey knew Robinson would have to do if this grand experiment was to work.

“Now, can you do it?” Rickey is quoted in the “Little Blue Book” as asking Robinson. “I know you are naturally combative. But for three years--three years, you will have to do it the only way it can be done. Three years--can you do it?”

As Rickey got progressively worked up, Robinson interrupted. “Mr. Rickey,” he said, “do you want a ballplayer who’s afraid to fight back?”

Rickey came back with a fastball aimed straight at Robinson’s head. “I want a player with guts enough not to fight back,” he screamed.

By now, Rickey was on his feet, pacing, gesturing, his voice booming, his face bathed in perspiration. He knew there would be ugly episodes in places where racism still flourished.

“What will you do?” he shouted, remembering the agony of Charles Thomas. “What will you do, when they not only turn you down for a hotel room but curse you out?”

It has been widely reported that Rickey got so emotional that he slapped Robinson in the face, screaming again, “What do you do?” Rachel Robinson insists that never happened.

“There were gestures and language that was provocative,” she said, “but he wasn’t slapped. Mr. Rickey didn’t touch him. Jackie wouldn’t have tolerated that.”

“He was just giving Jackie a true picture of what was in front of him, of what he would be facing.” Sukeforth said. “He said, ‘Do you want it that bad?”’

With Rickey in his face, screaming the question over and over, Robinson answered quietly.

“Mr. Rickey,” he said, “I’ve got two cheeks. If you want to take this gamble, I’ll promise you there will be no incidents.”

“That settled it,” Sukeforth said. “That was what Mr. Rickey needed to hear. He called in his secretary to draw up the papers.”

The signing bonus was $3,500. The salary was $600 a month. The social implications were enormous.

When the meeting ended, Robinson called Rachel in California.

“I was too young and too excited to be frightened,” she said. “He was jubilant about the opportunity. He knew he was a great player and could do well.

“He didn’t anticipate the social turmoil. Neither of us understood the scope of the pioneering role. We were excited because it meant he had a job. We were planning to be married in February, 1946, and this meant we could do it.”

For his own reasons, Rickey delayed news of the signing until Oct. 23. And then, he was curiously missing from the formal announcement that the Dodgers had signed this black player for their Montreal farm club, one short step away from Brooklyn.

Two years later, Jackie Robinson was the rookie of the year in the National League and baseball was on its way to truly becoming an All-American sport.