NEGRO LEAGUES

Lou Johnson stands atop the Dodgertown press box in Vero Beach, Fla., watching the sea of white faces leave the Dodgers’ spring-training game, and remembers.

Tears begin to well in his eyes. In a whisper, he says:

“If I had a wish, I would have God get all of the Negro league players, make them 30 years younger, and have them take the field again.

“This way, white folks could see them and what we’re talking about. I’d love for those fans to stand up, cheer, show their appreciation, recognizing them for what they’ve done.”

The Negro leagues were drastically different from the major leagues and, as some who played in both will attest, in some ways better.

The players were equals and there were no racist taunts. Players ate in the same restaurants, slept in the same hotels, dated whom they pleased and didn’t worry about repercussions.

“It was the way baseball should have been,” says Don Newcombe, who played for the Newark Eagles before becoming a Cy Young Award winner and most valuable player for the Dodgers. “People talk about how much better things were, once baseball was integrated. Come on, are you serious?

“You know what gets me? You hear all of the players today say how much they enjoyed playing with Jackie Robinson, and how much they admired Jackie, and how Jackie was their best friend. That’s a bunch of bull. . . .

“They didn’t want him here, they didn’t want any of us.

“Where were these people when we arrived in St. Louis, waited for our luggage in the train station, and just hoped we got a cab while the rest of the team left for the team hotel in their air-conditioned buses and the fancy Chase Hotel? We couldn’t stay at their hotel. We had to go to the Adams Hotel, a black hotel, where there was no air-conditioning, no restaurants, nothing.

“Not one of the white players on our team ever get off the bus in the morning and said, ‘Can I go with you guys? Can I stay with you? Is there anything I can say or do?’

“No one said a damn thing.

“They acted like, ‘Well, they’re the ones who want to be here, so let them go where they need to go.’

“Jackie would just say, ‘Bleep them. Bleep them all.’

“So me, Jackie and Roy [Campanella] would try to find a cab outside Union Station and go to this hotel. . . . It got so hot that we would soak our sheets in ice water, put them on the bed, and try to fall asleep. It got so loud with the bar downstairs it was impossible to fall asleep until 2:30 in the morning, when the music stopped.”

The Dodgers remained segregated in St. Louis until 1954, when Newcombe finally had had enough. He had just returned from the Korean War, and told Robinson he was going to meet with the manager of the Chase Hotel.

“I told Jackie, I’m not living like this anymore,” Newcombe said. “So Jackie went with me. I was just daring someone to throw me out of the hotel lobby. I sat in the dining room, got the manager, and we told him what we wanted.

“He said, ‘Fellas, I don’t have a problem with it. You can stay here. But the only thing is, I don’t want you to use the swimming pool.’

“Jackie nearly fell out of his damn chair. Jackie said, ‘Mister, I don’t even know how to swim, so I’m not going to be using your pool, anyway.’

“Jackie and I went back to the [Adams] hotel, packed our bags. But Roy and Jim Gilliam wouldn’t go with us. They decided to stay put. But Jackie and I couldn’t pack fast enough.

“We went back to the [Chase] hotel, and I still remember walking in and seeing all of those white faces, and they said, ‘Welcome to the club. You finally made it our hotel.’

“I’ll never forget that as long as I live.”

Newcombe and Robinson were proud that blacks from all around soon were staying at the air-conditioned Chase. They had integrated a hotel all by themselves. Yet the feeling of euphoria was replaced by anguish less than a year later when blacks quit staying at the Adams, causing it to to shut down.

“It was the same thing that happened to the Negro leagues,” Newcombe softly says. “Integration ruined it.”

*

There was Satchel Paige. There were Josh Gibson, James “Cool Papa” Bell, Roy Campanella. There was Buck Leonard . . .

There were plenty of players who might have been better than Jackie Robinson in the Negro leagues, but when it came time for Dodger President Branch Rickey to select a player to break baseball’s color barrier, he chose Robinson.

“We had quite a few players better than Jackie,” said Buck O’Neil, who managed the Kansas City Monarchs, Robinson’s team. “But most of these guys were older than Jackie. Major league baseball wanted a young player who could make an impact for a long time.

“It bothered a few of the fellas.”

Paige, considered by many to be baseball’s finest pitcher, black or white, perhaps was the most upset. He figured if anyone was going to break the color barrier, it should be him.

“Signing Jackie like they did hurt me deep down,” said Paige, who died in 1982. “I’d been the guy who started all that big talk about letting us in the big time.

“I’d been the one who opened the major league doors to the colored teams.

“I’d be the one who everybody said should be in the majors.

“But Jackie’d been the first one signed by the white boys.”

There also was a fear that if Robinson struggled, the majors would stop recruiting Negro league players.

“He was a hustler, but other than that, he wasn’t a top shortstop,” Monarch teammate Buck Leonard said. “We said, ‘We don’t see how he can make it.’

“Even when the Dodgers took Robinson, I said, ‘If he doesn’t make it, they’re going to be through with us for the next five or 10 years.

“ ‘And if he does make it, maybe they are going to keep him in the minors for a long time.’

“Thank God almighty I was wrong.”

Perhaps what was most surprising about the choice of Robinson was his quick and fiery temper. He didn’t much care for the Negro leagues, having to abide by the Jim Crow laws. It was a life he didn’t care to lead.

“You’ve got to remember that Jackie went to integrated schools and played on integrated teams,” O’Neil said. “So when he got to the Monarchs and saw the things they had to put up with--the Jim Crow laws, the separate drinking fountains and restrooms--he became furious.

“Jackie stormed out of so many places, he left behind a fortune.”

The most memorable incident occurred in Muskogee, Okla. The Monarchs had been stopping for gas at the same station for years. It had one restroom, which was off limits to blacks, but the Monarchs never much minded until Robinson came along.

“When the bus pulled into Muskogee and stopped at this station, Jackie got out and headed toward the restroom,” O’Neil said. “The owner, who was filling the tank, called after him, ‘Hey boy! You know you can’t go in there.’

“Jackie wanted to know why. ‘Because we don’t allow no colored people in that restroom.’

“Now, all of the guys knew about Jackie’s hair-trigger temper, so they just stood around, wondering what he was going to do. Jackie turned to the man very calmly and said, ‘Take the hose out of the tank.’

“The owner stopped the pump and looked at him. Jackie said it again. ‘Take the hose out of the tank.’ Jackie turned to his teammates and said, ‘Let’s go. We don’t want his gas.’

“Well, the Monarchs had two 50-gallon tanks on the bus. That gas station wasn’t going to sell 100 gallons of gas to one customer until the bus came back through a few weeks later.

“So he shoved the hose back into the tank and said, ‘All right, you boys can use the restroom. But don’t stay long.’ ”

The Monarchs never again patronized a place where they couldn’t use the facilities, O’Neil said, and never again were the Negro leagues the same.

Scouts started flocking to their games. Soon, Larry Doby was signed. Campanella. Joe Black. Willie Mays. Henry Aaron. Monte Irvin.

“There was so much talent, and we had such a beautiful time,” Newcombe said. “The only guy who bothered us was Satchel Paige. I was surprised he signed because of his age, but he was a drawing card.

“But to me, he was an Uncle Tom with the things he did. He was making a clown of himself. I know Jackie didn’t like it, hearing some of the things he would say or the things he did. I know Larry Doby, my best friend, didn’t like it.

“But what are you going to do. It got him to the big leagues.”

Yet, as the players soon discovered, compared to the racism and hatred they encountered in the major leagues, life in the Negro leagues wasn’t bad at all.

“The first day I took the field [with the Cleveland Indians] in Chicago, I stood on the sidelines for five minutes and no one would warm up with me,” Doby said.

“I remember too, when I got introduced to these guys. [Manager] Lou Boudreau had all the players lined up against their lockers. He’d say, ‘So and so, this is Larry Doby.’ He’d keep moving down, ‘So and so, this is Larry Doby.’

“The trouble was, when you’d reach out and shake hands, the guy would pull back his hand. Then the next guy, no hand. Then again. Right away I knew I was in trouble.”

Doby, who joined the Indians only three months after Robinson had joined the Dodgers, suffered the same pain and torment in the American League. But when they got together in the off-season, neither chose to discuss the tribulations of their rookie seasons.

“We knew what we had been through was the same,” Doby said. “To talk about it would only have made us angry, made things worse.”

Robinson wasn’t even sure he could make it through another season. Friends feared that baseball had broken him.

“Jackie almost had a nervous breakdown,” Newcombe said. “He was like a blast furnace ready to go off and blow off the safety valve. Rachel took him on a cruise for two weeks just to make sure he would be all right.

“That would have been a tragedy if Jack had blown his top. You had to know Jackie to appreciate what he did. Jackie was a fighter, he wasn’t used to taking it. He couldn’t prove his righteousness or stand up for his rights.

“It was a hell of a thing for a man to go through just because he’s black.

“I know people say Jackie died of diabetes, but I think it was the stress and everything he had to go through that really killed him. I’ve never saw a man age so fast.

“But to this day, I still don’t understand how the diabetes came about. They gave us blood tests every year in spring training. Every year we went through examinations. But Jackie didn’t know until 1957 that he had diabetes.

“Why didn’t someone check him in Vero Beach? What did they do with our blood? Didn’t they test it?

“Jackie never should have died that young.”

Newcombe takes a deep breath, pauses, and slowly exhales. There are days when it seems that the Negro leagues were a lifetime ago. There are other times it seems they were just yesterday.

“Those were the great times, the times we’ll all cherish,” Newcombe said. “Those were the days when everyone was treated as equals. We played in parks where fans appreciated us. You didn’t hear the name-calling or taunts. You just felt the love.

“The one thing I’ll remember more than anything was when Martin Luther King Jr. came to my house in ’68 and told me, ‘You guys will never know how easy you made it for me to do my job.’

“One month later, he was dead.

“The Negro leagues made it possible for us to be where we are today, and in many ways, where society is today.

“Jackie and Roy are dead, but I think they would join me in saying we’re proud of that.”