Hullabaloo

Sunday, April 15, 2012

 
He stole home

by digby

Did you see Jackie Robinson hit that ball?
Did he hit it? Yeah, and that ain't all.
He stole home.
Yes, yes, Jackie's real gone.
Jackie's is a real gone guy.

Pretty swingin' for 49, wouldn't you say?

But lest we ever forget the context ...

Sanford, Florida, does have its own history and it includes a collective moment of intolerance and bigotry that almost derailed the man Martin Luther King Jr. called “a freedom rider before freedom rides,” Jackie Robinson.

Before Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947 as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he spent a season desegregating the minor leagues, playing for the Dodgers AAA team, the Montreal Royals. The Royals held Spring Training in Sanford.

Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, after so many years, thought he knew Florida. He believed that Robinson’s presence could go over if efforts were taken to ruffle as few feathers as possible. Robinson, on Rickey’s instructions, didn't try to stay at any Sanford hotels. He and his wife didn’t eat out at any restaurants not deemed “Negro restaurants." He didn't even dress in the same locker room as his teammates.

Rickey thought that would be enough. He thought he knew Florida. But he didn't know Sanford.

As Jean West, a school teacher in Florida, wrote, "Branch Rickey had miscalculated the degree to which Jim Crow was entrenched in Sanford. As an example, an inanimate object, a second-hand piano, purchased in 1924 from the courthouse for use in a segregated school in nearby Oviedo, was filed as a 'Negro Piano' in the school board's record; living human beings challenging segregation certainly would not be tolerated."

It wasn't. The mayor of Sanford was confronted by what the author describes as a "large group of white residents" who "demanded that Robinson...be run out of town."

The Mayor caved. On March 5th, the Royals were informed that they would not be permitted to take the field as an integrated group. Rickey was concerned for Robinson’s life and sent him to stay in Daytona Beach. His daughter, Sharon Robinson, remembered, "The Robinsons were run out of Sanford, Florida, with threats of violence."

This was a low moment for Jackie. The man whose number, 42, is retired throughout Major League Baseball almost quit and rejoined the Negro Leagues.

The team then took an extraordinary step. As the late tennis star Arthur Ashe wrote in A Hard Road to Glory, Rickey, ''moved the entire Dodger pre-season camp from Sanford, Florida, to Daytona Beach due to the oppressive conditions of Sanford.'' That sounds heroic and it speaks well for Rickey's fierce desire to forge ahead with “the Great Experiment,” racists be damned. But the mob in Sanford had made, at least for the moment, a successful stand. In cites and small towns across the South, Jackie Robinson’s mere presence provoked challenges to power and provoked real, meaningful change. In Sanford, change did not come that easily.

This is why I'm a Dodger fan. If you get the chance I urge you to click over and watch this moving 30 second tribute by Vin Scully.

Vin talked about Jackie's fire, determination, and anger, how it didn't come naturally for him to turn the other cheek. Vin said that when he got irked by things said or done to him, he'd steal second, then third, then home. After a while, other players who didn't approve of him were nonetheless warning each other not to harass him, because he'd make their team pay.

Vin talked about a game in Cincinnati where Jackie had received death threats, saying he'd be shot if he stepped onto the field. FBI sharpshooters were brought in to monitor the game from the roofttops. There was an anxious team meeting before the game. Finally one player jumped up and said, "I've got it! I know what to do!" Everyone waited for his brilliant plan. "We'll all wear 42; then they won't know which one's Jackie!" The tense moment was broken up with laughter.

As Vin said, "Little did we know, someday it would come true."

Everyone in major league baseball will be wearing his number again today.

I'd say it's more important than ever to remember him.


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digby 4/15/2012 09:00:00 AM