Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson: The Misunderstood Relationship Between These Activist Athletes

Jackie Robinson and Paul RobesonThe Misunderstood Relationship Between These Activist Athletes Peter Dreier (bio) introduction On July 19, 1949, readers across America saw the following headlines in their daily newspapers regarding a battle between two of the country's most prominent African Americans: • "Jackie Robinson Calls Robeson Song Off-Key" (Miami Herald) • "Jackie's Views on Loyalty Refreshing Contrast to Robeson's" (Brooklyn Daily Eagle) • "Jackie Raps Robeson on Race Loyalty: Negroes Would Fight for U.S. Against Reds, Dodger Star Says" (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle) • "Jackie Robinson Says Robeson 'Silly'; Negroes Not Pro-Red" (Johnson City [Tennessee] Press) These headlines reflect how this incident is still remembered: Jackie Robinson attacked Paul Robeson for his communist views. But the story is more complicated—and more interesting—than what these headlines might convey. This paper puts the episode in its historical context and seeks to dismantle the myths surrounding the incident. jackie robinson The grandson of a slave and the son of a sharecropper, Robinson grew up in Pasadena, California, a wealthy, conservative, and racially segregated Los Angeles suburb, where his mother worked as a maid. During Robinson's youth, Black residents were only allowed to swim in the municipal pool on [End Page 80] Wednesdays (the day the water was changed) and could use the YMCA only one day a week. Robinson was a star athlete at Pasadena Junior College, then became UCLA's first four-sport athlete (football, basketball, track, and baseball). He was drafted into the army in 1942. At Fort Hood, Texas, he was assigned to an all-Black tank battalion. There on July 6, 1944, the twenty-five-year-old lieutenant boarded a military bus. He sat in the middle of the bus next to a light skinned Black wife of another Black officer. The driver instructed Robinson to go to the back of the bus. Robinson refused, knowing that buses had been officially desegregated on military bases. Two military policemen soon arrived and escorted Robinson away. He faced trumped-up charges of insubordination, disturbing the peace, drunkenness, conduct unbecoming of an officer, insulting a civilian woman, and refusing to obey the lawful orders of a superior officer. Robinson's court-martial trial on August 2, 1944, triggered news stories in the Black press and protests by the NAACP because as an athlete, he was already a public figure. The nine military judges found Robinson not guilty. By November he was honorably discharged from the army.1 Describing the ordeal Robinson later wrote, "It was a small victory, for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against prejudice at home."2 After his release from the Army, Robinson joined the Negro League's Kansas City Monarchs, playing in forty-seven games in 1945 for $400 a month. Two years later Dodgers part-owner and general manager Branch Rickey picked Robinson to integrate the major leagues. Rickey knew that Robinson had a hot temper and strong political views, but he believed that Robinson could handle the emotional pressure. Most accounts of baseball's integration portray it as the tale of two trailblazers—Robinson, the combative athlete, and Rickey, the shrewd strategist—battling bigotry. At a time when the other fifteen owners rejected integration, Rickey deserves credit as a pioneer.3 But it was also a political victory brought about by a social protest movement. Rickey's plan came after more than a decade of effort by Black and left-wing journalists and activists to desegregate the national pastime. Black newspapers, a few white newspaper columnists, and the Communist Party's Daily Worker published open letters to owners demanding integration and polled white managers and players to demonstrate that most were willing to accept Black players on their teams. They brought Black players to unscheduled major league tryouts during spring training, insisting that they be given a chance to demonstrate their talents. [End Page 81] The New York Trade Union Athletic Association, a coalition of progressive unions, organized an "end Jim Crow in baseball" day of protest at the 1940 World's Fair in New York. Unions and civil rights groups also picketed outside Yankee Stadium, the Polo...

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