Beyond the Baseball Color Line

Rebecca Bratspies, New York environmental and human rights lawyer, shared with me the extraordinary and inspirational life story of Jackie Robinson, the first black player in US Major League Baseball, back on April 15 1947, after crossing the Baseball Color Line. Having written "Naming Gotham - The Villains, Rogues and Heroes Behind New York's Place Names", Rebecca was able to share stories of many other characters who have been commemorated on New York bridges, tunnels, parkways, boulevards and parks. But why did they commemorate the rogues as well as the heroes? 

For more information, check out show notes at https://www.battingthebreeze.com/beyond-the-baseball-color-line

Thanks to Scott Beckwith for his fantastic song "Mercy" used throughout this episode. 
Mercy (Scott Beckwith - American Bandwagon, track 04) By Parking Lot Music is licensed under a  Creative Commons License.

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Thanks for listening!

Transcript

Rebecca 0:00

Jackie Robinson clearly knew that he was exceptional and he thought that he could do it, and in doing it could help break down this rigid hierarchy in a way that would benefit not only himself and his children, but his colleagues and all black people in America. It is an unbelievably heavy burden that no single individual should ever have to carry.

Steve 1:07

Jackie Roosevelt Robinson was born in 1919. I've asked New York environmental and human rights lawyer, Rebecca Bratspies, to share his extraordinary story.

Rebecca 1:20

Jackie Robinson's parents were sharecroppers, which was the iteration after the end of legalized chattel slavery. And it was a restructuring of the law to recapture the labor of black people and to pay them virtually nothing. So what a sharecropper did was farm land that wasn't theirs in exchange for payment in part of the crop at the end of the season. It was a really terrible system, and it was akin to slavery in many ways.

Steve 2:18

And we'll come back to that in a minute, but tell me how Jackie ended up in California.

Rebecca 2:23

Jackie Robinson's parents wound up splitting up and in search of a better life for herself and her children. His mother took them across the country, which was a hugely brave move on her part to Pasadena, California, where one of her brothers was. That gave him a tremendous number of opportunities that he never would've had. I mean, he still had to deal with racism on a daily basis, but he was in a much more flexible environment and an environment in which his remarkable talents could be identified and nurtured.

Steve 2:58

It's difficult to appreciate the effect of racial oppression at the time. The Jim Crow laws that had emerged soon after the American Civil War were still very much in evidence.

Rebecca 3:10

President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. It ended legal slavery in the United States, and then Congress in the post-war period enacted the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and the 14th Amendment, which did a number of important things, one of which was to ensure that the newly freed black people would be citizens. They would be citizens of the United States of America, and of the state in which they resided.

Steve 3:40

And as part of this process, Abraham Lincoln introduced the policy of Reconstruction.

Rebecca 3:45

So black people were voting, black people were elected to office on the state level and on the federal level. And there was an unbelievably violent backlash. That's where the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, was initiated and there were massacres of black people and we saw assaults on state government institutions and on state houses.

Steve 4:14

Unfortunately, the policy of Reconstruction didn't last.

Rebecca 4:19

After Lincoln was assassinated, his vice president, Andrew Johnson, who was not a fan of equality in any fashion, he ended Reconstruction, pulled all of those northern resources and those northern troops that had been protecting the black political emergence out of the south, and southern states passed what were called black codes.

Steve 4:47

The Black Codes were all about legal segregation, and that's where the sharecropping came in that Jackie Robinson's parents were caught up in, and the cause of racial equality took another backward step. They would, for example, criminalise a gathering of more than three black people.

Rebecca 5:06

And you could be arrested for the crime of loitering, and then you'd be put in jail and the prisons would lease out convict labour. These are all tools that are used to target black people going about their daily lives and keep them in a state of not feeling safe.

Steve 5:41

Incidentally, where did the name Jim Crow come from?

Rebecca 5:44

The term comes from this performer, this white performer who would perform in blackface, which was a hugely popular performance style, particularly in the South, but not only in the South, and so this performer had this character called Jim Crow. And it was, you know, a horrible caricature of a human being.

Steve 6:06

And you mentioned that Jackie and his family still suffered racial abuse in Pasadena. What did that look like?

Rebecca 6:13

In stories that are all too familiar today, Jackie Robinson talked about being harassed by the police, being accused of loitering. And at one point he was arrested and handcuffed for singing a song that a police officer didn't like, who decided that his behavior was disrupting the peace. He was expected to sit in the segregated section of a movie theatre, which he often refused to do.

Steve 6:37

So, from an early age, he demonstrated that he could be a disruptor. He also demonstrated an athletic prowess.

Rebecca 6:45

jackie Robinson was a remarkably talented athlete, as was his brother. He first went to Pomona Junior College. He was recruited there to play American football, and then from there he went to UCLA, which is one of the flagship schools in the California education system, was back then, still is. And he was a sports star in multiple sports. So he played American football, he played baseball, he played tennis, he played basketball, and he ran track. He was really just a clearly a phenomenally talented athlete. He also was a very smart and engaged student.

Steve 7:32

And in 1946, just after the war, Jackie married Rachel.

Rebecca 7:37

He married Rachel Isam. They had a marriage where she was his closest advisor, and particularly as he was navigating such fraught, racialized experiences in his daily life, he really turned to her for advice and support. Together they had three children, and by all accounts was a very happy family.

Steve 7:59

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941... Jackie Robinson, like so many other young men, was brought into the U. S. Army in preparation for the wider engagement that was to follow.

Rebecca 8:13

The Army at the time was segregated. There were white units and there were some black units, but most of the black soldiers were assigned menial tasks. Jackie Robinson, right, who was a college graduate from UCLA, no less, neither he nor any other black men were selected for Officer Candidates School. And in fact it took a nationwide push by very prominent black figures, including heavyweight champion Joe Lewis, to convince the president, who was Roosevelt, that it was really important that black men be admitted to Officer Candidates School. And Jackie Robinson was one of the people who was admitted, and he apparently did quite well there. And in 1943, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army.

Steve 9:09

Then on July the 6th, 1944, a year later, while stationed at Camp Hood, Jackie's army career was about to take an unexpected dip.

Rebecca 9:21

He was stationed in Texas, which was a state that had Jim Crow laws, had legal segregation. And one of the legal requirements was segregation on buses. And of course, this is right where Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat that launched a large part of the civil Rights movement 10 years later. So the thing about the military though, in Texas was that military buses were exempted by law from this Jim Crow requirement. So when a white civilian who was a bus driver, told Jackie Robinson,"Get to the back of the bus", he was fully within his legal rights to say,"No". And he in fact did say,"No". He said,"I am not moving from my seat". And the driver used some racial epithets, and then called the military police. The military police also used racial epithets towards Jackie Robinson and arrested him and handcuffed him and in fact shackled him, charged with disrespect to an officer and the other of refusing a lawful order and was court marshalled. Now he prevailed in the court martial and he was acquitted and in fact was given an honourable discharge from the Army relatively soon thereafter.

Steve 11:03

It seems a bit harsh that he was acquitted, but still had to leave the army. And I believe, after the Second World War, Harry Truman set in motion a process of desegregating the military, which interestingly enough, was overwhelmingly supported by soldiers who served in integrated units during the war.

Rebecca 11:25

So, you know, there is something to be said for knowing people of other cultures, other races, other religions, that makes you realize you don't need to be afraid of them and that you don't need to be kept separate from them, and that we are all, you know, have a common humanity that allows us to work together and live together and share life events together.

Steve 11:47

Well, at that point, Jackie Robinson needed a job, and it perhaps was no surprise that the job came in the form of baseball.

Rebecca 11:56

He got an offer to play for the Kansas City Monarchs, which was an all-black baseball team that played in the Negro League. The owners of the Major League teams had an unofficial agreement that they would not hire any players who were not white. So there was a whole parallel league called the Negro League, where black people and Latinx people could play baseball.

Steve 12:28

And presumably this league was nowhere near as lucrative as Major League Baseball?

Rebecca 12:34

It was very much an economic struggle for Jackie and for these other players, to... make a go of it and there was no guarantee that the teams even were going to survive financially because of the economic marginalization of the communities that they were, playing for and... part of.

Steve 12:53

So that was baseball's color line beyond which no black man would cross. But then quite unexpectedly, an opportunity arose via a gentleman called Branch Rickey.

Rebecca 13:08

After he had been playing for the Kansas City Monarchs for about a year, Jackie Robinson was approached by Branch Rickey, who was the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Branch Ricky, first of all, was a relatively committed desegregationist in his own personal beliefs, but he also was... an owner who wanted a winning team.

Steve 13:32

So, how did he get round the law and the wrath of the other team owners?

Rebecca 13:37

New York had just passed a law called the Ives Quinn Act that was a precursor to the Civil Rights Acts that were enacted on the federal level in the 1960s. The Ives Quinn Act made it illegal to refuse to hire a person on the basis of their race. And Major League Baseball was incorporated in New York, so was subject to this law. So the owners were trying to figure out what to do about it, without actually doing anything about it.

Steve 14:11

Because, of course, they were quite happy the way things were. Into the picture steps Fiorello LaGuardia, Mayor of New York, who created a task force to figure out how to deal with this new law.

Rebecca 14:24

He appointed Branch Rickey to the task force and Rickey decided that the thing to do was to actually comply with the law and to hire black players. So he approached Jackie Robinson and hired him.

Steve 14:40

But there was a kicker, wasn't there, in their agreement?

Rebecca 14:43

And that was that Branch Rickey made him promise that no matter what racial hostility he faced,'cause they both knew there was gonna be a lot of it, Jackie Robinson wouldn't respond for the first year. And that was, I think, a really hard thing to agree to. But

Steve 14:57

But Jackie Robinson did agree. And after a successful year in the minor leagues...

Rebecca 15:03

On April 15th 1947, Jackie Robinson debuted as number two with the Brooklyn Dodgers and he faced a withering barrage of hate from people attending, from fans of baseball, from opposing teams, and quite frankly, from his own teammates.

Steve 15:21

So just hold it there a second. I'm thinking about his agreement to turn the other cheek, to ignore the abuse. How would he have rationalised that?

Rebecca 15:31

He wrote and spoke a lot about that in his later years. He thought it was important for the country. He also thought it was really important for his colleagues in the Negro Leagues that he be successful so that they could get jobs too. So, he really saw himself as having a mission and the mission was larger than himself. And I think that was how he was able to navigate that. He also knew that he was a really good player and that he would win everybody over because he was so good.

Steve 16:01

Jackie Robinson endured a year of withering racial abuse. But the tide started to turn with the help of teammate, a Southerner, Pee Wee Reese.

Rebecca 16:12

Famously, when he was at one place when he was being booed from the stands...Peewee Reese came out and sort of put his arm around him and was like, you know,"You deal with him, you deal with me", kind of thing. But by the end of his first year in the major leagues, Jackie Robinson was the second most popular man in America. According to the Gallup polls.

Steve 16:40

That's an extraordinary turnaround, isn't it?

Rebecca 16:43

He was not as popular as Bing Crosby, but he was more popular than either President Harry Truman, or soon-to-be president and hero General from World War II, Dwight Eisenhower. So, you know, to the extent he was betting on his charisma and talent to win people over, he... bet correctly.

Steve 17:03

And he retired from baseball in 1957. He didn't stop there, did he? Tell me a little bit about his career and how it looked after that.

Rebecca 17:13

After he retired from baseball, Jackie Robinson became the first black person to serve as vice president of a major American corporation. He was vice president of the Chock full o'Nuts company, which Americans will recognize as a very popular coffee brand. And he was also a very important voice in civil rights advocacy. He spoke up a lot about equality, about racial equality. He wrote a column for the New York Post which, you know, is still a newspaper. It's now owned by Rupert Murdoch, so it's a little bit different now than it was then perhaps. He also had a column in the Amsterdam News, which was... the black press in New York, was one of the most prestigious papers... He was very much a public intellectual and a public figure for his entire life.

Steve 18:05

Jackie Robinson suffered from heart disease and diabetes, and tragically, he died young at the age of 53 in 1972, having achieved so much, in so short a time.

Rebecca 18:26

a remarkable amount to have accomplished in a very short period of time, but also I think, an indication of what kind of a toll all of these challenges took on him, and on his health.

Steve 18:39

And of course, this lifetime of achievement didn't go without recognition, did it?

Rebecca 18:44

After his death he was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for exceptional fortitude and integrity, which I think is very accurate. He also was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. These are the highest civilian honors in the United States and he certainly was a... deserving recipient.

Steve 19:08

Deserved recognition indeed, but some would argue a greater and more poignant memorial was still to come. Roll forward to 2004.

Rebecca 19:19

Every April 15th, which is the day that Jackie Robinson debuted as a dodger, is Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball, and every player in his honor wears number 42.

Steve 19:33

Just to emphasize that on that day, every player in Major League Baseball wears the number 42 shirt, as do the coaches and managers and the umpires. It must be a commentator's nightmare, but what an honour. Now, those of you who've lived in New York or visited will know about the Jackie Robinson Parkway, another memorial to the great man. Rebecca, there's parkways and expressways. What's the difference?

Rebecca 20:06

A parkway is a road that is designed with a park-like atmosphere. It was really designed much more for leisurely travelilng rather than for day-to-day working travel. So the parkways have tend to be very wooded, they were designed for a speed of about 45, which has created just nightmares for modern traffic. An expressway on the other hand, is a much more modern road. There's very little vegetation and they're designed for speed. One of the interesting things about what used to be the Interborough Parkway, which is now the Jackie Robinson Parkway, is that pretty much it went from where Branch Rickey lived in Forest Hills to where Jackie Robinson lived in a different part of the city.

Steve 21:01

And Jackie Robinson rests in the family gravesite in the Cypress Hills Cemetery, adjacent to... The Jackie Robinson Parkway. Well, of course, Jackie Robinson wasn't the only person to have a city structure named after them in New York. Traditionally, the city honored largely white men up until quite recently. Rebecca talked to me about Shirley Chisholm State Park, named after the first black woman to be elected to Congress in the United States, and in fact the first black woman to run for President. Rebecca also mentioned the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, named after the first black man from New York elected to Congress. So, at this point, you might be thinking, how come Rebecca, an environmental and human rights lawyer, knows so much about New York commemoration names? Well, Rebecca also happens to be an author, and she's published a book called'Naming Gotham'. It's a fascinating dive into the life stories of those commemorations we've already mentioned, plus many others. So my first question had to be, What is Gotham?

Rebecca 22:10

Gotham is one of the many aliases of New York. It's also called The Big Apple. People think of it as Batman movies, right? But it has a much earlier origin. There was a... very famous American author called Washington Irving. He wrote, among other things, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But as a young man, he had a literary magazine and he and his art friends used to, you know, hang out in New York and be cool and drink whatever. One of the things they did was write this satirical magazine about New York, and they called New York'Gotham'. It comes to us from middle English. It was, a term that meant'goat herders' and Gotham sort of was colloquial for a town of fools. So when Washington Irving was writing about Gotham, he was really insulting New York, but that's been lost through the era. And now Gotham is one of the names that we think of... New York. And actually, when my book came out, I got a letter from somebody in Gotham in England. There's a town in England called Gotham, talking about our shared history between New York and his town of Gotham

Steve 23:21

So what stirred you to write the book in the first place?

Rebecca 23:24

Traffic. I used to have to take a road here in New York called the Major Deegan Expressway. It goes right by Yankee Stadium and connects to the George Washington Bridge and anybody who's ever taken, and you put sort of air quotes around'taken', the major Deegan Expressway, has spent hours stuck in traffic. And I used to just curse him and I would say,"Who was this guy? I hate him". And I realized that everybody took the Major Deegan, but no one had a clue who the guy was. So I decided to find out.

Steve 24:04

And then, presumably, that whetted your appetite to look at some of the other named entities?

Rebecca 24:08

Once I realized that Major Deegan was this interesting, but not that impressive guy, I started asking who other people were. Like, who was Bruckner? There's another expressway named after him. Who was Kosciuszko? There's a bridge named after him. Who was Goethals? There's a bridge named after him. And most interestingly maybe who was Outerbridge because there's a... bridge in New York called the Outerbridge Crossing, and it is the outermost bridge connecting the islands of New York to New Jersey to the mainland? And so everybody assumes that it's called the Outerbridge because it's the outer bridge, but actually it was named after a guy named Eugenius Outerbridge. And that's why it's called the Outerbridge Crossing because Outerbridge bridge would be, you know, ridiculous.

Steve 25:05

It's a great read, even for someone like me from the UK who doesn't know New York particularly well. I still got totally wrapped in the individual stories. Perhaps my favourite who you mentioned, George Goethals and the Goethals Bridge, he was in fact responsible for building the Panama Canal back in 1914. One question that stands out, why did they honour the villains as well as the heroes?

Rebecca 25:30

Well, you know, the power to write history is, and to decide what... is history, is really very much about who has power. You know, what you see is so dependent on, first of all, on what you wan't to see, but also on what your position is. And I think that's something that we're all grappling with, right? History is written by the victors. History is written by the powerful, and they tell a version with them at the center and them as the heroes.

Steve 26:01

Would it be fair to say that observing how a city remembers its key historical players tells you a lot about how a city ticks today?

Rebecca 26:10

I think how a city commemorates people gives you a vision of who they either think or thought were their key historical players. And I think what we're finding is that it's not who the key historical players actually were.

Steve 26:29

So when we look at a city's list of memorialised structures, we shouldn't so much be wondering who the memorialised were, but more wondering who's missing.

Rebecca 26:39

The reckoning that we're facing here in the United States, and I know you're facing a similar reckoning in the UK and people really around the world is, what do we do about the fact that the people who wrote history eliminated very large portions of it? And you know, as we look with a more nuanced eye at the history of New York, and it's true elsewhere as well, right, we have to recognize that the history that is instantiated in our roads, our bridges, our civic institutions, is a very narrow slice of the real complicated, vibrant, messy story of all of the different people who together built this city.

Steve 27:29

And having looked at New York history through a rather novel prism, and with your hat on as a human rights lawyer, with respect to racial equality as it stands today, is your glass half full or half empty?

Rebecca 27:44

I am an optimist and part of what gives me optimism is that I look at my teenager who can't imagine any of this, who goes to school in New York City with people who've moved here from all over the world, who speak every language. And you know his classmates are people of color, they're white people, they're people of all religions. And that's the world that they know. We are gonna have more and more young people elected, and I think they have no time for these centuries old wrongs.