Jackie Robinson and Baseball's Great Experiment

In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier as a Brooklyn Dodger. He and his family received death threats, teammates signed a petition refusing to play with him, and he was trained to ignore racist taunts from the crowd. Matt Andrews explores Robinson's career, his impact on American history, and the hidden cost of integration in sports. 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome,
and we're back on the Untold History of Sports in America.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Last time, we compared the

(00:33):
American experience for two of the country's greatest athletes of
all time, Jesse Owens and Joe Lewis. Today will examine
the experience of another black American sports icon and trailblazer,
Jackie Robinson. Jackie is, in my opinion, one of the
greatest Americans of all time. He's a personal hero of
mine because, as you hear in the episode, he endured

(00:55):
horrific racism all to play the great American pastime at
the highest level where he belonged all along, and by
doing so, broke the color barrier of one of the
biggest national stage at that time. Matt has the whole story. Today,
we're going to explore baseball's great experiment, which refers to

(01:16):
the moment when Jackie Robinson, a black man, took the
field inn and he broke the color line in twenty
century major League baseball, and I think it's the most
significant moment in the history of American sports. It's called
Baseball's Great experiment because when when Jackie Robinson walked out

(01:38):
onto that field, major League Baseball was a laboratory in
which the principles of fairness and the equality of opportunity
they were put to the test. And I think of
the Jackie Robinson story as the central story of our
sport history course, and I think I mean that in
two ways. You know, First, it's with Jackie Robinson that

(02:02):
everything begins to change. Robinson plays for the Brooklyn Dodgers
in seven and with that season, all the ideas out
there about what certain people could and could not do
in sports, they begin to be uprooted. You know, with
regard to sport in American history, we can divide the
twentieth century into two eras, before Jackie Robinson and after

(02:26):
Jackie Robinson segregated and desegregated. But second, the Jackie Robinson
story is probably the story that best illuminates the central
premise of our course. Sports matter, what happens on the
athletic field can affect the larger society. And what's coming
today is the story of an athlete who affected the

(02:49):
course of American history. Now, just how much changed due
to Robinson's ninety seven rookie season and his major league career.
Just how much changed? I think that's a fair question,
and it's one we will consider. But that there was
some effect that's undeniable, and I'm going to show some

(03:10):
of my cards here from the outset. Some of the
effects of baseball's great experiment might be negative. We will
get to that, all right. To really understand the full
impact and the significance of Jackie Robinson, we need to
begin with black baseball. Before Jackie Robinson. We need to
consider the organized negro leagues. We talked in an earlier

(03:35):
lecture about Jim Crow and sports, and we focused on
horse racing and cycling in the eighteen nineties. Well, professional
baseball was segregated. In that same decade, baseball team owners
they came up with something called the Gentleman's Agreement. White
team owners agreed among themselves not to sign black players.

(03:56):
And I think it's important to mention that there was
never an official rule segregating baseball. This was an unwritten
rule that everyone knew. It was an effect in response
to the exclusion of black players in the major leagues.
A black baseball entrepreneur named Rube Foster Andrew Rube Foster.

(04:18):
He created a parallel baseball universe, a a Black baseball league,
and it would become one of the most successful Black
enterprises in the entire nation, the Negro Leagues. In the
Negro Leagues, the players were African American, the managers were
African American, most of the team owners they were black.

(04:39):
And the Negro Leagues they were a cherished institution. They
were a special point of pride in Black communities all
over the country. You know, opening day for for Negro
League teams, it brought out the entire Black community, men
and women. They wore their Sunday best suits, ties, hats, dresses,

(05:00):
jazz bands, they played music. Civic leaders like the president
of the local and double A c P. They would
give political speeches. And these leagues were critical to the
growing black economy. Black owned restaurants and hotels and saloons.
They would cater to black ball players and Negro league spectators.

(05:24):
So the Negro Leagues were caused by segregation. They were
a response to racism and segregation, but they became a
critical part of a of a profitable black business culture
and one of the centers of African American life. And
let's keep that in mind. What about the baseball in

(05:46):
the negro leagues? How good was the baseball in these leagues? Well,
it's hard to tell exactly. People debate this endlessly, but
here's a very interesting statistic for your consideration. Over the years,
during the off season, teams made up of white Major
league players they competed against teams made up of Negro

(06:08):
league players. We know of four hundred and thirty eight
such games. And of these four hundred and thirty eight games,
the white major league players they won one hundred and
nine of them, and the negro leaguers won three hundred
and twenty nine. The negro leaguers won three out of

(06:28):
every four games played between the top white and black players.
But despite these numbers suggesting that there was clearly some
excellent talent in the negro leagues, major league owners continue
to ignore black players. In nine the so called Gentlemen's
Agreement was still in full effect. And let's ask why,

(06:54):
why in ve was baseball still segregated? You know, who
are the people and what are the ideas that kept
the institution of Major League baseball racially aggregated as late
as nineteen and I suppose on a deeper level, what
I'm really asking is this, how does racism operate well.

(07:17):
One reason for the continued segregation of Major League Baseball
was a guy named Kenna saw Mountain Landis. He was
baseball's first commissioner Kenneesas. Landis was given almost total authority
over Major League Baseball after a gambling scandal rocked the
sport in nineteen nineteen, and his stern authoritarian presence it

(07:41):
helped to re inspire confidence in the game. But Landis
was an obstructionist when it came to black players. Landis
said time and time again that there was no rule
preventing blacks from playing in the major leagues, and I
suppose this was technically true, but he consistently blocked attempts

(08:02):
to desegregate baseball. Just one example, in the early nineties,
someone tried to buy the last place Philadelphia Phillies and
stocked the team with talent from the Negro leagues. But
when Landis got word of the plan, he made sure
that the team was sold to someone else. So here

(08:24):
we have segregation being protected by a single, very influential individual.
There were concerns over the feasibility of interracial teams as well.
One third of all Major League players came from the South,
the Jim Crow South, and there were fears among team

(08:45):
owners that white Southerners they might revolt if black players
joined their teams, or that there would be strife within
the team. And they were right. Actually some did revolt.
I'll mention that in a moment. Team owners also feared
that signing black players would cause them to lose fans
and then lose money. Look, baseball owners were businessmen, and

(09:10):
if the expectation of profit outweighed the fear of financial loss,
they might have been more willing to consider integration. But
they seem to believe that if they signed black players
they would lose white customers, and they didn't think they
would pick up enough black patrons in return. We will

(09:31):
see in just a moment if they were right about that.
And then, finally, to get sort of philosophical here, hovering
over the entire question was what Gunner Myrdal called the
convenience of ignorance. I told you about Gunner Myrtle before.

(09:51):
He was that sociologist who articulated the idea of a
glaring contradiction in American culture, a contradiction between egalitarian rhetoric
and the reality of racism. Yeah. Well, he also spoke
of the convenience of ignorance. He said, Look, most white
Americans aren't violent bigots. I mean, violent bigots exist, to

(10:14):
be sure, but most white Americans were just as he
put it, conveniently ignorant about the desires and the capabilities
of black Americans. So to relate this to Major League Baseball,
you can argue that millions of white Americans just never
thought that there was anything wrong with Major League Baseball

(10:35):
having no black players. They just never questioned a system
that excluded black ball players. Segregation just seemed natural, It
was normal. Someone had to smash that ignorance. Enter Jackie Robinson.

(10:55):
Like Joe Lewis and Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson was born
in the Deep South. Jackie was born in Georgia in
nineteen and his father abandoned the family when Jackie was
a young boy, and then he and his mother and
his older brother they fled Georgia and Jim Crow and
they moved to Pasadena, California, Southern California, where where Jackie's

(11:16):
mother worked as a maid she she cooked and cleaned
for white families. California was not the Deep South, but
it was not a racial utopia either. Jackie and his
brother Mac, they were taunted by the white kids in
their neighborhood. The white kids threw rocks at them until
one day Jackie and his brother started throwing rocks back.

(11:39):
So fighting back as a survival strategy. Keep this in mind.
Jackie Robinson went to an integrated university U c l A,
where he started every sport he played. He was a
tremendous athlete. He led the U c l A basketball
team in scoring. He excelled in track and field. Jackie

(12:01):
Robinson was the nation's best college football running back. You know,
baseball was probably Jackie Robinson's worst sport. And then the
war came and during World War Two, Jackie Robinson he
served in the army where he was almost court martialed
for refusing to obey Jim Crow laws and sit in

(12:21):
the back of an army bus. So we get a
hint of his activism early on. And once again I
want to emphasize this. We see how Jackie Robinson likes
to speak up and fight back. After he was discharged
from the Army. He played Negro League baseball. He played
one season for a team called the Kansas City Monarchs,

(12:44):
and then at the end of that season, in the
fall of branch Ricky that the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
He summoned Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn and he offered him
a contract to play in the Dodgers organization. Branch Ricky
is the other key character in this drama. Branch Ricky

(13:07):
was a white man who believed in integration. He believed
that baseball should be fair. He believed that signing a
black player and breaking the color line was the morally
right thing to do. Branch Ricky was a religious man.
He thought it was the Christian thing to do. But
branch Ricky was also a baseball businessman, and he wanted

(13:29):
to win. He wanted to make money, and he knew
that the Negro League players were good. Branch Ricky wanted
to get at the great black ball players first. Well,
in nineteen forty five, he's ready to open the door
to a black player. And it's no coincidence that this
experiment that it began in nineteen forty five. World War

(13:54):
Two ends in nineteen forty five, and the hope among
black Americans was that since the United States had just
fought a war against an enemy, the Nazis, you know,
an enemy that is bouse those insidious racial ideas and
spoke of the master race, maybe now white Americans would
be willing to consider and address racism back at home.

(14:18):
Added to this, black men and women they had served
in World War Two, that they fought in this war,
they fought for freedom and democracy. Perhaps the hypocrisy of
having Black Americans fight in a war abroad while denying
them opportunities at home, perhaps this would lead to change
in the arena of civil rights. So branch Rickey feels

(14:42):
that the time is right, but now he needs the
right man, and he thinks Jackie Robinson is that man.
Jackie Robinson was college educated, he had already played on
interracial teams at U c l A. He was a
veteran of the Armed forces. Jackie Robinson was married. You know,

(15:02):
in branch Ricky's mind, Jackie robins sin was respectable. So
branch Ricky offers Jackie Robinson a contract to play for
the Dodgers organization. But this offer to play ball, it
came with strings attached. Jackie Robinson had to promise branch

(15:22):
Ricky that no matter what was done to him, no
matter what was said to him, he would not fight
back for three years. He would not respond to a
punch with a punch. He would not respond to a
curse with a curse. To put it in terms of
the Bible, a book that branch Ricky was very fond of.
Jackie Robinson would have to turn the other cheek. That

(15:44):
was the deal. So no more throwing rocks back at
the white kids, no more arguing about being in the
back of the bus. Jackie Robinson just has to take it.
He has to take whatever comes his way, both on
and off the field. It's the most famous branch Ricky

(16:06):
Jackie Robinson story of them all. In that first meeting
in Brooklyn, to prepare Jackie Robinson for what he would
face on the field, branch Ricky hurled every racial slur
and insult that he could think of in Robinson's face.
You are going to be called this, You're going to
be called a dirty little that. And then finally Jackie

(16:27):
Robinson asked Mr. Ricky, do you want a player who
doesn't have the guts to fight back, to which branch
Ricky famously replied, no, I want a player who has
the guts not to fight back. Ricky believed that if
Robinson fought back at the racist taunts, and if he
if he showed anger, he believed that he would be

(16:49):
playing into the hands of the obstructionists, that the whole
experiment would fail. People would say, see, black and white
can't get along. It cannot work. So to put this
in terms of what we talked about last time with
Joe Lewis, for three years, Jackie Robinson had to wear

(17:09):
the mask. He had to quietly endure whatever came his way.
I don't know, it sounds awfully tough to me. After
the break, Jackie Robinson becomes a Brooklyn Dodger. Branch Rickey

(17:43):
signed Robinson in late for the six season. Jackie Robinson
played minor league baseball in Montreal. He was the only
black player in that league, the International League, and he
led his team to the championship, but he was voted
the most valuable player the next year. That was the Biggie.

(18:05):
At the start of the seven season, branch Rickey said
that Jackie Robinson would be playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
A black man in the Major leagues, a black man
in the national pastime. The symbolism was thick, but there
were a lot of questions out there. How would Jackie

(18:26):
Robinson do on the field? I mean, that was the
obvious question, but another question was this what would his
teammates do? And this was critical. Baseball is a team sport,
so Jackie Robinson needed to be accepted by his teammates,
to be allowed to sit in the dug out with them,
to to eat with them, to travel with them. This

(18:49):
is one of the reasons why Jackie Robinson playing Major
League baseball might be thought of as even more significant
than what Joe Lewis or Jesse Owens did. They were
individual athletes. Robinson played a team sport, and a baseball
team can be perceived as a metaphor for society at large.

(19:11):
If a baseball team could successfully desegregate, then perhaps the
larger society could desegregate as well. And if it couldn't, well,
then the reaction on the Dodgers was mixed. Some players
said they were fine with Jackie Robinson, like pee Wee Reese,
who was from Kentucky and played the same position as Robinson.

(19:35):
Peewee Rees said, if Jackie Robinson is a better player
than I am. He is entitled to my job. Other
Dodgers were less understanding, led by an Alabama born player
named Dixie Walker. A few of the Dodgers drew up
a petition and they said, we will not play with
Jackie Robinson. It looked like maybe those concerns over inter

(19:58):
racial teams might be right. Well. When branch Rickey found
out about this petition, he told these players is they
would all be traded to last place teams, and they
immediately tore up their petition. Kind of funny how that works.
And then it happens. April fifty seven. Jackie Robinson trots

(20:22):
out to first base in Ebbittsfield, the home of the
Brooklyn Dodgers, And though he is known as a second baseman,
he played first base his rookie year. You know, ninty
seven was a revolutionary year in American history. Remarkable Americans
were doing remarkable things and changing American culture. In ninety seven,

(20:44):
the Air Force pilot Chuck Yeager, he broke the sound barrier.
In nineteen forty seven, Jackson Pollock, he dripped paint on
canvas for the first time. Miles Davis joined Charlie Parker's quintet,
and they reshaped jazz, and now Jackie Robinson joins the
Brooklyn Dodge is a black man in the major leagues.

(21:09):
Jackie went hitless in his debut, and but he reached
on an error, and he scored the go ahead run
and the Dodgers won the game. And then the season
rolled on and there never was a baseball season like
the one Jackie Robinson endured in. And I think endured
is the right word here. Jackie was the target of

(21:32):
racial taunts all year long. He was spiked by opposing players,
pitchers through at his head. He received death threats, He
received letters saying that his wife and small child would
be murdered if he continued to play baseball. And somehow,
through it all, he was able to perform excellently on

(21:54):
the field. He was the best player on the Dodgers.
He led the Dodgers and home runs and stolen bases.
He led the Dodgers to the National League pennant in
all the way to the World Series. And maybe even
more important than that, more people came to Ebbittsfield that
summer to see Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers play than

(22:16):
in any other year in that stadium's history. At the
end of the nine seven season, the Sporting News they
named Jackie Robinson their very first Rookie of the Year.
He did it. You know, the professional sports are difficult enough,
but when you think of the monumental pressure placed on

(22:37):
Jackie Robinson that year, the the all the abuse hurled
upon him, it's a testament to just how magnificent an
athlete and really how strong an individual he was. In
my opinion, Jackie Robinson's seven season, with all the taunts
and the threats, and the pressure and the hopes put

(23:00):
on them. You know, all those people hoping he would succeed,
all those people hope thing he would fail. I think
what Jackie Robinson did in seven is the single most
impressive feat in American sport history. But if I were
being honest here, I would also have to say that
that season probably killed him. You know, Jackie Robinson died

(23:25):
in nine seventy two. He was only fifty three years old.
He was ravaged by diabetes and heart disease. He had hypertension,
that he died of a heart attack. It's very hard
not to think that all that he endured, all that
hatred that came his way that he just had to
swallow and accept. I think it killed him. And I

(23:50):
don't want to overplay this, but for being willing to
suffer for others to suffer for the greater good, I
think of Jackie Robinson as a saint. Today we tell
a story of Jackie Robinson as a celebratory story, and
it should be celebrated, and for for many reasons. You know,

(24:13):
first of all, there's the psychological impact of Jackie Robinson,
an impact that's difficult to gauge. Imagine Imagine what the
success of Jackie Robinson felt like two people being told
daily of their second class status. That's immeasurable. Jackie Robinson
also disproved the idea that white spectators did not want

(24:35):
to see black ball players. It just wasn't true. Jackie
Robinson was the biggest gate attraction since Babe Ruth. Jackie
Robinson taught all the major league owners that desegregation made
financial sense, and do not underestimate the role of money
in getting people to do the right thing or the
wrong thing. I suppose my point being money talks, and

(25:00):
one could argue that for millions of white Americans Jackie
Robinson altered their ideas about race. To put it in
the term used at the start of our lecture with
regard to baseball, Jackie Robinson demolished the convenience of ignorance.
You could not watch Jackie Robinson and not be impressed
with his game. You could not watch him and not

(25:20):
question why aren't there more black ball players in the
major leagues. There's a great baseball writer named Roger Kahn.
He wrote a book about the Brooklyn Dodgers in this era,
and he put it like this. He wrote, by applauding Robinson,
a man did not necessarily feel that he was taking
a stand on school integration or civil rights legislation. But

(25:44):
to disregard color, even for just one moment, is to
step away from old prejudices. Now I've said this before.
I think this is difficult to measure precisely. As a
sport historian, I think that gauging the effect of athletes
on the minds of spectators, I think it's one of
the most important things to try to a s but

(26:06):
it's also one of the most difficult. But I also
think that Jackie Robinson had to have played a part
in the changing racial consciousness of white Americans. In fact,
that's what Martin Luther King Jr. Said. He said that
Jackie Robinson made his job easier. He said that Jackie
paved the way white Americans started to change their mind

(26:28):
about race and Black America because of Jackie Robinson. But
I also think we need to be careful not to
over celebrate the Jackie Robinson story. First of all, a
white person rooting for a black man in baseball doesn't
necessarily change anything. I mean, he did not mean it

(26:49):
this way, but Roger Kahn or just read you his quote,
I think he's right. Rooting for Jackie Robinson is not
taking a stand on school integration or civil rights legislation,
you know, very important issues. But here's another possible full
critique of the Jackie Robinson story, and it's not a
critique of Jackie Robinson himself. It's a critique of the

(27:11):
story the way baseball's great experiment played out. We have
to confront the fact that the integration of Major League
Baseball it led to the demise of the Negro leagues,
that very significant economic and cultural institution in Black America.
Black baseball fans wanted to watch Jackie Robinson and then

(27:31):
the black players who followed him into the major leagues,
and they stopped attending Negro league games. By the mid
nineteen fifties, the Negro leagues were all but gone. And
so here is the great irony of the Jackie Robinson story.
The integration of Major League baseball meant that fewer, rather

(27:53):
than more, African Americans would earn their living playing baseball.
When the Negro leagues folded, there were fewer black professional
ball players than there had been thirty years earlier during
the era of segregation in baseball. And now on top
of that, there were no black managers, fewer black groundskeepers,
and you no longer had any black team owners. Nationally speaking,

(28:18):
baseball was wider than ever. Many tend to see this
as inevitable and inevitable outcome of something much more important, integration.
The great black sportswriter Wendell Smith, he wrote, nothing was
killing Negro League baseball but democracy. And maybe so. But

(28:38):
I think it's important to recognize that there was always
a cost to desegregation for the black community, and not
just in baseball. You know, for example, when schools begin
to actually integrate in this country, the way it worked
is that black schools closed and black students moved to
the white schools, so black teachers, principles, and administrators lost

(29:00):
their jobs. This is what we might call the hidden
cost of integration. Well, that critique that I just mentioned,
the idea that baseball integration wasn't necessarily in Black America's
best interests, that was a critique that one started to
hear more and more in the late nineteen sixties, during

(29:21):
the era of Black Power. And in a couple of
lectures we will explore that era and this change and consciousness.
We will explore a generation of Black Americans and athletes
who were questioning the progressive role of sports in the
United States. That's all for now. Next time on the

(29:41):
Untold History of Sports in America, presented by One Day University.
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