Free Rickey & Robinson by Roger Kahn

grandfather found himself utterly and completely alone.” In the shocked silence that followed Branch’s speech, I remembered words that my own father said were uttered once by Abraham Lincoln. After a contentious debate during which every member of the cabinet opposed his decision to go public on a matter of consequence, Lincoln said calmly, “One man in the right constitutes a majority.” The next day he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
    When the Princeton proceedings ended, Branch and I eased back with a few drinks at the Nassau Inn, a Princeton tavern that dates from 1756, when Princeton was a mostly Quaker town, a small colonial landmark between New Brunswick and Trenton. I asked where he had heard about the meeting that so roundly condemned his grandfather. “From my grandfather himself,” Branch said. “He spoke about it more than once.”
    Criticism from the media bothered Rickey, but usually only to a mild degree. He recognized that he was more literate and more intelligent than the sportswriters who busied themselves slamming him. When such attack dogs as Dick Young and Jimmy Powers of the raucous tabloid New York
Daily News
referred to him as “El Cheapo,” Rickey contained himself. “After all,” he told me once, “Young didn’tlike Jackie Robinson, either, and I understand”—a malevolent chuckle burst forth—“he is not even enthusiastic about his wife.” Young was renowned throughout press boxes as a philanderer. No cocktail waitress’s private parts were safe after a night game when Dick Young, nicknamed Young Dick, came to town.
    To Rickey the assault from other baseball men was far more wounding than press criticism. It was a shattering explosion detonated by people whom he had regarded as colleagues and friends. Rickey found their racism devastating. Their attack left him feeling threatened and humiliated. For all his days Rickey clung to a mystical sense of the goodness of baseball as a homegrown American institution. He never got over the bigoted attacks directed against him from within the game’s fraternity and in time he even exaggerated their magnitude. People do that, of course. We all exaggerate the pain of episodes that hurt us badly, be it a divorce, a dislocated knee or a proposed expulsion.
    Keeping blacks out of organized ball for more than six decades was the work of many people and proceeded with the tacit—and sometimes outspoken—approval of American society at large. As far as I can learn, there were no sustained calls from any groups, black or white, to boycott alabaster baseball, to hit the magnates where they were most sensitive. That place was not the heart, but the wallet.
    One eloquent individual protest survives from 1939. It was issued by Wendell Smith in the prominent black newspaper the
Pittsburgh Courier
. Under the heading “A Strange Tribe,” Smith wrote:
    Why we continue to flock to major league ballparks, spending our hard earned dough, screaming and hollering, stamping our feet and clapping our hands, begging and pleading for some white batter to knock some white pitcher’s ears off, almost having fits if the home team loses and crying for joy when they win, is a question that probably never will be answered satisfactorily. What in the world are we thinking anyway?
    The fact that major league baseball refuses to admit Negro players within its folds makes the question that much more perplexing. Surely, it’s sufficient reason for us to stop spending our money and time in their ballparks. Major league baseball does not want us. It never has. Still, we continue to help support the institution that places a bold “Not Welcome” sign over its thriving portal. . . . We black folks are a strange tribe! . . .
    We have been fighting for years in an effort to make owners of major league baseball teams admit Negro players. But they won’t do it. Probably never will. We keep on crawling, begging and pleading for recognition just the same. We know that