Could you do it?
Could you sit and do your job while people called you a bitch?
A fag?
A spic?
A nigger?
Could you sit and do your job and not even wince as people called you a slave, as they threw things at you (regardless of how close those things got), as they threatened your family?
Could you just sit there and take it all?
And if you think you could, how long do you think you'd last? A minute? An hour? A day? Maybe a week?
What if it wasn't just one person? What if it was a crowd? What if people gathered just to try to make you miserable? What if you had to travel for work and people gathered near the hotel just to say something you weren't expecting, trying to get you to react?
What if you opened your mail one day and this greeted you:
DIE NIGGER.
IF YOU KEEP PLAYING, SOMETHING MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOUR WIFE AND SON. GO BACK TO THE PLANTATION AND PICK SOME COTTON YOU SLAVE.
ME AND MY FRIENDS WILL BE AT THE GAME IN ST. LOUIS ON WEDNESDAY. YOU BETTER NOT SHOW UP TO THE BALLPARK.
GO BACK TO THE NIGGER LEAGUES WHERE YOU BELONG.
Could you focus on your job, hundreds of miles from home, with the threats your wife and infant son were facing?
Could you focus on your job with them watching you work, amid the crowd of people ridiculing and threatening you?
What if your co-workers wouldn't work with you?
What if people tried to hurt you at work?
What if they did hurt you at work?
Could you just keep taking it?
(Image courtesy of Baseball Almanac)
In memory of Jackie Robinson, born 92 years ago today.
History
Before Jackie Robinson became a cultural phenomenon, and before 42 was an institution, and before there were black coaches and black broadcasters and black television analysts and black members of Congress and black business icons and a litany of popular black music groups and Harvard had a class in African-American studies, Major League Baseball had gone nearly 60 years without a black player (or, at least, one who was not playing as Cuban or Indian or something else).
And before Jackie Robinson became the first black inductee into MLB's Hall of Fame, and before Ted Williams used his induction speech to rally for more black players to be included, and before baseball talents like Oscar Charleston and Buck O'Neil and Josh Gibson were discovered by mainstream America (after the fact), and before the lack of black coaches became an abject embarrassment rather than something anyone could argue away, and before stellar black athletes getting looked at by powerhouse colleges was the expectation rather than a surprise, there had been about half a dozen Negro Leagues, and if you were black and you couldn't live without a life in baseball, you had to be able to hit, and you had to be able to field, and you had to be able to field more than one position, and you had to be able to live on almost no money and you had to be willing to up and basically go wherever there was a game, and you had to be willing to sleep in the bus and you had to be willing to buy sandwiches and gas from a place that wouldn't let you use the bathroom.
And you had to like it.
So when I asked if you could take it, I did not ask the question for my health. I did not ask the question lightly. And I did not ask the question rhetorically.
I asked the question because Jackie Robinson answered it.
And he then answered the critics and then was the league's Rookie of the Year and then its MVP and then an all-star and then a World Series winner and then an executive and a coach and an activist and anything else he wanted to be. He did what he put his mind to, and if he didn't do it himself, he helped give to the people who were doing it what strength they needed to cross the finish line.
Before Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk so Barack Obama could run, Jackie Robinson laced up his cleats and stepped up to the plate.
But in all of this, his temper got him his big break.
Jackie's talents
"Cool Papa" Bell scored from first base on a bunt, which is about on par with kicking an 80-yard field goal. Satchel Paige was such a good pitcher that he was pitching professionally when he was 42. Josh Gibson could hit the ball a country mile without hitting the ball square -- and depending on whom you believe, he had a major league contract before Jackie got one. (I cannot find the evidence I need to say with conviction that Branch Rickey had put four black players on the 1946 Montreal Royals and had decided to choose the best one to integrate baseball. But however many black players the team had -- and it had several -- if Robinson was not the man for the job, nobody was.)
Jackie Robinson was not the best athlete the Negro Leagues ever produced or promoted. He was not even at his best on the baseball field -- he was better at football than baseball at UCLA (as Jim Brown was better at lacrosse than football). Was he an outstanding baseball player? Good enough to overcome racism and be Rookie of the Year and MVP in consecutive years.
But Jackie Robinson was hired as much because he could take the abuse as because he could abuse opposing pitchers. His tenacity on the basepaths was no more important than his tenacity when enduring racism from fellow players and those who attended the games. And where his ability to hit the ball out of the park was absolutely valued, more important was his ability to stay in the park -- to not allow himself to get riled up and seek confrontations with lesser men after the game.
In short, he was the right man for the job because he was everything the first black ballplayer needed to be -- all business on the field and off.
Learning more
Jackie Robinson begins a lot of discussions on race in America, race in sports, race in baseball, race in whatever.
But there's so much more than Jackie Robinson. And I've done link blitz diaries, where I have a paragraph or two with five or six links each to stories you hadn't read before or perspectives you didn't know about. Thematically, I didn't want that this time -- I wanted the focus to be on the text blitz because of what a situation Jackie Robinson had to endure and how he kept challenging himself and his country to look at challenges and see opportunity.
But in the interest of writing for people who like to read:
Old-timers' memories
Josh Gibson was a hell of a slugger
George Sisler helped Jackie raise his average almost 50 points in one season
Another reference book on black baseball
The Black Barons of Birmingham
A reference book for anyone interested in the Negro Leagues
Branch Rickey tests Jackie's moral strength
A brief bio of Jackie's roommate in Montreal, Brooklyn's Triple-A team
A CBC piece on Jackie's debut with Montreal
Jackie's Montreal team was rated the 84th-best in minor league history
A brief bio of Branch Rickey and examination of the situation he faced in helping Jackie bear the standard
Sol White wrote the first book on black baseball