Breaking Down The Barriers In 1947, Jackie Robinson Changed Baseball, And America, Forever

There is a short wrought-iron gate and two marble benches for those who want to stay awhile.

A few steps away, a huge gray stone bearing the family name identifies the plot, and carved into the granite is one of the man’s favorite sayings:

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

It is signed in script.

Jackie Robinson.

Day after day, they still come, a steady stream of fans who navigate the narrow roads of Cypress Hills Cemetery until they reach his grave.

The cemetery, on New York City’s Brooklyn-Queens border, is less than 10 miles from where Ebbets Field once stood, where the Brooklyn Dodgers played and Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier 50 years ago.

Robinson’s funeral cortege took the long way to get there, winding through the streets of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the city’s black neighborhoods. It was an opportunity for the people to say one final farewell to the man who changed baseball - and America.

That was not the original idea. All Jackie Robinson wanted was a job, something that would pay him enough money so that he and his college sweetheart, Rachel Isum, could get married.

What he got instead was the lead role in a sociological revolution.

The Brooklyn Dodgers opened the 1947 National League season at Ebbets Field against the Boston Braves. Batting second for Brooklyn and playing first base was Jack Roosevelt Robinson, son of a sharecropper, grandson of a slave and the first black man to appear in a major league baseball game since well before the turn of the century.

Blacks had appeared in American sports before Robinson. Joe Louis was the heavyweight champion and Jack Johnson had held that crown before him. Jesse Owens won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics.

But this was different. This was baseball, the national pastime, where integration would put a black on the field day after day, a constant reminder that the game was no longer all-white.

Branch Rickey, boss of the Dodgers, had decided to integrate baseball and chose Robinson, a marvelously skilled player. The task would not be easy. Robinson would have to silently endure every curse, every slur.

In a confrontational meeting in Rickey’s office, the Dodgers’ boss verbally abused Robinson with the vile words he could expect to hear on the field. It was a test to see how much the 28-year-old rookie could take.

Finally, an exasperated Robinson asked Rickey if he wanted someone who was afraid to fight back. Rickey’s answer was that he wanted someone with the guts not to fight back.

The assignment began on April 15, 1947, five days after the Dodgers casually issued a two-sentence news release in the middle of an exhibition game.

“The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson from the Montreal Royals. He will report immediately.”

The Dodgers’ players knew the day was coming, and not all of them were thrilled. There was talk during spring training of an anti-Robinson petition led by a pocket of Southern players, including Dixie Walker and Hugh Casey.

When word of it reached manager Leo Durocher, he called a midnight team meeting and chewed out the players. The revolt was crushed before it ever started, and before the year was over, the ringleaders had all been traded.

Brooklyn second baseman Eddie Stanky was less than enthusiastic about playing next to a black man.

“I want you to know something,” he told Robinson on the eve of the opener. “You’re on this ballclub and as far as I’m concerned that makes you one of 25 players on my team. But before I play with you, I want you to know how I feel about it. I want you to know I don’t like it. I want you to know I don’t like you.”

A famous dugout picture of the Dodgers’ starting infield on opening day 1947 shows third baseman Spider Jorgensen, shortstop Pee Wee Reese, second baseman Stanky and first baseman Robinson. Stanky is the only one not smiling. The next year, Stanky was traded to Boston and Robinson, who had been a middle infielder in college, switched to second base.

Robinson arrived early for that first game and was much more relaxed than his wife, who followed with their infant son from their Manhattan hotel.

“Jack was cool and calm and ready to play,” Mrs. Robinson said. “It was not a big deal for him. Whatever he felt, he kept to himself. Jack got prepared to leave with no particular discussion of what he was thinking about, no display of nerves or indication that he was worried.”

On that day, before a crowd of 26,623, well under a sellout, it did not go particularly well.

The first pitcher to face Robinson was Johnny Sain, then ace of the Braves’ staff. “Isn’t that something?” Sain said. “Nobody knows that.”

Robinson’s debut was no big deal to the Braves’ pitcher. “We thought he would play, but they didn’t announce it until just before the game started,” he said. “It was my second opening day and I was more excited that it was opening day, not who I was pitching against.”

Robinson was hitless in three at-bats. He grounded to third, flied to left, hit into a double play, reached on an error on a sacrifice bunt and scored a run as Brooklyn won 5-3.

Two days later, Robinson had his first major league hit, a bunt single. Then, in the Dodgers’ next series against the New York Giants, he hit a home run. But there was trouble ahead. He slipped into an 0-for-20 slump and was about to face a major test of his endurance when Philadelphia arrived to play the Dodgers.

The manager of the Phillies was Southerner Ben Chapman and he led a fusillade of racial abuse, worse than Robinson had ever heard, worse than the darkest days of spring training in the segregated South.

“Hey, nigger, why don’t you go back to the cotton field where you belong?”

“They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!”

“Hey, snowflake, which one of the white boys’ wives are you dating tonight?”

Robinson’s vow of silence was facing its harshest test. The abuse from the Phillies seemed too much to take and for a tense time Robinson thought about discarding the promise, plowing into their dugout and taking on the taunters.

He called it the toughest day he had to endure in that nightmarish first season. Somehow, though, he got through it and managed some revenge by manufacturing the game’s only run in a 1-0 Dodgers victory. He singled, stole second, went to third on catcher Andy Seminick’s overthrow and scored on a single.

For the next two days, the abuse increased, raining down on Robinson. Finally, one Dodger couldn’t take it anymore and shouted into the Phillies dugout.

“Listen, you yellow-bellied SOBs, why don’t you yell at somebody who can answer back?”

The defender was Stanky, the man who had told Robinson off before the season started.

Pee Wee Reese, the Dodgers’ captain, was vital to Robinson’s assimilation in Brooklyn.

“I knew about him,” Reese said. “I knew he had played football and basketball in California. I figured he’d be good and I knew he could help us win.”

And for the shortstop, that was all that mattered.

During the season, Robinson, Reese and a couple of other Dodgers sat down in the clubhouse at Wrigley Field for a game of hearts. “He was a hell of a card player,” Reese said, chuckling.

Afterward, Dixie Walker and Hugh Casey, the spring-training conspirators, confronted the captain. “They said, ‘How can you play cards with him?”’ Reese said.

He said he told Walker: “‘What’s that all about? You have a black lady taking care of your kids in New York.’ He said, ‘It’s just different.”’

There was more trouble ahead. There were rumblings about possible player strikes to protest Robinson. Al Gionfriddo, who started the season in Pittsburgh and was later a Robinson teammate, recently told ESPN that every team in the league had voted on whether to play the Dodgers.

The most serious talk about a walkout came from St. Louis, where the World Series champion Cardinals were angry about playing a team with a black man. This time, National League president Ford Frick stepped in.

“If you do this, you will be suspended from the league,” Frick told the Cardinals. “You will be outcasts. I don’t care if half the league strikes. Those who do it will encounter quick retribution. All will be suspended and I don’t care if it wrecks the National League for five years. This is the United States of America and one citizen has as much right to play as another.

“The National League will go down the line with Robinson, no matter the consequences.”

Like the Dodgers’ spring-training petition, the Cardinals’ strike evaporated before it ever got started. And Robinson pressed on.

He was thrown at routinely, sent sprawling on a daily basis. In the first two months of the season, he was hit by pitches six times, as many times as any N.L. player had been hit the entire previous season.

One day in Chicago, Dodgers pitcher Clyde King approached Robinson. “I just asked him how he was doing,” King said. “He said, ‘It’s tough. It’s tough. It’s tough.’ “Then he asked me how I thought it was going. I told him nobody could do it better and to hang in there. He patted me on the shoulder and walked away,” King said. “It was the only time we talked about it.”

Often the Dodgers were shunted from their regular lodging. Sometimes, Robinson left the team rather than disrupt the travel schedule. Always, it seemed, the Dodgers’ arrival in a city created a stir because of Rickey’s grand experiment.

Major league baseball had been an all-white operation since 1884 when Chicago manager Cap Anson caught sight of Toledo catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker, a black, warming up before an exhibition game and screamed, “Get that nigger off the field!”

But by 1959, every major league team had a black player, due in large part to Robinson’s monumental effort. The Boston Red Sox were the last team to integrate, calling up infielder Pumpsie Green from the minors.

In 1957, a year after Robinson retired from baseball, he began losing weight and was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease that would eventually kill him.

Without baseball, Robinson moved to the world of business. He became vice president in charge of personnel for Chock Full O’ Nuts and spent seven years with the restaurant chain. After that, he helped start the Freedom National Bank, serving as chairman of the board of the only black-owned and black-operated commercial bank in New York state.

Later, a small group of investors established the Jackie Robinson Construction Company to build housing for low- and moderate-income families.

By then, however, Robinson’s health was failing. There was a mild heart attack in 1968 and another in 1970, and he began losing his eyesight. Two years later, he was honored at the World Series to mark the 25th anniversary of his move to the major leagues. Ten days after the ceremony, on Oct. 23, 1972, he died at age 53.

In his autobiography, published shortly after his death, Robinson wrote, “I had to fight hard against loneliness, abuse and the knowledge that any mistake I made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there.”

He was alone at the beginning, but not at the end.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: HISTORY FOR SALE Among the products using Robinson’s image: Trading cards: Upper Deck has included nine sepia-toned cards featuring photos from Robinson’s playing days in its 240-card baseball set. Packs of 12 cards sell for $2.49. Figurines: Hasbro Toy group has a 12-inch Robinson figure for $29.99 and two-packs for $15 of smaller figures of Robinson with Hank Aaron or Larry Doby. Collectible distributor Longton Crown has a 2-inch pewter figurine of Robinson sliding into home plate for $19.99. Pins: Peter David Inc. has created lapel pins with the anniversary emblem that will be sold for about $6 each in ballparks and at stores. Cereal: Robinson photos appear on boxes of Wheaties, Honey Frosted Wheaties and Crispy Wheaties ‘n Raisins.