JACKIE ROBINSON – made for TV A-
USA (240 mi) 2016 Ken
Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon
A return to form for documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose
earlier film BASEBALL (1994) barely covered the life of Jackie Robinson,
despite nearly 19-hours in 11 exhausting episodes, so this is a more extensive
portrait, becoming analogous to an exploration of the changing race relations
in America, as Robinson’s life is characterized not only by the abject horrors
of the journey, but the ability to transcend prejudice and bigotry with an
extraordinary talent on the playing field.
Targeted with death threats and venomous race-baiting, Robinson was
living out the last vestiges of the Jim Crow era in the South where blacks
could not stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants as whites, so
traveling with the team became a lonely and particularly isolating journey,
where these laws were designed to humiliate and punish blacks for their
supposed inferiority. Robinson’s stature,
however, transcends sports, as he almost single handedly dispelled the notion
of black inferiority, where his Hall of Fame career spoke for itself, becoming
a role model for courage and grace, both on and off the field as he opened
doors, calling into question the senseless injustice of a segregated white and
black America, becoming a good will ambassador for integration and equality, an
advocate for Civil Rights, where his life serves as a personal and professional
inspiration, posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the
Congressional Gold Medal. What’s
particularly noteworthy in this film is the distinguished presence of Rachel
Robinson, Jackie’s surviving widow, who at age 93 remains as sharp and alert as
ever, as her own perceptions add an extraordinary dimension to the complexities
of her husband’s life, as she shared most all of these moments with him along
the way. First Lady Michelle Obama notes
in the film, while sitting alongside President Obama, “I think that’s a sign of
his character that he chose a woman that was his equal. I don’t think you would have had Jackie
Robinson without Rachel. To go back and
have refuge with someone who you know has your back, that’s priceless.”
Born Jack Roosevelt Robinson (where his middle name was in
honor of the President who died just 25 days before he was born), the youngest
son of a sharecropper and the grandson of slaves, Robinson was 14 months old in
1920 when his father abandoned the family, so his mother moved her five
children from the small town of Cairo, Georgia to Pasadena, a wealthy suburb of
Los Angeles, where she found work as a maid.
Moving to an all-white neighborhood, the family faced constant
harassment, including burned crosses on their front yard, but they refused to
move. The neighborhood pool was for
whites only, where blacks, Asian, and Latino kids could use it once a week on
“International Day,” where the pool was drained and scrubbed cleaned afterwards
before opening again the next day for the exclusive use of whites. Robinson learned early on that athletic
success did not guarantee acceptance in American society, as his older brother
Mack was an exceptional athlete and a track standout, earning a Silver Medal in
the 200 meters at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, finishing just 0.4 seconds
behind Jessie Owens, yet the only job he could find afterwards was as a street
sweeper and ditch digger, despite having a college education. Jackie attended Pasadena Junior College,
playing alongside mostly white athletes, before transferring to UCLA, becoming
the school’s first varsity athlete to earn letters in four sports, football,
basketball, baseball, and track, winning the national title in the long jump at
the 1940 NCAA Men's Track and
Field Championships. Ironically,
baseball was Robinson’s “worst sport” at UCLA, hitting only .097 in his only
season, although he went 4-for-4 in his first game and stole home twice. Twice he led the Pacific Coast League in
scoring in basketball, while he was such a threat to score in football, one of
only four blacks on the team, that a rival coach from Oregon claimed, “I guess
you’ve got to have a mechanized cavalry unit to stop this guy.” He was a football All-American and, along
with Jim
Thorpe, a contender for the greatest all-around athlete in American
history. Robinson left school in 1941 once
his baseball eligibility ran out, without graduating, against the wishes of his
future wife, Rachel Isum, who he met as an entering freshman when he was a
senior.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Robinson was drafted and
applied for Officer Candidate School in Fort Riley, Kansas, where blacks were
routinely rejected at the time until the intervention of Heavyweight Boxing
champion Joe Louis, who was also stationed there, eventually led to his
acceptance, quickly leading to a personal friendship between the two men. Robinson was commissioned as a second
lieutenant in 1943, became engaged with Rachel shortly afterwards, and was reassigned
to Fort Hood in Texas. It was there that
a white Army bus driver ordered Robinson to move to the back of a military bus,
which he refused, more than a decade before Rosa Parks
refused a similar request in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, which led to his
arrest and a recommended court-martial, adding on additional charges, including
insubordination and public drunkenness, though Robinson did not drink. Robinson, who described himself as “the kind
of Negro who isn’t going to beg for anything,” was eventually acquitted of all
charges. The court proceedings, however,
kept him stateside, while the unit he was assigned to, the 761st "Black Panthers"
Tank Battalion, was the first black tank unit sent into combat during the
war. As most of the military training
facilities were located in the Deep South, the black trainees were forced to
train over several years, while whites were being sent overseas after just a
few months, making them subject to hostile acts of violent racism, including
beatings and even murder. Rachel
graduated from UCLA in 1945 with a degree in nursing and the couple was married
a year later, a year before he broke into the big leagues, as he was instead
playing baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues, offered an
obligatory tryout with the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, which was largely a
political show to appease black newspapers and desegregationists, with no
intentions of ever giving him a shot, as he was routinely subjected to racial
taunts throughout. The Red Sox were
actually the last team in Major League Baseball to sign a black player in
1959. While there were other black
players with bigger names, like Josh Gibson and Satchel Page, it was Robinson
who was selected, largely for how solidly grounded he was with a stable
marriage. After a lengthy discussion
with Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodger President and General Manager, who “was
looking for a soldier,” according to Rachel, where he famously lays down the
law, explaining the turn-the-other-cheek scenario in the first few years requiring
Robinson not to respond to the racial animosity that would inevitably come his
way, telling him “I want a ball player with guts enough not to fight back,”
Robinson was assigned to the Montreal Royals as the first black player in the
Brooklyn Dodger farm club of the International Leagues, where he led the league
with a .349 batting average while also being named the Most Valuable Player.
Rachel Robinson recounts the ordeal of reporting to Jackie’s
first spring training in Daytona, Florida just two weeks after their wedding,
where the trip amounted to their honeymoon, flying from Los Angeles to New
Orleans, where they were bumped off their connecting flight to make room for
white passengers, leaving them stranded at the New Orleans airport where none
of the restaurants would serve them. Anticipating
this, Rickey met them there offering a bucket of fried chicken, which they
graciously accepted, making it last throughout their ordeal. Eventually taking a flight to Pensacola,
Florida, with a connecting flight to nearby Jacksonville, they were ordered off
the plane to make room for two white passengers. With little recourse, they boarded a bus for
Jacksonville, where the driver, calling him by the racial slur “boy,” ordered
them to move to the back of the bus, as the front seats reclined, but not in
the rear. After a long and arduous journey
through a part of the country where blacks who challenged discrimination were
often jailed, beaten, or murdered, with six blacks lynched in 1946 (Lynching
Statistics), and more than 20 others were rescued from angry mobs, they
finally made it to Daytona Beach, where Robinson was so angered and humiliated
that he was ready to quit. Only after
talking to journalists Wendell Smith and Billy Rowe from The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper avidly following his
story, was he convinced that he had to endure these indignities so others after
him would have opportunities that were closed to him now. Robinson, the only player allowed to bring
his wife, was not allowed to stay with his teammates in the same hotel, so instead
the newlyweds stayed in the home of a pharmacist and influential black
politician, Joe Harris, known as the “Negro Mayor of Daytona Beach.” Making matters worse, only Daytona Beach
allowed him to play on the field, and even there he received death threats,
while in nearby towns, the Sanford police chief threatened to close the
facilities if Robinson appeared, and in Jacksonville the team arrived only to
find the stadium padlocked. During his
time in the Negro Leagues, Robinson displayed a defiant spirit, sitting at a
segregated lunch counter at Woolworths where he would not move until he was
served, refusing to sit in the balcony at movie theaters, the designated area
for blacks, while also refusing to buy gas from gas stations that prohibited
blacks from using the rest room facilities.
Of interest, in the same year of 1946, Robinson’s backfield teammate at
UCLA, Kenny Washington, became the first black player to sign a contract with
the NFL in the modern (postwar) era. The
following year, just days before the start of the season, Robinson was called
up to the major leagues at the relatively advanced age of 28, starting at first
base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making his major league debut at Ebbets Field on
April 15, 1947 before a crowd of 26,000 spectators, which included 14,000 especially
excited black fans. 50 years later, the
city of Sanford issued a public apology to Jackie Robinson and proclaimed that
day Jackie Robinson Day. Major League
Baseball followed suit officially retiring his number on April 15, 1997, adopting
a tradition of Jackie Robinson Day in 2004 where baseball celebrates his legacy
every year on April 15th, a day many players elect to wear number 42 in his
honor. The last player to wear the
number 42 year-round was New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, an All-Star
Panamanian pitcher who retired after the 2013 season.
Early in his career Armed Forces veteran Robinson was called
upon to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1949 as
a stark contrast to singer and black activist Paul Robeson’s claim that black
Americans wouldn’t fight for their country, where he was largely duped by
reactionary conservative politicians to undermine a man with a huge black
following in Robeson, leading to his eventual blacklisting, this at a time when
Robinson was still not allowed to shower with his teammates, forced to accept a
locker off to the side in the corner of the clubhouse. But others coming up after him looked to Robinson
with hope, thinking now they might get a chance, where the weight of carrying
an entire race on one man’s shoulders is never really fathomable to the rest of
us, where he certainly felt the weight, according to Rachel, as “He knew if he
failed that social progress was going to get set back.” Described by New York Post sports journalist Jimmy Cannon as “the loneliest man
I’ve ever seen in sports,” the only way he could fight back was to do well on
the field and help his team win, something he did brilliantly throughout his storied
career. As President Obama notes in the
film, “Jackie Robinson laid the foundation for America to see its black
citizens as subjects and not just objects.
It meant that there were 6, 7, and 8-year-old boys who suddenly thought
a black man was a hero.” While there is
famous footage of Robinson at age 36 stealing home in the 1955 World Series,
there is also a considerable post career look at his life after baseball, where
he served on the board of the NAACP, supported Richard Nixon in the 1960
Presidential campaign, as he attended the 1960 Democratic National Convention,
where he heard reports that Kennedy was serious about civil rights, but after
seeing him prominently sit arch-segregationist Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus
on stage with him, Robinson walked out in disgust, but he later praised Kennedy
for the action he took on civil rights, and was disappointed and angered by the
conservative Republican opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, eventually
becoming a voice for black economic progress, but had his run-ins with Malcolm
X, the Black Panthers, and other black activists that felt he was out of touch
with the movement, calling him an “Uncle Tom.”
A lifelong Republican because the Democratic Party’s Dixiecrat wing ran
his family out of Georgia, he became one of six national directors for the
unsuccessful 1964 Presidential campaign of Republican Governor Nelson
Rockefeller in New York, leaving the Republican Party convention completely
demoralized when the nominee chosen was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, where
Robinson witnessed firsthand, “out of thirteen hundred delegates, 15 were
black, and of those 15, one had his credentials revoked and another had
cigarettes put out on him by Goldwater supporters,” claiming in his 1972
biography I Never Had It Made that he
now had “a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s
Germany,” eventually switching parties and supporting Hubert Humphrey against
Nixon in 1968. According to director Ken
Burns, “Robinson was there in 1960 and 1964 when the two parties switched sides
on the Southern white vote, and that’s a huge moment in American history. He witnessed it firsthand.”
With Keith David delivering the narration, and Jamie Foxx
reading from Robinson’s letters or columns, we get a fuller picture of just
what drove the man, as he continued to fight against racism and rail against
inequality well after his career was over, where he worked as a business
executive, the first black to serve as vice president of a major American
corporation, helped found a minority-owned bank, wrote a regular newspaper
column, and was politically involved.
Delving more into his family history and the relationship with his wife
and children, eventually buying a house in Connecticut, we hear the voices of
his now grown daughter Sharon and his son David as they reveal a deep sense of anguish
felt by their father at his inability to connect with the emotionally distant Jackie
Robinson Jr. who had a history of drug abuse, yet was well on his way to an
apparent recovery before a car accident took his life at the age of 24, where
there is an unseen backside exposed like never before, making him all the more vulnerable
and human, as his life is anything but perfect or heroic. Even as a player, Robinson didn’t always
remain quietly passive, becoming more aggressively argumentative after his
first few years, challenging umpires and opposing players, where his innate
personality opened up, but his outspokenness drew the ire of once-adoring fans and
beat writers who preferred his passivity and accused him of being “uppity” or
ungrateful, where his own black teammate Roy Campanella felt his combativeness
on the field was often divisive and hurt the team. “Without that anger, you don’t get Jackie
Robinson,” suggests sportswriter Howard Bryant, while according to Rachel, “He was
not an angry black man. He was an
athlete who wanted to win.” Robinson,
who spent his entire Major League career (1947 to 1956) with the Dodgers, was
voted Rookie of the Year in 1947 and Most Valuable Player in 1949, when he won
the National League batting title with a .342 batting average, becoming an
All-Star for six consecutive seasons beginning in 1949, receiving more votes
that year than any player except Ted Williams.
With a .311 career batting average, he led the Dodgers to six pennants,
helped win a World Series in 1955, and was elected to the National Baseball
Hall of Fame in 1962. While Brian
Helgeland’s Hollywood movie 42 (2013)
offers a glimpse into the racism and discrimination that Robinson encountered,
even from his own teammates, during his Major League career where more than a
third of the league’s players at that time hailed from former Confederate
states, this film offers a much more extensive portrait behind the scenes of a
man who endured the neverending assault of racial attacks to lay the groundwork
for the acceptance of blacks in America, fighting tirelessly for more black
managers and executives in the game of baseball, where Martin Luther King Jr.
called Robinson “a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom
rides,” eventually becoming an active spokesperson and fundraiser in the Civil
Rights movement, joining King at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the March
on Washington in 1963 attended by 250,000 people hearing King’s historic “I
Have a Dream” speech. He’s a man that
helped blacks believe that things they could not imagine were now possible,
where Robinson took the hateful insults, racial slurs, death threats and abuse
and made it just a little bit easier for the next person of color to become the
“first” or second in their school or workplace.
Again, according to Burns, explaining his overriding interest in making
the film, “Jackie Robinson is the apostle of our better selves and is the
apostle of the better angels of our nation.”
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