Narrative of Jackie Robinson, like that of MLK, is at odds with the reality
Jackie Robinson hadn't wanted to throw out the first ball at Game 2 of the 1972 World Series and address the public 25 years after he accepted Major League Baseball's invitation to be, as he once said, a "guinea pig in baseball's racial experiment." The experiment, as far as Robinson was concerned, was failing.
He had told as much to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, to whom he wondered how the game still hadn't seen Black men as capable of being managers.
But Robinson conceded to Kuhn's wish to be celebrated once more by America's so-called pastime. And as Robinson, addled by diabetes - leaving him blind in his left eye and threatening the sight in his right - graciously wrapped up a short speech that day, Oct. 15, 1972, televised from Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium filled with more than 53,000 fans, he said this:
"I'm extremely proud and pleased to be here this afternoon. But I must admit, I'm going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a Black face managing in baseball. Thank you very much."
He then turned to his left, holding an award Kuhn presented him, and walked away. It was Robinson's last public speech. He died less than two weeks later at 53.
But the Jackie Robinson whom baseball will fete again this week as part of an annual remembrance - this time, 75 years after it ended a 60-year practice of not allowing men of African provenance to play its game - will not be the dyspeptic Robinson. The one who doth protest. The one who, to quote civil rights firebrand Fannie Lou Hamer, was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Instead, he will be the Robinson who agreed with Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey to swallow his enormous pride, the one who turned the other cheek to those who spat racial insults at him, the one who is imagined smiling in perpetuity in a sculpture at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in his famous steal of home in the 1955 World Series.
He will be remembered rather benignly.
What has happened to Robinson over the years is not surprising. It is not unlike what has befallen other transcendent Black figures in history whom the public pretends to embrace. The makers and keepers of their narratives, particularly those of us in the media, defanged them. We made them palatable.
We recall Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous speech for its aspirational, nonconfrontational lines about dreaming rather than its revolutionary critique of America that warned of more urban rebellions to come if the country did not change.
We reminisce about Nelson Mandela as the quiet-spoken man who emerged from 27 years of imprisonment in South Africa speaking of reconciliation rather than the armed guerrilla leader of his country's Black majority who sought to obliterate the nation's brutal White settler colonialist regime.
And, of course, there is the media transformation of Muhammad Ali.
"Jackie Robinson's transcendent status in American culture is no surprise, then," University of Chicago anthropologist John Kelly observed in his 2005 journal article, "Exclusionary America: Jackie Robinson, Decolonization and Baseball Not Black and White." "He is not only a piece of American history, but a vehicle for the idea of it, specifically when he becomes one of 'us,' not 'them,' for U.S. citizens."
Robinson was far more complicated than almost everything that will be said about him this week. That pride he swallowed? He was court-martialed by the U.S. Army after refusing to surrender his seat under orders from a White officer in 1944 - 11 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in segregated Montgomery, Ala.
In "Jackie Robinson: A Biography," author Arnold Rampersad quoted Robinson explaining: "The bus driver asked me for my identification card. I refused to give it to him. He then went to the dispatcher and told him something. What he told him I don't know. He then comes back and tells the people that this [n-word] is making trouble. I told the driver to stop f---ing with me, so he gets the rest of the men around there and starts blowing his top and someone calls the MPs." A month later, after a four-hour trial, Robinson was acquitted.
Some years later, in the midst of his stardom, Robinson was talked into testifying against the great Black athlete turned actor, singer, socialist and human rights activist, Paul Robeson, before the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities. In his autobiography, Robinson later lamented: "I knew that Robeson was striking out against racial inequality in the way that seemed best to him. However, in those days I had much more faith in the ultimate justice of the American White man than I have today."
And after his much-ridiculed dalliance with Republican candidates and officeholders in the 1960s, most notably Richard M. Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller, Robinson wrote to Nixon's White House, "Black America has asked so little, but if you can't see the anger that comes from rejection, you are treading a dangerous course."
For this week's Robinson jamboree, MLB added a number of new ways to commemorate what it calls its most important moment. A video titled "Play, Run, Win, Rise" will be featured, narrated by Leslie Odom Jr. from "Hamilton." The No. 42 on all jerseys will be in Dodger blue. A new Robinson Day logo will be unveiled.
Then the games will commence with, of course, the national anthem, no matter that Robinson reflected in his autobiography: "Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey's drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made."
That was published four days after he died.
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Kevin B. Blackistone is an ESPN panelist and professor of the practice at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.
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