Jackie Robinson Can Never Again Negros Racists
The Story Behind Jackie Robinson'southward Damning Osculation-Off to a White Sports Writer
In the spring of 1956, Jackie Robinson was coming off a triumphant World Series, the only 1 the Brooklyn Dodgers would win before decamping to Los Angeles. Robinson was 37 years old, and only one season away from retirement. When he sabbatum down with a pair of journalists from the Pittsburgh Courier, the pioneering baseball game star was in a cogitating mood. "This isn't the story of my life," Robinson's as-told-to series in the storied Black newspaper began. "It is, however, a story of how I've establish the Due south after 10 years in the major leagues."
In that piece and a sequel the post-obit week, Robinson said that he'd been "exposed to the worst type of discrimination" and that to "a large extent the Southerners, particularly those in politics, are to arraign." Robinson decried the Jim Crow policies of the pocket-sized league Southern Clan, which featured just i Black American actor (in 1954, and for just two games) before shutting down in 1961. He also spoke upwards about the injustice of segregated housing. "Sometimes there are hotels (Negro-owned) that accommodate the states. When hotels aren't available nosotros stay with various families," he said. Robinson then made a simple plea: "Because nosotros are traveling in the South there is no reason why we shouldn't exist able to live with our teammates. Nosotros are all part of a team and should be treated that way."
For many Americans, Robinson's words and his presence on the field were a source of forcefulness. As a teenager, Hank Aaron saw Robinson requite a speech communication and play an exhibition game in his hometown of Mobile, Alabama. "I was allowed to dream after that," Aaron once wrote.
But others, peculiarly white Southerners, saw Robinson as a threat. I of them was Bill Keefe, the sports editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. In a July 1956 cavalcade, Keefe assailed Robinson as a "persistently insolent and antagonistic trouble-making Negro" and an "enemy of his race." Robinson responded to Keefe with a letter of the alphabet that did more than just put a racist in his place. Information technology also exposed the emptiness and idiocy of segregationist idea. "I am happy for you, that y'all were born white," Robinson wrote. "It would have been extremely difficult for you had information technology been otherwise."
Pecker Keefe started in journalism vii years before Jackie Robinson was born, getting his kickoff writing gig at the New Orleans Times-Democrat in 1912. He'd stay in the field for more than 50 years, earning renown among his white peers for his coverage of boxing, equus caballus racing, and college football. Upon Keefe's death in 1967, the Times-Picayune praised him as "1 of the South'southward (maybe ane of the nation's) virtually entertaining, knowledgeable, popular sports writers and editors." The sports editor of the Nashville Banner said Keefe was "the kindest, most gentle man I've ever known." Grantland Rice once claimed that Keefe had "helped bring dignity to sports writing."
Keefe did not extend that dignity to people of other races. When Aryan icon Max Schmeling knocked out American Joe Louis in 1936, Keefe wrote that the German language heavyweight had "chased the black terror from out of the country, which now seems safe for all white heavyweights." (Louis would become his revenge on Schmeling in their 1938 rematch.) 2 decades after, in 1956, Keefe covered the offset integrated Sugar Basin in New Orleans, and praised Pittsburgh's Blackness fullback Bobby Grier for playing "a whale of a game." Subsequently that same year, the Louisiana Legislature passed a law banning all integrated sporting events from the state: no boxing matches with Black and white fighters in the same ring, no football games with Black and white players on the aforementioned field.
Neb Keefe didn't say publicly that he supported the law. He did, however, fence that Louisiana lawmakers shouldn't exist blamed for passing information technology. Keefe wrote that anti-segregation activists had "congenital up opposition to integration" by claiming that racist incidents had taken identify around that Sugar Basin game. Those "warped" allegations, he argued, had created a backlash in Louisiana, making it easier for the segregation police force to gain passage. Keefe also blamed Jackie Robinson, challenge that "no 10 of the virtually rabid segregationists accomplished as much as Robinson did in widening the breach between white people and Negroes."
Keefe criticized Robinson relentlessly in the summer of 1956 for supposed breaches of both on-field and off-field conduct. First, Keefe branded Robinson a "troublemaker" for his "defamatory remarks" most the New York Yankees' organizational prejudice confronting Black players. (In reality, Robinson'southward argument was entirely accurate.) Keefe also wrote that Robinson had been "pampered and humored by the officials of organized baseball game," citing the fact that the Dodgers infielder hadn't been suspended for tossing a bat that landed in the stands. (A pair of fans sued Robinson for $40,000, claiming the incident had caused them "severe nervous stupor." They'd settle out of court for $300 each.)
Keefe was almost agitated, though, about those as-told-to pieces in the Pittsburgh Courier, the ones in which Robinson shared what he'd experienced as a Black ballplayer in the Southern Us. For Keefe, Robinson's asking for integrated accommodations—"Because we are traveling in the South there is no reason why we shouldn't be able to live with our teammates"—constituted an all-out assault on individual commerce and states' rights. "Perhaps Southern hotel owners volition become together and determine to broke themselves so Robinson will be satisfied," Keefe wrote on July eighteen, 1956.
It was in that column that Keefe called Robinson a "persistently insolent and antagonistic trouble-making Negro" and an "enemy of his race." Keefe ended his slice by writing that "sincere segregationists … should fleck in and purchase a plaque to present Robinson." White Southerners, Keefe was arguing, would dismantle their apartheid gild when they were good and ready, and that day might come more rapidly if Jackie Robinson types kept their mouths shut.
Robinson was not inclined to stay quiet. On Aug. iv, 1956, the Louisiana Weekly, a Black newspaper, reported that Robinson had learned about Keefe's column from an "insuranceman" who'd mailed him the clipping. Robinson sent that contributor, Verdun Woods, a individual response, telling him, "I really am proud that a man similar Keefe dislikes me and what I stand up for." Robinson connected:
I don't experience any anger toward his kind. Because I realize that true Americans are no longer letting his kind dictate what America is going to do and his fears are getting the best of him. […]
Allow me assure you that as long equally I have a voice I'll stand up confronting what I consider injustices and volition not worry almost what a Beak Keefe thinks. […] Too many existent Americans are in our corner and the Keefes and their fears will before long be forgotten.
Robinson sent a letter to Keefe, also, which the Louisiana Weekly published in full. That letter, which is reproduced in the book First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson, begins with Robinson telling Keefe that he's writing to him "equally ane man beingness to another." Robinson says that he and other Black Americans "inquire only that we be permitted to alive as you lot live, and as our nation's constitution provides." On the subject of accommodations, Robinson says that integrated hotels in cities such equally St. Louis and Cincinnati "take not gone out of business. No investment has been destroyed." In reference to Keefe calling him "insolent," Robinson asks, "Am I insolent, or am I only insolent for a Negro (who has courage enough to speak against injustices such as yours and people like you)?" Then, those immortal concluding two sentences, and a sign-off:
I am happy for you, that you were born white. It would take been extremely difficult for you lot had it been otherwise.
Sincerely yours,
Jackie Robinson
Two years after Robinson wrote those lines, a federal courtroom constitute that Louisiana's segregation police—the ane Bill Keefe had accused Robinson of instigating—was "unconstitutional on its face up." The U.South. Supreme Courtroom would concord, and as of 1959 integrated sports competitions were permitted in Louisiana, though true able-bodied desegregation in the state would take much longer.
Nib Keefe acknowledged the existence of Robinson'due south letter of the alphabet in a column published on Aug. x, 1956. In that piece, Keefe described how a pair of Black editors from the Louisiana Weekly had asked him to share his thoughts. "I told them it was a very dainty letter," Keefe explained, "simply, since it had not changed my stance in the to the lowest degree, I saw no reason to respond information technology."
Later on that month, the Pittsburgh Courier published excerpts of another letter, one that Keefe had written to an unnamed Louisiana pastor. In that annotation, Keefe made plainly the full extent of his racist behavior. He wrote that the "Divine Creator" had segregated Blacks and whites, and that Black people had thick skulls, apelike artillery, and a "characteristic odor."
"That's the kind of stuff that we argued virtually," said Isabelle Keefe Marrero, Nib Keefe'due south only kid. Marrero, who's now 83 years old and living in Alabama, told me that her begetter "went to his death" with a racist mindset, "and that'due south so sad to me."
Before nosotros spoke last week, Marrero didn't know that Jackie Robinson had written a letter to her father. After reading that letter, she told me that Robinson'southward cannonball had "so much humanity and character." When she read the words her father had written, she couldn't stop crying. "I just thought, this is a mountain of shit," she said.
Marrero grew upwards around her father's work, sitting with him in the printing box at New Orleans' Pelican Stadium. Keefe and his newsman friends used slurs constantly, she said, and their "whole view of Blacks was they're not capable of learning anything, they're not capable of acting as white gild acts, they don't have manners." Marrero described her male parent as highly literate but non well educated; he dropped out of loftier school to aid support his family. Keefe was an alcoholic, just a "pleasant, peaceful drunkard." Marrero's mother, by contrast, was a "mean drunk," and suffered from mental affliction. Marrero said that she ran away from home equally a teenager when her female parent threatened her physically. She didn't know about Robinson'due south letter, she told me, considering she was living with her grandmother in 1956, and she lost track of her father'southward career.
Marrero said that she grew up with the same racist attitudes that her male parent did. She inverse her views when she got married and moved to Aberdeen, Maryland, where her husband was in basic grooming. "That was my kickoff experience with Blacks as an equal," she said. "I was shocked that they were simply similar nosotros were."
When Marrero and her married man moved to Huntsville, Alabama, they sent their children to St. Joseph's Catholic Schoolhouse. This was an act of "reverse integration": The 12 white students who enrolled at St. Joseph's in September 1963 joined 106 Black ones, making it the outset racially integrated elementary school in the state. "I didn't want my kids to abound up in the same situation as we did," Marrero told the NAACP magazine the Crisis in 2003. "If you don't larn that everybody is the same at an early on age, it is going to be tough when you abound up."
In 1965, Marrero launched the school's commencement physical education program. She'd teach and coach at the school for 33 years. 1 of her students, Condredge Holloway, would become the kickoff Blackness quarterback to play in the Southeastern Briefing. Holloway, who starred at Tennessee in the early 1970s, went to college out of state because legendary coach Bear Bryant told him that Alabama wasn't ready for a Black quarterback. He then played for more than a decade in the Canadian Football League, because the NFL, too, had very firm ideas nearly what Blackness athletes should and shouldn't be allowed to practice.
Marrero'southward father never understood why she had Black friends. "He would just milkshake his head," she said. "To him it was a whole different globe that he didn't want any office of."
Fifty-iv years later on Bill Keefe's decease, and 49 years later on Jackie Robinson'south, Marrero is still trying to empathize who her father was and where his behavior came from. This week, she dug through some erstwhile boxes and establish a copy of a letter of the alphabet her father had addressed to a man in New Orleans. In that note, dated May 18, 1953, Keefe wrote that "the Negro stands on a lower evolutionary airplane than the White homo." His sources, he said, were Encyclopedia Britannica and Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Encyclopedia.
"Wow," Marrero wrote to me, "that'southward where he got all that garbage he argued with me near!"
In one of our conversations, I asked Marrero about what Jackie Robinson had said about her father—that Bill Keefe was lucky that he was born white. "Oh, that's very truthful. That'south very true," she said. "You stop and think of the way my daddy idea. He idea Blacks were inferior. … So, what if he was Blackness? I mean, how would that work in his head? It would exist very hard for him."
This article is adjusted from a segment of Slate's sports podcast Hang Upwardly and Listen. Listen to the original segment below, or subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts , Overcast , Spotify , Stitcher , Google Play , or wherever you lot become your podcasts.
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2021/02/jackie-robinson-bill-keefe-letter-born-white-racism.html
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