Jackie Robinson, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon. Public Broadcasting television, or on DVD from Shop PBS. Www.shoppbs.org. April 2016.
A new biography about Jackie Robinson on PBS examines American society in his time, and how Robinson confronted racial issues in a battle for first class citizenship.
In the four-hour series produced by Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah and her husband, David McMahon, people from that era are shown discussing their reactions to baseball’s breaking of the color barrier.
My home town comes across especially poorly in the documentary. The city most vividly discussed, aside from Brooklyn where Robinson played, is Philadelphia, which gave Robinson an especially hard time during that period.
The Phillies manager, Ben Chapman, heckled Robinson and asked his players to do the same. And the Phillies general manager, Herb Pennock, asked the Dodgers not to bring Robinson with them when their team came to play in Philadelphia in May of 1947. Pennock was born in Kennett Square Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia) and did not have Chapman’s excuse of being raised in a segregated Southern state.
Pennock begged the Dodgers president and general manager Branch Rickey not to bring Robinson to Philadelphia because the city was “just not ready for that sort of thing” and threatened that the Phillies would not take the field if Robinson showed up.
Chapman, from Tennessee, played for the New York Yankees from 1930 to 1936. He had taunted Jewish fans at Yankee Stadium with epithets and Nazi salutes and in a 1933 game he intentionally spiked the Washington Senators’ second baseman Buddy Myer who was incorrectly believed to be Jewish. [The Milwaukee Journal Apr 26, 1933]
When he became the Phillies manager in 1945, Chapman acquired outfielder Jake Powell, who was widely known as a racist. During an interview at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 29, 1938, WGN announcer Bob Elson asked Powell how he stayed in shape during the off-season. Powell replied that he worked as a policeman and “cracked niggers over the head” with his nightstick.
Dan Daniel of the New York World-Telegram trivialized this bigotry, writing: “Powell could have been more careful. But he is a hustling ballplayer.”
The sad truth is that Chapman was very popular as the Phils’ manager. After all, the team had been the worst in the National League between 1933 and 1945, finishing in 7th or 8th place every year. Then in 1946, Chapman’s first full season as manager, they rose to 5th place and drew more than a million in attendance for the first time.
Chapman admitted his ethnic name-calling to journalist Allen Barra in 1979: “We called Hank Greenberg ‘Kike.’ It was all part of the game back then. You said anything you had to say to get an edge.” No team, however, was as outrageously outspoken in its bigotry as the Phillies—not even the teams in cities that bordered the Confederacy, Cincinnati and St. Louis.
The Benjamin Franklin Hotel refused to allow Robinson to sleep there. The Phillies of 1950 were the last all-white team to win a National League pennant, and the Phillies were the next-to-last major league team to employ a black person. (The Boston Red Sox were the last.)
The documentary’s reminiscences prompt me to recall my own experience. At Wagner Junior High and Adath Jeshurun Hebrew school, all of us were happy with Robinson’s hiring. My parents had taught me properly; they were active in Jewish and inter-religious groups that urged racial integration and equality.
Although my parents would have welcomed them as neighbors, there were no blacks living near us. But that segregation was not of their doing. In fact, Jews were themselves restricted from moving into some neighborhoods. I remember my family entering a restaurant where we were ignored while other families entered and were seated, until finally my humiliated father had to lead us out.
Looking back from the 21st century it seems surprising that some progressive Jewish Philadelphians had black people working as maids, so let me put that in context.
A dozen families lived on our street in the northern Philadelphia neighborhood of Oak Lane. Most were Jewish, and had moved from crowded other Philadelphia neighborhoods into new homes between 1937 and 1941, just before home-building ceased for the duration of the war. Most had modest incomes. My mother was an elementary school teacher receiving pay of $32 a week (but nothing during summer months) and my father ran a small business in center city that barely provided enough to cover the mortgage and the cost of food and clothes. In the year that Jackie Robinson came to the major leagues, 1947, we still drove in a 1937 Plymouth (and that was our only car.)
Yet we, and most of the families on our street, had live-in “help.” Some were white, most were black. My parents paid a young woman $12 a week and provided meals and lodging in exchange for cleaning, clothes washing, babysitting, some of the cooking, and serving the dining room table.
When Pennock said this city wouldn’t accept a black man playing on the same field as whites, he certainly wasn’t speaking about us. We felt affinity for blacks because they were suffering the same oppression that Jews faced throughout history. We also felt reciprocity from blacks: they knew we were their allies, and they identified with stories about the Jews emerging from slavery in Egypt.
Other Philadelphians were less accepting. In the 1940s, Philadelphia’s population rose from 1,900,000 to slightly over two million, while Philadelphia’s black population rose from 220,000 to 650,000. Some whites resented the new competition for jobs. At Sun Ship the blacks worked in a segregated yard, and when the Philadelphia Transportation Company hired its first blacks as street car conductors, the transit workers union voted to go on strike. Because public transportation was needed to get war workers to and from their jobs, President Roosevelt had to nationalize the PTC and put armed soldiers on each trolley and bus to protect the black employees from violence.
Jews might have played a part in integrating baseball, but they weren’t allowed to. In February of 1943 the National League was looking for a buyer for the Phillies because its owner was behind on rent and bank loans. My mother’s old teachers-college schoolmate Eddie Gottlieb decided he wanted to buy and run the Phillies, and with his flair for showmanship he felt he could turn the team’s finances around. Because of his experience with the all-Jewish Sphas basketball team and with Negro baseball teams, Gottlieb could have become the first man to break baseball’s color barrier.
Gotty convinced Leon Levy, owner of radio station WCAU, to provide financial backing for the project. Levy needed assurance that he and Gottlieb, as Jews, would be allowed into major league baseball. Gottlieb asked sportswriter Bob Paul to be an emissary and call Ford Frick, president of the National League, and ask if there was any unwritten rule against Jews owning ball clubs. Frick was evasive. When the caller asked for an appointment for Gottlieb to meet with Frick, the league president refused and added, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I cannot discuss the sale of the Phillies with you.” So it remained for the Methodist Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers to do the deed.
The hostility to Robinson was disgraceful, and its enlightening to see this televised examination of the era.