Introduction

“Have you seen the Jackie Robinson file?”

I was conducting research on President Richard Nixon at the National Archives in Laguna Beach, California, when the archivist Paul Wormser approached my desk with that beautiful question.

It was December 2005, and while the Robinson file was beyond my immediate research topic, I could not resist the delicious temptation.

“I have not,” I replied. “But I’d like to.”

Paul quickly returned with the file, and for the next several hours I was just spellbound, completely immersed in digesting and copying a significant body of letters between Robinson and Nixon.

The topics ranged from the personal to the political—from shared lunches to Eisenhower’s race politics—but most of them centered on Robinson’s hard-hitting efforts to advance a civil rights agenda within the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s.

I was hooked because this was a Jackie Robinson I did not know. Growing up in central Pennsylvania in the 1970s, I had been exposed to benign biographies that depicted him as a smiling second baseman—a nice young man who had “turned the other cheek” when facing those who were furious about Branch Rickey’s experiment of breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball.

Of course, the elementary-school books offered the standard statistics, too, and so I also learned that even while enduring countless taunts, this smiling young man had earned a remarkable .311 career batting average and helped to lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to six National League pennants and one World Series championship.

Call it truncated history—and part of the reason for my shock and delight as I plowed through the Nixon-Robinson correspondence.

Here, at last, was a Jackie Robinson far beyond the baseball diamond. An angry black man who grabbed a pen and wrote rage-filled letters about segregation and discrimination. A fiery prophet who rebuked politicians for telling African Americans to exercise patience and forbearance when pursuing their constitutional rights. A fervent patriot committed to using his celebrity status and considerable resources to overcome the racial divide right now so that his children would have a brighter, bolder future.

It was as if I was meeting a new—or perhaps another—Jackie Robinson.

At first I was not sure what to do with the letters, but after returning to my hotel and watching yet another television program on athletes “gone bad,” I resolved to share that precious file with the wider world. We deserve a much better role model from professional sports, I thought, and who better than Jackie Robinson?

Within the week I asked Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow, for permission to publish the letters, and she kindly agreed. But as I continued my research at archives across the country, especially at the Library of Congress, which holds the Jackie Robinson Papers, I began to crave a bigger project.

The letters to Nixon were a good start, but Robinson wrote civil rights letters to so many major historical figures (Malcolm X, Barry Goldwater, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller) and about so many controversial topics (black power, the Vietnam War, divisions within the civil rights movement). And his letters sparked substantive replies that reflected America’s running conversation about politics and race and economics. How could I not share all these letters, too? I went back to Rachel, who has long touted Jackie as an informal civil rights leader, and she graciously agreed to the wider project.

Her generosity is to our benefit, because the more clearly we can hear Jackie Robinson’s voice from beyond the baseball diamond, the better we will understand the complicated history of race and politics in the United States, the more deeply we will sense our successes and failures to establish equal justice under law, and the fairer we will be when assessing the rich legacy of this American icon.

Other scholars and writers have come to this realization long before I have, and Alfred Duckett, Sharon Robinson, Arnold Rampersad, Jules Tygiel, and David Falkner have led the way in introducing us to Jackie Robinson’s life after his retirement from baseball. But their efforts notwithstanding, the general public has largely ignored or dismissed Robinson’s civil rights advocacy beyond the playing field, preferring instead to focus on the bright smile of a youthful baseball player. At best we will occasionally recall his understandable hostility toward fellow players, umpires, and the media during the latter days of his baseball career. But this fiery image, just like his civil rights legacy, has been far from enduring.

Perhaps it has been safe and convenient for us to picture Robinson as the tolerant, clean-cut ballplayer who gently helped to integrate professional sports in the United States. But however comfortable it may be, our collective focus on the first part of his baseball career is utterly unfair to the Jackie Robinson who loudly criticized the practices and policies of racist America, devoted countless hours to civil rights fund-raising and rallies, twisted the arms of politicians hungry for black votes and yet fearful of a white backlash, and encouraged young African Americans who have since become well-known veterans in the ongoing battle for civil rights.

This is the Jackie Robinson you will discover in the pages ahead. You will soon see that the only object mightier than a bat in his right hand was a ballpoint pen, and that in the struggle for civil rights he wielded his pen with remarkable talent and energy.

While he lavished eloquent praise on those who sought to overcome racial segregation and discrimination (for example, Lyndon Johnson and the Freedom Riders of the 1960s), Robinson also wrote scorching letters to anyone who dared to differ with his vision of fair play for African Americans (for example, Barry Goldwater and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.).

By turns affectionate and direct, incisive and incendiary, the letters provide us with a fresh opportunity to encounter Robinson anew, this time in his own words—largely unfiltered and uncensored, and sometimes just plain unbelievable.

It is not always easy to understand this prophet with pen in hand. Robinson’s passion for civil rights was complicated and nuanced. A natural maverick, he charted his own course, offering his support to Democrats and Republicans, questioning the tactics of civil rights leaders already in conflict with one another, and challenging the nation’s leaders to fulfill the promises of democracy and capitalism.

Robinson’s maverick spirit created a good number of enemies along the way. Malcolm X and his followers depicted him as an “Uncle Tom” perfectly suited to clean up after his “white bosses,” and the Nixon administration identified him as a threat significant enough to warrant a written report from J. Edgar Hoover—even as Robinson offered to help the Nixon team.

Taken together, Robinson’s letters and their replies provide us with new insight into the conversations that both created and weakened the civil rights movement. Above all else, however, these rich letters complete our picture of Jackie Robinson—a Hall of Fame baseball player, to be sure, but also an extraordinary political powerhouse and a civil rights leader in his own right, who personified the “first class citizenship” that he demanded for all Americans, and who, to the day of his death, fiercely competed against anyone who would stand in his way.

Copyright © 2007 by Michael G. Long. All rights reserved.