Thinking of Robinson and Rickey

American Lake in Aspen, Colorado

My father is a lifelong Brooklyn Dodgers fan. Although I am not and instead respond to Yankees pin stripes in the same way that a young zebra does to its mother’s stripes, the pantheon of Brooklyn’s heroes informs my world view. This past weekend like so many summer weekends, strolling to downtown Basalt, shopping for produce in the farmers’ market and bumping into friends and colleagues there crystalized an idea that had been on my mind increasingly over the last couple of weeks. As I moved among the vegetable stalls and tried in vain to avoid the local bakeries, I recalled that Dodgers players typically lived in Brooklyn and were part of their neighborhoods – shopping for groceries, having a yarn with the school kids playing marbles or stickball in the streets, and generally being members of the tight-knit communities they represented when playing at Ebbets Field and around the nation. Like all subjects Dodgers, this brought to mind Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey.

As a quick reminder, Branch Rickey was the General Manager of the Dodgers who brought Jackie Robinson to the team in 1945. When Rickey joined the Dodgers in 1943 he was already highly regarded as an innovative baseball scout and tactician, and he made clear to the Dodgers that identifying and signing players from the Negro Leagues to break the color barrier in baseball was a priority. Robinson was his first choice for reasons including a now well-understood, long-ago proven and exceptionally rare combination of athletic prowess and personal character. After two years in the Dodgers’ Minor League affiliates, Robinson went on to start his first Major League game in April of 1947, making him the first African-American to play in the Majors.

In August of 1945, Rickey called Robinson into his office for a conversation that has been mythologized in print and on film and that has achieved true legendary status – in sport and, more so, in our society. After being asked to turn the other cheek to the inevitable abuse he was to receive, Robinson asked Rickey if he was looking for a black man who was afraid to fight back. Rickey then famously explained that he was looking for a player “with guts enough not to fight back”. Rickey then signed Robinson to a contract with the Dodgers, assuring him that desegregating baseball was something the team would do as an organization, together.

Over the last few weeks, the conventional and unconventional press has spent a great deal of column-width parsing out and analyzing Vice President Kamala Harris’s approach to her racial identity and ethnicity. That is, she has let others discuss the groundbreaking nature of her potential presidency from that perspective, choosing instead to focus on her vision for America, the tone and approach she will take as President, and the policies she will pursue. She has a job to do and while she isn’t ducking questions when posed to her directly, she is not dwelling on the subject of the place her presidency would have in American history. What occurred to me this weekend while perambulating with a bag full of fresh produce is that she is taking a cue from Jackie Robinson: Vice President Harris is focusing on playing ball and winning games with and for the American people, retaining her remarkable grace and sense of humor in the face of some truly ugly comments and criticism from those that oppose her.

To be clear, Jackie Robinson was not mute on the subject of race or civil rights generally in America. I believe that he and Branch Rickey simply understood that his performance on the field while enduring abuse of a nature and extent that is difficult to fathom was the most important contribution he could make. I do not in any way mean for this to be a criticism of those athletes whose active and essential role in the civil rights and women’s movements were more vocal than his – Muhammed Ali, Billie Jean King, Jim Brown, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar immediately come to mind. Whether those remarkable athletes who used their influence in American culture to move our society forward could have done so without Robinson’s having broken the barrier in the way he did is a question that is more interesting than important to me – Jackie was the first, he did so with aplomb and an indefatigable nobility, and we are all the better for it.

In my world view, given my own family and baseball provenance, comparing anyone to Jackie Robinson requires treading carefully. In this moment I do so deliberately. I don’t know if perhaps President Biden had a quiet chat with Vice President Harris about what she could expect; perhaps it was President Obama whose own experience may be the best guidepost. Perhaps it is simply the examples provided those icons of our Civil Rights heroes with whom she may have had some personal experience that are guiding her – Congressman John Louis, for example. I just hope that when the digital age version of the chants and jeers from the outfield stands test her mettle, the Vice President knows that she can depend on myself and millions of other Americans to pick up the mantle of that other Dodger great Pee Wee Reese, put our arm around her shoulder and face the hate and the resistance to a better future, together.