What the American public knows about Jackie Robinson is certainly inspiring enough. A dazzling athlete who competed in four sports as a collegiate at UCLA, Robinson achieved a monumental achievement, becoming the first black American to play major league baseball 75 years ago when he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.
Still, it’s entirely possible that Robinson is grossly underestimated by those who know him just for breaking baseball’s color barrier. In truth, Robinson was a powerful civil rights advocate who spoke his mind both during and after his playing career, sometimes risking his own safety in doing so.
“People just forget that Jackie Robinson was a radical,” says Peter Dreier, a professor of politics at Occidental College and an author who has written extensively on the history of social justice in the United States and its national pastime. “He was a fierce principled person.”
With co-author Robert Elias, Dreier has written companion books, baseball rebels y Major League Rebels, which speak to the long history of sport, some of it involuntary, as a vehicle for social movements. Included is the players’ belated decision to unionize, hatched in the 1950s and finalized in 1966.
Prior to MLB’s league-wide Jackie Robinson Day celebration on April 15, Dreier spoke with Capital & Main by phone.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Capital & Main: Major League Baseball isn’t known as a particularly progressive sports business. Did it evolve socially at the same rate as the nation, or has it ever done so?
Pedro Dreier: Well, he definitely drove with Jackie. The racial integration of baseball occurred in 1947, seven years before the Brown v. Board of Education and eight years before the Montgomery bus boycott, two defining moments in the modern era of civil rights.
It’s hard for people today to realize how impressive and revolutionary it was to have Jackie Robinson play on a Major League Baseball team. In 1947, Jim Crow laws still existed. Blacks still couldn’t vote in the South. People were still being lynched. There was no city in America with a black mayor. There were two blacks in Congress. And here comes Jackie Robinson.
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But as he points out in Baseball Rebels, the movement to integrate baseball actually began long before Dodgers co-owner and top executive Branch Rickey signed Robinson, didn’t it?
Yes, although the story is not usually told that way. There had been efforts to integrate baseball since the 1930s, spearheaded by sportswriters such as New York columnist Heywood Broun and Wendell Smith of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most prominent black newspapers in the country at the time. Otherwise, the Communist Party [in America] played a significant role, and left-wing unions picketed outside major and minor league parks and circulated petitions calling for the game to be integrated. It’s possible that Branch Rickey could have done it on his own, he had it in mind, but he needed that move to force his hand.
Was Jackie himself well aware of all this?
Jackie understood that this move opened doors for him, that it wasn’t just him and Branch Rickey. And he paid that debt many times over with his activism. His activism in the civil rights movement, during and after his playing career, is generally downplayed. He risked his life a couple of times to go south and do picket lines and rallies. He raised money for civil rights groups over and over again. He was very brave, and people forget that part of his life.
It is a part of Robinson’s history that is lost in the sands of time.
Yes. And even people like it [football’s] Colin Kaepernick y [the NBA’s] LeBron James, although he has been publicly involved in social and political issues, probably doesn’t know that history. EITHER [baseball’s] Sean Doolittle, who are speaking now on different subjects. We wrote this book for the general public, but I really hope athletes read it and learn about their own story. When Sean Doolittle or [Dodger] Mookie Betts talks about Black Lives Matter or gay rights, or criticizes [former President] Trump for his immigration or asylum policies, they are standing on Jackie’s shoulders.
Is it fair to say that even if they aren’t viewed this way today, Major League Baseball players represented a class of exploited workers for quite some time?
Indeed. Baseball players were skilled craftsmen and exploited workers. The beginnings of baseball occurred during the Gilded Age [in the late 1800s], and the owners of that day considered themselves to be baseball’s version of the robber barons. They were going to make their money by exploiting the workers and increasing their profits. They really do charge these guys a nickel. They made them pay for uniforms and food, and they were kind of rude about it. It was pretty horrible, and the players got pissed off. But at first they didn’t know they had a choice, and it went on like that for decades.
After some unsuccessful efforts, the players finally formed a union, but at first it was only to negotiate their pension plan. Was it the hiring of Marvin Miller in 1966 that really gave the union power?
That changed everything, and as we mentioned in Major League Rebels, Marvin wasn’t a player’s first choice, so he really had to swallow hard before deciding to go for it. He was brilliant. He went toe to toe with the owners and won every battle he fought. With Miller at the helm, the Major League Baseball Players Association won the first contract between players and a union in the history of major sports.
One thing that is clear in your portrayal of Jackie Robinson is that he was outspoken throughout his career, not just afterwards. I’m sure that didn’t make his way any easier.
He was criticized by some of the sportswriters of the time for being a loudmouth and a troublemaker. Jimmy Powers, who was a popular columnist for the New York Daily News, once said, “Every time I talk to Roy Campanella [a Black player who joined the Dodgers in 1948]We talk about baseball. But when I talk to Jackie Robinson, we always end up talking about social issues!” He didn’t mean it as a compliment.
sports news, which was kind of a baseball bible, said that Jackie should stop being a crusader and just play baseball. that’s no different [Fox News host] Laura Ingraham recently told LeBron James to shut up and haggle. Jackie has a lot of that. Many black players also thought he was too outspoken. Many of them were simply grateful to play baseball.
But Jackie continued to speak his mind, and as you mentioned, there’s still some of that going on in baseball today. Would you like to see more of that?
Well, for example, MLB has a sweatshop in Costa Rica. For many years the store was owned by Rawlings, but MLB now owns a quarter of the stock in the company that owns Rawlings, so they own a speakeasy. About 2 million baseballs are produced there each year, exclusively for use by the MLB. And the working conditions and the salary and the lack of respect for the workers is just horrible. It is scandalous.
Wouldn’t it be great if the Players Association sent a delegation of high-profile players to Costa Rica after the season is over to draw attention to this? It would be hard for Major League Baseball to ignore that.
This story is published in conjunction with Capital & Main.
