Carrying Jackie's Torch: The Players Who Integrated Baseball-and America (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Carrying Jackie’s Torch: The Players Who Integrated Baseball—and America Lee Lowenfish (bio) Steve Jacobson. Carrying Jackie’s Torch: The Players Who Integrated Baseball—and America. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2007. 264 pages. Cloth, $24.95. During the activist decade of the 1960s, comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory commented bitterly that if white people had to put up with what black people have had to endure in America, half of them would have committed suicide and the other half would be burning down the country. I couldn't help but think of Gregory's raging, if hardly constructive insight when reading Steve Jacobson's Carrying Jackie's Torch. A veteran New York sportswriter who has been covering baseball since the late 1950s, Jacobson has developed a rapport with many of the black Major Leaguers who followed in Jackie Robinson's pioneering footsteps. The anecdotes that Jacobson elicits from these players are the highlight of his book. To his credit, he does not focus on the Hall of [End Page 123] Famers alone, stalwarts like Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Bob Gibson and Frank Robinson, but those lesser lights who also made their contribution despite wicked obstacles. Mild-mannered little southpaw Alvin Jackson of Waco, Texas, remembers arriving in Bradenton, Florida, for his first Major League Pittsburgh Pirates spring training camp in 1957 and finding nobody to greet him. "They just said come to the headquarters," Jackson recalls; "that's all I was told" (88). He must lug a heavy footlocker filled with his baseball equipment and everyday necessities before he gets a cab driver willing to drive him to Pirate Town. The cabbie, though, makes it a point to drive down back streets, making sure that he is not seen by his fellow white citizens lest he face criticism for driving a black person. When Jackson finally arrives at the hotel lobby, the pitcher recalls, "The way they looked at me was unreal. And I'm carrying a suitcase, too. Daggers stuck all into me" (88). Jackson was fortunate in that he had two loving parents at home who warned him early on about America's racist attitudes. Future Hall of Famer Lou Brock was not so lucky. He never met his father, who like his mother was a sharecropper in Arkansas and Louisiana. Yet Brock was always on the alert to what he calls "the ever-present danger" of irrational bigotry. "Don't break the rules or they can hang you from a tree without ever facing the law," Brock recalls of the early days of integration (221). However, the great athlete was not going to miss his chance at rising in the world. On his way to a tryout with the Cubs, he slept in the train station and washed floors for ten dollars a day at a YMCA. Though Hall of Famer Monte Irvin grew up in Orange, New Jersey, a New York City suburb that was somewhat integrated, he was born in Columbia, Alabama, and recalls being referred to as "alligator bait" (19). Ed Charles, who as a hopeful teenager climbed a tree during Jackie Robinson's epochal first spring training in Daytona Beach to witness history in the making, talks about denial of opportunity and "being on pins and needles all the time" (41). Jim "Mudcat" Grant, another native of Florida, recalls the threat of lynching as a real possibility for any black man acting out of line. Yet what also comes from the portraits in Jacobson's book is the pride of the black ballplayers who made the grade. "We did this without someone writing a [legislative] bill," says Larry Doby proudly; the American League's black pioneer was born in Camden, South Carolina, but raised not far from Irvin in Paterson, New Jersey (29). A player particularly sensitive to racial slights, a trait that probably kept him from maximizing his talents as a Major Leaguer, Doby became a national celebrity when his home run won Game 4 of the 1948 World Series for Cleveland over the Boston Braves. In a photograph that became a symbol for interracial cooperation one year after Jackie Robinson had won [End Page 124] Rookie...