A Brief Intro
After Jackie Robinson retired from the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was hired by the coffee company Chock Full O’ Nuts as the Vice President of Personnel. He could have been a figurehead celebrity, someone who just went around the country smiling for the cameras and talking about how rich and savory Chock Full O’ Nuts Coffee was. Mmm-mmm, it’s the heavenly coffee!
But Robinson was more than a corporate stooge. He attended UCLA before his service in the Second World War, and was a brilliant man. Like a lot of African Americans in the 1950s, he was a Republican due to the presence of a lot of ugly, vicious Southern segregationists in the Democratic Party at the time.
A Letter To The President
And so Robinson decided to use the leverage of his position at a well known American corporation to press for a controversial position – federal pushback against Orval Faubus, the segregationist governor of Arkansas. Which is what led Robinson to write this letter to President Dwight Eisenhower rejecting the president’s call for patience and moderation when it came to civil rights.
May 13, 1958
The President
The White House
Washington, D.C.My dear Mr. President:
I was sitting in the audience at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying, “Oh no! Not again.”I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people. When you said we must have self-respect, I wondered how we could have self-respect and remain patient considering the treatment accorded us through the years.
17 million Negroes cannot do as you suggest and wait for the hearts of men to change. We want to enjoy now the rights that we feel we are entitled to as Americans. This we cannot do unless we pursue aggressively goals which all other Americans achieved over 150 years ago.
As the chief of executive of our nation, I respectfully suggest that you unwittingly crush the spirit of freedom in Negroes by constantly urging forbearance and give hope to those prosegregation leaders like Governor Faubus who would take from us even those freedoms we now enjoy. Your own experience with Governor Faubus is proof enough that forbearance and not eventual integration is the goal the pro-segregation leaders seek.
In my view, an unequivocal statement backed up by action such as you demonstrated you could take last fall in dealing with Governor Faubus if it became necessary, would let it be known that America is determined to provide – in the near future – for Negroes – the freedoms we are entitled to under the constitution.
Respectfully yours,
Jackie Robinson
1958! This was five years before Martin Luther King Junior’s famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail, in which King rejected the calls from supposed moderates in Birmingham, Alabama for patience and delayed justice. Robinson wrote this just a year and half after the victory of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Robinson was, needless to say, risking tremendous blowback, and potentially the loss of a lucrative post-baseball job. Did that stop him? Obviously not!
The Lost Year
Nine months before Robinson wrote to Eisenhower, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had defied the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and ordered the Arkansas National Guard to stop the integration of Little Rock Central High by nine African American students. Eisenhower, to his credit, sent in members of the 101st Airborne Division to allow the Little Rock Nine to enroll, and he federalized the Arkansas National Guard to stop Faubus from using them any further.
As the school year continued, however, it was clear that Eisenhower’s appetite for continued involvement was waning. Faubus was maneuvering, along with much of the South, to simply shut down public schools rather than integrate them. Robinson’s letter was a plea for Eisenhower to go further than simply assert federal power over the states, and to stand up for the bigger principle of integration.
Eisenhower simply wasn’t willing to go further. And that’s why Jackson was being so blunt. And what happened in September is that Little Rock High shut down for the school year, replicating what happened all across the South. Whites were willing to blow up the public education system and at great economic cost to themselves pay for one of the private schools that started popping up like mushrooms rather than integrate.
It Wasn’t About the Money
It’s a classic rebuttal to the naive perspective that everything bad is driven by money. Often, much of it is. But the economic cost for racists to fight integration was huge, and yet they paid it anyway. And it’s a cost which racists continue to pay today. You’ll get blanket statements about how it’s simply impossible for whites to go to public schools, but those statements aren’t actually about education, and ironically come from people who defiantly refuse to educate themselves on what is actually possible. They will push endlessly to cut funding for public schools, and then complain endlessly that the kids today don’t know what they should.
And the other sad fact is that there are huge numbers of crummy private schools all over the country today where people pay for years to enroll their kids due to a rabid fear of others. The standards at the private schools which sprang up to offer all-white educations are often miserable despite costing $10,000 per year per student or more, failing not simply in science classes which fail to teach basic principles of biology and geology, but in subjects such as English and history as well.
Black History Month
In recent years there’s been a huge backlash among modern Orval Faubuses, with many of them trying to wrap themselves in Jackie Robinson’s voter registration from the 1950s to justify rejecting everything he stood for (he later rejected the Republican Party after they nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964). Calling themselves advocates for free speech, they are passing laws all over to wipe out anything historical like Robinson’s letter to Eisenhower on the grounds that someone’s feelings might be hurt.
But we don’t have to accept this. Honor the guy by remembering this letter, and just one of the stands he took at a time when he could have just stayed silent.
Of course Jackie Robinson was a Republican. The Democratic party was a horror show in the 1940s and 1950s. The corruption and the cronyism and the bossism in the big cities. The KKK south of the Mason-Dixon. Robert Byrd. Strom Thurmond. Joe Biden is so old that he was close to both of them. The JFK Chicago cemetery vote in 1960. All of those FDR-era benefits, like VA housing loans, were restricted to whites, not to mention the postwar redlining. My in-laws had a “Green Book” and it didn’t just cover the South. I think I would have been an Eisenhower Republican. I certainly wouldn’t have voted for Daley if I were of voting age and living in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s.
“Of course Jackie Robinson was a Republican?” That’s your takeaway? That’s not even remotely the point here, and it runs compeletely counter to what this piece is even about. I put a lot of work into putting this together, and it’s something which pointed out the betrayal Robinson felt from Eisenhower.
You’re throwing out basically unfiltered Dinesh D’Souza, and I’m pretty disappointed that you didn’t seem to read the letter where Robinson was expressing how angry he was with Eisenhower for his failure.
The point, and it’s completely clear, is that Blacks like Robinson were torn in both directions in the 1950s. And as I wrote, and you seem to have completely ignored, he broke with them by 1964. Following that in 1967, he wrote:
“During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake. One of them was the National Republican Convention in San Francisco, which produced the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known—Nominee Barry Goldwater.”
Once again your right wing sources have betrayed you. I’m really not sure why you don’t drop them.
I did read it, and I know a lot about Jackie Robinson. We’re not in disagreement here. And I know that he broke with the Republican Party when they nominated Goldwater, who went down in flames. “A choice, not an echo.” I will never stop reminding people that a young Hillary Clinton was a “Goldwater Girl.” I might have been right there with her, if I were 15 years older. Although probably not, I think.
PS: I don’t read a ton of right-wing media. You might think I do. I read the “Post’ for local news, since the “Times” has given up on us, and for the gossip, and I read the “WSJ” for their arts coverage and book reviews, because some of my friends write that coverage. But mostly I read the London Review of Books and the NYT Books Review. If it weren’t for D/S I really wouldn’t have any idea what was going on in the world. My ignorance might have been a blessing.
…ok, folks
…so…I’m calling an audible
…it’s the weekend…folks aren’t around & I haven’t even found the time to read the post myself but I’ve been party to some discussion as to how to maybe avoid some things we don’t think are in anyone’s interests & encourage some that might be of interest to some of the folks we don’t hear so much from as a rule…because as a rule when those folks speak up I find it pays to listen…& I’d like to get to do that more than I do…that’s just me, though
…& the point of this place…if it has one…is that it is pretty much literally what people choose to make of it
…in part…that’s a spot where it can be nice to hang out with some familiar faces & shoot the breeze
…& it can also be a place where people have at times posted some considerably personal & heartfelt or otherwise…heart-wrenching pieces that I don’t think anyone would mistake for an open thread
…the effort a number of people make to make that a place in the first place…the bulk of which does not show up anywhere you can click on it…is considerable…& regularly a thing for which I feel I myself am insufficiently grateful
…in my opinion…& for now that’s all this is…nobody has ever suggested or implied that effort to be wasted…except…let’s be honest…when it comes to my general inability to keep anything short…for love or money…though I will note nobody’s really had a serious go at the money angle…so there’s still hope
…but if either of you feel like you need to take this further I’d suggest fairly strongly that this is not the place to do so
…it’s not without the realm of possibility that we might make a designated place that would be…if there’s folks feeling the need to get things off their chests…but that’s a caveat emptor kind of a pitch to my way of thinking so I wouldn’t expect such a thing to appear with any particular alacrity?
Neither of us are really disagreeing, about Jackie Robinson of all people. And what I said was true, and I think blue dogcollar would agree with it. The Republican and Democratic parties were very different 80 years ago. I’d rather have a limb amputated than vote for Trump, but I can see voting for Eisenhower.
David Halberstam wrote this doorstopper of a book called The Fifties. It’s like 1,000 pages long. I have a copy and I’ve read it three times. The fifties were not a sleepy, uneventful decade. And Eisenhower, having successfully conducted the war campaigns during World War II, was more than prepared to go mano a mano with the Soviets. For one thing. The desegregation of the Little Rock schools in 1954 at gunpoint by the National Guard. The national highway system, which he was inspired by during his invasion of Germany and his observation of the Autobahns. His speech warning of the military-industrial complex. We owe him a great debt.
That’s fine. The difficulty for a lot of people choosing between Stevenson and Eisenhower in 52 and 56 was not an easy thing to resolve.
I just want to be clear that it’s really aggravating to go to the effort to put together a serious post about Robinson’s anguish watching Eisenhower abandon scared, isolated high school kids, and then get a response that says of course Robinson was a Republican.
The letter is clear evidence of how hard he struggled with that choice, and how much betrayal he felt watching Eisenhower walk away from those kids. He may have weighed the issues and decided not to switch, but it was deeply painful, and it underlines why most African Americans at that point were already Democrats knowing full well of the deal with the devil the party had made.
The thing about Jackie was that he was definitely a fighter. He was one of the original Black Panthers aka the 761st Tank Battalion, an all black (except most of the officers) tank unit who spent the early part of the war training white units as an aggressor unit and then became a decorated combat unit along the lines of the 332nd Fighter Group.
Jackie was court martialed for refusing to give up his seat on a non segregated army bus and altercation with white officers and MPs. Jackie had to be transferred to another unit whose commander was more cooperative and signed off on the court martial because his then commanding officer Paul Bates refused to sign off on the paperwork for the court martial because it was unjustified. He was later acquitted, but it kept him from fighting with the 761st in Europe.
Really is amazing how many private primary and secondary schools just hurriedly got founded in the 1950s and 1960s. Oh wait, no it’s directly related to fears about deseg.
People like Jackie Robinson are really amazing to me because of the combination of intelligence, strategy, and courage. When you learn about someone and go holy fuck, that was a ballsy move, oh wait, no that was actually amazing strategy.