The sun is very important. The theory, practice, and spectacle of bullfighting have all been built on the assumption of the presence of the sun and when it does not shine, over a third of the bullfight is missing. ... [Without] the sun the best bullfighter is not there. He is like a man without a shadow.
--Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
By the end of our semicentennial celebration of Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color line in professional baseball, the sheer volume of repetitious, melodramatic acclaim for his valor is likely to make him seem more trite than titanic. But there is something vital to be learned about the nature of American society and American race relations by trying to understand just what the heroism of this man is supposed to mean, especially to blacks today. For Robinson’s achievement was fraught from the beginning with ambivalence, both his own and that of the blacks for whom he was a hero. And that ambivalence is characteristic of black assimilation into many arenas of American life.
Robinson arguably was the person who launched the American era of racial integration after World War II. This rush and flood of people and events -- the Brown decision, the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the March on Washington, Birmingham and Selma, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Watts riot, Malcolm X, affirmative action, multiculturalism, the Million Man March -- provoked unprecedented historical change in how Americans perceived pluralism and race, but shockingly, in the end, did not at all lessen the abiding sense of alienation that African Americans feel toward their native land.
A famous passage in Richard Wright’s Black Boy discusses this alienation: Wright describes"the essential bleakness of black life in America” and says that blacks have"never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization.” Agreeing with Wright, Ralph Ellison later said that"Western culture must be won, confronted like the animal in a Spanish bullfight, dominated by the red shawl of codified experience and brought heaving to its knees.” The sports metaphor, or, perhaps more precisely, the metaphor of spectacle, is crucial in explaining the complexity of Jackie Robinson’s significance as a race hero. The metaphor suggests a kind of black masculine spin on the Hemingwayesque moral code of grace under pressure: a combination of stoicism and elan, of the tragic and triumphant confrontation with an adversarial, savage universe.
What Ellison values here is a style of action, a principle of engagement, that evoked what his disciple, Albert Murray, was to call"the blues hero.” Ellison’s metaphor suggests that African Americans must claim Western culture through an act not of submission, but of domination; through the power of ordering their experience, sculpting it out of both the chaos of life and the dominant, inimical white culture. Western culture is, thus, a complex set of brute impulses and vested interests represented in various institutions, a force that one must make one’s own by courageously making demands of it.
Jackie Robinson was, most profoundly, an Ellisonian blues hero. He confronted Western experience publicly and alone, yet within the democratic context of a team. He confronted both absurdity and injustice, taking his chances within the sunlit arena (baseball was still, like the bullfight, performed most often in the afternoon), armed solely with a set of highly specialized, elite skills. Robinson became a public spectacle in a way that no other African American had quite been before, and he subdued Western culture through his sheer will to win.
It is telling that we did not celebrate with anything near the same intensity the semicentennial of Joe Louis’s 1938 defeat of the German Max Schmeling, in its time an athletic event of at least as much political importance as Robinson’s integration of baseball. Nor was the anniversary of Jesse Owens’s track victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics -- also considered a momentous event in race relations -- met with as much fanfare. Both earlier events were public spectacles in which blacks seized an Ellisonian moment of domination. Indeed, both events might be said to be even more important than Robinson’s entry into the big leagues because of their international significance. Yet it is probably, in some measure, their international significance that contributes to our valuing them less than we should, our American provincialism being what it is.
Robinson’s greater resonance as a hero has to do with the very local meaning of baseball, not merely as a sport but as a well-ordered ritual of American life associated with contradictory impulses that grew out of its industrial-age origins: an obsession with quantification and statistics and a nostalgic quest for pastoralism.
Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, published just three years before Robinson’s ascension to the major leagues, presented a mountain of numbers and graphs demonstrating the disorder of black American life, as did, of course, any number of sociological studies done over the years, by both black and white scholars. And the dominant portrayals of black Americans then were such degrading pastoral images as Sambo, the comic darky, Old Black Joe, and other variations of minstrelsy. What more vivid, extraordinary way for blacks to reinvent and regenerate themselves than through the very cultural means that had been used to deny their humanity, through the pastoralism and statistics of baseball?
Baseball is also tied to our mystical, sentimental idea of democracy as teamwork and fair play. That is why Robinson’s act of assimilation-as-heroism has such a powerful impact on the American imagination; it is also what makes it so tangled and, for many blacks, so paradoxical. For blacks always approached professional baseball, from the time they were denied the opportunity to play it alongside whites in the 1880s, as a vehicle for assimilation.
Arising out of the insult and stigma of segregation, the Negro leagues were never meant to be an end in themselves. But because, through the leagues, blacks developed a more elaborate and enduring institutional relationship with baseball than with any other sport, baseball became not only a means to assimilate but also a black cultural and commercial venture. Black baseball demonstrated black independence as much as it showed whites that blacks were able, competitive, and desired very much to play baseball with them.
By expressing the desire for freedom and respect, even esteem, through entrepreneurship and enterprise, as well as demonstrating the nationalistic urge of blacks to act independently of whites, the leagues -- like black colleges, black churches, and other"shadow” institutions that blacks developed -- became an end in themselves, took on a compelling racial mission. Robinson’s heroism, as a contradictory form of liberation, cannot be understood outside this conundrum, one that explains a great deal about the ambivalence that African Americans feel about integration as a political and social goal.
This ambivalence among blacks is evident in a debate that took place in the press between Robinson and Effa Manley, co-owner with her husband, Abe, of the premier Negro-league team, the Newark Eagles. In June 1948, one year after Robinson’s major-league debut and amidst the general sense among both blacks and whites that integrated professional baseball was here to stay, Robinson published an article in Ebony titled"What’s Wrong With Negro Baseball.”
In it, he described Negro-league baseball as chaotic and mediocre. He never had a contract with the Kansas City Monarchs, the Negro-league team he played for in 1945. The umpiring was sloppy and often biased, he said. There was virtually no spring training or conditioning for the players. The pay was too low. The bus travel was interminable and uncomfortable. There was too much barnstorming, and road accommodations were awful.
Robinson wrote that when he first joined a Brooklyn Dodger farm club,"I was convinced that my leaving Negro baseball would stimulate interest in the colored leagues. Later it was my earnest desire to do all I could to make good with the Dodgers because I felt it would make the fellows in the [Negro] league I just left play harder, train harder, and give the fans much better baseball.”
Two months later, the sharp-tongued Manley answered Robinson in an article titled"Negro Baseball Isn’t Dead!” in Our World, another black publication. She argued that Negro-league pay was on a par with that in the white leagues, especially when one considered that the Negro teams drew fewer fans than white teams and thus generated less revenue for their owners. Indeed, she argued, it was Robinson, the gate attraction for the Brooklyn Dodgers, who was being underpaid in the major leagues. She maintained that bus travel was comfortable, better than going by train, and that road accommodations were bad because of Jim Crow, not because of the venality of Negro-league owners.
She reminded Robinson that at least her Newark Eagles, if not other Negro-league teams, did have contractual arrangements with their players, which major-league owners refused to honor, and that the barnstorming was necessary largely because Negro leagues lacked their own playing facilities."Wittingly or unwittingly,” she wrote,"Jackie Robinson has lent his powerful name to the destruction of Negro baseball.”
Here, in miniature, is the black debate over integration as both a tactic and a principle -- or, more precisely, the black debate over the meaning of pluralism in American life. Robinson’s description of Negro-league baseball is accurate but also self-serving; it justifies major-league owners’ use of black baseball as a virtual labor pool, a practice that gutted the Negro leagues.
What Robinson described was so chaotic that Negro baseball could hardly deserve respect as a business or even as something organized. (White professional baseball, both major and minor leagues, always called itself"organized,” suggesting that all other professional baseball was unorganized.) Robinson was under no obligation to say anything at all about his Negro-league experience to explain his desire to play in the major leagues. He must have denounced it in such harsh terms to justify, to himself and to other blacks, his own decision to abandon black baseball.
Effa Manley’s view was also accurate, and also self-serving. Although many of the problems in the Negro leagues were a direct result of racism, Manley here, as well as in other pieces she wrote and press interviews she gave, said the Negro-league owners’ lack of unity greatly exacerbated their disorganization. She seemed to be making a pitch for racial loyalty, virtually admitting that her team and Negro baseball existed because whites refused to use black players.
The owners of many black businesses, in fact, opposed integration on the grounds that it would break up the virtual monopoly they enjoyed. Black professionals -- doctors, lawyers, architects, and the like -- could hardly expect to have clients and patients, especially in a culture that so promoted white supremacy, without appealing to racial loyalty. In short, for Manley, what made racism so difficult for blacks was their inability to generate an organized, unified response to it. But basing commerce on racial loyalty suggests that blacks have no basis for community beyond the forces of segregation and racism that have made them a"community” in the first place.
Both Robinson and Manley were responding from their positions as members of other"communities” as well: Robinson endorsed a kind of individualism because he was, after all, a worker for hire. Manley, on the other hand, supported group organization and group integrity because she was an employer who was losing her workers to a competitor. Both, however, represented the rise of a highly driven, urban black middle class, essential to the development of a truly democratic black community and true democratic participation by blacks in the larger society.
For blacks, was pluralism in America to mean the redemption of the group through the actions of the individual, or the redemption of the group through the group itself? Was power in America diffused in a muddled middle, where remarkable individuals therefore made a difference, or was power largely the function and expression of a group dynamic and cohesion? In this instance, in 1948, Robinson was the radical who challenged the system; Manley was the reactionary who wanted things to remain the same. But also in this instance, a powerful public drama was being enacted and a powerful public debate was taking place about the nature and meaning of the African-American social contract.
What did integration cost? I have never heard a black person mention Jackie Robinson without noting that he died a physical wreck, at the age of 52 -- a fact attributed to the stress of his years as a major-league player. And it is undeniable that once the Negro leagues died, once baseball ceased to have an institutional presence in black life, blacks generally lost interest in professional baseball as spectators and fans.
What makes Robinson such a fascinating figure is how -- as a symbol of integration -- he combined militance with a sense of martyrdom and combined defiance and deference. We have the 1944 Robinson, who was court-martialed for insubordination to his white officers. We have the 1949 Robinson, who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, at its request, to reassure whites of black patriotism after Paul Robeson said that blacks ought not to fight for the United States against the Soviet Union. (The irony of asking a man who couldn’t stand being in a Jim Crow army to testify as an example of blacks’ loyalty and willingness to serve their country seems to have escaped the members of the H.U.A.C.) We have the Robinson who endured three years of abuse as a major leaguer, instructed by Dodger executive Branch Rickey not to fight back. And then we have the Robinson who, later, took umbrage at even the smallest slight and argued about anything he didn’t like on the field of play.
Robinson was both Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, reassuring white authority while his very presence seemed to undermine it, espousing belief in democratic ideals while the singularity of his presence and the reaction to it revealed how far Americans were from achieving those ideals. In this way, he was much like Martin Luther King, Jr., who also was Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, reassuring whites that he supported their values while, both intentionally and inadvertently, subverting them.
The ambiguity of Jackie Robinson’s heroism takes on another dimension today, given the cultural significance of black athletes in contemporary America. John Hoberman takes up this issue in his new book, Darwin’s Athletes. He intimates that blacks, for reasons not all of their own making, are too psychologically invested in their athletes, generally having much less respect or appreciation for, say, intellectual life and achievement.
It seems true that the harsh oppression that blacks have endured, which often created an intense need to conform to the group to achieve unity and gain protection -- coupled with the rampant anti-intellectualism in American life generally -- has made blacks overvalue their physical accomplishments. But athletes often best represent the heroism and achievement of an oppressed group, because their accomplishments are not seen as compromised by the fact that the athletes may be paid for their efforts. This is especially true among blacks, because of their continuing concern that black masculinity be seen as an uncompromised, assertive political and cultural force. In our patriarchal culture, black freedom has historically been the quest for black manhood.
Intellectual achievement, on the other hand, long has been suspect: African Americans historically have not been able to reward their best intellectuals and thus could never fully trust those who were largely supported by whites.
Moreover, as male intellectuals seem compromised, they appear decidedly less manly, especially to an oppressed group that devoutly wishes to see the arrogance of its oppressors challenged. And even as blacks may prize their engineers, scientists, and researchers, intellectuals do not operate in a framework where their besting of white competitors is the public spectacle that it is for the professional or highly placed amateur athlete. Although blacks have never been able consistently to support or reward their best athletes, either, the athletes’ excellence and the political and cultural significance of that excellence for the group as a whole is largely unaffected by that fact. Robinson was an outstanding ballplayer in the Negro leagues, and he was an outstanding player in the major leagues.
John Hoberman, seeing American professional sports as an arena controlled by whites, argues that it is a sign of blacks’ political and cultural weakness that athletes have become such a potent representation of who and what they are, and such a crucial expression of their cultural assertion. This is true. But it is also true that what blacks may be responding to in black athleticism is a form of the American pioneer myth of reinvention and discovery -- the need to conquer a wilderness that demands sheer physical courage. This mythology speaks to the tragedy of race, relying as it does on the need for human struggle to transcend race.
Is it possible that there can be, in the sunlit arena where one confronts the animal of Western culture, a man without a shadow? Can a black hero be without the shadow of race, the shadow of ambivalence about assimilation? Is the African American condemned, as the lyrics of the old song"Me and My Shadow” suggest, to prove his or her humanity simply by imitating whites?
This is what we are forced to ask about the achievement of every great and important black athlete, and every black person whose achievements require the compromise of assimilation. In remembering Jackie Robinson, what we have is a poignant rendering of a glorious fanfare of uncertain trumpets.
Gerald Early is a professor of modern letters at Washington University and director of its African- and Afro-American-studies program.
