The Noble Experiment

Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, inCairo,Georgia, during a Spanish flu and smallpox epidemic. His middle name was in honor of former President Theodore Roosevelt, who died 25 days before Jackie was born. Jackie was the youngest of five children. The Robinsons were sharecroppers. One year after Jackie was born his father left the family. His mother, Mallie Robinson, moved the family toPasadena,Californiaand single-handedly raised her five children. She worked various odd jobs to support her family. They were the only black family on the block. The prejudice they encountered only strengthened their family bond.

Jackie Robinson graduated fromWashingtonJunior High Schoolin 1935 and enrolled atJohnMuirHigh School(Muir Tech). Jackie’s older brothers Mack and Frank inspired him to pursue his interest in sports. Mack was an accomplished athlete at the time having won the silver medal at the 1936 Summer Olympics. At Muir Tech, Jackie played several sports at the varsity level and lettered in four of them: football (quarterback), basketball (guard), baseball (shortstop and catcher), and track. On the track team he won awards in the broad jump. Jackie also was a member of the tennis team. In 1936, he won the junior boys singles championship in the annual Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament. He earned a place on thePomonaannual baseball tournament all-star team, which included future baseball Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Lemon.

Following graduation from high school Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College (PJC). He continued his athletic career participating in football, basketball, baseball and track. In 1938, he was selected as the region’s Most Valuable Player in baseball. While attending PJC he also was elected to the Lancers, a student-run police organization that patrolled various school activities. Robinson was one of ten students named to the school’s Order of the Mast and Dagger, which was awarded to students who performed “outstanding service to the school and whose scholastic and citizenship record is worthy of recognition.”

Following graduation from PJC in the spring of 1939, Robinson transferred to UCLA. He became the school’s first athlete to win varsity letters in four sports: football, basketball, baseball, and track. He was one of four black players on the football team. At the time only a handful of black players existed in mainstream college football, making UCLA’s college football program the most integrated. In 1940, Robinson won the NCAA Men’s Outdoor Track and Field Championship in the Long Jump, jumping 24’ 10.5”. In his senior year Robinson met his future wife, Rachel Isum, a freshman who was familiar with his athletic career. In the spring semester of 1941 Robinson left UCLA just short of graduation due to financial difficulties, despite his mother’s and Rachel’s reservations. He took a job as an athletic director with the government’s National Youth Administration (NYA) inAtascadero,California. When the government ceased the NYA programs Robinson traveled toHawaiiin the fall of 1941 to play football for the semi-pro, racially integrated Honolulu Bears. After one season he returned toCaliforniato pursue a career as running back for the Los Angeles Bulldogs of the Pacific Coast Football League. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended his football career.

In 1942, Robinson was drafted and assigned to a segregated Army cavalry unit inFort Riley,Kansas. He and several other black soldiers applied for Officer Candidate School (OCS). Even though the OCS guidelines had been drafted as race-neutral few black applicants were admitted until directives from Army leadership enforced them. Robinson and his colleagues’ applications were delayed for several months. Heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis (stationed atFortRiley) and Truman Gibson (aide to the Secretary of War) protested the delay and got their applications moving. Upon finishing OCS Robinson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in January 1943. Soon after, Robinson and Rachel Isum were formally engaged.

Robinson was reassigned to Fort Hood, Texasand joined the 761^st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion. On July 6, 1944, Robinson’s military career was abruptly derailed. While waiting for hospital tests on the ankle he had injured in junior college Robinson boarded an Army bus with a fellow officer’s wife and although the Army bus was un-segregated the bus driver ordered Robinson to the back of the bus. Robinson refused. The driver backed down, but after reaching the end of the line he summoned the military police. They took Robinson into custody. Robinson confronted the investigating duty officer for his racist questioning. The officer recommended Robinson to be court-martialed. After Robinson’s commanding officer refused to authorize the court-martial Robinson was quickly transferred to the 758^th Battalion. The commander there quickly consented to the court-martial and charged him with more offenses, including public drunkenness- even though Robinson did not drink. By the time of the court-martial in August 1944 the charges against Robinson were dropped to two counts of insubordination during questioning. Robinson was acquitted by an all-white panel of nine officers. Although his former unit, the 761^st Tank Battalion, became the first black tank unit to see combat in World War ll, Robinson’s court-martial proceedings kept him from being deployed overseas and he never saw combat action. After his acquittal Robinson was sent toCamp Breckinridge,Kentucky, where he served as a coach for army athletics. He received his honorable discharge in November 1944.

Robinson returned briefly to his old football club, the Los Angeles Bulldogs. He then accepted an offer from his old friend and pastor, Reverend Karl Downs, to be the athletic director at Sam Houston Collegein Austin, Texas. The job included coaching the fledgling basketball team. The team was so new that he even had to insert himself into the lineup for exhibition games. And even though his team was outmatched by its opponents, Robinson gained respect as a disciplinarian coach. He drew the admiration ofLangstonUniversitybasketball player Marques Haynes, a future member of the Harlem Globetrotters.

In early 1945, while Robinson was at Sam Houston College, the Kansas City Monarchs sent him an offer to play professional baseball in the Negro leagues. Robinson accepted a contract for $400 dollars a month ($5,164 in today’s money). Robinson was frustrated playing for the Monarchs with the hectic travel schedule, the disorganization, and the embrace of gambling. He was used to the structured playing environment of college. In all, he played 47 games for the Monarchs, with five home runs and 13 stolen bases. During the season Robinson pursued major league interest. The Boston Red Sox held a tryout for Robinson and other black players. The tryout was essentially a farce designed to assuage the desegregationist sensibilities of powerful Boston City Councilman Isadore Muchnick. The fans in the stands subjected Robinson and the other black players to racial slurs. He left the tryout humiliated. It was more than 14 years later that the Red Sox became the last major league team to integrate.

Other teams had real interests in signing a black player. Branch Rickey, president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, began to scout the Negro leagues to add black players to their roster. Rickey selected Robinson from a list of promising black players and interviewed him forBrooklyn’s International League farm club, the Montreal Royals. Rickey was especially interested in finding a black player who could weather the inevitable racial abuse. In the now-famous three-hour interview Rickey asked Robinson if he could face the racial animus without taking the bait and reacting angrily. Rickey told Robinson he needed a black player “with guts enough not to fight back.” Robinson made the commitment to “turn the other cheek” and signed the contract. Their arrangement was kept secret for a time. On October 23, 1945 it was publicly announced that Jackie Robinson would be assigned to the Royals for the 1946 season. In what was later referred to as “The Noble Experiment”, Robinson was the first black player signed to baseball’s minor leagues.

Robinson’s first season with the Royals was challenging, starting with spring training. His presence was controversial in racially chargedFlorida. He was not allowed to stay with the team. Instead he stayed with a local black politician. At the time the Dodgers did not own a spring training facility. The scheduling of training games was subject to the whim of area localities. InSanford,Florida, the police chief threatened to cancel games if Robinson did not cease training there. InJacksonville, the stadium was padlocked shut without warning on game day. In DeLand, a scheduled game was called off due to the excuse of faulty electrical lighting. After much lobbying by Rickey himself the Royals were allowed to host a game inDaytona Beach. Robinson made his debut on March 17, 1946. Robinson thus became the first black player to openly play for a minor league team and against a major league team since the first de facto baseball color line had been implemented in the 1880s. Robinson proceeded to lead the International League that season with a .349 batting average. He was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. More than one million people went to games involving Robinson in 1946. Also in 1946, Jackie Robinson married Rachel Isum, his college sweetheart. Rachel and their three children helped to provide Jackie with emotional support and a sense of purpose all through his challenging early baseball career.

The following year, just six days before the start of the 1947 season, the Dodgers called Robinson up to the major leagues, bringing an end to sixty years of segregation in professional baseball. At the end of his rookie year he had become National League Rookie of the Year with 12 home runs, 29 steals, and a .297 average. In 1949, he was selected as the National League’s Most Valuable Player of the Year. Having started playing late (at the age of twenty-eight), Robinson played only ten seasons, all for the Brooklyn Dodgers. During his career the Dodgers played in six World Series. Robinson played in six All-Star Games. Robinson exhibited the combination of hitting ability and speed, which marked the beginning of the post-“long ball” era in baseball. Raw power-hitting gave way to balanced offensive strategies to create runs through aggressive base running. Robinson was one of only two players during the span of 1947 to 1956 to accumulate at least 125 steals. He accumulated 197 steals in total, including 19 steals of home. Jackie Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

“I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me…all I ask is that you respect me as a human being.”- Jackie Robinson

Jody Victor

Failure Is Impossible

Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820 inWest Grove,Massachusetts. She was the second oldest of seven children born to Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read Anthony. Susan’s father was a cotton manufacturer and abolitionist. He was a stern but open-minded man who was born into the Quaker religion. Lucy and Daniel Anthony enforced self-discipline, principled convictions, and belief in one’s own self-worth.

Susan B. Anthony was an intelligent child. She learned to read and write at the age of three. When she was six years old, the Anthony family moved fromMassachusettstoBattenville,New York. Susan attended a local district school where a teacher refused to teach her long division because of her gender. When her father learned of the poor education she was receiving he promptly placed her in a group home school, where he taught Susan himself. Another teacher at the group school, Mary Perkins, conveyed a progressive image of womanhood to Susan, which fostered her growing belief in women’s equality. The Quaker society in which Susan grew up was anti-slavery well before the Civil War. In 1836, at the age of 16, Susan collected two boxes of petitions opposing slavery in response to the gag rule prohibiting such petitions in the House of Representatives.

In 1837, Susan was sent to Deborah Moulson’s Female Seminary, a Quaker boarding school inPhiladelphia. She was not happy at the school but did not have to stay there for long because her family was financially ruined during the Panic of 1837. The Anthony family lost so much that they tried to sell everything they had in an auction. Susan’s uncle, Joshua Read, saved them at the last minute by bidding on their personal belongings and restoring them to the family. Two years later the Anthony family moved to Hardscrabble,New Yorkin the wake of the depression that followed the panic. That same year Susan left home to teach and pay off her father’s debts. She taught at Eunice Kenyon’s Friends’ Seminary for five years.

In 1845 the Anthony family moved toRochester,New York. The family was active in the anti-slavery movement. Anti-slavery Quakers met at the Anthony farm every Sunday. On several occasions Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison joined them. Susan’s brothers, Daniel and Merritt, were anti-slavery activists inKansas. In 1846 Susan began to teach at theCanajoharieAcademy, where she rose to become headmistress of the Female Department. Susan’s first occupation as teacher inspired her to fight for wages equivalent to those of male teachers. At the time, men earned roughly four times more than women for the same duties. Headmistress Anthony made $110 a year atCanajoharieAcademy.

In 1849, Anthony quit teaching and moved back to the family farm inRochester. In 1853, at the state teachers’ convention she called for women to be admitted to the professions and for better pay for women teachers. She also asked for women to have a voice at the convention and to be allowed positions on the committee. In 1859 she spoke before the state teachers’ convention at Troy,New York and at the Massachusetts teachers’ convention. She argued for coeducation, claiming there were no differences between the minds of men and women. Anthony called for equal educational opportunities for all schools, colleges, and universities regardless of gender or race. She also campaigned for the rights of children of former slaves to be able to attend public schools. In the 1890s Anthony served on the board of trustees of Rochester’s State Industrial School once again campaigning for equal treatment and opportunity for boys and girls. She raised $50,000 in pledges to ensure the admittance of women to the Universityof Rochester. In a last minute effort to meet a deadline, she put up the cash value of her own life insurance policy and the University was forced to make good on its promise to admit women.

In 1849 when Anthony returned toRochestershe was elected president of the Rochesterbranch of the Daughters of  Temperance by her fellow Quakers and raised money for the cause. In 1851 Anthony attended her first women’s rights convention inSyracusewhere she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two women believed the Republicans would reward women for their work in building support for the Thirteenth Amendment by giving them the vote. In 1853 she was refused the right to speak at the state convention of the Sons of Temperance inAlbany. She left the convention and called her own. She and Stanton founded the Women’s State Temperance Society. They petitioned the State legislature to pass a law limiting the sale of liquor. The legislature rejected the petition because most of the 28,000 signatures were from women. That was when she decided that women needed the vote so politicians would listen to them. Anthony and Stanton were criticized by the Society for speaking out too much for women’s rights so they resigned.

In 1866 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the American Equal Rights Association, which fought for both blacks’ and women’s rights to suffrage. Two years later they began publishing a newspaper called The Revolution. The paper’s masthead read: “The true republic- men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” The paper advocated for an eight-hour work day and equal pay for equal work. It promoted a policy of purchasing American-made goods. The Revolution brought Anthony in contact with women in the printing trades. Women in the printing and sewing trades were excluded from men’s trade unions. The paper encouraged women from the trades to form Workingwomen’s Associations. In 1870 she was elected president of the Workingwomen’s Central Association. During the 1890s, while president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Anthony emphasized the importance of gaining the support of organized labor.

In the 1870s Anthony campaigned tirelessly for women’s suffrage. One day a U.S. Deputy Marshal arrested Anthony for voting in the 1872 Presidential Election two weeks earlier. Anthony’s pending trial gave her the opportunity to spread her arguments to a wider audience than ever before. She undertook an exhaustive speaking tour. In her speeches she asked the question, “Is it a crime for a Citizen of theUnited Statesto Vote?” She made stirring and eloquent arguments that the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed to “All persons born or naturalized in theUnited States….are citizens of theUnited States. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of theUnited States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” She argued that the privileges of citizenship contained no gender qualification thus giving women the constitutional right to vote. The Judge refused to allow Anthony to testify on her own behalf, allowing her statements at the time of her arrest to be her “testimony”. The Judge explicitly ordered the jury to return a guilty verdict and read an opinion he had written before the trial even started. The sentence was a $100 dollar fine, with no imprisonment. Susan B. Anthony stated, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” She never paid the fine for the rest of her life and the U.S. Government took no collective action against her.

Before retiring, Susan B. Anthony was asked if all women in the United States would ever be given the vote. She replied, “It will come, but I shall not see it. It is inevitable. We can no more deny forever the right of self-government to one-half our people than we could keep the Negro forever in bondage. It will not be wrought by the same disrupting forces that freed the slave, but come it will, and I believe within a generation.”  “Failure is impossible” are the words she left her “girls” to encourage them to keep striving for equality in all things. Women were given the vote by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution on August 26, 1920, fourteen years after her death.

Jody Victor