ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 3, 1996 TAG: 9603010065
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS LAMB
FIFTY years ago tomorrow, Jackie Robinson, wearing an unlettered uniform, walked toward other ballplayers who were already practicing on a converted cow pasture in Sanford, Fla. Seven spectators were watching, slightly fewer than the number of writers and photographers. As Robinson walked past the reporters on his way to joining the other ballplayers and baseball history, he murmured, ``Well, this is it.''
Integration came to baseball 50 years ago with barely a murmur. Yet you can't overstate what happened that spring. Robinson came to Florida to change baseball. In changing baseball, he changed society. By confronting segregation, he helped to end it.
Baseball was one of the first institutions in society to accept blacks on a relatively equal playing-field. Beyond the human drama of Robinson's spring of hope, what stands out in retrospect is how ``baseball's first integrated spring training unveiled a strategy for later civil rights advocates,'' Jules Tygiel wrote in ``Baseball's Great Experiment.''
In the '40s, segregation laws prohibited blacks from eating in the same restaurants, sleeping in the same hotels, drinking from the same fountains, or playing on the same ball fields as whites. There had been no blacks in organized professional baseball since the 1880s.
In late August 1945, Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed Robinson to a contract with the Montreal Royals, the organization's top minor-league team. ``I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back,'' Rickey told Robinson firmly. Robinson agreed, and kept his word. If someone called him a racial epithet, he ignored it. If someone challenged him, he stood his ground but didn't fight. He couldn't lose his temper and he wouldn't quit. This was the strategy of civil-rights activists of the '50s and '60s.
Robinson's first test came at spring training or, more precisely, on the way there. On his flight from California to Florida, he was twice bumped from planes and replaced with white passengers. He finished his trip on a bus, forced to sit with the other blacks in the back, according to the laws of the day. When he got to Sanford, where Montreal had planned to practice for another week before moving to Daytona Beach, he could not stay in the same lake-front hotel with the other ballplayers. He had to stay in a private residence on the segregated part of town.
After the second day of practice, a delegation of white Sanford residents told Montreal they would not permit blacks and whites to play together. The team moved to Daytona Beach but couldn't get away from the racism. Robinson was barred from playing in games in every ballpark but one: Daytona Beach's City Island Park, now called Jackie Robinson Memorial Stadium.
Robinson struggled during the first few weeks of spring training with a sore shoulder- no wonder, considering the weight he was carrying. He could've quit anytime. He could've failed. He could've just let things be.
But he didn't. Baseball became integrated where it did, how it did and when it did because of Robinson. By the end of spring, his performance had improved, and he had become the team's starting second baseman. He ended that season leading the International League in hitting. The next season, he broke the major league's color line with Brooklyn. Other blacks followed. What started with a murmur ended with integration.
Chris Lamb is an assistant professor of journalism at Old Dominion University in Norfolk.
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