Reclaiming 42: Public Memory and the Reframing of Jackie Robinson's Radical Legacy by David Naze (review)

Jackie Robinson is a household name and arguably the most recognizable historical figure in American sports. The Brooklyn Dodgers pioneered integration with Robinson under Branch Rickey's leadership, and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. Indeed, Robinson's breaking of Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947 is a demarcation line in twentieth-century U.S. history. Robinson did not just open the door for subsequent generations of African American baseball players, but he broke its hinges and ultimately shattered the wall of exclusion. Within months, the Cleveland Indians (Larry Doby) and St. Louis Browns (Hank Thompson and Willard Brown) followed suit and had African American ballplayers on their rosters. In fact, every franchise integrated over the next twelve years, with the Boston Red Sox (Pumpsie Green) becoming the last team to do so in 1959—one year before a wave of lunch-counter sit-ins sparked the golden era of the civil rights movement. Robinson captivates the public because of who he is, what he accomplished, and the impact he made on American society. In short, his life and legacy tell a good story, and that is why he is the subject of major motion pictures, popular music, a cottage industry of books, and the subject of annual public commemoration.

In Reclaiming 42, David Naze reminds readers to rediscover what has conveniently been forgotten about Robinson. With 128 pages of text encompassing four chapters, plus a lengthy introduction and brief conclusion, this academically oriented monograph reads quickly enough that all serious Robinson scholars should be aware of it. In Chapter 3 the book's strongest, Naze evaluates how Robinson and the story of segregation are depicted at two significant museums: the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. Other chapters focus on Robinson's newspaper columns, his 1949 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the contemporary annual commemoration of Jackie Robinson Day throughout Major League Baseball. While many of the author's insights are on the mark, the book could certainly benefit from a stronger historiographical grounding. A deeper reading of Arnold Rampersad's landmark work Jackie Robinson: A Biography (1997) and consulting other well-respected Robinson biographies such as J. Christopher Schutz's Jackie Robinson: An Integrated Life (2016) would have helped Naze avoid omissions in his own research such as Robinson's endorsement of Richard Nixon—a key historical fact that undermines the author's claim of Robinson's radicalism. Essential secondary sources are missing from the bibliography and endnotes, including Rob Ruck's Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game (2011) and Howard Bryant's The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism (2018). Thoroughly engaging, this scholarship would refine Naze's arguments, especially in sections about the Negro League's rapid collapse and the Robinson–Robeson HUAC incident. Although Reclaiming 42 does not introduce much significant new material and occasionally suffers from choppy prose, insights gleaned from the author's background as a specialist in rhetoric point toward novel interpretive directions for scholarship on Robinson and the integration of sports.

Naze is correct to point out that the popular perception of Robinson is as a heroic but depoliticized athlete, but the question remains as to whether Robinson was always seen that way. A literary and textual analysis of Robinson's autobiographies, My Own Story (1948) and I Never Had it Made (1972), for instance, would offer revealing findings about how Robinson actively sought to shape the public's perception of him. Similar work can be done with the dozens of children's and young adult books about Robinson, to examine what motifs are presented and how the framing of Robinson has changed across generations. An analysis of local and national newspapers, back issues of major sports periodicals, and even the...