Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life After Baseball

5. On Politics with Principles

126 5 On Politics with Principles Politics Is Sort of Like Baseball Robinson stakes out an independent position in American politics—one that selects candidates simply on their record of “making democracy work.” Nine months after writing the column excerpted here, Robinson heaped praise on his favorite Democratic candidate—Senator Hubert Humphrey. “From the very first, Humphrey has made it all too plain that his position is one of vigorous action and to assure every American of equal civil rights,” Robinson wrote.1 Source: New York Post, May 8, 1959, 92. Back in 1947 when I joined the Dodger baseball club, there were a couple of Dodgers who objected to Branch Rickey about my coming on the team. Later, however, they came to me to pass on tips as to how I might help win games. Frankly, I don’t think these particular players, within a short month or so, had changed their feelings toward me. It was just that they felt it would mean more money in their pockets if we could win. Politics to me is somewhat similar to that situation—except that instead of money, it’s votes. The year 1960 is fast coming around, and all the politicians who have kept their distance since the last campaign are out in full force now—each with a big smile, a warm handshake and a hatful of promises. And I won’t 1. New York Post, February 22, 1960, 36. On Politics with Principles • 127 say that I never forgive, but like the proverbial old elephant, believe me, I don’t forget! I guess you’d call me an Independent, since I’ve never identified myself with one party or another in politics. As a Negro, I’ve been wooed by the Democrats with the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, and cultivated by the Republicans with the memory of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. But, like more and more people nowadays, I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves, no matter what the party label or the ancestral ghost. And now that a presidential election is just around the corner, I’m giving careful scrutiny to the records of all the leading contenders to see what they’ve actually done, not so much what they say they’ll do. For instance, I would ask Gov. Rockefeller why he now insists he has to wait to see how New York City’s law against discrimination in private housing comes along before he starts implementing his campaign promise to throw all his resources into enacting a similar measure on a statewide level. I’m remembering, too, the votes that Sen. Kennedy and some other Northern “liberals” cast to send the 1957 civil rights bill back to committee in a Southern-engineered attempt to kill any action by Congress to help Southern Negroes gain the equal voting rights promised them by the Constitution nearly ninety years ago. And I’m wondering just what was said by and to this same senator behind closed doors at the Southern Governors Conference that resulted in his emerging as the fair-haired boy of the Dixie politicians. And I think I’d want a fuller report about the reasons the President’s Committee on Government Contracts, headed by Vice President Nixon, has largely been so ineffectual in enforcing provisions in federal contracts that are supposed to bar racial discrimination in hiring and in upgrading in any company doing work for the government. Since I believe Adlai Stevenson has as good a chance as any, I’d have to mull over his marked soft-pedaling of civil rights issues when he was actively seeking delegates’ votes to insure his re-nomination in Chicago in 1956. 128 • Beyond Home Plate I certainly don’t want to give the impression that during the elections Negro voters will be considering only what’s best for Negroes alone. As Americans, we have as much stake in this country as anyone else. We, too, are concerned about foreign policy, farm policy, national defense, a balanced budget, and all the rest. Still, to effectively participate in a democracy, you must first enjoy the basic freedoms that democracy guarantees to everyone else. And since Negroes, North and South, have so long been deprived of many of the rights that everyone else takes for...