Branch Rickey Read Free Page B

to the base.
    Now the pitcher is ready again. He has his leg coming up and his arm in a windup, and down the third base line comes the runner. Running furiously. Good Lord, is he going all the way?
    No. He stops dead, halfway down the line.
    Rickey is so excited that he is talking to himself.
    â€œWhy is the pitcher winding up?” he asks. “Why doesn’t he just stretch and hold the runner on? Good Lord, he is making it easy. Oh, see. Here it is this time.”
    It is. The pitcher has a long, complicated windup and here comes the runner, powerful legs flying, head down. Who is he? thinks Rickey. I can’t see his face with his cap pulled down. He slides. His feet flash under the tag.
    He steals home!
    The player rises up with his back to Rickey. He lopes into the grayness. As he disappears, Rickey gets a fleeting glance at a dark-skinned face.
    Soon, Rickey is excitedly sending his scouts out searching for this base runner, this black man, whom they had never sought before except while hailing parking lot attendants. He was out there somewhere in the mists and he would be found. At that moment he was a dream figure who only Rickey could see, somebody with no name or face or features other than dark skin, a man not yet visible but already a destiny.

CHAPTER TWO
    That mysterious player who stole home in front of Rickey at Ebbets Field was nearly lost forever to the thing he was supposed to change, American racism. His name was Jack Roosevelt Robinson, and to look at what happened to him, as a soldier in the United States Army with the rank of lieutenant, is to see how much had to be overcome.
    Robinson was arrested on July 17, 1944, at the McCloskey hospital in Temple, Texas, on the outskirts of Fort Hood. Rickey’s dream for changing the nation sat in a bare courtroom at Fort Hood that August with multiple charges against him in a general court-martial. It all came about due to a dispute over a seat on a bus that was outside army jurisdiction, and so most of the charges were thrown out. But two remained. One was conduct unbecoming an officer, which could mean anything. The other had to do with refusal to obey an order during time of war, and the circumstances may seem innocuous—Jackie didn’t stay in a room when he was ordered to—but it was ominous at the time. In a court of nine officers, several of whom had been in combat and understood the gravity of the charge, he faced a possible long sentence. Any hope for a career would be gone.
    STATEMENT of Mr. Milton N. Renegar, Bus Driver, Southwestern Bus Company, 7 July 1944:
    I drive a bus for the Southwestern Bus Company. At approximately 10:15, 6 July 1944, I was driving my bus and stopped at Bus Stop #23, on 172nd Street, Camp Hood, Texas. Some white ladies, maybe a soldier or so, and a colored girl and a colored Second Lieutenant got on the bus. The colored girl and the colored Lt., whom I later learned to be 2nd Lt. Jack R. Robinson of the 761st Tank Battalion, sat down together about middle ways of the bus. On that particular run I have quite a few of the white ladies who work in the PX’s and ride the bus at that hour almost every night. I did not say anything to the colored Lt. when he first sat down, until I got around to Bus Stop #18, and then I asked him, I said, “Lt., if you don’t mind, I have got several ladies to pick up at this Stop and will have a load of them before I get back to the Central Bus Station, and would like for you to move back to the rear of the bus if you don’t mind.” When I asked him to move back to the rear he just sat there, and I asked him to move back there a second time. When I asked him the second time he started cursing and the first thing he said was, “I’m not going to move a God dammed bit.” I told him that I had a load of ladies to pick up and that I was sure they wouldn’t want to ride mixed up like that, and told him I’d rather he would either move back