Branch Breaks the Ice

The management palmed him off as an Indian. But Charley Grant, who played second base for the oldtime Baltimore Orioles, was a lightskinned, straight-haired Negro. A scattered few Mexicans, Cubans and strongly suntanned whites who have played for other big-league clubs have been widely believed (but never proved) to be Negroes. Last week, after three years and $25,000 worth of scouting the Negro leagues, Branch ("The Brain") Rickey called in reporters--not to make a confession but to tell the world that Brooklyn had signed Jack Roosevelt Robinson, a Negro shortstop.

Minor League Commissioner Bill Bramham exploded: "Father Divine will have to look to his laurels, for we can expect Rickey Temple to be in the course of construction in Harlem soon." Ex-Star Rogers Hornsby put his finger on a sore spot: ". . . Ball players on the road live [close] together. It won't work. . . ." Most baseball men, after an initial blush, realized that it could and perhaps would work (it had worked pretty well in college sports).

With the ice broken, the New York Giants' President Horace Stoneham planned to give Negro leagues a looking over. His Polo Grounds park is located on the edge of Harlem, and a Jack Robinson would step up his already substantial Negro trade. The big-league clubs least likely to cross the racial bridge were the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns, who, until recently did not even allow Negroes in the grandstand.

Risks & Chances. Branch Rickey, as usual, had looked before he leaped. If Robinson should make the grade, he would come up to the big show as a war veteran and a college graduate. At U.C.L.A. he won All-America mention as a halfback. Later, with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League, he hit a healthy .340 and fielded sensationally.

Shortstop Robinson would start with the Montreal farm club, and there was little chance that he would get to Brooklyn's Ebbets Field. For one thing, the Dodgers were already loaded with shortstops (Pee Wee Reese, Stan Rojek, Claude Corbitt, Tom Brown, Ed Basinski).

No one knew better than 26-year-old Jack Robinson how high a barrier he had to scale. Wrote Ludlow Werner in a Negro newspaper, the New York Age: "I'm happy ... but sorry for Jackie. . . . Unlike white players, he can never afford an off-day . . . and Lord help him with his fellow Negroes if he should fail them." Robinson himself was no more worried about such psychological burdens than he was about the physical risks of covering second base, where spikes fly sharpest. Said he: "There is no possible chance I will funk it or quit . . . for any other reason than that I am not a good enough ball player."

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