BUSTING THE COLOR LINE

By Paul Gray

Major League Baseball has just completed its season-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's arrival in the game. The number he wore during his 10 years with the Brooklyn Dodgers--42--was permanently retired from use by all teams. Tributes were offered, speeches made. And some of the ensuing applause sounded suspiciously like people, including those who run baseball these days, patting themselves on the back.

But flag waving and marching bands and feel-good oratory may not be the best way to remember Jackie Robinson. The tragic measure of his remarkable accomplishments is the hatred and bigotry he was forced to overcome. Fortunately, Arnold Rampersad's Jackie Robinson (Knopf; 512 pages; $27.50) arrives just in time to save the real man from his legend and to cut through the fog of a half-century's worth of nostalgia.

Plenty of books have been published on Robinson's life, including two ghost-written autobiographies bearing Robinson's name. But Rampersad, a professor of literature at Princeton and the co-author of Arthur Ashe's Days of Grace, secured the cooperation of Rachel Robinson, Jackie's widow, who gave him full access to her private papers and the archives of the Jackie Robinson Foundation. The result of Rampersad's research may strike some readers as unduly dry and academic. The prose sometimes seems stiff: "He thought of himself and his future in terms of moral and social obligations rather than privilege and entitlement." Missing here is the fiery Robinson old-time fans remember not just running the bases but also thundering around them, leaving spectators in the box seats swearing they had felt the vibrations. But Rampersad's dispassionate tone is, on the whole, an effective counterpoint to his impassioned subject.

Robinson could have gone wrong in so many ways; the black-and-white world he inherited all but decreed his failure. The youngest of five children, whose father abandoned the family shortly after his birth in rural Georgia, Jackie was taken, along with his siblings, by their mother Mallie from the segregated South to Pasadena, Calif. But Jim Crow restrictions existed there too. His elementary school transcript contained a curt note about the young boy's probable future: "Gardener." Jackie's extraordinary athletic abilities--in football, basketball, baseball and track--won the cheers of the same townspeople who would not allow him to swim in the municipal pool.

Rampersad methodically retraces the amazing story of Robinson's transition from a local Southern California hero, albeit with paltry prospects after college, into the man who broke the unstated but implacable color line in major league baseball and changed American race relations forever. First from his mother, and later from a black Methodist minister who befriended him in his troubled adolescence, Jackie imbibed the belief that God had plans for him. Sure enough, an implausible design took shape. Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, plucked Robinson out of the obscurity of the Negro league Kansas City Monarchs in 1945 and asked him if he could accept the terms of making history, with all the abuse that would ensue. "I'm looking," Rickey famously said, "for a ball player with guts enough not to fight back."

What Robinson was forced to endure stoically when he came up with the Dodgers was, and remains, unspeakable: beanballs and spikings from opposing players, isolation on the road because he was not allowed to stay with his teammates at segregated hotels, and relentless invective from spectators. His wife Rachel, who went to all the games she could, sat in the stands and helplessly heard her husband called "nigger son of a bitch" and even worse.

Amazingly, Robinson not only triumphed on the field--he was the 1947 Rookie of the Year and the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1949, and he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, his first year of eligibility--but he also retained his humanity. Late in his career he wrote an eloquently spare letter to a white New Orleans journalist who had abused him in print: "I wish you could comprehend how unfair and un-American it is for the accident of birth to make such a difference to you."

Read today, the simplicity of that sentence seems shocking. Robinson never, despite all the reasons his society gave him for doing so, regretted the color of his skin. He simply believed that race should not affect personal freedoms. He educated, at great sacrifice, his era. His lesson lives in Rampersad's book.