When Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey met Jackie Robinson in 1945 to recruit him as Major League Baseball’s first black player, he tested Robinson’s resolve. He unleashed a barrage of racial insults, gauging whether he could withstand the abuse that surely lay ahead.
Robinson was stunned. “Mr. Rickey,” he asked, “do you want a ballplayer who’s afraid to fight back?”
Rickey shook his head. He wanted someone, he said, “with guts enough not to fight back.”
In his new book “Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America” (Dey Street), author Howard Bryant examines Robinson’s politics and how Rickey exerted his influence on him, pushing him to be passive and agreeable — most notably when he was asked to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1949 and openly criticize Paul Robeson.
The black actor, singer and activist had made comments suggesting African Americans — still denied many basic rights — should not be expected to support the United States in a war against the Soviet Union, leading to accusations that he was a Communist.
Appearing before HUAC put Robinson in a fraught position, and it was Rickey who urged to go through with testifying, a moment that pit the two most famous black men in America against each other.
“Robinson had been positioned since 1947 as a symbol of the American Dream whose integration of the national pastime symbolized the inherent goodness and limitless potential of his country,” Bryant told The Post. “Robeson, meanwhile, was treated in the American press as a pawn of the Soviet Union.”
Robinson’s HUAC testimony won him considerable approval in mainstream America — and among some of his teammates, some of whom hadn’t taken kindly to his joining the Dodgers.
When Robeson later encountered Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe at Harlem’s famed Red Rooster restaurant, he approached to offer a handshake. Newcombe, who was weeks away from entering military service, refused — angrily.
“I don’t want to meet you. I don’t want anything to do with any Communists,” he shouted. “I’m joining the Army to fight people like you.”
Robeson himself would face HUAC in 1956. When asked why he didn’t simply move to the Soviet Union, he delivered one of the most powerful responses ever heard in that chamber: “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you.”
In shining a light on an oft-forgotten moment in history, Bryant also recasts Rickey’s legacy. While he’s credited with integrating Major League Baseball, the author notes that he wasn’t a revolutionary.
Both he and Robinson were conservative, and Rickey’s goal was integration without disruption. White fans could be reassured; the system itself would not be challenged. As Bryant reveals, Rickey had little intention of broadly integrating black American players.
Rickey’s long-term recruitment strategy focused on Latin America, not the Negro Leagues — which he openly disparaged as corrupt and poorly run. Even more striking was Rickey’s fear that black Americans themselves might embrace Robinson too enthusiastically, potentially alienating white audiences.
“The great man credited with being the architect of integration didn’t even want black Americans to do the integrating,” Bryant observes.
Despite Robinson’s historic achievements, criticism followed him relentlessly. Even the Republican Party he supported often treated him with contempt. Conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr. dismissed Robinson as a “pompous moralizer” and a “philosophical moron.”
Robeson viewed Robinson as well-meaning but politically naïve — a man, Bryant writes, “manipulated by some of the most fervid, anti-black, right-wing entities in the country.” Robinson’s proximity to power offered protection, but also imposed limits.
Those limits only became fully visible after Rickey’s death in December 1965. Freed from his longtime mentor’s influence, Robinson grew more outspoken about economic inequality, structural racism and the failures of American liberalism.
He also reassessed Robeson.
“I do have increased respect for Paul Robeson,” Robinson said late in life, “who, over the span of twenty years, sacrificed himself, his career, and the wealth and comfort he once enjoyed because, I believe, he was sincerely trying to help his people.”
Robeson paid an extraordinary price for his refusal to temper his politics.
In 1950, the State Department revoked his passport — a ban that lasted eight years and effectively ended his international career. He was blacklisted, surveilled and financially ruined, not because he was a communist, but simply because he refused to deny being one.
“Unlike today’s celebrities who whine about the consequences of saying or doing something dumb,” Bryant said, “Robeson was truly canceled — essentially a political prisoner for his beliefs.”
Robinson and Robeson came to represent an enduring divide in black leadership — reform versus confrontation, integration versus transformation.
Their conflict was bitter, public and deeply personal. Yet it failed to diminish either man’s long-term significance.
“Every athlete’s political voice today is a descendant of both Robinson and Robeson,” Bryant concludes. “Indeed, the legacies of both men resonate ever more greatly today.”
