{"id":15184,"date":"2019-01-30T02:04:44","date_gmt":"2019-01-30T02:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=15184"},"modified":"2019-01-31T02:55:37","modified_gmt":"2019-01-31T02:55:37","slug":"how-jackie-robinsons-wife-rachel-helped-him-break-baseballs-color-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-jackie-robinsons-wife-rachel-helped-him-break-baseballs-color-line\/","title":{"rendered":"How Jackie Robinson\u2019s wife, Rachel, helped him break baseball’s color line"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Lamb<\/a>, IUPUI<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Jackie Robinson will be remembered for his courage, athleticism, tenacity and sacrifice on Jan. 31, the centennial of his birth. By confronting Jim Crow \u2013 both as a baseball player and as a civil rights activist \u2013 he changed America.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack in the days when integration wasn\u2019t fashionable,\u201d Martin Luther King Jr. said of Robinson<\/a>, \u201che underwent \u2026 the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking through the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written<\/a> three books about Robinson, in addition to dozens of columns and articles. I used to wonder how Robinson persevered in the face of so much hate and ugliness. He was certainly as tough a competitor as any athlete who ever lived, and he had an unwavering religious faith<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But I eventually realized that he couldn\u2019t have achieved what he did without his wife, Rachel, whose spirit was as formidable as his own.<\/p>\n

Sure, he had his mother, Mallie; his minister, Karl Downs; Brooklyn Dodgers\u2019 president, Branch Rickey, who signed him; and sportswriter Wendell Smith, who served as his ghostwriter and confidante.<\/p>\n

Rachel, however, was the only constant.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was not simply the dutiful wife,\u201d Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Roger Wilkins said about Rachel<\/a>. \u201cShe had to live through the death threats, endure the vile screams of the fans and watch her husband get knocked down by pitch after pitch. \u2026 She was beautiful and wise and replenished his strength and courage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rachel Isum met Jackie Robinson at UCLA when she was a freshman and he was a senior. Jackie was a four-letter athlete and \u201ca big man on campus<\/a>,\u201d as she described him.<\/p>\n

They married five years later on Feb. 10, 1946, a few months after Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey signed Jackie to play for the organization\u2019s top minor league team, the Montreal Royals.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jackie and Rachel, two weeks after their wedding in February 1946.<\/span>
\nAP Photo\/Ed Widdis<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Two-and-a-half weeks after the wedding, the Robinsons left the relative comfort of Los Angeles to go to spring training in Florida. Robinson would have to confront both baseball\u2019s color line and the Jim Crow laws of the South, where blacks who challenged segregation risked jail, injury or death<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rachel knew she and Jackie could not react to every racial epithet hurled their way. But she wasn\u2019t averse to quiet forms of resistance. When their plane stopped in New Orleans on their flight to Florida, Rachel saw something she had never seen before: separate restrooms for \u201cwhite women\u201d and \u201ccolored women.\u201d She defiantly walked<\/a> into restroom marked \u201cwhite women.\u201d<\/p>\n

During that first spring training, segregation laws prohibited the Robinsons from staying in the same oceanfront hotel in Daytona Beach with his white teammates. Nor could they eat in white restaurants. They stayed with a black family and ate their meals in a black restaurant.<\/p>\n

Robinson, feeling the weight of representing millions of black Americans, struggled during the beginning<\/a> of spring training. He had trouble hitting, and he hurt his throwing arm so badly that he could barely lift it.<\/p>\n

Rachel calmed Jackie every night in their small room, massaging his sore arm as he raged against the indignities he faced on and off the field. She also learned she was pregnant while they were in Daytona Beach, but decided not to tell him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was such an incredible amount of pressure, it might have driven two people apart,\u201d she told Sports Illustrated in 2013<\/a>. \u201cBut it had the opposite effect on us, it pushed us together.\u201d<\/p>\n

At some point, as Rachel later told<\/a> Robinson biographer Arnold Rampersad, Jackie began to refer to himself not as \u201cI\u201d but as \u201cwe.\u201d Jackie and Rachel were united as civil rights activists; they knew, as Rachel put it, \u201cthat the issue wasn\u2019t simply baseball but life and death, freedom and bondage, for a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the spring progressed, Jackie\u2019s arm improved and so did his confidence. He played the 1946 season with the Montreal Royals before being promoted to the Dodgers the next spring. He established himself as one of the best players in the National League. But the racist epithets continued to rain down on him from the stands and the dugouts of opposing teams.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jackie and Rachel at their home in Stamford, Connecticut, shortly after he was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.<\/span>
\nAP Photo<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rachel was determined to make their home a refuge from that malevolence, whether the Robinsons were living in Montreal, New York City, or later, in Stamford, Connecticut.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a pledge to each other that we were going to try to keep the house a haven,\u201d she said<\/a>. \u201cSomeplace safe. Someplace we didn\u2019t have to replay the mess outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rachel raised their three children<\/a> while her husband was playing baseball and crusading for civil rights. After earning her master\u2019s degree, she worked as a nurse-therapist and researcher at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She then taught nursing at Yale University while she served as director of the Connecticut mental health center.<\/p>\n

After Jackie died, Rachel created the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which has provided scholarships for 1,400 college students.<\/p>\n

When the Jackie Robinson biopic \u201c42<\/a>\u201d was released in 2013, Brian Helgeland, the film\u2019s writer and director, asked Rachel what she thought of the film.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved how much we kissed,\u201d Helgeland recalled Rachel telling him<\/a>. \u201cAnd then she got emotional,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt was the only thing she ever said to me about the finished film. And it hit me: Her take-away from the whole thing was that she got to see her husband one more time.\u201d\"The<\/p>\n

Chris Lamb<\/a>, Professor of Journalism, IUPUI<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Lamb, IUPUI Jackie Robinson will be remembered for his courage, athleticism, tenacity and sacrifice on Jan. 31, the centennial of his birth. By confronting Jim Crow \u2013 both as a baseball player and as a civil rights activist \u2013 he changed America. \u201cBack in the days when integration wasn\u2019t fashionable,\u201d Martin Luther King Jr. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":15180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[5820,179,500,459,314,5819,498,1609],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15184"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15190,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15184\/revisions\/15190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}