Jackie Robinson: Funding Black Entrepreneurship in the Civil Rights Era

Navigating Race

Jackie Roosevelt Robinson was born on January 31, 1919. Just two generations removed from slavery, his parents eked out a living as sharecroppers in Georgia. When his father left the family a year after his birth, Robinson’s mother moved her five children to Pasadena, California. Despite the affluence of the surrounding community, Robinson grew up with little financial security, as his mother worked various odd jobs and made use of wealthfare services to support the family.1

Robinson's athletic career began in high school and continued initially at Pasadena Junior College (PJC) and then UCLA where he excelled in football, basketball, track and field, baseball, and tennis.2 Most of his teammates were white, and Robinson needed to learn how to navigate racial tensions from a young age.

By 1942, with the United States now entrenched in World War II, Robinson was drafted into a segregated Army cavalry unit. His military career was soon derailed, however. In July 1944, Robinson boarded a “Whites Only” Army bus, despite the fact that the Army was ordered to integrate its bus lines. When Robinson refused to move, the driver summoned the military police, and he faced a court-martial for insubordination.3 Robinson was eventually acquitted, but his court-martial proceedings stand out as illustrative of Robinson's ongoing impatience with racial barriers, a character trait that would drive much of his life’s purpose after baseball.

Breaking the "Color Barrier"

When Robinson was honorably discharged in 1945 at the close of World War II, the Brooklyn Dodgers selected him to play for the Dodgers farm club, the Montreal Royals, for the 1946 season. When Robinson signed a contract with them for $600 per month, he became the first Black baseball player in the International League since 1884. Despite early success, the moment Robinson arrived in racially-segregated Florida for spring training, he was subjected to an onslaught of racial discrimination. When he was excluded from staying at a hotel with his white teammates, Robinson instead stayed with Joe and Dufferin Harris, an African American couple active in local politics, who introduced Robinson to civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Though Robinson spent much of his youth protesting discrimination he faced in his own life, this was his first interaction with organized civil rights activism.4

In 1947, the Dodgers finally called Robinson up to the major leagues. When he made his Dodgers debut on April 11, 1947, Robinson became the first player to break the color line as 24,237 attendees watched on. New York’s Black baseball fans quickly flocked to see him play, and Robinson quickly became a star on the Dodgers team. By 1950, his salary was the highest of any Dodger ever at $35,000.5

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Robinson was often the target of racial slurs and rough physical play from opposing major league teams. In 1947, the St. Louis Cardinals threatened to walk out if Robinson played. In a later Cardinals game, Enos Slaughter left Robinson with a seven-inch scrape on his leg. Philadelphia Phillies players were known to yell racial slurs at Robinson from their dugout.6 He also received a string of death threats throughout his career. These moments of violence and intimidation, however, did not dissuade Robinson from addressing racial issues publicly. In 1953, Robinson wrote a piece for Our Sports magazine openly criticizing segregated hotels and restaurants that served the Dodger organization.7

After ending several seasons with World Series losses, Robinson won his only championship when the Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in 1955. He retired after the following 1956 season.8 Robinson’s impact on the game of baseball cannot be overstated as his major league debut brought an end to approximately sixty years of segregation in professional baseball. However, while Robinson is best known for breaking baseball’s “color barrier”, he himself believed that his community work in retirement was notable in its own right, if remembered less today.

Funding Black Entrepreneurship

After 10 years of playing in the major leagues, Robinson dedicated his retirement to leveraging his national profile in the fight for civil rights. Robinson’s activism centered more locally on championing Black New Yorker’s economic advancement.9 When the Second Great Migration brought a wave of Black Southerners to New York between 1940 and 1970, white middle-class residents fled for the suburbs. As the city divested much-needed resources from New York’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, Black communities endured decaying and dangerous infrastructure and racist redlining practices that perpetuated economic disadvantage. Robinson responded by funding institutions of economic aid for New York’s Black communities that lay outside of the municipal government. In 1964, Robinson co-founded Freedom National Bank, a Black-owned and operated commercial bank based in Harlem. In 1970, Robinson established the Jackie Robinson Construction Company to invest in housing for low-income families in the city.10 Robinson himself witnessed the inequities wrought by structural racism and sought to help communities of Black New Yorkers combat these inequities through entrepreneurship, house ownership, and building intergenerational wealth.

On October 24, 1972, Robinson died at the age of 53 of a heart attack at his home in Connecticut.11 His funeral service on October 27, 1972 at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights attracted 2,500 mourners. Thousands of New Yorkers lined the procession route to Robinson's burial here at Cypress Hills Cemetery. Twenty-five years after Robinson’s death, the Interboro Parkway that runs through Cypress Hills Cemetery was renamed the Jackie Robinson Parkway in his honor.

Citations and Further Reading:

1 Jules Tygiel, Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 3.

2 Tygiel, Extra Bases, 4.

3 Tygiel, Extra Bases, 22.

4 Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 104.

5 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 182-186.

6 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 198.

7 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 201.

8 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 328.

9 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 343.

10 Tygiel, Extra Bases, 11.

11 Tygiel, Extra Bases, 13.