Alfred Surratt would never tell where, along the way, he was dubbed "Slick." It was a Kansas City Monarchs thing, a Negro Leagues thing, a baseball thing. Brothers to the core, the men of the Monarchs kept one another's confidences, watched one another's backs, mourned team­mates' losses and failed dreams, and cheered on their brothers' achievements.
Never were the cheers louder, said Slick Surratt, than on April 11, 1947, the day Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, a one-time Monarch, to a major league contract. ...
The joy within the black baseball community was palpable. The destruction of segregation within Major League Baseball was at hand. Four days later, on April 15, 1947, Robinson would debut with the Dodgers, his first step onto Ebbets Field in Brooklyn tromping out the National Past­time's odious color barrier forever.
As we all now know, it wasn't just singing on to be a baseball player. Those opposed to integra­tion would push back, virulently, viciously, unrelentingly. Robinson, a former Army officer and one of the greatest ahtletes to come out of UCLA, was about to meet his great opponent: Jim Crow. And he would be asked to do so pretty much on his own. One black man against a nation in which large swaths were steeped in segregationist policies.
Raised in California, Robinson and his bride would be asked to step into hostile territory where racism ws not only codified by gentlemen's agreements, but mandated by law. The ugly cultural divide they were about to experience was not only enforced by men wearing badges, but also by nightriders hidden beneath hoods and wearing sheets.
The Dodgers and Robinson, daring to change in 1947 what legislatures, Congress and presi­dents had failed to do ..., knew both the risks and the responsibilities. Yet the man who carried the hopes of so many Slick Surratts, Hank Aarons, and Willie Mayses, never shirked. Incredibly, Robinson not only authored one of the most impressive inaugural seasons the game had ever seen, he also gave lessons in heroism each and every day he stepped onto a major league field.
For the record, the first time Robinson stepped on such a field was on that April 15 in 1947; the 28-year-old debuted against the Boston Braves before more than 25,000 fans at Ebbets Field. He played first base and went 0-for-3 at the plate. 155 games later, Robinson had authored the first chapter of what was destined to be a Hall of Fame career.
Likely no other player ever traveled quite so treacherous a path to the Hall as did Robinson. In an article printed in The New York Times on May 10, 1947, it was revealed that Robinson had received "threatening letters of anonymous origin" from the day he'd broken into the big leagues that spring. ... "This disclosure followed on the heels of a report that a strike of opposing players against the Negro players had been spiked."
"Harassment of Robinson ... by unidentified persons was confirmed in Philadelphia last night by Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Baseball Club. 'At least two letters of a nature that I felt called for investigation were received by Robinson,' Rickey said.
"Robinson himself admitted receiving several such letters. ... A high police official here disclosed that a letter warning Robinson to 'get out of baseball' had been turned over to the police department by the baseball club for investigation."
The article went on to describe a short-lived attempt by St. Louis Cardinals players to engineer a strike in protest against Robinson's playing that was put down by team president Sam Breadon.
The indignities heaped on Robinson by others in baseball uniforms included spikes-high slides and head-high knockdown pitches. Racist epithets were the rule of the day. What historians came to understand was that Robinson would not, could not, lash out, because he, too, had made a gentleman's agreement with Rickey.
In his words, ... Robinson said, "I remember Mr. Rickey saying to me that I couldn't fight back, and I wondered whether or not I was going to be able to do this."
Nowhere was his resolve to honor his agreement with Rickey tested more than in Robinson's first games played against the Phillies in late April at Ebbets Field. The Phillies, led by manager Ben Chapman, infamously rained an unending torrent of racist slurs on Robinson, taunting the infielder about his physical features, telling him to go back to the cotton fields and calling him the "N" word. The onslaught was so relentless and debilitating that Robinson later said it pushed him closer to breaking than any other humiliation suffered that season.
"For one wild and rage-crazed minute, I thought, 'To hell with Mr. Rickey's noble experiment,'" Robinson once recalled.
He was physically and verbally abused, particularly when he was on the road, in certain cities," said Rachel Robinson, Jackie's wife, in ... 1998. "The taunts angered him, sometimes frightened him, but he turned away from them."
Said Robinson's teammate, CF Duke Snider: "He knew he had to do well. He knew that the future of blacks in baseball depended on it. The pressure was enormous, overwhelming and unbearable at times. I don't know how he held up. I know I never could have."
Author Jonathan Eig wrote of Robinson's brutal season in his book Opening Day. In a 2016 interview ..., Eig said the incidents with Chapman brought into focus what Robinson was being made to endure.
"It was so offensive that, for a lot of Americans, it was a wake-up call," said Eig. "It made people, white people in particular, realize for the first time just what burden Robinson was shouldering." As sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote: "Jackie Robinson is the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports."
Chapman would later try to explain away his actions by saying that he was bench-jockeying, and, in an effort to say he wasn't being racist, described how he also hurled ethnic slurs at Italian-American players such as Joe DiMaggio and Jewish players like Hank Greenberg. Chapman told writer Allen Barra he was doing no less with Robinson, looking for a way to rattle a rookie. ...
What Chapman could not envision was that his action eventually won Robinson sympathetic - and vocal - allies. As Eig wrote in Opening Day, in the second game of the initial Phillies-Dodgers series, the Dodgers' Eddie Stanky, a veteran infielder and native Philadelphian, called out Chapman and the Phillies, deeming them cowards for railing against a man who could not fight back.
"It was the first time a lot of white people and white reporters in particular noticed the abuse Robinson was taking," Eig said, adding, "I interviewed a fan who had been a teenager who went to one of those games, heard the heckling, and was shocked."
By the time the Dodgers visited Philadelphia in May, Chapman, prodded by baseball, asked to have his picture taken with Robinson. The Dodgers rookie would not shake his hand, so the two men grasped opposite ends of a baseball bat as photographers snapped away.
Off the field, many municipalities remained stubbornly unwelcoming. Even after Chapman's attempted truce, the Dodgers were not allowed to register at their chosen hotel in Philadelphis until other accommodations were made for Robinson. Sadly, this was nothing Robinson and the Dodgers had not experienced before.
Save for the Spring Trainings spent with the Dodgers in the Caribbean rather than segregated Florida and a minor league season spent in a welcoming Montreal, Robinson felt the hot breath of hate at every step even as he broke color barriers one ballpark, one town, one city at a time - with "Colored Only/White only" signs on water fountains and public bathrooms throughout the south and meals delivered through restaurants' back doors and eaten in solitude on the back of buses.
"He faced it in Spring Training, in every town in Florida that he visited. He faced it in Pittsburgh and St. Louis and Cincinnati," Eig said. "I doubt that he would've singled out Philadelphia as the worst place in the world."
Larry Doby, who became the second black major leaguer in the modern era when he joined the Cleveland Indians midseason in 1947, was often asked by youngsters of later generations why Robinson, he and others didn't just refuse to leave balking hotels, movie theaters and restaurants.
"Because we didn't want to die," Doby told one such inquisitor ...
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told Don Newcombe, Robinson's Dodgers teammate ... "You'll never know how easy you and Jackie and Doby and Campy (Roy Campanella) made it for me to do my job by what you did on the baseball field."
Thus, 72 years after 1947, we still marvel at a rookie who - by any measure - refused to fail.
Robinson, buffeted by societal ills, but steeled by the challenge to change a nation, hit .297 in 151 games that season. He stole 29 bases, more than anyone else in the National League, scored 125 runs and ... helped Brooklyn win a National League pennant for only the second time since 1920. It would be the first of six league championships won by a Brooklyn team that featured a player Dr. King called "one of the truly great men of our nation."
For his efforts, as well as for the example he set, Robinson received the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award by the Baseball Writers' Association of America, an award that now bears his name. In the words of Yogi Berra, some might say that Jackie Robinson made that award necessary.