Jackie Robinson? Really? (1944)

In which the people running America prove they don't understand America.

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I.

On the evening of July 6, 1944, Jackie Robinson boarded a military bus and headed toward the back. Then he stopped, saw a woman he knew sitting near the front, and took a seat next to her. It was roughly 11 at night; Robinson had spent some time at a club for Black officers near Camp Hood in Texas, and now he was returning to the hospital where he was staying while the Army checked on the status of an ankle that tended to swell up every time he played a baseball game. This was three years before Jackie Robinson became arguably the most impactful American of the 20th century. This was back when Robinson was merely a star athlete and a Black man seeking to serve his country in some capacity while it fought fascism abroad.

That night on the bus, the driver, seeing Robinson near the front and presuming the woman he sat next to was white (she was not), told him to move to the back. Robinson refused. He had obeyed on the ride from the hospital to the base, but he had read recently that the Army now forbade segregation on its bases, and he’d read about the refusals of boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson to obey Jim Crow laws at a bus station in Alabama.

And so Jackie Robinson refused to move. The bus driver told him again. Robinson still refused to move. The argument grew increasingly heated. The bus driver reported Robinson—‘‘This n—-er" is making trouble,” the driver told his dispatcher—and Robinson was handcuffed and shackled.

“Look here, you son-of-a-bitch,” Robinson reportedly said. “Don’t you call me no n—-r!”

Robinson was court-martialed. The case went to trial in front of nine men, eight of whom were white. Robinson needed four votes four acquittal. After a four-hour trial, he was exonerated. He was honorably discharged in 1944.

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II.

I will admit that I did not really know the details of this story until an article I read online made reference to this incident, and I looked up the relevant passage from Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Robinson, as well as this PBS article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. That initial Jackie Robinson article was hosted on the website of the United States Department of Defense, part of an innocuous series of stories about sports heroes who served in the military. I would not have come across this article otherwise, except that it got caught up in the DEI purge of the current administration; the article got removed and then restored, but by the time it returned, it was clear that however and for whatever reason this article got removed, the people responsible for running America at this moment do not actually understand a goddamned thing about America.

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III.

There are moments now—too many of them, to be honest—when the sheer surreality of what we’re living through sets in. I am not merely speaking of the crushing venality, nor am I merely speaking of the colossal incompetence; I am speaking of the realization that everything this country has built toward and fought for since the Civil War is now being completely twisted and stepped on by a cabal of scoundrels and bigots. And I know every metaphor has become overstretched at a moment like this, and I know words like “Orwellian” are in danger of losing their meaning, but honestly, I’m not sure how else to describe it. I read Orwell when I was in the sixth grade, around the time the Berlin Wall was on the verge of collapse. The world seemed to be heading in the opposite direction; the animals on that farm seemed captured by an increasingly extinct philosophy. I never really thought I would live through a truly Orwellian moment, but then yesterday the news broke that Elon Musk’s team of post-adolescent AI code-bros had (accidentally, but not really) scrubbed an article about Jackie Robinson and his service in the Army, and I realized once again just how deeply fucked this all is.

There are certain things you learn about history as a kid, and one of those things is that Jackie Robinson changed American history because of what he represented and because of the way his personal strength helped to alter America itself. This is not a difficult lesson for a child to absorb; this is the definition of heroism. And even if you think DEI has its excesses, how is it humanly possible to sweep Jackie Robinson into some imaginary bucket of “DEI hires” unless you are engaging in unapologetic bigotry?¹ I can’t believe I have to say this, but here we go: Jackie Robinson mattered not just because he was one of the greatest baseball players of all-time, but because he was a Black man in an era when Black people did not enjoy anything even resembling equal rights. You cannot somehow sever Robinson’s Blackness from his legacy. In 1948, a year after Robinson debuted in Brooklyn, Harry Truman abolished racial discrimination in the armed forces, and that decision likely led to Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 (somehow, that National Archives page has yet to be purged). And yet here is what the Pentagon said after they restored the article about Robinson to their website: