RACHEL ROBINSON
Rachel Robinson is spry and articulate and a sight to behold. She’s a beautiful woman. She’s 95 and you’d never know it to look at her.
Rachel Annetta Isum attended Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles and then UCLA, graduating in 1945 with a bachelor’s degree in nursing. She met Jackie Robinson in 1941, prior to his leaving the university when his collegiate baseball eligibility had expired.
They married on February 10, 1946 the year before her husband broke major league baseball’s color barrier. He died in 1972, 26 years later and 45 years ago, at age 53. They were blessed with three children, the eldest of whom, Jackie Robinson Jr., died in 1971 in an automobile accident.
She is still full of life. It is remarkable.
When Jackie Robinson retired from baseball in 1956, Rachel turned it up a notch.
A registered nurse, she earned a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing from NYU and then worked as a researcher and a clinician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Department of Social and Community Psychiatry.
After that she became an Assistant Professor at Yale School of Nursing and later moved on to become the Director of Nursing at the Connecticut Mental Health Center.
That was just the beginning.
In 1972, she incorporated the Jackie Robinson Development Corporation, a real estate development company focusing on the construction of low-to-moderate-income housing. She served as the company’s president for ten years.
Then in 1973 it was on to the Jackie Robinson Foundation, a not-for-profit organization created by Rachel a couple of months after his death, whose dual mission is to give scholarships to minority youth pursuing higher education as well as to preserve the legacy of her husband.
Since its inception, more than 1,450 students have received scholarships and the Foundation’s strategic mix of financial assistance and myriad support services help it to boast a nearly 100% college graduation rate. Among its benefactors are Major League Baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers, General Electric, Goldman Sachs and Nike, Inc.
Rachel headed the Foundation’s Board of Directors until stepping down in 1996, the same year she authored Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait, published by Abrams.
No grass has ever been known to grow under Rachel Robinson’s feet.
“I was the support person so often misidentified as the ‘little woman behind the great man,’ but I was neither little nor behind him. I felt powerful by his side as his partner, essential, challenged, and greatly loved.”
Spoken like the educator, philanthropist, civil rights and social activist, professor, nurse, wife, mother, and person Rachel Robinson is.
Jackie Robinson may very well have been unable to accomplish what he did, without Rachel right next to him. The travails and triumphs the two shared during and after his playing days, if accurately detailed, would require industrial strength bookbinding.
And it is Rachel who continues to keep Jackie’s legacy alive in baseball, but more importantly in the world beyond.
Certainly she’s been a driving force in continuing and perpetuating her husband’s commitment to restructure Major League Baseball’s hiring policy so as to be a more inclusive one.
Hiring more people of color as managers and as executives has long been a priority.
But to her, that’s the tip of the iceberg.
In 1997, when the country was celebrating the 50th anniversary of husband Jackie breaking baseball’s color barrier, she was asked if Jackie would be pleased with the status of race relations at that time.
She pulled no punches.
“No,” she sternly replied. “I think he’d be very disturbed about it. We’re seeing a great deal of divisiveness, a lot of hatred, a lot of tension between ethnic groups, and I think he’d be disappointed.”
In 2014 the Baseball Reliquary inducted Rachel into its Shrine of Eternals, an alternative Hall of Fame which celebrates baseball’s rebels and renegades.
The Shrine’s annual ballot is composed of individuals, running the gamut from the obscure to the well-known, who have altered the baseball world in ways that supersede statistics and who have left an indelible imprint on the baseball landscape.
In essence Rachel Robinson was being honored and acknowledged as one of the most important women in baseball history.
As a pioneer of social justice, this highly-educated woman has been and is so much more than that.
When she was teaching at Yale, the university asked her to join its board of trustees. Rachel declined, explaining that she was uninterested unless “you put another black or another woman on the board. You won’t get a two-fer from me.”
Is it any wonder that this courageous, resilient woman holds honorary doctorates from a dozen colleges and universities and has been invited to the White House by five presidents?
At the end of May the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s Board of Directors announced that Rachel Robinson had been selected as the 2017 recipient of the John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award.
She becomes the fourth winner — following O’Neil in 2008; Roland Hemond in 2011; and Joe Garagiola in 2014 — honored as an individual whose efforts broadened the game’s appeal and whose character, integrity and dignity is comparable to those traits exemplified by the late O’Neil.
On Saturday July 29th the Award, established in 2007, was presented to Robinson in Cooperstown as part of Hall of Fame Weekend 2017. It is presented at the discretion of the Directors though not more frequently than every three years.
Said Hall of Fame Chairman Jane Forbes Clark, “Rachel Robinson has worked tirelessly to raise the level of equality not only in baseball, but throughout society. Through her grace, dignity and unsurpassed spirit, she continues to show the value, decency and importance of inclusiveness. She personifies the strength and character of Buck O’Neil, and on behalf of our Board of Directors, we are very happy and honored to bestow upon her this prestigious award.”
On April 15, 1947 playing with the Brooklyn Dodgers Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to appear in a modern Major League Baseball game.
Buck O’Neil was a pillar of the Negro American League with the Kansas City Monarchs; he worked as a scout and became the first African-American coach in Major League Baseball; and he played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
The Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award in his name is the most recent of Rachel Robinson’s trove of honors and signatures of recognition.
She and Jackie are the first husband and wife team ever to be enshrined in Cooperstown; fittingly she is right by his side once again.
“It was us against the world, and we enjoyed that and kind of laughed about it and strutted around with that in mind,” Rachel waxed eloquently when describing the pair’s connection. “It was important for us to feel that they couldn’t separate us. They could do a lot of things to us but they couldn’t separate us.”
Truer words have ne’er been spoken for documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Remarks Burns concisely, “No Rachel, no Jackie…I don’t know how he could have done it alone.”
Obama embellishes by saying, “There’s nothing more important than family, than a real partnership…I think that’s a sign of [Jackie’s] character, that he chose a woman that was his equal. I don’t think you would have had Jackie Robinson without Rachel.”
Amen.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in August 2017.]
