The debut of Jackie Robinson at Ebbets Field on opening day of the 1947 baseball season was nothing short of a watershed moment in American life, breaking the color barrier in our national pastime 15 months before President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the U.S. military.
Robinson would later be described by Ken Burns as “the most important person in the history of American sports and… one of the greatest Americans who’s ever lived” but you’d never have known it reading the New York City papers that morning 70 years earlier.
Sometimes journalism is not the first draft of history, and while everyone knew that history would be made on that Tuesday, April 15, at the cozy ballpark on Bedford Avenue in what was then considered Flatbush (now Crown Heights), the coverage was what one historian calls “subdued.”
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Sportswriters had focused their attention in the run-up to opening day focused on the surprise full-season suspension of the Dodgers feisty manager, Leo “The Lip” Durocher, by baseball commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler. Along with his close pal, Hollywood star George Raft, Durocher was known to consort with gamblers. In 1946, the Brooklyn district attorney had tapped his phone. Early in 1947, Durocher—who clearly enjoyed the limelight—eloped with actress Laraine Day to Mexico, where the MGM contract star got her current marriage annulled. In response, the Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization vowed to boycott the team’s games. Durocher, in the meantime, had told his players that “I’m the manager of this team, and I say [Robinson] plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you cannot use the money, I will see that you are all traded.”
But just five days before the season started, Chandler suspended Durocher. The celebrity manager nonetheless graced the cover of Time as the season began.
On Opening Day, the Brooklyn Eagle, then a large-circulation paper with two daily editions, gave its most sizable front-page headlines to Joe Hatten, the Dodgers’ starting pitcher against the Boston Braves. A sub-headline read, “Robinson, Jorgensen in Lineup”—thus equating the first Black player in the modern major leagues with a white fellow rookie memorable only because his nickname was “Spider.”
The following day’s Eagle coverage was found only in the sports section, although it did include a photo of Robinson shaking hands with Brooklyn Borough President John Cashmore and another with the first baseman in the dugout with his three fellow infielders. One of the paper’s sportswriters noted that while “Robinson received a good hand” from the crowd, Dodgers star Dixie Walker received “an ovation.”
Such a reaction stood in contrast to what had happened a few days prior, when the Alabama-born Walker received a chorus of boos during an Ebbets Field exhibition game against the Yankees. Walker was one of a handful of Dodgers players who opposed adding Robinson to their roster. Noting that the jeers came from Robinson fans, the Eagle editorial board denounced the “mistreatment” of Walker, warning that it could imperil the “expansion of the Dodgers experiment in bringing a Negro into the national game.”
The passion of Robinson’s fans, meanwhile, received front-page attention in the Amsterdam News, the city’s leading Black newspaper. The Harlem-based weekly also featured extensive coverage of Brooklyn’s fast-growing African-African community.
“Meddling of Well-Wishers Hurts Jackie,” declared the lead story in the Am News during the week of Robinson’s debut. The piece quoted the concerns of Branch Rickey, president of the Dodgers and Robinson’s leading advocate, about the “5,000 invitations to attend all sorts of events” that Jackie had already received. “Jackie’s greatest danger is social,” Rickey warned.
Am News columnist Dan Burley, a pal of Langston Hughes who had chronicled the fight to integrate baseball, perhaps unexpectedly agreed with the Eagle’s denunciation of the fans who booed Walker. In Burley’s view, when the team’s schedule took the Dodgers to racially hostile environments like Cincinnati and St. Louis, Robinson would need the support of “Dixie Walker and all the rest of the guys.”
Burley also suggested that Durocher’s suspension may have been orchestrated by other baseball executives opposed to integration. MacPhail, Burley said, had helped elevate Happy Chandler to become commissioner. Meanwhile, MacPhail had shown “an inclination to laugh off the idea of a Negro player in a Yankee uniform.” According to Burley, the fact that Durocher had been one of Robinson’s most vocal supporters likely contributed to Chandler’s decision to sideline him.
While the Dodgers were thus led in Robinson’s first season by a low-key figure named Burt Shotton, a teetotaler who wore suits in the dugout, Jackie’s dazzling play throughout his inaugural campaign earned him Rookie of the Year honors. The team won the National League pennant under the interim skipper, only to lose the World Series in seven games to Joe DiMaggio and the damn Yankees. By 1949, Robinson was an unquestioned star, and the subject of a hit song.
Robinson’s successful rookie year clouded his own memory about opening day. As he recalled it 25 years later in I Never Had It Made, “There was an overflow crowd at Ebbets Field.” In fact, attendance was surprisingly low, with over 7,000 seats unfilled in the small (33,000 seat) ballpark.
The Eagle speculated at the time that many fans may have stayed away because of a smallpox outbreak. That week Mayor Bill O’Dwyer, a former NYPD officer (and the last ex-cop to end up as mayor before Eric Adams) announced a plan to vaccinate the city’s nearly 8 million residents within the following three weeks. At the Polo Grounds in Harlem on the first weekend of the baseball season, 90,000 fans turned out to see Robinson play two games against the New York Giants. It’s not clear whether these were superspreader events.
Even if the year had started more quietly than it would be recalled, Robinson’s play on the field made him an unquestioned star by the end of the 1947 season. The following season, Rickey let Durocher get out of his contract and manage the New York Giants, where he would end up winning a World Series in 1954 with Willie Mays in center field. Mayor O’Dwyer, however, fell from glory. Shortly after his re-election in 1949, a huge gambling scandal broke, directly implicating the NYPD. In late 1950, Harry Truman bailed out the embattled O’Dwyer by appointing him as U.S. ambassador to Mexico. For its coverage of the scandal, the Brooklyn Eagle took home a Pulitzer Prize.
