Book Analysis: 42 an Autobiography of Jackie Robinson

Book Analysis:  I Never Had It Made by Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson’s autobiography I Never Had it Made is a bitter recounting of the experience of being the first black player in Major League Baseball.  Robinson explains what it felt like, both to be the first black man to be allowed into a jealously guarded white man’s club, and at the same time to know full well that when he was accepted by his team mates, it was only because he was helping line their pockets.  Robinson remembers how many critics tried to demoralize him and rob him of his dignity by calling him a fool and pointing out that Branch Rickey, whom Robinson revered, only brought him in as a business stunt and not out of altruism.   One thing that is clear from reading this text is that Robinson was nobody’s fool, and that he had a keen understanding the whole time of precisely what the implications were of his status as the first black player in the major leagues.  

Race formed the crux of the story Robinson told. For Robinson, there was almost never a point when, among whites, he was viewed as a professional baseball player and not as a black man. The sole exception might be the inspiration he derived from the indifference to race exhibited by young white children who cheered him on as loudly as they cheered on white players.  Beyond that group, however, baseball for Robinson was not a story of the camaraderie engendered by sport between players on a team or fellow players of the same sport.  This was not a factor present on the Brooklyn Dodgers between the white team and its single black member in any significant dose.  The opposite was true—teammates were just as nasty as the outside world—until, that is, they realized that having Robinson on their team helped earn them more money.

Blacks were treated differently than whites on the ball field.  Delaney notes how baseball was one of the first sports to erect barriers of racial segregation via unspoken codes to keep blacks out of the major leagues.  During the 1880s, when blacks first started being recruited into the lower leagues, even in those leagues one finds that different aspects of the sport were used to intimidate. Pitchers would throw at their faces, and other forms of physical and verbal abuse were very common.  According to Delaney, this is due to the institutionalization of a “Jim Crow mentality [into] America’s pastime.” Jim Crow refers to the laws requiring racial segregation during the first half of the 20th century.  Jim Crow had profound implications for Robinson’s sports career aspirations.  At one point in his biography, he describes evaluating exit opportunities from college and feeling there was “no real future in athletics” for him—despite how remarkably talented he clearly was (Robinson 36).  He only grants that topic the single line of text in his book, but one can only imagine what it was like as an athlete who had always outperformed his peers throughout his life, and who on campus was known as the university’s most accomplished athlete, to feel that social norms kept him from being able to even begin to contemplate a major league career.