Schram: A gold medal respite from hate

Robinson, of course, became legendary for the courage he demonstrated in the face of the hate-filled protests and assassination threats in 1947 while breaking baseball’s color line. Robinson also went on to become a leading civil rights advocate the rest of his life.

In 2005, Robinson was awarded, posthumously, the Congressional Gold Medal, an honor first presented to George Washington. The FBI’s once-secret files quoted numerous vile threats against Robinson’s life in 1947. Others showed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was operating on the notion that anti-segregation efforts were linked to pro-communism and thus subversive. One memo reported Robinson was New York chairman of United Negro and Allied Veterans of America, calling it a “communist front” that was seeking “to provoke racial friction.”

Jimmy Erskine, the fourth child of Betty and Carl Erskine, was born with Down syndrome, after Erskine’s and Robinson’s baseball careers ended. Betty and Carl rejected doctors’ suggestions that Jimmy should be institutionalized and raised him at home, in Anderson, Ind.

Carl would later say, in speeches, that he had two best friends — Jackie and Jimmy. And Jimmy would later win numerous gold medals in the Special Olympics, an effort Carl worked extensively to support.

In 2005, the year Robinson’s widow, Rachel, accepted her husband’s Congressional Gold Medal in a ceremony beneath the Capitol Dome, Carl Erskine wrote a warm, powerful, little book, “What I Learned from Jackie Robinson,” published by McGraw Hill. Erskine dedicated the book to Rachel Robinson and his own wife, Betty. Jackie suffered from heart disease and diabetes and died young, at just 53, in 1972. Jimmy, 63, is now retired from his career job at Applebee’s.

“Jackie and Jimmy, because of tradition, superstition, ignorance, fear, and arrogance, felt the bitterness of rejection,” Erskine writes. Also: “Jackie helped me to encourage other parents whose children had birth defects or physical disabilities or diseases. Jackie had his Rookie of the Year and his Hall of Fame plaque, and my Jimmy went on to earn gold medal after gold medal in the Special Olympics. I wish Jackie had lived to see those days because Jackie had a lot to do with Jim’s success.”

EPILOGUE: During spring training in 1949, the Dodgers arrived for an exhibition game in Atlanta, where racial segregation was the law. The Ku Klux Klan was picketing outside the minor league stadium. In the clubhouse before the game, Dodger manager Burt Shotton read aloud to the team a letter threatening Robinson: “Take the field and you’re going to be shot!”

The players sat in silence — until outfielder Gene Hermanski broke tension with a joke that signaled a serious team unity: “Why don’t we all wear number 42? Then the nut won’t know who to shoot at?”

“Robinson thought that was the topper of them all,” Erskine wrote. Now, indeed, that is the uniform of the day for all of Major League Baseball on Jackie Robinson Day.