By the 1950s, Brotherhood Week prioritized racial as well as inter-religious friendship. But racial tension grew in Flatbush and other Brooklyn neighborhoods as a great migration from the rural South brought poor African Americans to New York. Redlining (denying loans or jobs in a specific areas) and blockbusting (when businesses convinced white homeowners to sell their houses at lower prices because of incoming races to neighborhoods that were previously segregated) were common.
Photograph, “Jackie Robinson in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.” U.S. Information Agency.
Against that background, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ addition of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in Major League Baseball, was all the more dramatic. In 1947, just months before Jackie Robinson joined the baseball team, athlete and sports executive Frank Shaughnessy explained that despite not having much racial prejudice, he still had to be convinced that adding Robinson to the Dodgers’ minor league Montreal baseball team the year before was a good idea.[i] Racism and racial segregation were still evident at the time. Novelist Alan Lelchuk, who grew up watching the Dodgers in his elementary school years, remarks that they were a team of “comedy and futility…[and with the] acceptance of Robinson and then other black players…[it] stood for aspirations at a time when the people of the city were ready for a future of rightness.”[ii] Brooklyn’s admission of an African American man suggests the growth in cultural diversity, although some very deep racial divisions were beginning to form in that time.
Lobby card for The Jackie Robinson Story, 1950, with Minor Watson (left, playing Dodgers president Branch Rickey) and Robinson
Adding to this was The Jackie Robinson Story, a movie released in 1950 about the life of Robinson, starring Robinson himself. This movie tells us several things about Flatbush at the time: first, the struggle Robinson underwent tells us about the racial barriers that he had to break through, as the movie depicts how several other members of the Dodgers had even signed a petition for him not to be on the team. The very reception and success of this movie demonstrates just how popular Robinson was in breaking down those barriers—a whole movie centering around one person had become a major biographical drama of the time. People were excited to learn more about their beloved baseball player, and excited to see him excel in acting in addition to his athletic excellence. However, as much as The Jackie Robinson Story tells about the racial disparities at the time, the racism is not shown in its entirety. The more recent film 42 (2013), depicts the life of Robinson and his emotional responses to the racism and distress he faced.[iii]
[i] Tommy Holmes, “Scatter Shot at the Sports Scene,” Brooklyn Eagle, February 3, 1947. http://bklyn.newspapers.com/.
[ii] Myrna Frommer and Harvey Frommer, It Happened in Brooklyn: An Oral History of Growing up in the Borough in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 15.
[iii] Crystal Finlay, ““42” Compared to the “Jackie Robinson Story” of 1950,” The Movie Pot, April 13, 2013, http://mymoviepot.com/2013/04/13/42-compared-to-the-jackie-robinson-story-of-1950-2/.
