49 pages • 1 hour read
Jackie RobinsonI Never Had It Made
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Personal Integrity versus Social Responsibility
Personal integrity might best be described as acting in a way that adheres to the moral and ethical values that one believes in. Social responsibility, on the other hand, is an organization or an individual acting in a way that benefits society at large rather than benefiting the organization or individual. Jackie Robinson’s late career in Major League Baseball and his career in business and activism is unquestionably one in which personal integrity was a major characteristic. Robinson’s historic early career in Major League Baseball, however, was one in which social responsibility was the defining characteristic.
In late 1945, when Branch Rickey met with Robinson about the possibility of using him to break the unwritten rule of baseball’s color line, Rickey let him know that what was at stake if his plan was not a success for his club or a success for Robinson, but rather a success for equality and democracy in baseball. Warning Robinson of what would come his way from the opponents of equality, Rickey told him that those opponents would do anything “to prove to the public that a Negro should not be allowed in the major league” (34). Rickey was, in his own way, asking Robinson to sacrifice his personal integrity for social responsibility, meaning that if he accepted the abuse and just played, the game’s unjust color line would shatter, and other black players would follow.
Rickey’s plan worked to perfection. Robinson accepted unimaginable abuse from fans and opponents, but by his third season in the big leagues, Robinson had his personal integrity back. He would no longer have to turn his back and hold his tongue to injustice and inequality. Robinson speaks to this newfound freedom, arguing that “by 1949 the principle had been established: the major victory won. There were enough blacks on other teams to ensure that American baseball could never again turn its back on minority competitors” (79).
The Continued Fight for Racial Equality
An overarching theme throughout I Never Had It Made is that of the continued fight for racial equality. The fight is a continued one because during the lifetime of Jackie Robinson, significant progress had indeed been made. The grandson of a slave and the son of a sharecropper, Robinson shattered the wall of racial segregation in professional sports and a few years later saw the historic Supreme Court ruling that made segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Despite the gains toward racial equality that occurred in Robinson’s lifetime, the reminders of how much more needed to be done to achieve true equality were always there. Even after he had been named Major League Baseball’s Rookie of the Year, Robinson was still not allowed the same services as his teammates at hotels. Likewise, even though racial segregation in public schools had been ruled unconstitutional, Jim Crow was still very much alive when it came to dining, restrooms, and hotel rooms.
The way in which Robinson transforms from the rookie and second-year baseball player who cautiously accepts injustice to the veteran and then retired player who pushes back against injustice is represented in the way he writes I Never Had It Made. While Robinson’s early chapters discuss various incidents of racial injustice, his tone is not as confident and defiant as it clearly becomes in the latter half of the book when discussing racial equality. This is likely because his willingness to speak out about racial equality in his later life seems to have been entirely altruistic in nature, trying to change things for all African Americans rather than himself. Indeed, this sort of altruism was also a central characteristic of the civil rights movement. Speaking to this idea while reflecting on the influence of Martin Luther King Jr. and his assassination, Robinson argues that “Martin Luther King accomplished much in his lifetime, but Americans still have a long way to go in terms of working toward the beloved society concept for which he lived and died” (216).
The Effect of Racial Integration on Professional Sports
An underlying theme of I Never Had It Made is the effect of racial integration on the competition and business aspects of professional sports. Within only three years of becoming Major League Baseball’s first black ballplayer since the color line was established in the 1880s, Jackie Robinson had been recognized as a Rookie of the Year Award winner, a Most Valuable Player Award winner, and he had led the league in batting average and stolen bases. Without question, he was quickly regarded as one of the league’s top players, as were the handful of other black players who got their chances in the subsequent two years. Although Robinson never overtly makes the claim that the on-field product of big league baseball was deficient without black players, that seems to be the case. Concerning the notion that sports competition in the days prior to racial integration was not the best that it could be, Robinson brings up the fact that black and Latin players were beginning to dominate the game by the early-1970s:
When you look at television today or scan the sports pages, and see how many blacks and Latins are starring in the game, it is almost impossible to conceive of those days, less than twenty-five years ago, when world series champs literally meant white champs (24).
Although not as high-minded as the competition ideal, another aspect that was often overlooked in the days when opposition to integrated sporting events was strongest was what it could do financially for the respective sports and leagues. In regards to baseball, a built-in fan base of black fans already existed, as evidenced by attendance figures for Negro league games throughout the late-1930s and early 40s. Robinson speaks to this a number of times in I Never Had It Made by giving credit to surging black turnout as one of the reasons that his breaking of baseball’s color line was successful. For example, Robinson argues that “this was the first time the black fan market had been exploited, and the black turnout was making it clear the baseball could be made even more profitable if the game became integrated” (47).
By integrating the game, Rickey and Robinson likely had a far greater effect on American history than they ever could have imagined. Not only were there now black players on the field, but also black fans, by the thousands, in the stands. With this sort of racial melding taking place in cities across the nation for the first time, racial integration in places such as schools and restaurants was almost certain to follow. A unique aspect of Robinson’s approach in writing I Never Had It Made is his conciliatory nature while also bluntly representing the bitterness that he felt because of the racial abuse that he was subjected to. Recognizing that Robinson had support not only from black fans and young fans, but also from “people of all races and faiths and in all parts of this country, people who couldn’t care less about [his] race” (xxiv) was likely eye-opening to the baseball establishment and politicians.
