“My Dear Mr. President”: Jackie Robinson and Dwight Eisenhower

As president, Dwight Eisenhower received letters from citizens, officials and famous figures alike. In 1957 and again in 1958 one came from Jackie Robinson, who a decade earlier had broken Major League Baseball's color barrier. For Robinson, writing to the president was simply exercising his rights as an American — the same sense of citizenship and belonging that led him to put on a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947 and change history.

Parallel lives, different Americas

Both men rose from modest beginnings, loved sports and competition — as a boy, Eisenhower dreamed of playing professional baseball — and followed similar patterns. But their experiences show the gulf between Black and white America in the twentieth century.

• When Eisenhower was two, his family moved from Texas to Kansas for a better life. When Robinson was two, his mother moved her children from Georgia to California — for a better life, and to escape Jim Crow and lynching.
• In World War II Eisenhower became Supreme Allied Commander and one of the most admired men in the world. Lieutenant Jackie Robinson was court-martialled for refusing to move to the back of a segregated Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas.

Both shaped the civil rights movement. Eisenhower, president in a time of great change, signed legislation and used executive power to enforce the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Robinson's impact came through culture, breaking decades-old barriers in baseball and giving new life to the struggle for civil rights.

A handshake

Robinson first met Eisenhower in November 1953, at a Washington dinner for the 40th anniversary of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, where the president gave a keynote carried live by the four television networks. Robinson was meant to greet him on the dais with other guests but was delayed; by the time he stood, Eisenhower was returning to his seat — and, seeing him, crossed the room to shake his hand. Robinson called it one of the great thrills of his life, marvelled to a reporter that the president had come halfway across a room to greet him, and wrote afterwards to thank him for the warmth of that handshake. Having met Vice President Richard Nixon the year before, Robinson seemed comfortable with the Republicans, and in 1956 he endorsed Eisenhower.

Growing impatience

By 1957 Robinson had retired from baseball, become a vice president of the Chock Full o'Nuts company, and was speaking out on civil rights. After Black churches were bombed in Montgomery, Alabama, he publicly urged Eisenhower to show that the government would not tolerate such attacks. He still thought Ike a decent man but was frustrated by his slow pace. That spring presidential aide Maxwell Rabb brought him to the White House; after talking with the president, with Joe E. Brown also present, Robinson wrote that he now understood Eisenhower's thinking on race relations much better.

Jackie Robinson and President Eisenhower in the Oval Office, 1957. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library.

That summer a civil rights bill to protect Black Americans' voting rights — stripped away by Jim Crow laws and Southern legislatures — moved through Congress, and Southern opposition weakened it badly. On August 13, 1957, Robinson telegraphed E. Frederic Morrow, the first African American in an executive post at the White House. He and his friends did not agree that half a loaf was better than none, he wrote; having waited this long for a meaningful bill, they could wait a little longer unless the House strengthened it — and he asked Eisenhower to veto it. Weeks later Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first significant civil rights law since Reconstruction.

Events then turned from legislation to executive action. In September Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, defying the Supreme Court, used the state National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Little Rock's Central High School. Eisenhower, reluctant to use troops at home but bound as chief executive and commander in chief to enforce the law, sent the 101st Airborne — the division he had once sent into Normandy. Robinson welcomed it, but still wanted more.

The 1958 letter

In the spring of 1958 Eisenhower told a Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders that they must have patience. Robinson, in the audience, wrote to him the next day. In summary, his letter said:

• that on hearing the word patience he had wanted to stand up and protest, "Oh no! Not again";
• that Black Americans had been the most patient of all people, and could not keep their self-respect while waiting indefinitely for hearts to change;
• that 17 million Black Americans wanted now the rights other Americans had won long ago;
• that by constantly urging forbearance, the president unwittingly crushed their spirit and encouraged segregationists like Faubus, whose real aim was delay, not integration;
• and that a clear statement, backed by action like his at Little Rock, would show the nation meant to secure Black Americans' constitutional rights soon.

To Robinson and many others, Eisenhower remained far too moderate. He had real achievements, but believed there were limits to what government could do to end segregation and discrimination; Robinson's letter voiced a wider impatience with that view.

Later years

Robinson backed the Republican ticket again in 1960, partly out of regard for Nixon, but grew increasingly frustrated with moderate stands on civil rights, including congressional opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He chaired the NAACP's million-dollar Freedom Fund drive in 1957, joined the 1963 March on Washington, founded the Freedom National Bank in Harlem in 1964 to support Black-owned businesses, and started a construction company in 1970 to build low-income housing. He once told the young Hank Aaron that the game was great, but what you do after your career matters most.

Diabetes increasingly weakened him in the early 1970s. His last public appearance was on October 15, 1972, throwing out the first pitch at Game 2 of the World Series. Accepting a plaque for the 25th anniversary of his breakthrough, he said he would be far prouder the day he saw a Black manager in the third-base coaching box. He died nine days later, on October 24, 1972. Two years afterwards the Cleveland Indians hired Frank Robinson as Major League Baseball's first African American manager.

Corrected: the article spells the presidential aide's name "Maxwell Raab"; he was Maxwell Rabb.

Sources

• National Park Service, Eisenhower National Historic Site, "My Dear Mr. President": Jackie Robinson and Dwight Eisenhower — Robinson's letters and remarks paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article draws on David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice (2007); Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson (1997); Jackie Robinson, I Never Had It Made (1972); and Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment (1983).