Jackie Robinson Day, April 15, 2013

I was asked to write this poem and read it at the Jackie Robinson, Race, Sport and the American Dream conference, held at LIU Brooklyn in 1997 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's major league debut.  (See my entry, You'll Play Better if You're Clean for more on that.)

 A Railroad Stop in Syracuse

Syracuse –
a stop on the Underground Railroad
for slaves of the mid 1800s South,
escapees from the plantations
that raised a white crop – the cotton they picked,
the symbol of slavery.

They sneaked off,
and on their way north to Canada, and freedom,
they might spend a night hidden in Syracuse.

Jackie Robinson arrived there in 1946
on the train from Montreal where he worked on
Mr. Branch Rickey’s farm,
a farm that also raised a white crop –
white ballplayers –
to send south to Brooklyn.

But Jackie was following the opposite route to escape his slavery,
the slavery of the mid 1900s that kept the black man
off the white man’s land,
off the green grass and rich dirt
of his athletic plantations.

When he left that train from Montreal,
on his ride from slavery,
that white man’s train with its

 black porters and black conductors 

and white engineer,
and stepped into the bright sunlight
and the harsh glare of the public eye
he was no longer just another black man
aspiring to a white man’s job.

He was a man opening a door that could not be closed,

accompanied by every man and woman and child

who had ever ridden that other railroad –

fellow passengers to freedom.

And he was anything but hidden
that first game in Syracuse,
a lone black man
against a white background.

 

 

© 1996

Hermon R. Card