Betty Shabazz. Ed Sullivan. Bayard Rustin. Beyond the
famous people, and the grieving family, and the many
who had known Robinson in his professional lives, the
strength of the assembly came as well from the many
who had never met Robinson, but whose lives he had
also changed. A high school teacher from New Jersey.
Off-duty policemen. A barber who’d shut down his shop
through the middle of the day. Reporters would comment
on the interracial makeup of the funeral gathering, call-
ing it a melting pot.
Ira Glasser was 34 years old and the executive director
of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and he still had his
Brooklyn boyhood running through him. He’d come to
the funeral with an NYCLU
lawyer, Alan Levine, who had
been weaned on the same
team and the same man. “I
knew that I owed a lot of the
way I approached the world—
what to do with my sense of
right and wrong—to having
seen Jackie Robinson play,”
Glasser said. Fact is, the
Riverside Church that day
was lousy with Dodgers fans.
A series of ministers bade Robinson farewell that
afternoon—Wyatt Tee Walker read from Corinthians—and
a 60-voice choir delivered “Lift Every Voice and Sing,”
and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had been on the balcony
of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968, gave the formal
eulogy. “Today we must balance the tears of sorrow with
the tears of joy,” Jackson began. “Mix the bitter with the
sweet. Death and life.”
The pews were packed. People stood in the outer aisles,
in the hallways and in the open bays. The silence of the
transfixed filled the great church as Jackson paused
between his opening phrases. “When Jackie took the
field, something reminded us of our birthright to be
free,” Jackson said. And he added: “He didn’t integrate
baseball for himself. He infiltrated baseball for all of us,
seeking and looking for more oxygen for Black survival,
and looking for new possibility.” By the end of the eulogy,
a half-hour long, the silence had yielded to responses from
the crowd, cries of Hallelujah! Amen! and You’re right!
that echoed off the great stone walls. “Jackie’s body,” said
Jackson, “was a temple of God, an instrument of peace.”
Afterward, on the streets outside, crowds gathered
around the ballplayers: Ernie Banks, Willie Stargell,
Elston Howard, Monte Irvin, Vida Blue, Campy, Oisk.
Also Henry Aaron, who was then 41 home runs shy of
Babe Ruth. “Most of the Black players from Jackie’s
day were at the funeral,” Aaron would say. “But I wasappalled by how few of the younger players showed up
to pay him tribute.”
For all the love and reverence at the funeral, you
couldn’t anticipate what the reception would be once the
hearse and the trailing cars pulled away from the
Riverside Church and began traveling through Harlem,
and then through Bedford-Stuyvesant and to the cem-
etery in Brooklyn. Robinson had never found firm
footing with the newer wave of the movement. He’d
clashed with Malcolm X and differed sharply with
Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a beloved son in Harlem.
Robinson once chastised Black protesters outside the
Apollo Theater. More to the point, in recent years,
Robinson’s voice had not resonated so widely as it once
had. “We knew Jackie Robinson wrote columns for
the Black newspapers,” says the scholar and historian
Gerald Early, who was 20 years old in 1972. “But we
didn’t necessarily read them. He was my father’s hero.”58
“JACKIE’S BODY,” SAID JACKSON IN HIS
EULOGY AT ROBINSON’S FUNERA L ,“WAS A TEMPLE OF GOD,
AN INSTRUMENT OF PEACE.”BE
TT
MANN/GETTY^ IMAG
ESJACKIE ROBINSON