So, when the funeral procession began to move through
the streets, there was no telling just how the neighbor-
hoods would respond.
People came out of their apartments. They came out
of their shops and they came off the schoolyards.
Cabdrivers stopped their rides in the middle of the fare.
People stood in doorways and sat on rooftops and leaned
out of windows. They gathered thick along the sidewalks
and they jostled out onto the streets. Men and women.
Old people and young. They wore dress suits and grocery
store aprons and uniforms from their schools. Some
along the route raised their fists in the Black Power
salute as the cars rolled by. Others bowed their heads.
Some called out Jackie’s name, some stood silently and
some put hands above their eyes like a visor, allowing
tears to roll down their cheeks rather than interrupt
the moment to wipe them away. The police estimated
30,000 people along 125th Street, 5,000 at the mouth
of the Triboro Bridge, 2,000 waiting at the graveyard.
There was a time in many of these people’s lives when
Jackie Robinson carried the brightest light of hope.
From the pulpit, Jackson had described Robinson
as “a rock in the water, hitting concentric circles and
ripples of new possibility.” An incoming rock disturbs
the surface as well as the water below, and it rouses,
too, the sediment on the water’s f loor. The smallest and
most measurable indicators—the height and length of a
rippling wave, say—can only suggest the larger impact.
Before 1949, the year Jackie Robinson hit .342 to lead
all batters, no Black player—because of the history of
exclusion—had finished among the top seven hitters in the
National League. In 1972, the NL’s top seven hitters were
Billy Williams, Ralph Garr, Dusty Baker, César Cedeño,
Bob Watson, Al Oliver and Lou Brock.
The condolence letters that arrived at Cascade Road
were another measure, another small start. Wrote
Ralph Abernathy: “Our nation in general and Black
people in particular have lost a pioneer, a cham-
pion....Jackie Robinson belonged not only to the
Brooklyn Dodgers but to all Black and underprivileged
people in America.”
Ira Glasser began his letter, “Dear Mrs. Robinson:...I
thought that perhaps you would like to know—insofar as
I can explain—what it meant in the late forties and early
fifties for a white boy to have a Black man as his hero.”
Aaron sent a telegram. This was one year, five months
and 11 days before he hit Al Downing’s fastball over the
left-field wall in Atlanta. Aaron had gotten his start
playing Negro leagues ball with the Indianapolis Clowns.
“I share with you your grief upon the passing of a great
American. Baseball and the Black athlete are the poorer
because of his death. My own success in baseball has been
in large measure because Jackie Robinson marked the
trail well. May you and your family take consolation in
knowing that he did so much
for so many. —Henry Aaron.”
At Cypress Hills Cemetery,
six miles from the site of the
first base bag at Ebbets Field,
the teammates carried the
casket from the hearse to the
gravesite, and Robinson was
lowered into the earth beside
his son, Jackie Robinson Jr.,
who had died in a single-car crash in 1971 at the age of 24.
Two burials in 16 months. Jackie and Rachel’s son, David,
stood beside the grave, and so did Robinson’s siblings—
Edgar, Mack and Willa Mae all in from Pasadena. Neither
Sharon nor Rachel got out of the car. This scene, Rachel
knew, was more than she needed. She had held Jack as
he lay in the hallway outside their room, and she had
greeted mourners at the funeral home and she had taken
in the eulogy through her sense of disbelief.
She wanted to keep certain memories clear: Jack in his
vibrancy, insistent, wry, purposeful. My dearest Jack, my
giant, Rachel had thought on the morning he fell. Clouds
had now moved in over Brooklyn—“dark clouds” in the
reporter’s words—and the larger group at the cemetery
began to disperse and get into their cars. The loss, Rachel
would say, felt unbearable, although she knew that she
would bear it. She would allow herself to disappear for a
time into grief and then she would emerge. Lifted by her
own implacable strength, buttressed as well by Jack’s,
she would begin to reassemble herself and go on.SPORTS
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Robinson’s old teammates,
along with Russell,
carried the casket at his
funeral in 1972.