The Story of How Jackie Robinson Was Fired From a Job for Being a Die-Hard Republican

Brad Fox | April 16, 2015
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April 15 was the anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s historic entry into professional baseball and all major leaguers wore the number 42 in honor of Jackie Robinson Day.

Jackie Robinson was more than just one of the best baseball players - he was also a national champion long-jumper, league champion collegiate basketball scorer, and  All-American halfback at UCLA.

If you didn’t know, Jackie Robinson was a bit more complicated than that, as he was also a writer, political campaigner (For Rockefeller), and passionate civil rights activist, and business man.

He was also pro-business, as he wrote in an essay titled, I Never Had Made It:

“I believed blacks ought to become producers, manufacturers, developers, and creators of businesses, providers of jobs.  For too long we had been spending much too much money on liquor while we owned too few liquor stores and were not even manufacturing it. We talked about not having capital, but we needed to learn to take a chance, to be daring, to pool capital, to organize our buy power so that the millions we spent did not leave our communities to be stacked up in the downtown banks.”

Mr. Robinson was impressed by Nelson Rockefeller’s charitable giving to black education programs and charities as well as his deep admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. (a Republican). He was also the first black columnist for a major non-black newspaper, The New York Post, which fired him for supporting Nixon. The civil rights historian Michael Long wrote the following in his recent book, Beyond Home Plate:Jackie Robinson On Life After Baseball, and tried to explain how Jackie could have belonged to the Republican Party:

“It may seem strange to us now that Robinson found a home in the Post, but at this point in history the newspaper was known for its liberalism. It was simply impossible to find the politically conservative opinions that are so characteristic of its op-ed pages today. And as a liberal paper, the Post had given Robinson, and larger civil rights issues, favorable coverage through the years; it was one of the few racially progressive media outlets of its time.”

 Reason.com writes:

“On November 4, 1960—Election Day—Post Editor James Wechsler informed Robinson that he and Dorothy Schiff had decided not to resume his column. (Robinson had taken a leave of absence to serve on Richard Nixon's campaign team in September 1960.) Wechsler, a Kennedy supporter, apparently felt that Robinson's pro-Nixon sentiments had led to unfair reporting during the presidential campaign[.]"

Jackie's responded with this, published in the New York Amsterdam News:

"No one will ever convince me that the Post acted in an honest manner. I believe the simple truth is that they became somewhat alarmed when they realized that I really meant to write what I believed. There is a peculiar parallel between some of our great Northern "liberals" and some of our outstanding Southern liberals.

Some of the people in both classes share the deep-seated convictions that only their convictions can possibly be the right ones. They both inevitably say the same thing: "We know the Negro and what is best for him."

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