On April 15, 1947, Ed Silverman, a reporter for Sports-Week magazine, took the subway from his apartment, on West Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan, to the Prospect Park stop, in Brooklyn, walked to Empire Boulevard, and crossed the street to Ebbets Field. Silverman, who was born in Jersey City and raised in Queens, was twenty-three years old, and he had been handed a plum assignment from his editor, Marty Berg: cover the Dodgers’ Opening Day. The team had just called up Jackie Robinson, generally recognized to be the first African-American player to make the major leagues. (Although historians have pointed to a couple of players who came before him.) Berg told Silverman that word on the street was there might be riots in the stands if Robinson took the field.
Before heading to Brooklyn that day, Silverman, who, like Berg, is white, checked in with his friend Les Matthews, a columnist at the black-owned Amsterdam News, whom he had met while covering a boxing match. “Les told me there was some substance to the rumors,” Silverman, now ninety-three, recalled by phone from his apartment, in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx. Matthews also told Silverman that “black clergymen had been talking to their congregations, telling them, ‘This is a very critical time for us, because not only is Jackie Robinson being judged, we’re all being judged by how we behave at the ballpark. So we’re asking you, please contain yourselves, act like ladies and gentlemen, wear proper attire, please do not drink or make any derogatory remarks. As Jackie goes, we all go. We’re all going to rise or fall together.’ ”
When Silverman passed through the press entrance and made his way to the stands, he was surprised at how many empty seats he saw. In the end, a little under twenty-six thousand fans showed up, roughly six thousand short of capacity. Silverman’s first thought was that white fans were boycotting the game—more than half of the fans in the crowd were black, he estimated—but it was impossible to say for sure. There had been an outbreak of smallpox in the city, which could have been keeping people away. And Clyde Sukeforth, who was filling in for the Dodgers’ suspended manager, Leo Durocher, hadn’t given any indication whether Robinson would actually play. Neither had the Dodgers’ front office. Most fans, Silverman included, figured that Robinson would make only a token appearance, if any at all. “I deliberately sat in the bleachers, which were predominantly filled with black attendees,” Silverman recalled. “The women were all well coifed. Many wore lovely dresses and light coats. The men were all nicely attired. It was more like going to church than to a ballgame.”
When the P.A. system recited the lineup before the game, Silverman was surprised to hear Jackie Robinson, No. 42, announced as the starting first baseman, batting second. Dodgers fans knew that Robinson had begun taking grounders at first only a week before; they didn’t realize that the team had moved him from his usual position, second base, for fear that the Boston Braves base runners would spike him when sliding into the bag. Besides being at a new position, Robinson would be batting in a key spot against Johnny Sain, who’d pitched twenty-four complete games the previous year, won twenty of them, and threw the game’s nastiest curveball. It seemed the Dodgers were asking a lot of Robinson—maybe too much.
The crowd applauded politely when Robinson’s name was announced, Silverman noted, and did so again when he made a putout at first base. Then, in his first at-bat, Robinson nearly beat out a ground ball to third. As Silverman recalled the play, “It looked like Jackie, at the very worst, had gotten to the base a half step ahead of the ball, or certainly simultaneous with the ball. And the saying goes, ‘Tie goes to the runner.’ Al Barlick was the umpire and he called Robinson out. Jackie wasn’t happy with the call, and he stepped off the bag and started to approach Barlick, and then he stopped. He realized what his fate would be and he just walked off with a sullen look.” Silverman continued, “A couple of immigrant Irishmen were standing not too far from me—you could tell by their very broad brogues. And they were shouting, ‘We was robbed! We was robbed!’ The reaction of those two guys said it all. That one moment had transformed Jackie from a stranger and outsider to a Brooklyn Dodger.”
Trailing 3–2 in the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers rallied. Robinson, with the hustle and fearlessness that defined his career, scored the go-ahead run on a Pete Reiser double. When the game ended, Silverman went to the players’ entrance to catch Robinson leaving the ballpark. Robinson had taken the subway from a Manhattan hotel to the game, but a friend had come to pick him up. As he made his way to the car, fans mobbed him, hoping to shake his hand, or at least get a glimpse of the new Dodger. “There were well over three hundred fans out there waiting for him,” Silverman said. “And I’d say eighty per cent of them were white. It must’ve taken him twenty, twenty-five minutes to work his way to that car. He was signing autographs, and people were slapping him on the back.”
The next day, white-owned newspapers played down the historic nature of the game. The_ Times’ headline read, “Double by Reiser Beats Boston, 5–3.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle opted for “ ‘Old’ Reiser, ‘New’ Hermanski Stars of Dodgers’ Opening Day Triumph.” Newsday offered even less: “Dodgers Win, 5–3.” The black press, on the other hand, put Robinson in front-page headlines, and not only in New York. “Jackie Scores Winning Run; Robbie’s Bunt Turns Tide,” the Pittsburgh Courier declared. “Jackie Sparks Dodgers,” the Baltimore _Afro-American reported. The Chicago Defender was perhaps most on-point, with its banner headline: “Jackie Robinson Opens Door . . . Makes History.”
Since Silverman wrote for a weekly magazine, his article didn’t appear until a few days later. Reprints are long gone, he said, but he remembers writing that he had no doubt Robinson would make it in the majors. It was a day like all other days, he wrote, except that now, in addition to the black faces in the stands, there was one on the field.
Silverman left Sports-Week in 1948; it folded a few years later. He eventually went into radio and television, and won eleven Emmy Awards. He also “got to know Jackie as a human being and saw the courageous role he played as a pioneer in the emerging civil-rights movement,” he said. Over the years, Silverman came to see the historic game he witnessed, and the season or two that followed, as “baseball’s finest hour and its most disgraceful,” as he put it in a reminiscence years later. “Disgraceful because of the price Major League Baseball made Jackie pay in order to ‘integrate’ our so-called national game.” Last year, on the Web site Voice of North Carolina, Silverman wrote an open letter to the M.L.B. commissioner, Rob Manfred, arguing that the league should issue a long-overdue apology for what it forced Robinson and those who came immediately after to endure. As he expected, the letter went unanswered.