“Kings and Pawns:
Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America”
The author: Howard Bryant
The details: Mariner Books/HarperCollins, 320 pages, $32, released Jan. 20, ’26
The links: Publisher site, author website, Bookshop.org
“Royal Treatment:
Jackie Robinson, Montreal,
and the Breaking of Baseball’s Color Barrier”
The author: Sean J. McLaughlin
The details: University of Nebraska Press, 296 pages, $36.95, released April 1, ’26
The links: Publishers website, Bookshop.org
A Jack Robinson Day preamble
Only a year ago, as we rounded up the book reviews for Jack Robinson MLB Appreciation Day — or however they’re selling it — the disgust over crude governmental redaction of all things DEI was front and center. It may seem like such a long time has passed. But it’s still lingering.
What would Jack Robinson had done if he was invited with the Dodgers’ championship team to be vetted in the Trump White House? What would his reaction be if he saw that a bio on his World War II military requirement that’s heralding him on the U.S. Department of Defense’s website had been taken down “by mistake” during a Trump-mandated cleansing history.
What could the Dodgers players do, as they were being “honored” for their 2024 World Series triumph, in protest to mark the occasion — all wear No. 42 jerseys? Give Trump a 42 jersey?
It was all the wishy-washy white washing that was abhorrent, and called out.
When the Dodgers were recently in DC-adjacent territory over the Easter weekend to face the Washington Nationals, they said “a scheduling conflict” precluded them from making a Trump/Easter Egg roll re-visit to mark their 2025 title. Maybe they’ll reconnect sometime later in the season when some of the push back dies down. Hopefully not.
Don’t let those triggering memories of ’25 dissipate now that ’26 has splashed down on us.
Don’t forget how writer Craig Calcaterra pointed out that the MLB continues to scrub the word “diversity” from what was once its “Diversity and Inclusion” web link, and that “the Trump regime remains a shitty, segregationist enterprise that is unworthy of anyone’s respect or obeisance and Major League Baseball utterly lacks a spine.”
Peter Drier, a professor of politics and urban policy at Occidental College and author of “Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America,” provides a reminder this week in a piece for TalkingPointsMemo.com that demands Jackie Robinson Day should be “a wake-up call, not a feel-good moment.” Frequent Robinson topic author Chris Lamb also doesn’t want us to forget the impact of Rachel Robinson, who will turn 104 this summer and outlived her husband by 50 years. They married 80 years ago.
That is, in a very interesting way, directly conflicting with how Robinson is adored in the new film, “Baseball: Beyond Belief.”
The Paulist Productions film, after a short theatrical run, and with some irony, was embraced by Fox to put it onto its Easter Day programming slate. It is an extension of the book by John Sexton, “Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game,” who teaches a class by that same name at New York University. Sexton, a Catholic, puts into words all the connections he makes between baseball and faith-based entities, and many have noticed.
Joe Price could be identified these days as is the Executive Director of the Baseball Reliquary, the non-profit focused on the cultural history of baseball, which has an annual Shrine of the Eternals election. He is also co-director for the Institute for Baseball Studies at Whittier College, which houses the Reliquary’s research archives. For the film’s purposes, his status as a professor emeritus of religious studies at Whittier College, holding a doctorate in theology and culture, lends him the gravitas to say things in the film such as: “Dodger Stadium might be a sacred place depending on how much you have to pay for parking.”
Robinson and sainthood are discussed by Price because “saints are doing the work of God in ordinary ways.”
Sexton is shown in his classroom explaining to students how the April 15 Jackie Robinson Day is “set apart the same way Easter is set apart, the same way Passover is set apart” by religious followers. Willie Alfonso, one of the New York Yankees chaplains, says “God was using (Robinson) as the catalyst to break down this barrier” of MLB discrimination. A rabbi in the film explains how Jews “took on Jackie Robinson as their hero — to them, if Jackie Robinson could be a Brooklyn Dodger, maybe Jews could be acceptable (in America) too.” Baseball broadcaster Chip Caray says the grace by which Robinson made it through his career “was somewhat Christ-like. Think about the abuse that he took. Could you imagine someone of this generation going through that today? People today cry when they get a bad tweet. … Definitely a saint, maybe numero uno.”
David Robinson, Jackie and Rachel’s youngest son, explains how his father lived a life “that could be seen as a model and as an obligation to follow … he showed examples of leading with action.” But as for sainthood? Jackie Robinson, a lifelong Methodist, as was Branch Rickey, and grew up attending Scott Methodist Church in Pasadena and later in life belonged to a Congregational/United Church of Christ church in Connecticut, “would absolutely refuse the term,” said David. “But he was striving to lead a good life.”
The Dodgers are giving away a new version of a Robinson 42 jersey to honor the day. ESPN has national coverage, bringing out Joe Buck back to the baseball booth with Doug Glanville as his analyst. MLB has a new “We Are Jackie” campaign for social media, tying it somehow to the country’s 250th birthday.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts will take his players, as well as members of the visiting New York Mets, out to the center field plaza where the Robinson statue is displayed for another teachable moment/video capture for social media content. This time with Robinson’s grandchildren Sonya Pankey Robinson and Ayo Robinson, plus and Negro League Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick.
UCLA’s No. 1-ranked baseball team also broke out new retro jerseys this week to honor Robinson. The first night the Bruins wore them, the were shutout for the first time this season, by UC Santa Barbara on Tuesday night, 4-0, ending a 27-game win streak, falling to 33-3. On Jackie Robinson Field in Westwood.
So we wonder again: How does this all uniformly resonate in a 2026 setting?
A review in 90 feet or less
The newest machinations that connect and correlate well with the current interpretation of all matters Jack Robinson:
== In Bryant’s “Kings and Pawns,” the author has explained on social media about how the title reflects not just his love of chess but a realization that “each Black entity in the story was accused — often by each other — of being manipulated either by a foreign government, or their own” as they tries to traverse the politics of the day aside from their main jobs as athlete and actor.
The two events Bryant focuses on:
= A July 1949 House Un-American Activities Committee meeting convened to smear and derail the career of Paul Robeson, a great All-American football player at Rutgers in 1917 and ’18 who played pro ball and then made a career in the theater as an actor and singer, but was also true to his ideological compass and social justice activism in the 1930s and ’40s. It was easy to label him as dangerous and subversive by the FBI. Robinson had been recruited to testify against him.
= A June 1956 Robeson battle with the HUAC over it prohibiting him from leaving the United States, with Robinson again being called to testify at the hearings.
Bryant writes: The Cold War resembled a chess match, and everchanging cast of kings and pawns. The United States and Soviet Union fought for control of the chessboard, which was to say, the world. Robinson, Robeson and (NAACP founder and author W.E.B.) Du Bois had been kings, crowned by the Black community who idolized them, but who were the pawns? Robeson supporters believed it was Robinson, allowing himself to be used by HUAC that July day in 1949, a champion to the segregationists who would not shake his hand. The NAACP, and much of the country, believed it was Robeson, the former for setting back Black progress by conflating civil rights with communism, the mortal enemy of his country — American were were currently fighting communists in the unforgiving mountains of Korea. Robeson and Du Bois suspected it was the entire Black leadership itself, the Walter Whites and Roy Wilkinses, who appeased the very government agencies — Hoover’s FBI and the State Department among others — that were also surveilling them, did not trust them and would, in the very near future, accuse them of the same subversiveness that was destroying Robeson’s livelihood. The furious Malcolm X saw Black America as the pawn, constantly willing to be used by their country in exchange for an acceptance from whites as equals that would never come.
Heavy stuff, and heavy content, asking the readers to do a lot of heavy lifting. What are we often missing here?
Doreen St. Félix points out in her review of the book for The New Yorker:
“The narrative that increasingly takes shape, in our minds, as we read ‘Kings and Pawns’ is that of a fratricide — one that is particularly captivating, because the ‘brothers’ in question did not meet at any point during the overlapping course of their two extraordinary lives. But it’s us, the appalled readers, who are doing most of that projecting, and imposing on this story the logic of a modern-day pop-culture feud. … The fastidiousness of (Bryant’s) elastic text does little to allay those who are likely to become inflamed. (Bryant) is a serious and engaging sportswriter who has published eleven books, many of them fuelled by his ambition to disturb the stubborn and déclassé jingoism that still sustains the subject he loves — baseball, the American game.
“He leans on a labored metaphor here: ‘Through countless published biographies over several decades, Robinson’s 1949 testimony against Robeson on Capitol Hill had long sat in plain sight, explored in only a page or two or usually by a single sentence—Jackie Robinson testified against Paul Robeson—an exposed root on the beaten path of the story of baseball integration.’ The “root” grabs and tugs Bryant down into a swamp of disinformation, hero worship, groupthink, xenophobia, daddy issues, and dark bargaining. The book is a little like a thriller, following Bryant as he lances a Red Scare factoid, which spills out on him its substance.”
For Bryant, tackling this important moment in time is hardly a surprise, or a stretch. It’s also a given that his text is rich, ripe and, at times, a challenge to navigate, but that is a style we’ve already become accustomed to from “Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original” (Mariner Books, 2022), “Full Dissidence: Notes From an Uneven Playing Field” (Beacon Press, 2020), “The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America and the Politics of Patriotism” (Beacon Press, 2018), “The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron” (Pantheon, 2010) and “Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston” (Routledge 2002), plus his weekly appearance on NPR’s Weekend Edition.
It is important to note that Bryant, in sizing up Robinson for a newer generation of historians, wasn’t someone who embraced having to be involved in the civil rights movement because he had “to live within the deferential parameters of how an athlete was expected to speak,” especially him, for all he did.
Also it is enlightening that Bryant recounts an interview Al Cohn of Newsday did with Rachel Robinson in October of 1976, almost a year after her husband’s passing, where she talked about his civil rights leadership role. She admitted there were “two major mistakes that Jack made” in this arena. “He regretted them very much .. He didn’t think he did wrong things when he was doing them. But his judgment changed as time went on. … (One of the mistakes) was his statement against Paul Robeson and his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. I think we got some bad advice, and we didn’t fully understand the committee … When Jack was asked to testify, he conferred with Mr. Rickey and with black leaders who were heads of organizations. Jack was at that time very patriotic — his country right-or-wrong. … We came out of conservative families that were afraid of communism. … He got misused.”
Bryant can put this into the context of current events and accept that no longer should Robeson and Robinson been viewed as adversaries, but as manipulated minority leaders thrown into a public square and expected to say whatever they had to for survival and acceptance in their world.
“The shock of the Trump administration’s assault on the arts and universities, its immigration and visa restrictions, and domestic attacks on citizenship may feel unprecedented because many of today’s generation have no firsthand memory of the first half of Cold War and cannot envision Americans comfortable with the police-state tactics, but what is past is prologue: Trump is merely re-instituting the playbook of the McCarthy 1950s, the time of Robeson and Robinson, American versions of authoritarianism.”
== McLaughlin’s “Royal Treatment” first should be commended for its brilliant commission of a Gary Cieradkowski illustration that fits the occasion.
Recounting Robinson’s time playing Triple A ball in Montreal — the year after he signed his contract with the Dodgers and a way for him to get integrated in a pro baseball world for one season before his MLB arrival in Brooklyn — might have already been presented well enough in Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal from the 2013 film “42.”
Robinson actually wore No. 9 that season with the Royals, when he led the International League with a team-record .349 average as well as a .468 on-base percentage, and tied for the lead with 113 runs while stealing 40 bases. It wasn’t enough to win league MVP (it went to Baltimore first baseman Eddie Robinson — .318, 34 homers, 128 RBIs).
But there was a lingering question as the season went on: What would prevent the Dodgers from promoting Robinson to the big-leagues during that ’46 season rather than wait until the start of the ’47 season?
“For perfectly understandable reasons, there was no bigger fear in the stands of Delorimier Stadium (in Montreal) in the late summer of 1946 than the one posed from above in Brooklyn. Would (GM Branch) Rickey rob the Royals of their greatest hero ever to save the Dodgers? How could he not?”
The Royals had wrapped up their league title with a 71-36 record by August 1, 14 games up and “Royals fans were becoming quite accustomed to (Robinson’s) heroics and had no desire to share him with Brooklyn just yet.” They had the Junior World Series to look forward to, and the last Canadian team to win that was Toronto in 1926.
“Rickey would have done considerable damage to his relationship with the club,” McLaughin writes, “if he exercised his right to pluck Robinson away for its own playoff run. Would this be enough to resist tempations?”
The Dodgers would tie St. Louis for the National League title, but then lose a best-of-three playoff for the right to face Boston in the World Series. What if Robinson played that last month?
On Aug. 10, the Dodgers had traveling secretary Hal Parrot announce in Brooklyn that Robinson would stay in Montreal. Even though the Dodgers could have used help at first base and third base for Leo Durocher’s lineup.
“This was nowhere hear enough to satisfy the conspiratorially minded north of the boarder,” McLauglin wrote. “Such a statement would have carried more weight coming from Rickey himself, or Rickey Jr., the Dodgers’ farm director, rather than a potentially disavowable former sportswriter turned PR man.”
Maybe there was concerns Robinson, who had moved from shortstop already to second base, wouldn’t do well with another position switch — he would eventually start 151 games at first in his rookie season with Brooklyn. Robinson also had some back ailments that kept him out at times in the Montreal lineup and a doctor had “advised him to step away from baseball for ten days to calm his nerves (to the approval of) Rachel Robinson,” but Jack only missed one day.
“Rickey ultimately concluded he made too big an investment in Robinson, both as a player and a broader change agent in American culture, to rush the Great Experiment, which had been planned and executed methodically up to this point,” McLaughlin concluded. “If Robinson were white, it is nearly unimaginable to think that he would not have gone up to Brooklyn mid-season. Reality being what it was, Royals fans could breathe easy and Dodgers fans would have to wait another year.”
Robinson helped Montreal outlast Louisville in six games for the Junior World Series title and the love of the fans poured out for him before and after the game as they serenaded him with song and appreciation.
It led to the famous words by Sam Maltin, a reporter from the Pittsburgh Courier, who not only wrote that Robinson, in his opinion, was “the most popular athlete ever to wear a Montreal athletic uniform,” but as fans swarmed Robinson afterward, Maltin famously wrote that it was “probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on the mind.” He added, as McLaughlin noted in his book, that the group of Louisville fans who came to the game saw “a lesson of goodwill among men. That it’s the man and not his color, race or creed. They couldn’t fail to tell others down South of the ‘riots,’ the chasing of a Negro — not because of hate but because of love.”
A message that future Dodgers teammate and Louisville native Pee Wee Reese also took to heart.
More to explore:
== Maybe it’s also worth nothing that today marks the 120th anniversary of the first Japanese professional baseball game, by a team of barnstormers in Kansas — thanks for the heads up by Robert Fitts.
== University of Nebraska Press, in honor of Jackie Robinson Day, offers “The Royal Treatment” at a special 40 percent discount (down to $22.17 from its cover price) through May 31 on its website. Use the promo code 6AS26
== In the new book, “American Sportswriters: A Biographical Dictionary,” by Jerry Roberts (McFarland, 652 pages, $145), the entry for Bryant includes: “Bryant’s books are incisive, taking on large issues in no uncertain terms, exposing the rot behind the scenes in an even-handed way. Saying Boston is a racist town, particularly regarding sports and sportswriters, is not a new issue. But Bryant went a step further and put some blame on an icon of the trade: ‘Influential Globe sports columnist Will McDonough sees race in Boston as a media creation, a topic alive only because the Red Sox haven’t won a championship,’ Bryant wrote in ‘Shut Out” in 2002. ‘It’s a viewpoint that is immediately offensive because he is not Black and thus cannot relate to the tremendous emotional distance that African Americans have felt from Boston.”
== Recent review posts of Robinson books to align with Jackie Robinson Day/April 15 in this annual series include:
= 2025: “Jim Gilliam: The Forgotten Dodger” by Steve Dittmann; “Play Harder: The Triumph of
Black Baseball in America,” by Gerald Early, “They Changed the Game: 50 Stories
and Illustrations Celebrating Creativity in Sports,” and “Dream Merchant of the Perfect Game:
The Life and Legacy of Frank ‘Doc’ Sykes.”
= 2024: “Under Jackie’s Shadow: Voices of Black Minor Leaguers Baseball Left Behind” by Mitchell Nathanson
= 2023: “Strength for the Fight: The Life and Faith of Jackie Robinson” by Gary Scott Smith, “Call Him Jack: The Story of Jackie Robinson, Black Freedom Fighter,” by Michael G. Long
= 2022: “True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson” by Kostya Kennedy, “Not an Easy Tale to Tell: Jackie Robinson on the Page, Stage and Screen,” by SABR
= 2021: “42 Today: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy” by Michael G. Long, “Jackie: Perspectives on 42″ by SABR
= 2020: “The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson: The Baseball Legend’s Battle For Civil Rights during World War II” by Lt. Col. Michael Lee Lanning
= 2019: “Reclaiming 42: Public Memory and the Reframing of Jackie Robinson’s Radical Legacy” by David Naze, “A Fine Team Man: Jackie Robinson and the Lives He Touched,” and “Black Baseball, 1858-1900: A Comprehensive Record of Teams, Players, Managers, Owners and Umpries,” by James E. Brunson III
= 2018: “Singles and Smiles: How Artie Wilson Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier” by Gaylon H. White
== One final curious discovery with “Kings and Pawns”: In the acknowledgements, Bryant credits the “tireless research and watchful of eye of Brooks Melchoir” for making the book happen. “With precious few possible exceptions, I cannot think of a person in the country who has devoted more personal time to the story of Jackie Robinson, especially his early, pre-major league years. For the past three years, Brooks has worked on making sure this project was afforded the benefit of every magazine article, newspaper story, video clip, cartoon and photograph of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson. Every author should have such an ally and friend.”
Melchoir could be the subject of a Bryant book, if he so desires. The former SportsByBrooks.com blogger disappeared between 2013 and 2018 after becoming so ubiquious online, and few are apt to explain why. Only Jeff Pearlman seems to have known as much to write about it, and then not particularly make clear what happened. Even when one asks him about it. But now Melchoir is back, and has Bryant’s back? Well, OK then …
More reviewers and interviews to access:
== The PBS News Hour interview with Bryant includes a transcript of the segment at this link.
== Bryant joins Bomani Jones for his “The Right Time” podcast:
== Reviews about “Kings and Pawns” from DemocracyNow.com, Kirkus review, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and an excerpt from the Jackie Robinson Foundation website, where a bio of Bryant exists on the organization’s website as well.
These are also out there we have yet to find and review:
“Opening the Door for Jackie: The Untold Story of Baseball’s Integration,” by Keith Evan Crook (McFarland, 297 pages, $49.95, released Nov. 26, ’25).
Leslie A. Heaphy, author, “The Negro Leagues, 1869–1960,” offers a blurb: “You may think you know the story of Robinson and Rickey and the integration of the baseball, but author Keith Crook provides a more extensive story. Rickey plays a role but as we read so did many others. Crook places Robinson’s signing in the much deeper context of New York politics and law in 1945. What he has produced is a rich story steeped in primary sources to show the more complex story surrounding Rickey, Robinson and the Dodgers.”
“Black Baseball’s Heyday: Capturing an Era in Art and Words,” by Denny Dressman; illustration by Anthony High (McFarland, 189 pages, $39, released Dec. 4, ’25).
A blurb from Booklist: “A prominent Kansas City artist and a veteran author collaborate to create a colorful snapshot of Black baseball stars and the Negro National League from the 1880s through 1948 and the integration of Major League Baseball. Each chapter includes colorful reproductions of High’s artwork, highlighting pivotal moments in baseball history or individual players who shaped the face of the league and have only recently been recognized by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Chapters conclude with High’s meditations on his inspiration and methodology for creating a particular work, and several illustrations portray works in progress with explanations of the art and composition of his unique collagraphs, making this as much an art book as a baseball history. Covering everyone from Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first Black major-league player in 1885, to Cuba’s Martin Dihigo, one of the greatest players who never played in MLB, Dressman and High recount the greatness of Black players and coaches in early baseball history, the innovations they created to showcase their talents, and the obstacles they had to overcome for long-overdue recognition.”
“Simulating Satchel: A What-If History of Integrated Major League Baseball in 1934” by John Graf (McFarland, 341 pages, $39.95, released March 5, ’26).
It’s framed as a ” Utopian Baseball Fantasy” to guess how the game might have been different if things really were different in a 1934 world. Graf assumes it could have come about at the urging of President Theodore Roosevelt, imploring the 16 teams of the all-white NL and AL to add four Negro League teams — at a time when many of the Negro League stars were in their prime. Teams are then integrated to include White and Black players through a draft. It’s like Strat-O-Matic come to life. Satchel Paige, in real life, wasn’t allowed to join the established Cleveland Indians in 1948 at age 41, a year after Robinson came to the Dodgers. In 1934, Robinson was a 15-year-old at Muir High in Pasadena, best known as the city’s ping-pong champion.
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