Herm Card is the City Eagle's roving street reporter and photographer as well as the Eagle's Poetry Editor.
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He is an English teacher, poet, educational consultant, and motivational speaker. He has been a college baseball player and coach, military officer, tournament squash player and NCAA baseball umpire. He is also a Museum Educator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and co-editor of the academic journal, "The English Record."
On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s 20th century color barrier making his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In so doing, he opened the doors for African Americans – not only in baseball, but in American society. His number 42 has been retired by all major league teams since 1997, with only Mariano Rivera still wearing it, until he retires. Today, to honor Robinson, every major league player coach manager and umpire will wear number 42.
In 1997, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut, I (along with a number of other poets) was asked to write and read a poem at the Jackie Robinson: Race, Sport and the American Dream conference at LIU Brooklyn, less that a mile from the former site of Ebbets Field.
While a number of stories, perhaps apocryphal, perhaps not, regarding the racially motivated mistreatment of Robinson in Syracuse, the fact that he played everywhere under intense pressure is incontrovertible.
The poem connects the fact that Robinson played in Syracuse in 1946 as a member of the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers’ AAA farm team to the fact that Syracuse was a well known stop on the Underground Railroad, and the undeniable similarities between his struggle and that of the freedom seeking slaves.
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The Railroad Stop in Syracuse
Syracuse – a stop on the Underground Railroad for slaves of the mid 1800's South.
On their way north to Canada, and freedom, fugitives from the plantations
that raised a white crop, the cotton they picked, the symbol of slavery,
they might spend a night hidden in Syracuse.
But Jackie Robinson was following the opposite route
to escape his slavery of mid 1900's America,
that kept the black man off the white man's land,
off the green grass and rich dirt of his athletic plantations.
He arrived in Syracuse in 1946, on a train from Montreal,
where he worked on Mr. Branch Rickey's farm,
a farm that also raised a white crop;
baseball players, to send south to Brooklyn.
When he left that train, on his ride from slavery,
that white man's train with its black porters
and black conductors and white engineer,
he was no longer just a Negro aspiring to a white man's job.
Stepping off with Mr. Branch Rickey’s team, with its white owner
and white players and white coaches and white fans, he was
a lone black man, accompanied by every man, and woman, and child
who had ever ridden that other railroad, fellow passengers to freedom.
He was a man opening a door that would not be closed,
and he was anything but hidden that first game in Syracuse.
Herm Card
Jackie Robinson; Race, Sport and the American Dream
1997
For more on Jackie Robinson Day, go to: http://web.baseballhalloffame.org/index.jsp
