The time is 1947, Robinson's turbulent first year in the Majors, when he was subjected to the worst abuse of all his time in baseball, with stadiums full of people filled with hate at the very sight of him, jeering and praying for his downfall. The Dodgers are in Cincinnati for a series against the Reds. Up in the stands, a father and son are seated together, and sharing in the joy of the upcoming game. It is a scene which has played out with American fathers and sons on countless occasions, and one I have had the distinct pleasure of enacting with my own son several times over the years. The boy asks his dad eagerly how many times Pee Wee Reese will score. The father replies he doesn't know but recalls in fond memory how he once saw Honus Wagner score three times in one game and that maybe they'll see the same thing in this contest. "That would be great!" the boy replies. The beginning of what should be a perfect day...
But in an instant, as soon as the Dodgers take the field and Robinson steps out of the dugout and into the full view of the Cincinnati fans, everything changes.
The innocent boy suddenly finds himself totally alone in a sea of hatred; abandoned by the very man who should be his protector and guide, with the happiness in his heart extinguished in the span of a few seconds. The poor kid has no one to show him right from wrong — particularly not his own father.
In one moment, innocence is shattered. The boy then he gets swept up in the tide of hatred just like the rest of the crowd surrounding him, just like the father sitting next to him.
Inevitably, the boy joins the racists.
This entire sequence is horrifying for the truth it reveals: that racism is a disease of exposure which rapidly infects an innocent mind and perverts it within the blink of an eye. And that very often, racists are created by their own parents, by family, their closest friends, at young ages.
Something dies inside a person when they are subjected to this kind of group pressure and lack the capacities to resist it. This scene shows the process within a minute of screen time. Even if the boy eventually manages to grow out of the hatred he had just learned to parrot, as many such individuals are fortunate enough to achieve when circumstance intervenes to show them a better way, the shadow of that moment in which he became a hater will haunt him forever. So too will the memory of his own father's hatred for another human being simply because of a difference in pigmentation and how it destroyed what should have been a beautiful time for the two of them.
I write of this scene from this movie at this time instead of at the beginning of baseball season, as might be expected, because the issues of the movie transcend any one particular season and especially seem to speak to this very uncertain time in American history. The moral balance of the republic is now hanging on a knife-edge with the election to the presidency of a man who rode into office partly upon a campaign of not-so-subtle race hatred and prejudice, built upon eight years of white rage against the nation's first non-white president. At this time, America is very much like that lost boy at Crosley Field in 1947, immersed in a sea of hatred and perhaps not strong enough to resist the floodtide. And whether America can find within itself the strength to resist or to recover from the hatred which has been unleashed within the culture and the body politic is an open question, with a disturbingly uncertain answer.
One of the ironies of this scene is that the father's favorite player, the great Pittsburgh shortstop Honus Wagner, was once compared to Negro League shortstop John Henry "Pop" Lloyd, one of the greatest ballplayers ever to come into the game and barred from the Major Leagues because of the "Gentleman's Agreement" which kept baseball segregated. When told of the comparison, Wagner replied that he was honored by it.
No doubt the father didn't know that.
