When Hall of Fame baseball player Jackie Robinson was born in 1919, Father’s Day was not a nationwide event and had only been in existence for nine years. He never got to celebrate one with his father.
Jerry Robinson abandoned his family in 1920, leaving Mallie McGriff Robinson to raise Jackie and his four older siblings on her own. It wasn’t until the spring of 1972, the year Robinson died, that the U.S. made Father’s Day an official holiday, 58 years after Mother’s Day became one.
When Robinson died on Oct. 24, 1972, at age 53, he left his wife Rachel, daughter Sharon, 22, and son David, 20. A year earlier, Jackie Robinson Jr. died in a car accident at 24.
Now, Jackie Robinson has been gone almost as long as he was alive.
David Robinson, who turned 72 on May 14, has lived in Tanzania for decades and comes back to the United States for special occasions, like Major League Baseball’s Jackie Robinson Day. On April 15, the 77th anniversary of his father debuting with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first African American to play in the MLB in the modern era, Robinson, who’s a director of the Jackie Robinson Foundation; his mother Rachel, now 101; and other members of the family celebrated at the New York Mets’ stadium, Citi Field.
One of Jackie and Rachel Robinson’s 12 grandchildren threw out the first ball. Rachel Robinson has three great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.
In a recent interview with David Robinson, who spoke by phone from Tanzania, he reflects on fatherhood, family and the legacy and lessons of a father who made and changed history.
This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
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What are your thoughts about Father’s Day?
I think parenting is the most important job obviously for a family, but for society as well. And my father knew that he grew up without his father. He made a point in his life to make a commitment to his family and a commitment to his children to be a father who showed concern and love and spent time with his children. We had a great time. His favorite activity after baseball was playing golf. He and I had wonderful times on the golf course with myself caddying. I did not play, but I loved caddying for him. And he knew that I loved to fish, so whenever we got an opportunity, he would take me fishing, whether it was on a lake or the ocean. We spent that time together whether it was Saturdays or a holiday. And that was his expression of being together with his children and making sure they understood that their father was there for them and had time for them.
What was it like to share him with the public, given that he was a such an important public figure?
Well, we had our times. If we were out to eat at a public restaurant, people would come to the table. And that was a public time. I drove for him for a couple of months when I turned 19. I drove him to meetings, and those were when he was engaged with the public, so we had public time when, really, he was a man of the society. And we had our private times when he was the father of myself and father of our family. So, you had to recognize which time you were existing in. And we enjoyed both times.
You mentioned what fatherhood meant to your father and the impact on him of not having his father around. What do you think he would have told you to be like as a father?
Being a father and being around requires commitment. And it requires respect and a great deal of tolerance. So those are characteristics which he showed to me — and he was a man of few words. But it was his deeds of tolerance, of commitment, of respecting our family, mother and children that he taught us more than with his words.
You told us a beautiful story when we spoke two years ago (a TV interview in New York for the ESPN special Jackie to Me) about responsibility and cutting the grass. And I’m wondering what sort of response you’ve gotten since sharing that story.
I tell you, Willie, the last time I shared, I wondered if anybody was interested in our Saturday morning mystery. It’s a very personal experience that we had. I don’t know how it translated in the rest of society, but it was the perfect example of teaching with action rather than a lot of words of observation and talking about shirking responsibility. You know, he showed me that I left my responsibility, and he would pick up on that. But that was my job in the future, to wake up and take care of business. That was my business to take care of. I haven’t gotten a lot of response from the public — not that I don’t get response from the public — but it was impactful on myself.
Martin Luther King Jr. said he could not have done what he did if it had not been for your father. When you think back to those remarks by Dr. King, what goes through your mind?
I think the realization of how remarkable a human being Jackie Robinson was, that grew from the time I was more of a teenager than an actual adolescent. And the recognition of his importance and the challenge that he faced, I think that grew as I grew older. But you do see Martin Luther King was part of a movement. And you knew he was part of a church. And he was part of an organization. With Jackie Robinson, you knew whether it was as a batter or as a fielder, he was standing out by himself. And that’s a remarkable thing to have to come up against — a whole ballpark of hostility and a society that had not yet awoken to the possibilities and prospects of our doing better and living better and performing better together. He had to stand up for that, particularly in that first year, but it wasn’t just in that first year. Racism followed Jackie Robinson throughout his life.
When playing golf, we could either go to a public golf course, which was very crowded, and had very limited time slots, or we could try to be a guest at somebody’s private club. But in the 1950s and ’60s, Jackie Robinson in Stamford, Connecticut, and in the golf clubs around, could not become a member because of the policies of racism in the golf courses in America at that time. So, to have done what he did on his own, to build his own team from a solo player, where he rallied the Dodgers to the point that he was the Rookie of the Year in his first year and turned society’s heads, that is a heroic achievement. And I think he had every right to be considered by society a hero.
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What did you learn about your father from how he dealt with the ultimate adversity, the loss of your brother?
Well, he took all of our lives, at whatever stage we were at, and he worked with them. My brother was in Vietnam when he was 17 years old. It was a traumatic experience for my brother. It was a traumatic experience for my family. He came out with tremendous difficulties — of what it means to be in warfare in your teenage years, overcome those difficulties himself as his own personal challenge — and then, shortly thereafter, to have tragically died. It was something that put years on my father’s life that you cannot say that you will ever recover from. You will just stand up, utilizing that much more effort and energy, to try to face the day, to face the challenges.
So again, he was a man who faced the challenges and adversities all of his life. I think he stood up to the loss of my brother in a manly way and tried to carry on as the father and the husband and a member of society to try to make opportunities where kids didn’t have to go, where kids didn’t need to go, where kids didn’t want to go, where there wouldn’t be wars that took children at age 17. So, he continued on in his path to try to do for society, together with the losses that he himself faced.
You have a very large family yourself. And your family is in Africa. What would you most like to tell your father, if you had the opportunity today, about what your life has been like as a father?
Well, I am thrilled, Willie, to have been Jack and Rachel Robinson’s son and to have been so hugely influenced by their life, their teachings, their mission and their values – and what was important. Because I feel that what we’re doing here in Tanzania, in East Africa, is an international extension of what Jackie Robinson was doing in terms of baseball in the 1940s and 1950s. We are ourselves small-scale, family-owned farmers, but we are working with a community of several thousand small-scale family-owned farms who have been excluded from the international, profitable and developmental aspects of the coffee industry. And we, by our work, are trying to include that group that was, like the African American community being excluded from baseball, excluded from the profitable and beneficial aspects of coffee.
My first trip here to Tanzania was a trip that was sponsored by my parents and chaperoned by my mother (Note: Rachel Robinson has made a dozen trips from New York to Tanzania to be with her family, according to David Robinson). Their awakening my global perspectives was something that they consciously did when I was 15 years old. And I am extremely pleased to have been taking the mission of expanding opportunity for people who have been excluded from such opportunity and progress and continuing it for another generation. On on top of that, to be honored to have 10 children who are now all adults, who I have worked with, who are continuing a version of the mission of Jack and Rachel Robinson, and of their father, David Robinson. And they’re taking that developmental aspect to their own levels in their own life. But I’m here on the farm with one of my daughters who’s now working with our cooperative to bring all of these experiences that she gained in school and in work in America to bring it back to our farming community here in Tanzania.
If you could say something to your dad today, if you were to imagine that conversation, what would you say?
I would say — this is a family conversation — the family has not to any degree given up or diverged from the mission of human development. But as he saw, as his life progressed, the struggle is not easy. The struggle began many generations before him. It continued many generations after his passing. And we are still in the midst of struggle that is monumental for humanity, for ordinary citizens, for the weak, for the poor, for women and children. But the courage that he showed, the courage that our family showed, the victories that they gained through standing up with that courage, has carried on to other generations. And we’re not turning around. We’re not losing momentum. We’re not losing heart. That is all because of what he did in America, with his family, so many years ago.