Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America
Howard Bryant/Mariner Books/2026/320pp/IBSN: 9780063308169

“I have seen white people ground down, depleted, crushed. But not so these great black people. Nothing the future brings can defeat a people who have come through three hundred years of slavery and humiliation and privation with heads held high and eyes clear and straight.” Paul Robeson.

“I don’t care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a zebra.  I’m the manager of this team and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you can’t use the money, I’ll see that you’re all traded.” Leo Durocher, Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, speaking of Jackie Robinson.

“There can be no question anywhere of a ‘backward’ people if they are given the opportunity of complete equality.” Paul Robeson.

It was August 1942, and the train named the New Haven was enroute from New York to the Boston Navy Yard, carrying enlistees who could not have imagined what lay ahead. The Boston Globe had reported the warning of a German Nazi leader: “future intervention on behalf of the Jews of Holland” would be punished by forcing those involved “to share the fate of the Jews.”

Among the passengers was Paul Robeson, who was now in his third decade of fame as a concert artist. Born in 1898 to a father who had escaped enslavement at age 15, Robeson attended Rutgers University, where he was elected Class Valedictorian and twice-named a consensus All-American in football. After graduation, he played for the NFL while simultaneously earning a law degree at Columbia University. And in the year to come, he would be the first Black actor to play Othello in America – overriding the tradition of casting a white-actor-in-blackface to avoid offending audiences with the play’s theme of interracial love. He was also, and may be best remembered today, as the magisterial presence of the Black stevedore Joe, singing “Ol’ Man River” in the stage play and, later, the movie Showboat.

Meanwhile, a 23-year-old Black Army draftee familiarly called Jackie Robinson had reported for duty at Fort Riley, Kansas. And Bill Benswanger, President of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team, was quoted as having said that tryouts would be held within a month for three Black players, one of whom was to be Roy Campanella, a 20-year-old catcher in the Negro League. Benswanger reasoned that “Negroes are American citizens with American rights … somebody has to make the first move.” The war-driven shortage of talented athletes had apparently overridden the unwritten rule barring Black players from the American and National Leagues. Soon, however, it became clear that no final resolution had been achieved. No tryout occurred.

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Bryant’s complex study travels the circuitous path that led to acceptance of Black players by professional baseball. Although his scope is broad, he maintains a focus on the roles of those two very different men: born a generation apart with different talents and personal histories, but a shared tough pride and commitment to their work, their people, and their unique inherent gifts.

Central to both their stories was the shadow still cast by the slaveholding past and America’s living struggle between the traditions of segregation and the new demands for integration. That’s history, long known. What makes Robeson’s and Robinson’s stories so engrossing here is Howard Bryant’s study of how their past and the present – their inherent talent, challenged by forces way beyond their expectations and control – came together in the lives of two very gifted, very proud and determined, yet very different Black men. Both strove to ascend within a nation that was (and is) riven and morally scarred by the legacy of slavery – while maintaining their own values espousing their own harsh truths.

Kings and Pawns is simultaneously a study of who we Americans once were as a nation and still struggle to resolve – and a story of two men, living symbols, who became both icons and sacrifices to that nation.

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Striking anomalies, injustices, and flat stupidities abounded throughout the long midcentury upheaval – and have continued in more subtle guises. Still, it is hard for us today to reconcile this trio of facts:

In 1919, baseball’s credibility had been threatened by a World Series gambling scandal. In response, the National Baseball Commission had been established and its first Commissioner – former Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis – had been appointed to restore that credibility.

Babe Ruth thrived in Boston, then became a star in New York, and baseball “soared in popularity,” transforming “into a game of awesome power and influence.” It was rapidly becoming “the model for all professional sports … and part of that model was total segregation” – to which Landis was committed, He justified this position with the creative argument that integration “misused” and “exploited” Black men comparably with their treatment in slavery.

It’s clear in retrospect that this “model” could never have survived. It was incongruous in wartime, implausible for any time, and was being challenged by the growing Black- and Communist-controlled presses.  (In a resistance “cartoon” of the time, a wounded Black soldier is depicted above the sardonic legend: “Good enough to die, but not good enough to play.”)

Perhaps more important and ultimately more influential, however, it was illogically incorrect. The measure of professional sport, won through skill, sweat, determination, and discipline, is result: the arbiters are the referees; the final record is the scoreboard; and survival is endurance. Today, we consider it inevitable that Black players would ultimately have prevailed in sports, and perhaps especially in baseball – because in the scope of our witness, they always have.

Through his rhetorical lens, which is both broad and deep, Bryant re-places the reader in a time when American chattel slavery was only 80 years’ past, and the Civil Rights Act that would outlaw segregation lay decades in the future. Franklin Roosevelt, elected President in 1932 during the Great Depression, had taken office the following March and moved quickly to implement the “New Deal” financial reforms and programs designed to rescue the economy and promote equal opportunity and well-being.

Into this time exploded Paul Robeson – singer, actor, athlete, and outspoken socialist – who would be reviled as anti-American and regarded “frostily” by even the NAACP; and Jackie Robinson – tellingly named Jack Roosevelt Robinson by his aspirational family and possibly the greatest athlete of his time.

In Bryant’s complex, meticulous, deeply thoughtful study, their individual stories are deftly woven into the domestic and international politics of the time – and echo down through the decades to ours. Today. In America.

“I felt that there were two wars raging at once – one against foreign enemies and one against domestic foes – and the Black man was forced to fight both … slavery in this country – in whatever sophisticated form – must end.” Jackie Robinson.

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Reviewer Mary Biggs is a retired English professor, and has written numerous short stories, essays and articles, and a book on contemporary American poetry. Mary has also served as an editor and consultant on several literary magazines and a legendary small press, The Spirit That Moves Us, for which she co-edited two collections of new fiction and poetry.