“More eyes were on Jackie than on any rookie who ever played,” recalls Rex Barney, a Brooklyn reliever that year. It was a wonder, as he endured the mounting pressure of his first weeks in the bigs, that Robinson could perform at all. Yet perform he did, putting together a 14-game hitting streak in the first 2 1/2 weeks of May. By May 25, with the first extended road trip behind him and the novelty of his presence on the wane, Robinson was sensing what he later called a “new confidence” in his game. As he took the field that day against the Phillies--who, led by their Southern-born manager, Ben Chapman, had lacerated him with taunts of “nigger” and “black boy” from the dugout during their first series in April--Robinson had begun to feel, as he would put it, “some of the old power returning.”
...
But Robinson also suffered racial insults in Cincinnati, and they took all forms, even musical. At the end of that May 13 game, as the crowds clambered for the exits and the players walked down the leftfield line toward the tunnel leading to their clubhouses, the Crosley organist started playing Bye Bye, Blackbird. Gabe Paul, then the Reds’ traveling secretary, says he nearly keeled over when he heard the music. “I was shocked,” he says. “Somebody must have put [the organist] up to it.”
According to John Murdough, then the Reds’ ticket manager, Paul flew into a rage, yelling, “Get rid of that guy! Get him out of here. This is a disgrace. We’ll never live it down!”
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