When Jackie Robinson visited Notre Dame

Jackie Robinson was born 103 years ago today, and to mark the occasion I have another story about him related to the University of Notre Dame.

A couple years ago, I wrote about a connection Robinson had to another civil rights advocate, Father Theodore Hesburgh, Notre Dame’s president and a presidential appointee to the Civil Rights Commission. That meeting happened in 1959, but it might not have been the first time the two met.

On Feb. 10, 1954, two years into Hesburgh’s 35-year tenure as university president, Robinson spoke on the South Bend campus about “Brotherhood in Sports.” The visit was part of a five-city tour “under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews,” reported the Notre Dame Scholastic, the weekly campus magazine. “The NCCJ is a civic organization made up of religiously motivated persons who through educational methods seek to reduce inter-group prejudices and to build understanding, amity and civic cooperation among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.”

Before his 4:30 p.m. talk at Washington Hall, next to the Main Building, Robinson spoke to students at South Bend’s Washington High School in the morning. “If we are to be the leaders of the world, we must prove that we can work together,” he said, according to a report in the Feb. 10 edition of The South Bend Tribune, then an evening paper. His speaking tour continued at Central High School and the YMCA before the Notre Dame appearance, and the long day ended at a teen banquet at the Hering House community center.

A four-sport star in college, Robinson naturally used sports metaphors to connect with the students. He said that when he was in high school, he and his friends would argue over “which was more important in football, the backfield or the line. Actually, we all realize one is useless without the other. That sort of example should be carried over into life by all of us. In sports, in high school, in college, out in business, it is working together that counts.”

Robinson’s talk at Notre Dame doesn’t seem to have been covered by The Scholastic – an oversight that the daily campus newspaper that I worked for as a student, The Observer, would not have made. Alas, the paper wasn’t established until 1966. But in his evening address at Hering House, Robinson spoke of his earlier engagement on campus, where he learned that the student body was made up of people “from 60 foreign countries,” according to an article in The South Bend Tribune on Feb. 11.

“I was uplifted by my experience at Notre Dame this afternoon,” he said. “These students will return to their countries with the impression of the United States and Americans that they are given at Notre Dame. If they find discrimination or meet fellows who believe that second-class citizens exist in the United States, they will take this impression back home with them. I don’t think they get this impression at Notre Dame and we must make sure they never will.”

The campus stop – and perhaps the entire visit to South Bend, rather than, say, Chicago – may have been because Louis Radelet, a former Notre Dame professor, was part of the tour as a director in community outreach with the NCCJ.

From South Bend, Robinson was to travel south to St. Louis, then on to the West Coast before reporting to spring training with the Dodgers in Florida on March 1.

“Right now, I’m getting a valuable education,” the Tribune quoted him as saying. “We aren’t trying to hammer people into doing something they don’t want to do. We just want to wake them up to certain truths and values.”

That all five of Robinson’s South Bend speaking engagements were to youth or student groups surely was no coincidence. The minds to change were the ones that may not have been made up yet.

“There is very little to worry about when youngsters can band together the way you have tonight to eliminate the false thinking of which many of us are guilty of,” he told the Hering House attendees. “Unfortunately, some of us forget to fight this false thinking on a full-time basis. We observe Brotherhood one week of the year but we should practice it 52 weeks.”