Jackie Robinson: a Biography
This Jackie Robinson biography, originally published in 1997, does a good job of being authoritative, but not overly academic and of admiring its subject without ignoring his flaws. Speaking of appropriate balance, 150 pages of the 464 pager (excluding the 23 pages of notes) are devoted to Robinson's time in Dodger organization. That's ten of his 53 years. Rampersad knows that fans of the athlete want plenty of coverage of Robinson's baseball career, but that fans of the man can also handle 300 pages of his life pre- and post-major league baseball.
Nevertheless, protesting against Jim Crow was important: "Every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he's going to use every bit of intelligence, such as he has, to stop it. This has got to absolutely nothing to do with what Communists may or may not be trying to do." Similarly, "because it is a Communist who denounces injustice in the courts, police brutality and lynching, when it happens, doesn't change the truth of his charges." Blacks were "stirred up long before" the Communists arrived and will be "stirred up long after the party has disappeared--unless Jim Crow has disappeared by then as well." p.214, speaking before HUAC, regarding Paul Robeson.
...[at the NAACP] called "Patience, Pride and Progress," Robinson challenged the notion that patience meant submission, or that impatience always meant radicalism. "Although we who struggle to secure civil rights deplore prejudice," he declared, "its elimination is not our goal. Containment is our goal. What we seek is the suppression, by law and the weight of public opinion, of the hostile manifestations of racial prejudice. We wish that the hearts of all men were filled with good will for their fellow human beings. But this goal is beyond our reach and we cannot wait until men's hearts are changed to enjoy our constitutional rights." p.330