Professor Rachel Isum Robinson

Professor Rachel Isum Robinson (1922- ), nurse, educator, and activist. Rachel Annetta Isum was born in Los Angeles. Her father, a World War I veteran, worked as a bookbinder and linotyper at the Los Angeles Times and on one occasion successfully sued a restaurant that tried to charge him higher prices than white customers. When an illness from his military service forced him to retire early, Rachel’s mother started a catering business, and Rachel also helped support the family by working in the business, working at the library, and sewing baby clothes. The Isums were one of the only black families in their neighborhoods, and she was forced to sit in the balcony when she went to the movie theater. After graduating from high school in 1940 Rachel entered the nursing program at UCLA, where she helped pay her tuition by working as a riveter in a factory that made airplanes for the World War II effort; she often worked the night shift, drove to campus at dawn, and then went to class. “The struggle to be someone despite what the society is saying about me and my people,” she recalled, “got implemented in me in a way that made me strive harder.” Her perspective on race relations was also shaped by watching her Japanese-American next-door neighbors be forced to sell their home and move into an internment camp; “I remember being just heartbroken about that and not understanding it at all,” she later said, “because they were American citizens.”

While at UCLA Rachel began dating a fellow student named Jackie Robinson, and the two were quickly engaged, but at her insistence they did not marry until she had finished her degree in 1945. Several months later, Jackie signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers and thus became the first African American in white professional baseball since 1884. A year later the Robinsons took were in the New Orleans airport on their way to spring training, and Rachel had her first experience with southern Jim Crow. Upon seeing a “Whites Only” sign outside the women’s restroom, she walked in anyway. Jackie soon integrated Major League Baseball, performing at a Hall of Fame level despite suffering horrible abuse from fans and other players, and Rachel provided the foundation that made it possible. One journalist wrote of her: “She was not simply the dutiful little wife. She was Jack’s co-pioneer. She had to live through the death threats, endure the vile screams of the fans and watch her husband get knocked down by pitch after pitch. And because he was under the strictest discipline not to [fight back], she was the one who had to absorb everything he brought home.” She herself said “I was the support person so often misidentified as the ‘little woman behind the great man,’ but I was neither little nor behind him. I felt powerful by his side as his partner, essential, challenged, and greatly loved.”

When Rachel tried to purchase a home in the New York suburbs, every property that she viewed was denied to her until a Jewish community activist intervened on their behalf and lodged them with her own family (including her young daughter and future music star Carly Simon) until the Robinsons were ready to move into their new place. Beginning in 1963, they used their home to host the Afternoon of Jazz, an annual concert that featured performers like Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie and which raised money for jailed civil rights protesters, Dr. King’s children after his assassination, and other activists. Rachel also took part in the 1963 March on Washington and other aspects of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1960 she resumed her nursing career, earning a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing from New York University; “I was always interested in,” she later said, “the combination of the mind, the body, and the soul. I was always concerned about trying to intervene and help.” She worked as a researcher and clinician at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York from 1960 to 1965, helping to start America’s first day psychiatric hospital, which enabled the mentally ill to receive treatment while still living at home. From 1965 to 1972 she was a professor at Yale School of Nursing, teaching graduate students and serving as director of their new community mental health center. During a two-year span between 1971 and 1973, though, Rachel endured the deaths of her oldest son, her husband, and her mother, but she emerged from her grief more determined to help the less fortunate. In 1972 she founded the Jackie Robinson Development Corporation, a real estate company that in ten years built more than 1,300 housing units for poor and working-class families. She also created the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which has provided $14 million in college scholarships, internships, mentoring, and other assistance to more than 1,400 minority students. The Foundation has also worked to preserve the memory of Jackie Robinson’s baseball career and activism, and its museum is scheduled to open in 2019. In 1996 she authored the biography Jackie Robinson: An Intimate Portrait. She was instrumental in Major League Baseball’s decision to retire Jackie’s “42” uniform number (making him the first American professional athlete so honored) and in the production of the 2013 biographical film 42, and she has also pushed the league to hire more minority managers and executives. On her 75^th birthday, she celebrated by climbing 10,000 feet on Mount Kilimanjaro. Her numerous awards include: the Candace Award for Distinguished Service from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women; the Associated Black Charities Black History Makers Award; the UCLA Medal; the Commissioner’s Historic Achievement Award in 2007 (making her the first non-player recipient); the 2017 Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame; and twelve honorary doctorates. When asked why she and her husband had been so committed to the fight against inequality, the then-82 year old simply stated “You can’t stand still for that stuff.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.