The baseball legend worked to break color barriers in the world of business, too.
In the 1950s and 60s, it wasn’t uncommon for David Robinson to tag along with his father, baseball legend Jackie Robinson, to the Apollo Theater in New York. David said his dad would “shoot the breeze” with friends who worked there.
That was on 125th Street, in the heart of Harlem, and the elder Robinson wasn’t just there to visit. He owned a clothing store a block away from the Apollo, where Black shoppers could avoid the discourtesies they often encountered shopping at white-owned establishments. Jackie Robinson also co-founded Freedom National Bank, a few doors down from the Apollo.
The history books will forever tell the story of how Jackie Robinson changed the world by breaking the decades-long so-called gentlemen’s agreement that kept Black players out of America’s pastime, Major League Baseball, on this day 75 years ago. Off the field, he was a prominent business leader who championed Black economic advancement and entrepreneurship. Aside from the bank and the clothing store, he also co-founded the Jackie Robinson Construction Co., invested in apartment developments and, according to his son, tried to start a golf club after being denied entry to many courses because of his race.
“We were, as a people, seeking every avenue — employment and the creation of businesses — in order to develop ourselves,” David Robinson told Forbes. “The same spirit of a guy who can steal home base 19 times, that’s the same spirit of a guy who can go into a business and succeed.”
Robinson’s pioneering leadership in the business world set standards for Black Americans and also for Black athletes, such as Magic Johnson and LeBron James, who’ve parlayed their fame and multimillion-dollar salaries into successful business ventures.
Robinson, who died in 1972 at the age of 53, played 10 seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers and was part of the team’s first world championship in 1955. He saw firsthand the societal inequities of racism, said Della Britton, president and CEO of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and believed that Black Americans should seek economic empowerment, including entrepreneurship, to combat those inequities.
“His legacy is that of not just advocating for economic empowerment and equal opportunity,” she said, “but actually demonstrating what that could look like.”
A report published this week by the National Urban League shows how far Black Americans still have to go to reach equity with white Americans. Their median household income, $43,862, is 37% less than that of white people’s $69,823. Black Americans also are less likely to benefit from home ownership, the driver of generational wealth, and Census data show Black couples are more than twice as likely as whites to be denied a mortgage or a home-improvement loan. Black households have just 13% of the wealth as white households.
Jackie Robinson’s campaign for Black entrepreneurship, and his own involvement in business, started long before his playing days were over.
In 1951, he developed the Jackie Robinson Garden Apartments in Brooklyn, according to his foundation, and, in 1952, opened the Harlem-based Jackie Robinson Store, which sold men’s apparel.
Robinson’s winning ability and novelty in America’s favorite pastime made him a celebrity, and it wasn’t before long that media organizations started offering him platforms. He launched The Jackie Robinson Radio Show in 1948, under a contract with WMCA in New York. In 1952 he signed a deal to direct community affairs for WNBC and, in 1959, began writing a nationally syndicated column with the New York Post.
“He understood that he was a celebrity athlete and used that to his advantage — and to the advantage of Black people,” said Britton. She added that Robinson used those platforms to “freely speak his mind” about dismantling barriers for economic opportunities.
During his playing career from 1947 to 1956, Robinson earned the equivalent of $2.8 million in 2022 dollars, according to his foundation, which put him among the game’s top earners in an era devoid of collective bargaining and mega TV-rights deals.
Robinson didn’t receive any offers to coach or work in baseball when he retired, his foundation said. He was, however, offered a job in 1957 by coffee company Chock Full o’Nuts to become its vice president of personnel. That’s how he became the first Black senior executive at a major U.S. corporation, one with a majority-Black workforce.
In 1964, he parted ways with Chock Full o’Nuts and co-founded Freedom National Bank of Harlem. Robinson was its chairman and co-founder William Hudgins was the bank’s president. It set out to increase access to financing within Black communities and became the second-largest majority Black-owned bank in New York state behind Carver Federal Savings Bank.
In addition to financing, Robinson also championed housing as a pillar of Black economic development. In 1963, he and heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson partnered on a real estate development project in the upstate New York town of Wurtsboro. In 1970, Robinson formed the construction company to build low-income housing.
David Robinson said he’s proud that the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which his mother Rachel Robinson started in 1972, has developed more than 1,800 young leaders. The foundation is set to open a museum in the baseball icon’s honor in July. David Robinson is the founder of Sweet Unity Farms Coffee, a cooperative of more than 200 small family-owned coffee farms in Tanzania.
“In his continuation of a role of trying to achieve social development for the African-American community, and for America as a nation,” David Robinson said. “There’s really no separation between his objectives in baseball and his objectives in his further life, in politics and business.”
Robinson was also heavily involved in community engagement and politics. Some of his political choices overshadowed some of his economic development messages. He supported Richard Nixon, a Republican, versus John F. Kennedy in the 1960 U.S. presidential race, a decision that likely rubbed many Black voters the wrong way, according to Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City.
“I remind people that during that era, in every black person's house there were simply going to be three pictures hanging on the wall — a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a picture of John F. Kennedy, and a picture of Jesus,” Kendrick said.
While Robinson came to regret some of his political decisions, Kendrick said he was always his own man. And he was unrelenting in his belief that the “key to social change was economic empowerment.”