The long years of unequal opportunity and menial service caused this sort of unconscious belief

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Branch Rickey was also in great demand as a speaker on fifa 15 coins civil rights and race relations. His speeches were characteristically passionate and eloquent. “Of course the Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln made the southern Negro slave free,” he told an Atlanta audience in January 1956, “but it never did make the white man morally free. He remained a slave to his inheritances. And some are even today.”6 He wondered aloud about that “something in human nature that gets contaminated with fear,” but he said the problem must be faced honestly if it is to be cured. There could be no finessing the basic issue of racial justice, Rickey declared, or else you were the “moral pickpocket” he always decried, a person who was too scared to bludgeon you but who would sneak away with something from your pocket when you weren’t looking.

“The American public not only in the south, but all over the place has a secret feeling that the Negro is really inferior by nature,” Rickey wrote to nationally prominent black journalist Carl Rowan in 1958. “The long years of unequal opportunity and menial service caused this sort of unconscious belief. I think the stark fact of it ought to be brought to the public’s attention in every way we know how.”8 Rickey’s 450-word article, “How It Looks from Where I Sit,” for Look magazine’s May 27,1958, issue also made the point crisply about the need for full equality of opportunity.

As his semiretirement began Branch Rickey was still living in the big house in the Pittsburgh suburb of Fox Chapel. In addition to the eigh- teen-room house and the cottage Rickey turned into an office, he owned over one hundred acres of adjoining land, where he could indulge his love of the farm life. There was a huge barn, where he housed farm ani- mals and many ponies that his grandchildren could delight in and ride when they came to visit.

Branch Rickey Jr. and Mary Iams Rickey and their children did not have far to come because they lived just across a clearing from their par- ents’ home. Caroline Rickey, Branch Rickey Jr.’s oldest daughter, was already attending Ohio Wesleyan; her younger sister Nancy would also shortly enroll at her grandfather’s beloved alma mater; and the young- est child, Branch Barrett Rickey, born in 1946, would attend owu in the 1960s.