by James Harvey

Created on: May 04, 2009   Last Updated: December 14, 2009

Today, major-league African American baseball players virtually dominate the sport. We see them so often it is easy to take them for granted. Yet there was a time when there wasn't a single black ballplayer in major-league baseball. Though blacks in white-dominated baseball was experimented with as early as the 1880's with the Fleetwood Brothers, they were deliberately kept out of baseball for decades because of the rampant, institutionalized racial hatred against African Americans of the time just as they were discriminated in every other aspect of American life as well. More than 60 years later a young black man named Jack Roosevelt Robinson would forever change the way the game was played and White America's perception of blacks.

Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia, more than two months following the end of the First World War and during a Spanish flu and smallpox epidemic. He was the youngest of five children. His middle name, Roosevelt, was in honor of the late former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had died just 25 days earlier.

The Robinsons were a family of sharecroppers, as most southern blacks were at the time. Jackie's father abandoned the family when he was still an infant, and in 1920, the family moved to Pasadena, California. He was raised by his mother as well as the rest of his siblings. But by the time he entered into his teens, Jackie was becoming a little unmanageable and rebellious. In fact he joined a neighborhood gang in which they engaged in acts of juvenile mischievery in the community.

Fortunately, Jackie was persuaded by a close family friend that gang life wasn't for him; he had greater aspirations. He attended John Muir High School (sometimes called "Muir Tech"), which he graduated from in 1935. It wasn't long before it was discovered that this was a talented young man. He lettered in four sports, football, basketball, track and baseball. He was even a member of the school tennis team, which needless to say, he also championed in. Already Jackie was becoming a sports celebrity in the community.

He continued his sports streak right into Pasadena College, which he attended following his graduation from high school. Like he did in high school, he excelled in sports in college, in fact he broke his own brother Mack's track record -who was a sport star himself; he participated in the 1936 Olympics as a silver medalist. Jackie later attended UCLA in 1939 where he excelled even greater, in

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