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 fact he became the college's first athlete to win varsity letters in four sports, namely the four previous-mentioned sports.
It was also that he met and fell in love with a lovely, young African American woman named Rachel Islum, whom he would later marry in 1946, the relationship being interrupted but maintained briefly by certain family obligations on Jackie's part and later by World War Two.
It seemed as if Jackie's sports aspirations was strongly leaning toward football, which he had a particular love for. In 1941, after his job with the NYA (National Youth Adminstration) was shut down by the government, Jackie joined the Hawaiian football team the Honolulu Bears, which was a racially-mixed team. Later that year, he returned to California where he pursued a career as a fullback on the Los Angeles Bulldogs. But something abruptly interrupted his rising career: It was called World War II, which Americans got involved in following the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941.
Jackie was finally drafted in 1942. Like most black soldiers during that era, he was assigned to a segregated unit in which he rose to the rank of second lieutenant, which he served with distinction. Later he joined the 761st tank Battalion called the "Black Panthers", located at Fort Hood, Texas.
Also like most African Americans of the time period, Jackie Robinson was not immune to the racist attitudes that influenced most whites of his generation. Unlike most blacks, who tended to take a somewhat passive, concilliatory attitude toward the racial "norm" of the time, Jackie was a unusually outspoken black man at a time when being outspoken and black could have cost most black men their lives in those racially backwards times. One can say that Jackie Robinson was an early proponent in the civil rights struggle of blacks.
In the Spring of 1944, when Jackie was 25 years old and awaiting results from a previous ankle injury that he sustained while in junior college, boarded a bus along with a fellow black officer's wife, who in actuality was a light-skinned black woman whom some of the passengers thought was white. Based on the segregation practices of the time, blacks were required to go to the back of the bus whenever whites persons entered to deter them from sitting next to whites. The bus driver ordered Jackie to the back of the bus, he adamantly refused and was subsequently arrested by military police. The case became a heated and controversial one in August of that year, which resulted in Jackie's being court-martialed. He received an honorable discharge in November 1944.
While he was working as an army coach at Fort Breckinridge, in Kentucky, where he was sent when he was acquitted, met an ex-player from the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the various Negro League teams throughout the country, who urged him to to try out for the team. Needless to say, he made the team.
After Jackie joined the Monarchs in 1945, he was making $400 a month-a lot of money in those days. But he wasn't happy-the hectic travel schedule, which put a strain on his relationship with Rachel, as well as the League's disorganization and obsession with gambling bothered Jackie. He played 47 games, stole 13 bases, hit an average of .387 and five home runs with the Monarchs.
It wasn't long before Jackie began to attract Major League attention. The Boston Red Sox (which ironically enough was the last major league team to integrate-in 1959), decided to give Jackie a tryout in April 1945. It was not a success. Jackie was subjected to the common racial epithets and abuses of the day.
Not long afterward, Robinson met an older white gentleman-in his 60's- named Branch Rickey. Rickey was a most unusual white person for his times. He was a racial visionary who foresaw the future potential of African Americans in major-league baseball from earliest times. In fact when he was a young coach had had a black player on his team. When the team went to stay in a hotel one night, everyone else on the team was allowed to stay but the young black player. Rickey put up an argument and the young player was allowed to stay in Rickey's room. Rickey remembered the young black man's rubbing the hands of his dark skin and crying out "Its my skin! My skin's against me!" It was an experience that Rickey would never forget.
Branch Rickey was the new manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, an all-white team established in 1913, who played at Ebbets Field in the named borough. It was a well-known and highly-acclaimed team-at least for most Brooklynites- like the Bronx's New York Yankees. Unbeknowing to them, their team was about to meet a monumental challenge-they were going to have to learn to accept the reality that their team was not going to stay all-white.
Rickey prepped Robinson for what he could possibly-and certainly-was bound to face. He staged various scenarios with Robinson and asked how would he respond. It was constantly stressed by Rickey that no matter what racial and verbal abuses he was subjected to, Jackie had to promise that he would not retaliate, he would not fight back. Bravely, Jackie agreed, knowing full well what he was going to face. He was signed on for the 1946 Season with the Montreal Royals.
When Robinson arrived with the team for spring training to play the Dodgers in an exhibition game at Daytona Beach, Florida in March 1946, his presence was met with trepidation and of course, prejudice. Some, absurdly enough, even wondered if he was actually a human being. But when they saw him play, they began to change their minds now that he was winning points for them. In fact, he had a batting average of .349 and a .985 fielding average. When he played in Montreal that same year, he was hailed as a local hero, in fact one news report of the time stated that it was the first time that a white crowd 'ran after a black man with love, instead of lynching on it's mind'.
Now Jackie was ready for the big test. He was about to make baseball history-world history for that matter-A black man was about to break baseball's color line for good.
In 1947, just two years after the Second World War, black men-and women had fought valiantly and with distinction. Yet oddly enough, they were still being treated like second-class citizens. They were still living in the shadows and fringes of American society, not being taken seriously or being treated with respect. Most Whites still saw African Americans as insignificant, inferior people, who did not have a right to the "American Dream".
On April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn, NY, Was a historic day. There was a huge number of blacks there that day, in fact almost half of the patrons there that historic day was black-more that 14,000 in an audience of over 26,000 as if they expected something monumental to happen. It did. When the Brooklyn Dodgers came out on the field that day, to the amazement of some and the dismay of others, a black man was right out there with them. HISTORY HAD BEEN MADE! For the first time since 1887, a black man was a part of White-dominated baseball.
Even though history had been made in major-league baseball, it wasn't long before Jackie's racial endurance would be put to the extreme test. He would have to endure some of the most hateful and vicious racial diatribes of his day.
He was despised by most of his fellow teammates, even though he was winning games for them and putting money in their pockets and his. One member of the opposing team reportedly exclaimed "That nigger needs to be sent back to the cotton fields!"
He also had to endure racial abuses from certain hecklers in the stands, "HEY BOY! GIVE ME A SHINE!" "HEY JACKIE! WANT SOME WATERMELON?" On one occasion, a bigoted heckler put a black cat out on the field, exclaiming, "HEY JACKIE! HERE'S ONE OF YOUR RELATIVES!"
But true to his promise that he made to Branch Rickey, Jackie would not retaliate, not fight back. He endured these abuses for several more years until they began to subside somewhat in the early 1950's as America's racial views were beginning to change.
Yes, Jackie Robinson was a big star now, a virtual celebrity. He was invited on many radio and television shows, live shows, there was a 1950 movie about his life in which he actually played himself. There was even a "Jackie Robinson" Comics.
But despite his stardom and success, he was not free from the racial prejudices that still permeated Postwar America. Being an intelligent, articulate and handsome black man, he began to rouse the further jealousy and contempt of whites and even some fellow blacks. There were even accusations that he was supposedly involved in dalliances with certain white ballplayers wives, charges which has never been proven. White America had never seen the likes of a black man like Jackie Robinson. It was something that at the time was their worst nightmare. Robinson would go on to play with the Dodgers for nine more seasons, retiring in the 1956 Season.
Robinson would go on later to becoming not just a baseball figure, but a social and somewhat political figure as well. He was the President of CHOCK FULL O' NUTS in the 1950's-early 60's and was involved in the campaign of Richard Nixon as Presidential candidate in 1960. In 1962 Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Now in his late 40's he was able to relax at home with his wife, Rachel, whom he married in 1946, and who bore him several children, the oldest, Jackie Jr., a Vietnam veteran dying of a drug overdose in 1971 at the age of just 24.
The effects of bodily enduring emotional abuses as well as other physical complications, including diabetes, finally took it's toll on October 24,1972, when Jackie Robinson, age 53, died of a massive heart attack.
The legacy of Jackie Robinson continues. He not only opened doors for blacks in baseball, but in essence he literally changed America forever and it's perception of blacks and as well opened up numerous doors for African Americans in various fields that would have been considered unimaginable in 1947.