The Importance of Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson with Martin Luther King

Today is Jackie Robinson Day in Major League Baseball, and while Jackie Robinson's importance to Major League Baseball is recognized and understood, his importance to the American Civil Rights movement as a whole is largely overlooked.

Robinson was a lifetime Civil Rights advocate. Though he promised Dodgers GM Branch Rickey that he would "have the guts not to fight back" against the racist taunts and threats from white fans, players, and coaches, he spent his entire life fighting against racism. 

During his playing days, he proved racist expectations wrong again and again, performing at the highest level of the sport under 24/7 emotional siege. Robinson and his family were constantly targeted for harassment - somehow he not only survived that kind of stress, he led the league in multiple statistical categories.

Robinson's excellence in the previously all-white major leagues was a powerful symbol to Americans years before Brown vs. Board of Education began the slow process of school desegregation. His perseverance in the face of unspeakable bigotry served as an inspiration for thousands of people.

After retiring from baseball, Robinson wrote letters to several US presidents, urging them to take action against racism. He corresponded with Martin Luther King, and attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Robinson and his family at the March on Washington

Robinson was only 53 years old when he passed away in 1972. Just before his death, he attended the World Series, where he once again advocated for the breaking of barriers, urging MLB to employ more black people in coaching and management positions: "I'd like to live to see a black manager, I'd like to live to see the day when there's a black man coaching at third base." 

Sadly, Robinson didn't live to see that particular dream realized. He died much too young, and there's a lot of speculation that the extreme stress of his life contributed to his short lifespan. 

As I've done many times before in this space, I'm going to highly recommend Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. 

As Red Sox fans, we have a responsibility to understand the kind of racism perpetuated by our team less than 70 years ago. The Red Sox were the very last team to integrate, twelve years after Robinson made his debut for the Dodgers. Boston had a reputation for being wholly unwelcoming to nonwhite players well into the 1990s. For more on this topic, I recommend It Was Never About the Babe: The Red Sox, Racism, Mismanagement, and the Curse of the Bambino, and Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston.

Great expectations for 42

Since tonight's game has already been called on account of inclement weather (luckily it's just rain and not the snow/sleet that's afflicting parts of norther New England), I hope that some of you will take this opportunity to go and see 42: The True Story of an American Legend. I'm planning to see it after the weekend with my roommate - she's out of town, and I promised I would wait.

One of the best things about being a baseball fan is the richness of the sports history - but it's important to acknowledge that not all of that history can be romanticized. The game of baseball is just as stained with racism as the rest of US history, and though Jackie Robinson was a revolutionary figure, his first game in the major leagues (exactly sixty-six years ago as of next Monday) was only the beginning.

I have high hopes for 42, but I will always point to Jule Tygiel's book, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy as the quintessential volume on the career and life of MLB's first African American player. By definition, a film has to cut out things that a book can expand upon - and the life of Jackie Robinson has far and away too many incredible moments to contain in two hours.

Jackie Robinson's legacy is incredible, and simply cannot be overstated. Though Major League Baseball only started officially celebrating Jackie Robinson Day in 2004, ballplayers have always been keenly aware of his amazing contributions; indeed, Yankees second baseman Robinson Cano was named for Jackie Robinson (if you're wondering, Sox fans, Jackie Bradley Jr. was named for his father, who was named for singer Jackie Wilson - though Bradley Jr. names Robinson as one of his baseball heroes).

If anything, this movie will bring the hard fought achievements of Jackie Robinson to light in a way that will make a younger generation pay attention. It's easy to pretend that baseball's racial struggles are in the distant past, but one of my mothers was born in 1947 - the very year that Robinson debuted with the Dodgers (the other was born later, but still four years before the Red Sox finally integrated). We are literally just a generation or two removed from such shameful segregation - on and off the baseball field - and it's important to acknowledge the shame of the past, even as we work toward a better future.

Happy (belated) Birthday to the late, great Jackie Robinson!

If you went to Google yesterday, you saw that the Google Doodle was legendary baseball player, Jackie Robinson.  Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, and has been a household name in the United States since he broke baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. 

For all the glowing remembrances that float around each year on Robinson’s birthday and on MLB’S Jackie Robinson Day (each year since 2011 on April 15), the actual difficulties Robinson endured at the hands of white fans and even fellow ballplayers are usually glossed over.

From Dave Zirin’s A People’s History of Sports in the United States:

In their first meeting [Dodgers’ General Manager Branch] Rickey asked his new second baseman, “I know you have the skills. But do you have the guts?” This meant, in effect, did he have the guts to take torrents of abuse and not respond?  A decade before the rise of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his movement of nonviolent resistance, Rickey was asking Robinson, a player with a hair-trigger temper, to turn the other cheek.

Robinson faced explicit racism from his managers, teammates, umpires, and white fans, and endured it all with a stoicism that might as well have been a superpower. Some onlookers decided that this meant Robinson didn’t hear or didn’t mind the taunts, racial slurs, and threats showered upon him at every turn, but that was never the case. When Robinson died of a heart attack at the age of 53, his wife Rachel reported that all those years of holding such powerful feelings of stress and rage inside had caused Jackie’s early death.

The definitive book on Jackie Robinson’s life is Jule’s Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy,  and it’s a must read for anyone interested in baseball, race relations, history, or just the story of an incredible human being. It tells of Robinson’s amazing athletic achievements (starting with being a varsity letter winner in FOUR sports at UCLA), and of his passion for ending Jim Crow and segregation (including the tale of being court-marshaled and then acquitted for refusing to give up his seat on an illegally segregated army bus). 

Happy Jackie Robinson Day!

I'm headed to Fenway this morning to see the Red Sox battle the Rays - and keep hopes for a sweep alive.  It will be my first time at the park since Game 81 of last year (which ended in a Red Sox loss), and I could not be more excited about the fact that today is Jackie Robinson Day across MLB.

I'm taking a couple of sports related classes this semester (Baseball as American Culture and History of US Sports), and so we've obviously talked quite a bit about Robinson, both as an incredibly talented baseball player and as an amazingly strong and resilient human being.

Robinson took more abuse from fans, opposing teams, and even coaches, than any of us will ever understand - he not only paved the way to end segregation in baseball, but he was a beacon of hope to African-Americans all over the United States.  The best book I've read on Robinson is called Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy, by Jules Tygiel.  If you're interested in reading about Robinson's journey, or about Dodgers' mastermind Branch Rickey, this is the book for you.

The Red Sox in particular have cause to reflect on Jackie Robinson today, because they were the last MLB team to integrate, when Pumpsie Green debuted in July of 1959, TWELVE YEARS after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.  The Sox remained a notoriously racist organization far beyond Green's tenure on the team, and this fact was a big part of some terrible Red Sox teams - even when the Red Sox were ready to bring in African-American and Latin players, said players wanted nothing to do with an organization with that kind of reputation. (For more reading about this topic, check out It was Never About the Babe: The Red Sox, Racism, Mismanagement, and the Curse of the Bambino, by Jerry M. Gutlon.)

Of course, the Red Sox aren't discriminating against non-white ballplayers these days, but it's important to understand the scarred history of the franchise, because it all led up to today.

Today, every player in Major League baseball will wear 42 in honor of Jackie Robinson, and all that he stood for.  It's a meaningful and important sight, and I feel privileged to have tickets on this day specifically.