Jackie Robinson was an outstanding baseball player. With his talents for the game, his impressive achievements, and the records he set over his ten-year career, he would have certainly made it into the history of one of America’s favorite sports. However, he was more than just a high-scoring sportsman. Years before the Civil Rights Movement, Jackie Robinson courageously opposed racial segregation and discrimination, contributing greatly to the struggle for equal opportunity and becoming a national hero.
Robinson was born in 1919 in Georgia and grew up in Pasadena, California. He discovered his pronounced aptitude for sports early, playing football, basketball, baseball, and other games at school. He had three older brothers who always supported him and encouraged him to pursue a career in sports (Falkner). However, in 1942, Robinson was drafted into the US Army. The army was segregated during that time, but throughout his service, Robinson challenged the injustice with bravery. In 1944, he was court-martialed for defying orders to sit in the back of a bus. This act resembles the same famously brave deed of Rosa Parks, but it happened eight years earlier. The court eventually decided that the order violated US Army regulations, and Robinson was acquitted (Robinson and Kerry). After being discharged, Robinson started playing baseball in Negro leagues and proved to be a very promising player. By 1946, he was already playing for a minor league team, the Montreal Royals, in Daytona Beach, Florida. While in Florida, he was not allowed to live in the same hotel as his teammates, so he had to stay at the house of a local African American (Robinson and Duckett 41). That year, Robinson became the first black player to play against a major league team, the Dodgers, and the following year, he broke the baseball color line by joining this team.
In 1947, at the age of 28, Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play Major League Baseball. Before this, since the 1880s, black people had been excluded from Major League Baseball. Although this so-called color line was not an official written rule, it had been there for 60 years as a symbol of segregation. Robinson played for ten seasons until 1956, demonstrating outstanding achievements, new techniques, and innovative game strategies. David Falkner has called him “the father of modern base-stealing” (171). At that time, even as a major baseball star, Robinson still had to face racism and bigotry. Dodgers President Branch Rickey wrote that Robinson repeatedly received “hate letters and death threats” and was “the target… of pitchers throwing at his head and legs, and catchers spitting on his shoes” (Robinson and Kerry). Karl Erskine, a former Dodgers player, emphasized Robinson’s inner strength when he wrote that “[m]ost mortal men would have cracked” if, while at the happiest of moments of their lives, they had been forced to deal with racial indignities on a daily basis (Williams and Sielski 1). Allan H. “Bud” Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball at that time, remembers that in 1947, he went to see the newest star, Jackie Robinson; when he and his friend were climbing to their seats, Selig noticed something that impressed him to his very core: they were the only white fans in the entire section. He writes, “I began to understand the impact that Jackie had made on his fellow African Americans” (Williams and Sielski x). In a segregated society, Robinson became more than a new baseball star.
Jackie Robinson was acknowledged with many honors throughout his life, both as a remarkable baseball player and a civil rights pioneer. He was introduced into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, and his uniform number, 42, was retired by Major League Baseball. Robinson participated in six All-Star Games and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949 (Falkner). It was an incredible success for an African-American man in an area that had been closed to African Americans for decades. He achieved this success at a time when many major universities did not admit black people, and drinking fountains in many American cities were still marked “white” or “colored.” After he retired from sports, Robinson continued his civil rights activities, co-founding the African American-owned Freedom National Bank in Harlem and founding the Jackie Robinson Construction Co. to build low-income housing (Robinson and Kerry). He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. He truly became a national hero, “a man to be emulated, a life to be studied, a legacy to be treasured” (Williams and Sielski xvi). Revealing the importance of Robinson’s pioneering role in the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called him ”a legend and a symbol in his own time” who ”challenged the dark skies of intolerance and frustration” (Robinson and Kerry).
Jackie Robinson’s life was a story of overcoming intolerance and oppression with courage and strength. He not only managed to make his way into an area from which he had been excluded because of the color of his skin, but he also managed to succeed in it. Jackie Robinson’s role in history is hugely significant: he was one of the first people in the 20th century to symbolize hope for equality and justice in American society.
References
Falkner, David. Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robinson, from Baseball to Birmingham. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Print.
Robinson, Jackie, and Alfred Duckett. I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson. Hopewell, N.J: Ecco Press, 1995. Print.
Robinson, Rachel, and John F. Kerry. “A Pioneer in Civil Rights.” The Boston Globe 2005. Web.
Williams, Pat, and Mike Sielski. How to Be Like Jackie Robinson: Life Lessons from Baseball’s Greatest Hero. Deerfield Beach, Fla: Health Communications, 2004. Print.