Profiles in Character: Jackie Robinson, Life-Long Campaigner for Civil Rights

When Brooklyn Dodgers’ rookie Jackie Robinson, wearing number 42, trotted out to first base at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, he broke a rigid, unwritten barrier, becoming the first black Major League ballplayer since the 1880s.  Of 24,237 fans that day, over 14,000 were Black, testifying to the significance and joy in his achievement. 

He paid a price. He would be taunted, threatened, spiked and deliberately hit by pitched balls.  At the start even his teammates objected to his presence.  Could he handle the pressure and play well enough to prove the benefit of integrating Major League baseball?

On August 28, 1945, Dodgers’ president and general manager Branch Rickey had met with Robinson to test his mettle.  “I know you’re a good ballplayer,” Rickey said.  “What I don’t know is whether you have the guts.”  As Robinson later recalled: “I was twenty-six years old, and all my life back to the age of eight when a little neighborhood girl called me a nigger - I had believed in payback, retaliation.  Are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?”   “I’m looking for a ballplayer with guts not to fight back,” Rickey said.

“I didn’t know how I would do it,” Robinson recalled.  “Yet I knew that I must. I had to do it for so many reasons.  For black youth, for my mother, for Rae [his wife], for myself.”

Robinson had the inner strength required.  Born into a sharecropper family in Cairo, Georgia on January 31, 1919, his father abandoned them a year later.  His mother, Mallie, moved them to Pasadena, California in 1920.  The family of six lived in relative poverty but not poverty of spirit.  His mother raised him to be proud of his skin color, telling him that Adam and Even were black, part of God’s original design for humanity. 

Jack, as he preferred to be called, became a fighter for civil rights before that movement blossomed. Barred by racism from swimming at the public pool, he and his friends swam instead at the city’s reservoir and, as he said, “were escorted to jail at gunpoint.”  Refused service at a lunch counter, he and a friend sat there until the server relented.  As Pasadena Junior College’s star quarterback he took a stand against the racist behavior of white Oklahoma teammates. He told his coach that he and another black star would transfer to another school unless the coach ended that behavior.  He did. 

Drafted in 1942, he applied for Officer Candidate School.  When his application languished, he called upon help from a friend he’d made, boxing champion Joe Louis.  As a second lieutenant he boarded an Army bus on July 6, 1944 and was told by the driver to move to the back. He refused.  He was court-martialed but acquitted by an all-white panel of officers.

Jack’s minor league debut with the Montreal Royals came on April 18, 1946.  When Montreal manager Clay Hopper learned that Rickey was sending Jack there first, he said “Do you really think a nigger’s a human being?”  In his first game, Jack went 4 for 5 and stole two bases.  His three-run homer provided a test for a white player.  As described in Call Him Jack: The Story of Jackie Robinson, Black Freedom Fighter, that next batter was George Shuba. “Shaking the hand of a Black man would surely be frowned upon in his hometown of Mobile Alabama.  Shuba extended his hand, and Jack took it.  Together, in that brief public exchange, they defied more than fifty years of Jim Crow.”  By the end of the season, Hopper would say of Robinson: “He’s a big-league ballplayer, a good team hustler, and a real gentleman.”

Jack’s major league career would lead to induction into Baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1962.  At the July 20, 1962 ceremony, Martin Luther King, Jr, said of him: “In the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, he understood the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes from being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom.  He was a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom-rider before the Freedom Rides.”

Jack retired from baseball in December 1956, yet continued to fight discrimination, marching with Dr. King and others.  He chaired an NAACP’s Freedom Fund Drive, served on its board and helped found Harlem’s Freedom Nation Bank. 

In his final public appearance on October 15, 1972 he threw out the first pitch before Game 2 of the World Series.  Grateful for the honor, he nevertheless commented “I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”

Jack died of a heart attack nine days later.  Inscribed on his tombstone are the words: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on others.”

In 2009, Major League Baseball began a tradition.  On April 15, the anniversary date of him breaking the color barrier, every player wears Number 42 on their jersey.  His impact continues.

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Photo Credit: U.S. Information Agency