There are many « firsts » in the long history of African Americans in this country. And with each one, a new plateau of equality and acceptance has been reached. But it can also be said without exception that each has had a price for the brave men and women who fought hard to improve the lives of their people and achieve that great breakthrough in their chosen field.
These principles are certainly true in the realm of sport, and baseball in particular. Baseball has long been considered the great American pastime. So on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson took the field to be the first black man to break the color barrier in professional baseball in a game between his team, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves, he was making a dramatic statement.
But it wasn’t a day of parades and celebrations for Robinson. As with so many great events in black history, it was a time of racism, prejudice and discrimination against African-Americans. Jackie Robinson was an extraordinary baseball player. In his first year alone, he played 151 games, led the league in base-stealing ability and received the first Rookie of the Year award ever. While Jackie played with the Dodgers, they went to the World Series six times and he also played in six All-Star games. He was a solid performer and a tremendous asset to his team, for whom he won the Most Valuable Player award in 1949 and helped the Dodgers win the World Series in 1955.
As is often the case, it took courageous leadership from supporters outside the African-American community to ensure that prejudice would not prevent a brilliant career like Jackie Robinsons from reaching its true potential. When some of the Brooklyn Dodger players refused to sit next to Jackie Robinson and displayed other hostile attitudes towards him because of his race, management firmly stated that if they couldn’t become a team with everyone in the club, they were welcome to go and play Baseball elsewhere.
But one of the most moving and heartwarming moments that became a shining example of the fall of racial bigotry in this country came at a game in Cincinnati, Ohio during Robinson’s rookie year. As fans at the game began heckling and shouting racial slurs at Robinson, one of his fellow Dodgers, Pee Wee Reese, took a stand to put a stop to such behavior. His declaration that racism would no longer reign in baseball was simple and elegant. As fans shouted their hateful remarks, Reese stepped out onto the field and put his arm around Jackie Robinson, clearly communicating that this man was a valued teammate and ballplayer on this team. The jeering ended abruptly and Reese and Robinson continued to do what they had come to do at this game, play exceptional baseball.
Jackie himself never made his baseball career about race. He chose to dramatically demonstrate what Dr. Martin Luther King later described when he said that the day must come when we judge a man not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. Jackie Robinson championed equality by showing that at the heart of his character was a superior baseball player and a valued member of the baseball community.
Even when Robinson spoke of his days as a baseball pioneer for other African-Americans, his words demonstrated that he only wanted the chance to be tested fairly alongside all other athletes, no more and no less. His simple statements really summed up much of what the civil rights movement was about when he declared, « You can hate a man for many reasons, color is not one of them. » And later in his career, he repeated it beautifully when he said, « I’m not concerned with whether you like me or dislike me…all I ask is that you respect me as a human being.
This emphasis on the individual, on the quality of all men and all Americans and their right to be judged for who they are as people, and not subjected to prejudice as African-Americans, is a perfect summary of the struggle of African-Americans everywhere.
