John Roosevelt ("Jackie") Robinson, baseball player and business executive, was born in Cairo, Georgia, on 31 January 1919. He was the first black man in the history of american baseball playing in the big leagues.
Background
John Roosevelt Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia, on 31 January 1919, the son of Jerry Robinson and Mallie McGriff. Jerry Robinson worked on a local plantation for wages and for a time as a sharecropper, but shortly after Jackie's birth he deserted his family and went to Florida with another woman. Mallie Robinson and her five children were forced off the plantation. After working for a time as a domestic, she decided to go to California, where one of her brothers had settled after his army service in World War I. Installed in a ramshackle house in Pasadena, the Robinsons made do on the mother's meager income combined with welfare. The family eventually was able to move to a better house, where they lived for several years, enduring periodic harassment from white neighbors.
Education
At John Muir Technical High School, Jackie became a standout athlete, known for his reflexes, coordination, and speed.
Since no nationally known college stepped forward with an athletic scholarship, he entered Pasadena Junior College, where he played football as quarterback, was the basketball team's leading scorer, and the key member of the track and baseball teams.
Subsequently he enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he would become the finest all-around athlete that UCLA had ever known, excelling not only in the sports he had played in high school, but also winning championship tournaments in golf, swimming, and tennis.
Career
Each of the four Robinson boys sought a means of earning money as he became old enough.
Jackie found all sorts of odd jobs, from maintaining a newspaper route to shining shoes.
Recreational facilities were few, and Jackie belonged to the Pepper Street gang, which periodically ran afoul of the law for minor misdemeanors, but was spared the consequences through the intervention of compassionate policemen.
Only a few months before he was scheduled to graduate from college, Robinson decided to quit school in order to accept a job at a youth camp at Atascadero, California, under the auspices of the National Youth Administration. His stated purpose was to help support his mother.
The camp closed a few months later. His departure from the athletic scene produced a remarkable outpouring of accolades on the sport pages of the country, proclaiming the brilliance of his achievements on the playing fields. Because blacks had no opportunity to play professional football in the United States, Robinson went to Hawaii, where he played halfback for the Honolulu Bears, a semiprofessional team, and worked at a construction company.
At the end of the season, he headed home, just two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, aiming to work with deprived young men. But military service now beckoned.
Still troubled by an ankle he had broken in junior college, Robinson was designated for limited duty, although he might have avoided service altogether by claiming he was his mother's sole support. Assigned to Fort Riley, Kansas, a cavalry post, Robinson tended horses.
When he applied for Officers Candidate School, he was turned down because he was black. With the help of Joe Louis, the reigning heavyweight boxing champion, Robinson had the ban lifted, and a few blacks, including himself, were enrolled. In January 1943, Robinson was commissioned a second lieutenant and detailed as a morale officer for black troops. Almost immediately he was questioning and protesting the traditional discriminatory practices at Riley. He refused to play football with the fort's team because its schedule included elevens that would not play against blacks.
In time Robinson was transferred to a tank battalion at Fort Hood, Texas, and ordered to help prepare it for overseas service. While there, Robinson was brought before a court-martial on charges of insubordination growing out of his refusal to move to the back of a bus, in accordance with the accepted practice of that time and place. In the end, he was acquitted of all the charges.
While awaiting his final papers at Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky, Robinson met a member of the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League, who knew of Robinson's reputation as a collegiate sports hero but was not aware that Robinson was a baseball player. The chance encounter proved momentous in the history of baseball and American race relations. Robinson had accepted a position as basketball coach at a black college in Texas, but upon receiving a call to join the Monarchs, he seized the opportunity without hesitation.
Meanwhile, Branch Rickey, co-owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, ever on the prowl for baseball talent, had made up his mind to widen his search by seeking Latin American and black players.
He had been influenced substantially by the writings on race of Professor Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia University's Department of History, who maintained that people of different races will work together harmoniously when they have a common goal. After extensive research, Rickey decided that Jackie Robinson was the perfect choice to break baseball's color line: he was a superb player blessed with a must-win attitude, was college-educated, did not smoke or drink, was accustomed to white teammates, was articulate and self-disciplined, and was already experienced in fighting racial prejudice. Many of his fellow players in the Negro American League did not regard him as the most talented member of their ranks, and executives of the black leagues sensed that if Robinson succeeded and the flood gates opened for black players to enter organized baseball, the only sure result would be the demise of their franchises. Nevertheless, the political and moral implications of bringing an end to all-white baseball were clear to all.
In signing Robinson, Rickey exacted from him a pledge that no matter how fierce the brickbats, hate mail, and threats he might have to confront, he would not flinch or respond publicly.
On April 18, 1946, Robinson, amid unprecedented publicity and pressure, made a story-book debut with the Montreal Royals of the International League, a Dodger farm team.
He hit a three-run homer and had three singles in five at bats, stole two bases, and scored four runs, twice by forcing the pitcher to balk.
In 1947, Rickey promoted Robinson to the Dodgers, signing him to a contract paying $5, 000 for the season.
For the first time in the twentieth century a black man was playing in the big leagues.
In his ten seasons with the Dodgers they won six National League pennants--in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956. They failed to win in 1950 on the last day of the season, and in 1951 after a stunning loss in a playoff game. Although he was a line-drive hitter and had only 137 home runs in his career, he batted in the cleanup position--fourth in the lineup--because he catalyzed his mates with his clutch hitting and competitive fire.
He played mostly at second base, but also did stints at first base, third base, and left field.
Batting and throwing right-handed, he stood five feet, eleven inches tall, and in his prime weighed between 200 and 210 pounds. Once on base, Robinson would take a lead off it in a kind of ritual dance, as if he were about to steal, in order to rattle the pitcher so that he could not concentrate on the batter. A daring base runner, Robinson stole home nineteen times, the most by any player in the post-World War II era.
In 1955, in the opener of the only World Series that his team won, he stole home against the Yankees.
When Rickey left Brooklyn and the years of fierce play had taken their toll on Robinson's body, Robinson was ready to retire.
In what was widely regarded as ingratitude for his years of brilliance, after the 1956 season the Dodgers traded him to the hated rivals just across the Harlem River, the New York Giants. Robinson announced, however, in an article in the January 22, 1957, issue of Look magazine that he was retiring; he could not be persuaded to change his mind.
Robinson now entered the business world, serving first as an officer of the Chock Full O'Nuts luncheonette chain, and subsequently with an insurance company, with the Jackie Robinson Construction Corporation, and with a food franchising firm. For a time he was the chairman of the Freedom National Bank in Harlem.
In 1966, he accepted, largely as window dressing, the post of general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers football team, a franchise in the short-lived, upstart Continental League.
After his son's death, Robinson found such comfort as he could by volunteering his services in public campaigns against drug addiction. Robinson's health had been deteriorating for some time. He had suffered a heart attack in 1968, and diabetes had cost him the sight of one eye and left him partial vision in the other. His hair had turned white, and spectators were shocked at his appearance and painfully slow gait when, a few weeks before his death, he had participated in ceremonies at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles marking the retirement of number 42, which he had worn on his uniform throughout his big-league career. He died in Stamford, Connecticut, and is buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in the borough of Queens in New York City.
Mourned by millions, his twin legacy was secure: he was an iconic figure in the mighty endeavor to create a color-blind nation and an immortal superstar in the firmament of baseball.
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Politics
Having endured racial virulence from many quarters, including even from his own teammates, Robinson ended his self-imposed silence in 1949, and he became a strong voice for ending Jim Crow arrangements that persisted in the South and racial discrimination in general.
His prominence made him a magnet for the attention of politicians. In the presidential election of 1960, Robinson supported Richard Nixon because of Nixon's strong stand for civil rights.
In 1968, Robinson, having resigned as a special assistant to New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, backed the candidacy of Hubert H. Humphrey.
In 1969, he refused to participate in a Yankee Old-Timers Day as a protest against baseball's continued failure to put blacks in leadership positions in the dugout and in the executive suites.
Views
Quotations:
Jackie Robinson wrote later about the beginning of his career in big ligues: "I had to fight hard against loneliness, abuse and the knowledge that any mistake I made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there. "
Personality
He was a natural role model for black athletes in many sports; as the racial barriers fell and the opportunities opened, Robinson crusaded to widen them. Robinson remained devoted to Rickey, "the greatest human being I had ever known. "
Quotes from others about the person
"The only way to beat the Dodgers, " said the owner of another team, "is to keep Robinson off the bases. "
Connections
Although considered by girls to be a loner because he was generally shy with them, Robinson was attracted to Rachel Isum, a fellow student at the University of California at Los Angeles, whom he married on February 10, 1946.
They had three children.
Adding significantly to the melancholy of his last years was the fate of his son, Jackie, Jr. , who had become hooked on heroin while serving in the U. S. Army in Vietnam, where he was wounded. Just when his recovery was progressing, he was killed in an automobile accident in 1971, at the age of twenty-four.