Jackie Robinson (1919-1972)
Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) was a world class athlete whose breaking of baseball’s so-called color line was a milestone in the history of civil rights in America. Robinson was born in Georgia, raised in California and became a star football player at UCLA. According to this article written by Robinson in 1946 for Teen Life Magazine, integrated athletics can help breakdown racial prejudices: “At Pasadena Junior College…I learned that sports activity is one of the best ways to break down racial barriers. On our (football) team were eight Southern chaps…at first they refused to cooperate with the three other Negro fellows and myself on the team. But we were living together, learning from one another, and soon the Southern boys began to reconsider their attitude. They respected us as good ball players, and then gradually learned to respect us also as human beings. As soon as we began to click as a real inter-racial aggregate, we were invincible.” The following year Robinson became the first African American to play baseball in the major leagues in the modern era. During his ten seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was Rookie of the Year (1947), a six-time All-Star, the National League’s Most Valuable Player (1949) and helped Brooklyn win its only World’s Series championship in 1955. Robinson was also the first African American inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. Time magazine listed Robinson as one of the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century, and he is also a recipient of the Congression Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
