BiggAndyy the Magazine

Jackie Robinson was a great baseball player. Jackie Robinson was the first student ever to letter in four different sports at UCLA. He was a Professional Football player for the Honolulu Bears in 1941. He served his country in World War II. He was an upstanding citizen of the United States of America. Jackie Robinson was also a negro in a segregated America.

In all the accomplishments Jackie Robinson achieved on the baseball field, and subsequently off of it, let’s not forget that he did not put himself there on his own. He did not decide one day, “I’m going to break the color barrier in Professional Baseball” and set off to do that. His background and accomplishments on and off the sports fields made him an ideal choice, but others had to put him on the diamond. It had to be a team effort, and Jackie was one member of that team.

In all of the coverage during Jackie Robinson Day (April 15, 2007) I did not see nary a mention of people like Branch Rickey, Leo Durocher, and Sam Maltin. Branch Rickey spent years planning and bringing to fruition his desire to integrate Professional Baseball. Leo Durocher, during the first years of Jackie’s MLB career, kept very tight reigns in the clubhouse, squashing petition drives by players to remove Jackie from the lineup and other more serious threats. Sam Maltin and his wife became the best of friends to the Robinson family in Montreal where Jackie first entered the Major Leagues in 1946. Sam, a sportswriter, championed the cause of an integrated MLB with pen and ink and championed his friend, Jackie, even more.

But in all the adulations and tributes to Jackie Robinson himself, most reports and retrospectives and documentaries fell short of getting the whole story. They only got one fourth of it, actually. Jackie is the face of Negro Equality in post World War II America. But he stood on the shoulders of men equally willing to face the racism and hatred of their friends, family, and co-workers. These apparently forgotten men are the rest of the story. Forgotten casualties of the politically correct rewrite of history simply because they were white.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Featured, Humanity, Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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