A Little Informative Article About One of the First Black Baseball Players

Jackie Roosevelt Robinson was the grandson of a slave and son of a sharecropper. Born in Cairo, Georgia on Jan. 31,1919, the fifth and last surviving child, times were hard. Making a hundred dollars a week, the family barely got by. When Jackie's father left with another man's wife, leaving Mallie Robinson to support her five children and herself, they had to move across the country to San Francisco to live with Mallie's brother, Burton.

Growing up in an all white town for a black man is tough, but when you're a single black woman with five kids to support, it is hell on earth. But somehow, Mallie Robinson raised her children to be religious, kind and caring when their neighbors were anything but. Growing up, wherever Jackie's family moved, they always lived in all white neighborhoods. Having rocks thrown at them, crosses burned on their front lawn, ugly words thrown at them was a daily occurrence, And it all could have made him bitter and angry if it wasn't for his mother keeping the family together spiritually. If not for Mallie Robinson and a young minister named Karl Downs, Jackie would have walked down the wrong path. The path of a juvenile delinquent.

Two men influenced him greatly, besides his mother to choose the right path. One of the men, Karl Downs was a young minister who tried to get the young people out of gangs and into church life. He helped the young find jobs, he provided aid and counseling to families, but most of all he got the youth to organize a youth center inside of the church so they would have a place other than the streets to go.

The other man who powerfully influenced Robinson was a mechanic named Carl Anderson who worked near a gas station near Jackie's house. He told Jackie that it didn't take guts to follow a crowd, that courage and intelligence lay in being different. Something that we all can learn from, but we don't all learn soon enough..
How Karl Downs died was a major factor for Jackie to turn to politics after retiring from baseball. After surgery, Karl Downs had complications, the white doctor who operated on him refused to operate again. He died in his hospital room.

Moving from Georgia to California for a number of reasons including the start of the KKK, Jackie went into a Jim Crow army, becoming a second lieutenant and then a morale officer. I can not imagine the pain he must have gone through., being black in those days. Men not following you because your black, taunts and jeers thrown at you day in and day out. Becoming a morale officer in a Jim Crow army probably was an initiative to fight for equal rights in politics later on.

Getting on the bus with a black woman who was light skinned but appeared white, invoked a disturbance to say the least. Refusing to move to the back of the bus where all the other blacks were caused Jackie a court martial which he won. He left the army soon after. After he left the war, Robinson went into the Negro leagues (Kansas City Monarchs). Robinson did not like it at all because of the poor conditions the players had to live with. Uncomfortable buses, prejudiced umpires, unsanitary conditions just to name a few. Jackie Robinson hated it all. To make matters worse, he didn't fit in, he was the only player on the team who had attended all white schools and because of that he certainly had a different perspective on life.

Jackie was also good in all sports, not just baseball.. Aggressive by nature, Jackie was not someone to take slights lightly. Being black was a shot against him in sports, being aggressive and black were four shots against him, being the first ever black to hit the majors was impossible. But Brach Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers thought he had what it took to beat the odds. And he did. Brach Rickey, along with others had a plan to introduce black players into the game. He was the solution to Robinson's problem supporting his mother and how he was going to marry his sweetheart Rachel Issum.

What Rickey was looking for was a player who could take abuse and not retaliate. In order to gain acceptance, he could not talk back, he had to ignore all the insulting comments, all the negative remarks thrown at him. From that perspective, it would seem that Jackie Robinson was not the man for the job. But once he had proven himself almost two horrible years later) he could then cast off the veneer and ride rough shot and tumble over all of them.

Jackie Robinson broke a lot of the color barriers. At the beginning of the season, Robinson's teammates were against him solely because he was black, at the end of the season they stood up for him when other teams made slights toward him. Everybody grows strong by learning, Robinson grew stronger by learning self control. To answer negativity with silence. His teammates learned that it's not skin color, but talent and ability that counts. The media had learned not to judge a book by it's cover so to speak. At first, the media was publicly degrading him, but once he showed them how much power he had with a bat, they changed their tune, they practically almost bowed down to him. One of the triumphs of breaking the color barriers was being treated just as one of the guys. One such incidence, an umpire called him out of the game because of heckling, Robinson and some other guys on the team were doing it, but only he got pulled out. Robinson didn't seem to think it was because he was black.

Racial tension infected home life. When Robinson's youngest son David was in school, he didn't like to dance because his classmates taunted him for having "dirty" feet. Both of his parents told him adamantly that they would not wipe their precious color away even if they could. His oldest son, Jackie Jr. being the oldest had it tough. Always expected to be as good as his father, he turned toward instead a life of drug abuse.. Amazingly he turned his life around in such a big way, only to have it end when his car spun out of control and hit a guardrail.

At the end of Robinson's career, he was traded to the Giants for thirty thousand and a pitcher. But before they could trade him, he retired from baseball. He was tired of not being able to play, he was getting benched a lot and his average was down. He was not hitting well at all.

Instead he became vice president of a company called Cock Full O'Nut's and took a prominent lead in politics where civil rights were concerned. Starting out in the NAACP, Robinson went on speaking tours and hosted a hundred dollar a plate dinners. Jokes about a black hosting an expensive dinner like that abounded. Robinson eventually resigned from the national board of the NAACP because he didn't think it was going anywhere.

Campaigning for Nixon was a bad choice, Robinson later realized but at the time Kennedy seemed to be uncomfortable around and talking about blacks. Robinson felt Kennedy wasn't doing enough for blacks and so he chose Nixon who wasn't doing much, but a lot more than Kennedy. Although suspicious and doubtful of Nixon, Robinson chose him over Kennedy. Ultimately everything Robinson said or did was influenced by how it would help the black community.
One of Robinson's friends said it best. "It is a horrible thing to sit here and realize you can be an American, but you have to go to court to find out how much of an American you are." Jackie Roosevelt Robinson's life was so fruitful that it is hard for some people to believe that he said that he never had it made. But being a black man in a white world, you never do have it made.

His life has been so informative to me personally and socially, I have only just realized what it is to be black and his life is such an inspiration to me. There are times when you have to be silent and things will work out. Times when you have to speak out and be criticized for it. But either way you make a step in the right direction. I remember a time when I wanted to wash away this blackness to reveal a pale white coating, but I've come to love this blackness that I have. I am proud of my color and my people, and I grow sick whenever I think about that time when I wanted to change my heritage. (At the time I wrote this, I was in high school where taunting was a daily occurance and being of a different color was not good. I have since changed my views of my color of course and really happy with what I've got.)