Major League Baseball Is Sanitizing Jackie Robinson’s Radical Legacy |
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Major League Baseball (MLB) likes to congratulate itself for being a civil rights trailblazer. Jackie Robinson Day celebrations are held at every ballpark on April 15, the date Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Since 2009, all players, managers, coaches, and umpires wear Robinson’s iconic number 42 to commemorate his impact on the game and society. At every game played that day, teams feature on-the-field ceremonies and show clips of Robinson. Winners of the Jackie Robinson Foundation’s college scholarship program show up to discuss how his legacy changed their lives. It is a feel-good day for sport.
Though Robinson was a fierce competitor and an outstanding athlete, the aspect of his legacy that often gets glossed over on Jackie Robinson Day is that he was also a radical.
Baseball has had its share of iconoclasts, dissenters and mavericks who defied baseball’s and society’s establishment. But none took as many risks — and had as big an impact — as Robinson.
The celebrations of Jackie Robinson Day downplay his activism during and after his playing career. They don’t delve into the forces arrayed against Robinson — the players, fans, reporters, politicians and baseball executives who scorned his presence in a major league uniform and outspoken views on racial segregation. (In 1946, at least 14 of the 16 major league owners opposed ending baseball’s apartheid).
Major league baseball integrated at a snail’s pace after Robinson broke MLB’s color barrier. As late as 1951, only six of baseball’s 16 major league teams had a Black player. The Boston Red Sox were the final holdout, when Elijah “Pumpsie” Green joined the team in the middle of the 1959 season, 12 years after Robinson joined the Dodgers.
Black players in the major and minor leagues — particularly in the South but elsewhere, too — continued to face blatant racism long after Robinson retired from the Dodgers in 1956. They couldn’t eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as their white teammates. Even taxis were off-limits to many Black players. Fans, opposing players, and even some of their own teammates hurled racist epithets and made it harder for them to concentrate on the game. White managers used racist double standards in deciding which players would play, get promoted, or demoted.
Will this year’s festivities remind fans that last year the Department of Defense deleted a story on its “Sports Heroes Who Served” website highlighting Robinson’s military service as part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to purge references to diversity, equity and inclusion? The DOD restored the page in less than a day in response to numerous media stories and comments by members of Congress, Robinson’s relatives, the head of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and some major league players. Conspicuously absent were any words from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, whose office coordinates the annual Jackie Robinson Day events.
In anticipation of this year’s Jackie Robinson Day, MLB announced that........