Comedian Chris Rock called it “the Jackie Robinson thing.”
The stories of trailblazers who become the first Black person to break a particular barrier — as Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line — focus on the exceptional skill that allowed them entrée, rather than the racism that kept them out.
The vicious destruction of a youth baseball club’s beloved statue of Robinson in Wichita, Kansas, has focused attention on Robinson’s legacy and the ugly history of baseball’s color line at a critical moment when anti-racial justice activists are trying to erase it.
“As if there weren’t Black people that could play before him,” Rock said. “And that’s how White people have learned about racism. They think, when these people work hard enough, they’ll be like Jackie.”
Indeed, there was no shortage of phenomenal Black baseball players in America in 1947, when Robinson made his Major League Baseball debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The idea that Robinson broke the color line because he was the first Black player to achieve a certain level of skill is ludicrous.
Though Robinson certainly was a great athlete — he lettered in baseball, basketball, football and track at UCLA — it was his courage in the face of racist abuse that allowed him to cross MLB’s color line.
League 42, a youth baseball league named for the number Robinson wore, commissioned the statue to honor Robinson’s courage and perseverance. Thieves hacked the statue from its base, leaving only its bronze feet, severed at the ankles. Wichita authorities have not filed hate crime charges, as the suspect arrested intended to sell the statue as scrap metal — though what could be more repugnantly racist than treating a symbol of civil rights and racial justice as mere scrap metal? Nor does the suspect’s story explain why the statue was found hacked apart, with the pieces on fire, five days later.
Whatever the motivation, the defilement of the monument was an attack on League 42’s mission to inspire, educate and create opportunity for children in underserved neighborhoods. A community has been traumatized. And that trauma has been forged into an even greater resolve to honor Robinson’s legacy.
The racist myth of ‘working hard’
That resolve is needed as much now as it was the day in 1947 when Robinson stepped onto the field, only to hear the manager of the opposing Philadelphia Phillies, call him the n-word and scream, “Go back to the cotton field where you belong.”
The prevailing idea that racial barriers can be broken “when these people work hard enough,” as Rock put it, is not an accident of history. It is the very intentional, primary goal of the anti-racial justice movement calling itself “anti-woke.” It puts the burden of eliminating racial gaps on the backs of the oppressed — who simply haven’t been “working hard” — while protecting and preserving a system of discriminatory hiring practices, persistent redlining, bias in home appraisals, inequitable school funding, voter suppression and gerrymandering.
That’s why these activists are desperate to ban books like “Thank You, Jackie Robinson,” by Barbara Cohen, which tells the story of the racial segregation policies of the 1940s and how they affected the friendship between a white boy and a Black cook who share a love of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
By the time Robinson made his major league debut, baseball’s “gentlemen’s agreement” banning Black players had been in effect for 60 years. The St. Louis Browns effectively drew the color line in 1887 when the players banded together and refused to play against the all-Black New York Cuban Giants.
Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey chose Robinson to break that line because he was “so strong that he could survive,” as longtime Dodgers play-by-play announcer Red Barber recalled. And while Robinson promised Rickey he would not respond to taunts and threats on the field, off the field he was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement, raising bail for jailed protesters, registering voters in the South, and speaking out against police brutality.
What we remember, when we honor Jackie Robinson, are not only his 141 home runs and his 761 RBIs, but the fearlessness that inspired sportswriters with terms like “combative,” “troublemaker,” and “rabble rouser.”
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League. He was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002 and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Georgetown University Law Center.
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