Athletes Inspire America: Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson Breaking the Color Barrier, Lighting A Spark that Leads Off the Civil Rights Movement

Perhaps more than anyone else of his generation, Jackie Robinson helped to transform America. Despite the Founders’ visionary rhetoric of freedom and rights, African Americans were living in circumstances as unfree, unjust, and unequal as those anywhere in the world.

Ira Glasser, for many years Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, explained: “Seven years before the Supreme Court’s [Brown v. Board of Education] decision and nearly nine before Rosa Parks sat down on that Alabama bus, ordinary people all over this country, including small children black and white, participated in and learned from Jackie Robinson’s struggle in a way that was direct, powerful, and enduring....” Glasser added, “It is quite possible that for many of us,” Glasser said, “these were the first images of black humanity we as white children had ever been allowed to see.”

It is no surprise that the meritocracy of competitive sports helped pave the way for American acceptance of the Civil Rights movement. Robinson forced fans to come to terms with the fact that a black man could compete with, and be accepted by, white players. As he performed heroic feats of sport, many who witnessed the taunts and abuse quickly began to question the “racial superiority” claimed by those who were jeering rather than cheering Robinson.

★ JACKIE ROBINSON. Printed Document Accomplished and Signed “Jack Roosevelt Robinson,” American Baseball Bureau questionnaire answered during spring training, undated, but early March, 1946, stamped “28 March, 1946” upon receipt back in Chicago. 1 p., 8½ x 14 in. #27010