On this day 69 years ago, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier at Ebbets Field as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers. And in 2004, Major League Baseball adopted April 15th as Jackie Robinson Day, allowing every player to wear the pioneer’s number “42.” With the release of a new documentary chronicling Robinson’s life, WAMC looks back at how an area congressman worked to honor one of America’s greatest historical figures.The new documentary Jackie Robinson by renowned historical filmmaker Ken Burns along with Sarah Burns and David McMahon follows the athlete from his early childhood in Georgia to his post-baseball civil rights activism until his death in 1972. It premiered on PBS nationwide earlier this month.
In 2005, Robinson was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Congress’ highest civilian honor was presented to Robinson’s widow Rachel. The legislation to do so was sponsored by Massachusetts Congressman Richard Neal.
“I was approached by the Boston Red Sox,” Neal recalls. “The Red Sox, I think, were lamenting the fact that Jackie Robinson, although he had a tryout with the Red Sox, really never had a tryout. The tryout apparently took place early in the morning when the professionals who would have made the decision as to whether or not to retain and sign him weren’t even there. I think that they saw it as a missed opportunity and an effort to address an inequity that had accorded in Red Sox history.”
That moment in 1945 when Robinson was playing in the Negro Leagues is recounted in the film.
In July 1959 — more than 12 years after Robinson broke the color barrier — the Boston Red Sox became the last Major League team to integrate.
“I was approached by Larry Lucchino [Red Sox CEO] at the time and I was only too happy to do it,” Neal said. “It took me a long period of time — months to get the necessary signatures to put the ballot in front of the Congress. We were able to pass the Jackie Robinson Gold Medal acknowledging the special characteristics that he had brought to the American game. And to understand, as often is cited, that he’s really one of the great pioneers in civil rights history. I’ve heard John Lewis, the civil rights icon, say that before there was Martin Luther King and before there was Brown v. Board of Education [of Topeka] there was Jackie Robinson.”
President George W. Bush and then-U.S. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts were among those in the Capitol Rotunda for the 2005 medal awarding. Congressman Neal says he spent a considerable amount of time with Rachel Robinson leading up to that day. He recalls a story she tells about the iconic image of Robinson stealing home against the New York Yankees in Game 1 of the 1955 World Series.
“It remains one of the most controversial calls in modern sporting history,” Neal recalled. “She [Rachel Robinson] said that no matter when she saw Yogi Berra, literally for the rest of his life, the conversation always started with Berra saying to her ‘Rachel, he was out.’”
Neal noted Robinson’s playing style, terrorizing pitchers and catchers on the base paths with his speed and quickness, in pursuing the medal. The Hall of Famer lettered in four sports at UCLA — football, basketball, baseball and track and field. Some historians have said baseball was his worst sport. He was drafted into the Army in 1942 and served as an officer of a tank battalion during which he also faced racial segregation.
After retiring from baseball in 1957, Robinson became involved in the civil rights movement and politically active, supporting both Republicans and Democrats. As the film recalls, he took part in the March on Washington in 1963.
“I have never been so proud to be a Negro, Robinson wrote,” the film recounts. “I have never been so proud to be an American.”
In 1997, Major League Baseball universally retired Robinson’s number “42,” the first athlete to be so honored in any professional sport.
“If I had a room jammed with trophies, awards and citations and a child of mine came into that room and asked what I had done in defense of black people and decent whites fighting for freedom,” the film recounts. “And if I had to tell that child I had kept quiet, that I had been timid, I would have to mark myself a total failure in the whole business of living — Jackie Robinson.”
Click here to view the film.
