100 Years Ago: Jackie Robinson was Born

100 years ago today, on January 31, 1919, baseball legend Jackie Robinson was born. He was Major League Baseball’s first acknowledged African-American player when he made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame just 15 years later.

Besides being forever tied with the historical significance of breaking baseball’s color line, Robinson is also considered one of the most important people in all of American history. In 2006, The Atlantic magazine ranked the 100 most influential figures in the history of the United States. Robinson was ranked 35th, behind 13 presidents and ahead of 30 others. The only other athlete to make the top 100 was Babe Ruth.

Robinson was listed above civil rights luminaries such as Lyndon Johnson and Thurgood Marshall and considered more influential than 19th-century anti-slavery heroes such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, John Brown, Nat Turner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Breaking the Color Line

The announcement of Jackie Robinson’s signing (on October 23, 1945) occurred less than two months after the end of the Second World War. It was a groundbreaking moment that led shortly thereafter to the integration and reintegration of other professional sports leagues. Kenny Washington, Jackie’s college teammate in football and baseball, signed with the Los Angeles Rams the following March. Because Robinson spent a year in the minor leagues in 1946, Washington actually played in the NFL (in the fall of 1946) before Robinson’s MLB debut.

In October 1950, Earl “Big Cat” Lloyd broke the NBA’s color line with the Washington Capitols. The first black player in the NHL was Canadian-born Willie O’Ree, who debuted with the Boston Bruins in 1958.

The signing of Jackie Robinson to play Major League Baseball predated even the integration of the United States military, which occurred in July 1948 in an Executive Order by President Harry Truman. In World War II, 125,000 African-Americans served overseas but almost all were in segregated units.

“Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.”

— Jackie Robinson

“Jackie was a college football hero, a handsome, intelligent, talented guy with a lot going for him. He didn’t need that kind of humiliation. And it certainly wasn’t in his nature to suffer it silently. But he had to. Not for himself, but for me and all the young black kids like me. When Jackie Robinson loosened his fist and turned the other cheek, he was taking the blows for the love and future of his people.”

— Hank Aaron (New York Times, April 13, 1997)

Cooperstown Cred: Jackie Robinson (2B)

• Inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962 (1st year on the ballot, 77.5% of the vote)
• Brooklyn Dodgers (1947-56)
• Career: .311 BA, .409 OBP, 137 HR, 734 RBI, 197 SB
• Career: 132 adjusted OPS+, 61.4 WAR (Wins Above Replacement)
• 6-time All-Star, 1947 M.L. Rookie of the Year, 1949 N.L. MVP

(cover photo: jackierobinson.org)

Thanks to the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) for biographical info.

Jackie Robinson Early Life and UCLA Years

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born on January 31, 1919 in Cairo, Georgia, a small town in the southern part of the state, 35 miles north of Tallahassee, Florida. Robinson’s middle name was inspired by President Theodore Roosevelt, who died 25 days prior to his birth.

Jackie was the youngest of five children to sharecroppers Jerry and Mallie Robinson. Jerry left his family six months after Jackie was born. About eight months later, Mallie moved the family across the country to Pasadena, California.

The Robinsons moved into a predominantly white neighborhood in Pasadena. Young Jackie and his brothers often had to fight to defend themselves and were involved more than once in run-ins with authorities. Jackie was the second star athlete in the family; his older brother Mack finished second to Jesse Owens in the 200-meter dash in the 1936 Olympics.

Jackie was a star athlete in high school and then played four different sports at UCLA. Besides baseball, Robinson starred in track and field, basketball and football. On the gridiron, Robinson shared running back duties with Kenny Washington who, as we noted earlier, broke the color line in the NFL. Robinson averaged over 11 yards per carry as a junior and led nation in punt return average both years. On the hardwood, he was the conference leader in scoring in his junior and senior years.

In track and field, Robinson was a NCAA long jump champion. Oh, and as if the exploits in four sports wasn’t enough, Jackie won swimming championships and reached the semifinals of the national Negro tennis tournament.

While at UCLA, Jackie met Rachel Isum, who would later become his wife.

Courtesy: Jackie Robinson Foundation and The Sporting News

Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey

Robinson was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942. He was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas with boxing legend Joe Louis and later in Fort Hood, Texas. At Fort Hood, Robinson defied a white bus driver’s order to go to the back of the bus, an action for which he was court-martialed. Although he prevailed at his hearing, the Army decided to grant him an honorable discharge.

Free from military service, Robinson joined the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues for the 1945 season, playing shortstop. Meanwhile, in New York City, Branch Rickey was planning to integrate Major League Baseball, starting with his Brooklyn Dodgers, for whom he was president, General Manager and part owner.

The timing was right, especially in New York. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had formed an anti-discrimination committee. Additionally, a city councilman running for re-election circulated a pamphlet showing two black men on the cover. One was a dead soldier, the other a Negro League baseball player. The caption read, “Good enough to die for his country, but not good enough for organized baseball!”

Rickey was looking for the perfect player to be the face of baseball’s integration and Robinson checked almost all of his boxes, the exception being questions about his throwing arm. What Robinson had that Rickey liked was prior experience (at UCLA) of competing with and against white athletes. It was also important to Rickey that Robinson was a nondrinker, nonsmoker and non-womanizer.

When Rickey interviewed Robinson on August 29, 1945, he asked Jackie if he “had a girl,” a question to which he already knew the answer. One of the first things Rickey did was urge Jackie to marry his “girl” quickly.

Next, in a scene reported in The Saturday Evening Post in 1950, Rickey told Robinson what he was really looking for. The scene was immortalized in the 1950 movie The Jackie Robinson Story (starring Jackie as himself) and recently by Harrison Ford and Chadwick Boseman in the movie 42.

Rickey leaned close to Jackie and spoke with a crescendo of feeling. “You think you’ve got the guts to play the game, no matter what happens? They’ll throw at your head!”

“Mr. Rickey,” Robinson said bitterly, “they’ve been throwing at my head for a long time.”

Rickey’s voice rose, “Suppose I’m a player in the heat of an important ball game!” He drew back and prepared to charge at the Negro. “Suppose I collide with you at second base! When I get up, I yell, ‘You dirty black —’” He finished the excoriation, and then said calmly, “What do you do?”

Robinson blinked. He licked his lips and swallowed. “Mr. Rickey,” he puzzled, “do you want a ballplayer who’s afraid to fight back?”

“I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back!” Rickey exclaimed almost savagely. He paced across the floor again and returned. “You’ve got to do this job with base hits and stolen bases and fielding ground balls, Jackie. Nothing else!”

— “The Truth about the Jackie Robinson Case,” Arthur Mann, Saturday Evening Post (May 13, 1950)

A Year in Montreal

Branch Rickey wasn’t ready to put Jackie Robinson in the Major Leagues right away, preferring to give the 27-year old a year of professional seasoning in the Dodgers’ AAA affiliate, the Montreal Royals. That decision was certainly in part to give the players and fans of MLB a year to get used to the idea of a black player on the diamond.

In 124 games with Montreal, Robinson showed that he was clearly ready for prime time. Playing second base, Jackie hit .349 with a .468 on-base%, scoring 113 runs while stealing 40 bases. His teammates with the Royals included future Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis and Giants/Cubs manager Herman Franks.

As Rick Swaine notes in his SABR bio, one of the biggest concerns about integrating Major League Baseball was that white fans would be turned off by an integrated team. Robinson’s success in Montreal put those fears to rest. The Royals set a Montreal attendance record and, in total, over one million fans went to see Royals games throughout the International League.

Rookie Campaign in Brooklyn

Rickey was determined to have Jackie Robinson play the 1947 season in Brooklyn. Besides the sometimes uncomfortable process of integrating with some of his southern teammates, there was another glitch in Rickey’s plan. The Dodgers were already set in the middle of the infield, with Eddie Stanky at second base and Pee Wee Reese at shortstop. Stanky was coming off a season in which he finished 7th in the N.L. MVP vote while Reese did him one better, finishing 6th the MVP balloting.

First base, on the other hand, had been manned by the underwhelming platoon of Howie Schultz and Ed Stevens. Thus, the athletic Robinson spent the entirety of his rookie campaign playing first base. In that lone season at first, Robinson led the National League in double plays turned and was third in assists.

It was with the bat and on the base paths, however, that the 28-year old rookie shined. Robinson hit .297 with 12 home runs, 31 doubles, 125 runs scored and a N.L. best 29 stolen bases. Not surprisingly, Robinson was hit by a pitch 9 times, 2nd most in the league.

There were many incidents in Robinson’s rookie campaign that tested his vow to Rickey that he would turn the other cheek. Most notable was an incident early in the season in which he was repeatedly taunted with racial epithets by Ben Chapman, the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. Chapman would later say that he was just trying to get a competitive edge, that he had tried to rattle Joe DiMaggio by calling him “Dago” or “Wop” and Hank Greenberg “Kike.”

For Robinson, the taunts from Chapman nearly broke his will to turn the other cheek. “For one wild and rage-crazed minute, I thought, ‘to hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment,’ ” Robinson once recalled. Chapman’s epithets, however, served as a turning point that aided Jackie’s integration with his teammates. Stanky, a Philadelphia native, confronted the Phillies, calling them cowards for heaping verbal abuse against a player that they knew could not fight back.

The Chapman-Robinson scene was depicted vividly in the movie 42. Another scene in the 2013 film depicts the Kentucky-born Reese putting his arm around Robinson to quiet a hostile crowd in Cincinnati, a city right on the Kentucky border. Whether or where this actually happened is a matter of debate but the event was immortalized in 2005 with a statue of Reese and Robinson outside the home field of the minor league’s Brooklyn Cyclones.

In his rookie season, Robinson helped the Dodgers to the N.L. Pennant, setting up a rematch of the 1941 World Series against the New York Yankees. In ’41, the Bronx Bombers prevailed in 5 games but the ’47 edition, the first of 6 Subway Series in a 10-year stretch, went a full 7 games, with the Yankees prevailing in the final tilt. Jackie’s first foray in October baseball was a bit of a disappointment; he hit just .259 with a .310 OBP.

Still, after the season, Robinson was named the Major League’s Rookie of the Year. Rickey’s “experiment” was a huge success, both on the field and at the gate. The Dodgers set a single-season attendance record and all but one of the other N.L. teams set single-game records when Robinson was in town.

1949-1953: One of Baseball’s Best

Eddie Stanky was traded to the Boston Braves before the 1948 season, opening up the second base position for Robinson. With the color line now successfully broken, Robinson was joined by another black player, catcher Roy Campanella.

The Dodgers as a team in 1948 had a disappointing 3rd place finish in the N.L. but Robinson became a dependable RBI bat, driving in 85 runs (mostly from the 2-hole) while hitting 12 home runs with 38 doubles.

With integration of the Major Leagues fully underway, pitcher Don Newcombe joined the club in 1949 and followed Jackie’s lead by pitching well enough to be the league’s Rookie of the Year (this was the first year that there were separate “Rookie of the Year” awards in each league).

From 1949-1953, Jackie Robinson was arguably the best player in all of Major League Baseball. In 1949, at the age of 30, he started a superlative five-year run with a MVP season. Robinson hit a league-best .342 with 16 HR, 124 RBI, 203 hits and 122 runs scored. He also swiped a career-high 37 bases.

Easily the team’s best player, he led the team back to the World Series; the Dodgers won 97 games, one more than the St. Louis Cardinals. It was, however, another disappointing Fall Classic for Robinson and the Dodgers. Jackie hit just .188 as the Yankees won the series in 5 games.

The 1949 season was the pinnacle of Robinson’s career but he followed it up with four more superb campaigns. In those four seasons, Jackie averaged .326 with a .429 OBP and an average of 104 runs scored per season. For the five seasons combined, Robinson’s WAR (Wins Above Replacement) was 42.1, the best in all of Major League Baseball. Stan Musial was second (at 41.3) with Robin Roberts third at 37.2.

The Dodgers barely missed the postseason in 1950 and 1951 despite Robinson’s superb play. In ’51, the Dodgers and Giants finished the regular season tied with 96 wins. On the Dodgers’ side this was thanks to Jackie’s heroics.

On the last day of the regular season, in Philadelphia (no longer managed by Chapman), the Dodgers and Phillies were tied at 8 in extra innings. In the bottom of the 12th, the Phils loaded the bases but failed to score thanks to a diving, inning-ending catch by the Brooklyn’s second baseman. In the top of the 14th, Robinson hit a solo home run off the future Hall of Famer Roberts, who had entered the game in the 9th out of the bullpen. The Dodgers went on to win the game 9-8, setting up a 3-game tiebreaker series against the New York Giants. That series famously ended in the Giants’ favor with Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”

In 1952 and ’53, two more African-American players joined the Dodgers. 28-year old pitcher Joe Black became an ace relief pitcher and was the team’s third Rookie of the Year in 5 years. Jim Gilliam joined the team in ’53 and made it 4 out of 6 years with a black Dodgers’ player winning Rookie of the Year honors.

The Dodgers returned to the World Series in both ’52 and ’53, losing both times (again) to the Yankees. Robinson hit .174 in ’52, doing better in ’53 (.320 BA) in the losing effort.

Jackie Robinson’s Final Four Seasons (1953-1956)

In 1953, even though he was the team’s best player, the now 34-year old Jackie Robinson graciously gave up his starting position at second base to make room for the 24-year old Gilliam. After five seasons as the team’s starter at 2nd, Robinson became a utility player, playing mostly left field and third base. In that utility role, he continued to thrive both offensively and defensively.

In 1954, again splitting time between left and third, Robinson made his 6th and final All-Star game but was limited to just 124 games due to injuries.

Robinson was no longer a star-caliber player in his final two seasons (1955 and 1956). He hit just .266 in those two campaigns (far below his career .311 BA), playing just 105 games in ’55 and 117 in ’56, mostly at the hot corner.

Jackie had a very shiny silver lining in 1955, however, as the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees in the World Series. For Robinson, however, other than a steal of home plate in Game One, it was not a memorable series. In fact, manager Walter Alston benched Jackie in Game 7 for reasons never fully explained.

In 1956, the Dodgers lost the Fall Classic in 7 games to the Yankees, with Game 7 a 9-0 wipeout. In his final MLB at bat, Robinson made the final out by striking out, with Yogi Berra forced to throw him out at first when he dropped the ball on the third strike.

Robinson was traded to the San Francisco Giants in December 1956 but he elected to retire instead.

Jackie Robinson’s Legacy

Although he played only 10 years playing Major League Baseball, Jackie Robinson’s mark on the game is indelible. The totality of Robinson’s ten years on the diamond were eminently superb.

For his offensive, defensive and base running prowess, Robinson was a first ballot selection to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1962, joining legendary fireballer Bob Feller in Cooperstown. Robinson and Feller were actually the first two first-ballot inductees since the Hall’s inaugural class of 1936, when Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson were inducted.

As for his legacy, besides paving the way for an entire generation of black players in baseball and all other sports, Robinson became a key figure in the Civil Rights movement. Robinson served for over a decade on the board of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). In retirement, Robinson because close friends with Martin Luther King Jr. They stood together in the March on Washington and also simultaneously received honorary doctorates from Howard University.

“Do you know what Jackie’s impact was? Well, let Martin Luther King tell you. In 1968, Martin had dinner in my house with my family. This was 28 days before he was assassinated. He said to me, ‘Don, I don’t know what I would’ve done without you guys setting up the minds of people for change. You, Jackie, and Roy (Campanella) will never know how easy you made it for me to do my job.’ Can you imagine that? How easy we made it for Martin Luther King!”

— Don Newcombe, in Time Magazine (2007)

A few years after he retired from baseball, Robinson revealed that he suffered from diabetes. He died of a heart attack on October 24, 1972 at the age of 53. His wife Rachel is still alive at the age of 96.

Today, Jackie Robinson is still honored and revered in Major League Baseball and in America as a whole. In 1997, on the 50th anniversary of his MLB debut, his uniform number 42 was retired throughout the sport of baseball. New York Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera, unanimously elected to the Hall of Fame last week, was the last player allowed to wear the sacred number because of a grandfather clause.

Later in 2019, the Jackie Robinson Museum will open to the public. The museum, which will commemorate Robinson’s life and legacy, is under construction in lower Manhattan, a short distance from the Freedom Tower and the 9/11 Memorial.

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

— Jackie Robinson

100 years ago today, this legend was born. His unique role in American history will never be forgotten.

Thanks for reading.