Jackie Robinson was a football star before he broke baseball's color line
When Jackie Robinson took first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947, ending decades of segregation in the major leagues, many knew him from a different sport. At UCLA he was famous chiefly for football. His brother, meanwhile, had finished just behind Jesse Owens in the 200 metres at the 1936 Olympics.
He was the youngest of five children of Georgia sharecroppers, born in Cairo in January 1919 and given a middle name honouring Theodore Roosevelt, who had died weeks earlier. His father left the next year and the family moved to Pasadena, where his mother took odd jobs and the children grew up poor in an affluent town that shut minority kids out of much of its recreation. He briefly ran with a neighbourhood gang before a friend talked him out of it.
Sport became his outlet. At high school he lettered in football, basketball, track and baseball and played tennis besides, winning a junior title at a regional tournament for Black players. At Pasadena Junior College he played quarterback, led off at shortstop, and in 1938 broke a junior college long jump record previously held by his older brother Mack. He also showed a lifelong refusal to accept racist treatment: that same year he was arrested after protesting police detention of a Black friend.
Drafted in the Second World War, he was court-martialed for refusing to move to the back of a segregated Army bus, and eventually discharged honourably. Playing for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro leagues, he caught the attention of the Dodgers' general manager Branch Rickey, who saw in him the right man to integrate the majors.
He delivered on the field: the first Rookie of the Year award in 1947, six straight All-Star selections and the 1949 National League MVP, the first Black player to win it. The Dodgers won the 1955 World Series with him. His restraint and talent undercut segregation's logic and fed the civil rights movement. Later he became the first Black vice president of a major American company and helped found a Harlem bank. In 1997 baseball retired his No. 42 across every team, a first in professional sport.
Source: Jackie Robinson
