|
IN YOUR PRIME
Jackie
Young Americans today suffer from “historical amnesia.” As a result, too few know much about the nation’s past, and the heroes who mattered—then and now.
Jackie Robinson, baseball warrior, remains at the head of a short list of authentic sports heroes, but he is much more than that, too. Over dinner one night, Martin Luther King told Robinson, “You made it easier for me…for all of us,” who carried the civil rights torch.
As another baseball season gets underway, it is befitting to remember, and honor, the contributions of Jack Roosevelt Robinson, born in Georgia, schooled in California, and belonging to all America.
“The dominant truth of the Jackie Robinson Brooklyn Dodgers was integration,” author Roger Kahn wrote in “The Boys of Summer,” his brilliant recapturing of a special time for baseball.
“The Robinson experience developed as an epic,” Kahn continued. “Everywhere, in New England drawing rooms and on porches in the South, in California, which had no baseball, and in New York City…men and women talked about Jackie Robinson…and as they did, they confronted themselves and American racism.”
Robinson, of course, was major league baseball’s first African-American player (According to the time-honored cliché, “he broke the color barrier.”), and we are indebted to Jack’s only daughter, Sharon Robinson, for this description:
“On April 12, 1947, my father, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, stepped out of the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout, crossed first base, and assumed his position…He paused…lifted his cap, and saluted the cheering crowd.
“It was a defining moment for baseball,” she writes, “and for America.”
To many old fans who saw him up close, including this one, the quintessential Jackie Robinson, number 42 on his back, was a base runner leading off third and, suddenly, an authentic threat to steal home. He distracts the pitcher and causes infielders to shift and surrender defensive positions. The crowd reacts with each pitch…and every feint to run from ever-aggressive Jackie.
“As a kid,” Sharon Robinson remembers, “my favorite photograph showed dad stealing home in the 1955 World Series…his right hand was clenched into a fist…(and) my dad’s face was twisted with a fierce determination. Could this be the same man who never raised his voice at home?”
This and other childhood memories are part of a new book, “Promises To Keep, How Jackie Robinson Changed America,” by Sharon Robinson, and published by Scholastic Press as children’s history. Only 64 pages long, it is nonetheless notable for black and white photographs, plus a brief history of blacks since slavery, and of course background on the Robinson family.
Jackie’s mother, Mallie, wife of a failed sharecropper, moved her family from Cairo, GA to Pasadena, CA for the proverbial “better life.” During the 1920s, however, segregation and deprivation were the law of the land. A God-fearing woman who earned her living cleaning white homes, Mallie is described as exceedingly stubborn by author David Falkner, who wrote she “crossed the country for her children; she crossed the street for no one.”
It is ironic, perhaps, that Jackie Robinson, described universally as fierce, brave, endlessly interesting, high-strung and, to be sure, often angry—for just cause—was greatly influenced by, and closest to, several strong women: his mother first, and later his wife, Rachel Annetta Isum, a registered nurse and later an educator at Yale School of Nursing.
Now, joining the crusade to keep the Jackie Robinson legacy alive, is daughter Sharon, vice president of Educational Programming for Major League Baseball, and formerly a nurse-midwife and educator. Since Sharon was just six when her father retired from baseball in 1957, she often is asked: “Did you really know your father?”
She tells her young inquirers: “My father taught me to flip pancakes, hit a baseball, question political leaders, solve problems and keep promises.”
It is Sharon Robinson’s premise that her late father, who died much too soon at age 53, made a commitment of service to America; now she is throwing out that challenge to young people everywhere…as a commitment to study hard, be a better friend, family member, or neighbor.
“Making a promise and keeping it is so important,” she repeats, adding to the splendid, enduring legacy bequeathed Americans, of all ages, by Jackie Robinson.
|
Outrageous Associations
