Jackie Robinson was a true leader
I thought that I knew all there was to know about Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson until last week.
Thanks to Ken Burns’ comprehensive portrait of the man during his two-part, four hour PBS series, simply titled “Jackie Robinson,” I realized how complex his life story had been.
I’d already known that Robinson had excelled in four sports while he was enrolled at UCLA. And that, of the four, baseball had been his “worst” sport.
There’ve been a wealth of books and movies that have chronicled the fact that, at the outset of WWII, Robinson joined the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of 2nd Lt., but then he got court martialed for refusing to sit in the back of an Army bus.
America has known for a long time that he signed a Major League contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but only after he agreed to put aside his temper for two years, and not respond to his overwhelming desire to fight back against a steady stream of hostilities hurled his way.
Robinson, as gifted an athlete as he was, wasn’t the best baseball player of his generation.
He was, however, a serviceable example of a prickly young man who could achieve great things despite the odds against him.
Perhaps I’m being a little harsh by saying he wasn’t the best baseball player of his time.
In 1949, Robinson had a .342 batting average; he had 124 runs batted in; and he scored 122 runs. In each of those categories, he would’ve bested just about everybody in Major League baseball last season.
There’s an interesting reason 1949 was an important year for Robinson.
That year, Branch Rickey, who’d signed him to his original contract with the Dodgers, released him from his pledge to stay calm while the cruel winds of racial hatred swirled around him.
He was free to show his righteous indignation at being mistreated on or off the baseball field, and, thusly, he was permitted to be himself!
Sportswriters didn’t seem to like the new, feistier Jackie Robinson as much as they admired the docile one.
They took turns calling him “a chronic griper,” an “ingrate,” who was “insolent,” and worse, “an angry black man.”
It’s here that I feel compelled to tell you that this isn’t really about a sport that had, with great hypocrisy, called itself “The National Pastime,” while it had only served part of this nation.
Nor is it about one man who showed enormous strength of character, while he broke baseball’s “color-line.”
It’s really about politics and two men.
Ken Burns’ shrewdly included another man who broke another of this nation’s “color-line,” in the telling of Robinson’s life story – President Barack Obama.
The president appeared throughout Burns’ documentary, and his mere presence brought a contemporary freshness to the program.
When Robinson became the first black man to step onto a Major League baseball field on April 15th, 1947, he probably never dreamed that America would elect its first black president 61 years – 22,561 days later to be exact.
But if he had imagined that there would, someday, become a black president, he could imagine that his critics might call him “a chronic griper,” an “ingrate,” who was “insolent,” and worse, “an angry black man,” – and for no good reason.
It’s clear that Obama, more than anybody, understands exactly how difficult it was for Jackie Robinson to travel his tortured path to acceptance, and, ultimately to much-deserved acclaim.
“Part of what I admire about Jackie Robinson is precisely his ability to approach baseball and those first two years of integration in ways that were contrary to his character; or his fundamental sense of what was right and wrong, in service of a larger cause,” says the ever-mild mannered Obama in a passage of the documentary.
He added, “But that’s not something that made sense for him to sustain. He had purchased the right to speak his mind many times over.”
And so, I might add, has President Obama, regardless of what anybody might say or think.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net