A shot-riddled historical marker from Jackie Robinson’s hometown of Cairo, Georgia, and the severed cleats from a bronze Robinson statue in Wichita are both on display at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
They’re spread around other historical artifacts from a period when Black baseball players refused to surrender their love of the game to racial discrimination and segregation. But unlike those weathered jerseys, black-and-white photographs, faded newspaper clippings and other aged memorabilia from a monument to generations past, the Robinson items are from incidents that occurred this decade.
“Jackie and his legacy have been a target of hate for quite some time,” said Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Museum.
On Tuesday, MLB will celebrate the 78th anniversary of Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier, with tributes and recognition across the major leagues that will include every player and coach wearing his No. 42, as has been the custom since 2004. But as baseball leads its annual celebration of the most iconic symbol of integration, much of what Robinson stood and fought for has felt under attack.
In the first week of his second term, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal government, prompting some prominent corporations to abandon or rebrand programs that supported those efforts. The shift nearly left Robinson as collateral damage last month when the Defense Department removed and later restored an article on its website about Robinson’s military service in a purge of material related to what it deemed as DEI.
In March, MLB responded to Trump’s executive orders by removing all references to “diversity” from the careers page on its website. A spokesperson said the move was made to ensure MLB’s hiring programs comply with federal law but emphasized that it does not reflect a change in values. In other words, MLB insists its commitment to ensuring all kinds of candidates receive opportunities is unchanged, but it will not risk a lawsuit — or put its many Republican donor owners under White House scrutiny — to do it.
In a recent interview with Forbes, Commissioner Rob Manfred said MLB will continue to uplift Robinson’s legacy.
“Jackie Robinson transcends any debate that’s going on in today’s society about issues surrounding DEI,” Manfred said. “What Jackie Robinson stands for was moving us past an overt kind of segregation that I don’t believe anybody actually supports today. He’s a symbol of that, and he’s an important part of our history. We will continue to celebrate him as we always have.”
Neither the NFL nor the NBA plans to adjust its DEI initiatives. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said during a news conference at the Super Bowl, “We’re going to continue those efforts because we’ve not only convinced ourselves, and I think we’ve proven ourselves, that it does make the NFL better.” An NBA spokesperson said in a statement that the league “will continue to pursue employees from the widest possible pool of applicants.”
Sports sells itself as the ultimate meritocracy, but that wasn’t always the case. Robinson didn’t need a three-letter acronym to prove that the game’s best players should all share an equal playing field, regardless of their race, heritage and nationality. He withstood personal insults and violent threats so that baseball could stand, as it does today, as the most diverse professional sport in North America.
The number of Black American baseball players has been in decline for decades, a development that is often highlighted on Jackie Robinson Day, but other ethnic groups have thrived. Shohei Ohtani, the game’s best player, is from Japan. He, along with Juan Soto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., both from the Dominican Republic, own the three largest contracts in baseball history.
“The opportunity for what you see today, where you have players from all over the world – none of this exists if it wasn’t for Jackie,” said Curtis Granderson, former MLB player and chairman of the Players Alliance, a nonprofit seeking to make the game more equitable and accessible.
In 1997, recognizing that Robinson was “getting the blood and dust all over his hands to bring society to a different place,” former National League president Leonard Coleman Jr. proposed retiring No. 42 across all of baseball, saying the idea occurred to him “like a lightning bolt hit my head” as he was driving to work one morning.
“I felt as though he needed differentiating from all other ballplayers,” Coleman said of Robinson. “The most important moment in baseball was April 15, 1947, when he walked on the field. He revolutionized the game.”
As testimony to Robinson’s enduring power, Jimmy Rollins, the 2007 National League MVP and 2008 World Series champion with the Philadelphia Phillies, said he considered only one team when he was put up for a trade following the 2014 season.
“You wear 42 in a Phillies jersey, it’s cool; it is just a number. But when you do it in a Dodger jersey, it’s like, ‘I’m part of his Dodger legacy,’” Rollins said.
Now an analyst for TNT Sports along with Granderson, Rollins gets annoyed by attempts to whitewash what happened when Robinson ran onto Ebbets Field for the first time as the Brooklyn Dodgers hosted the Boston Braves before 26,623 fans.
“They’d make it seem like he broke the color barrier and now everybody’s going to Disneyland,” he said.
Robinson’s story can’t be told without the ugly parts. He heard the slurs, felt the cleats from base runners piercing his skin, absorbed the inside fastballs he couldn’t dodge and found the strongest resistance was resilience. Following his retirement after the 1956 season, he was active in the civil rights movement, but progress moved slowly, never to his satisfaction. The struggle took a toll.
At his last public appearance, at the 1972 World Series, Robinson made a request to see a Black manager in baseball. He looked worn down. His hair was whiter than an unscuffed baseball. He died nine days later at age 53.
“The ladder to equality is steep, and Jackie was an important rung on that ladder,” Coleman said.
That’s why Coleman found the Defense Department’s near-erasure of an element of Robinson’s past, which was essential to his signing with the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs and later the Dodgers, so offensive.
“I just thought it was a malignant ignorance of American history that you could take down the website for a man who was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and lived his life as the best of America,” said Coleman, who for 18 years served as chairman of the Jackie Robinson Foundation. “Taking down the website was the worst of America.”
Said Kendrick: “If we’re doing this to try to make ourselves feel better about who we are as a nation, you cannot do that. You cannot pretend that these things didn’t happen.”
Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts is the son of a Marine who, like Robinson, played collegiately at UCLA. As one of MLB’s two Black managers, Roberts considers it an honor to represent Robinson’s franchise.
“There’s always going to be resistance to certain things. But for me, this is a moral issue,” Roberts said. “I’m very grateful for the sacrifices he made for a lot of people. And that’s never going to go unspoken for or [not] lauded.”
Critics of the Trump administration’s policies scrutinized the Dodgers’ visit to the White House last week. During his remarks to the team, Trump recognized three-time World Series champion Mookie Betts, who had declined to join the Boston Red Sox for their White House visit in 2019. Betts, the only Black player on the Dodgers roster, initially expressed uncertainty, but he decided to join his teammates, who he said supported him through some challenging portions of their championship run.
“Being Black in America in a situation like this is — it’s a tough spot to be in,” Betts said. “Nobody else in this clubhouse has to go through a decision like this except me, so that’s what makes it tough.”
Betts added that the country is in a different place than it was when he skipped the White House visit with the Red Sox. Back then, professional athletes were more vocal in their criticism of Trump. LeBron James called him a “bum” after the 2017 champion Golden State Warriors preemptively declined a White House invitation. Around the same time, Jerry Jones and a few other NFL owners knelt or linked arms with their players after Trump called anyone protesting police brutality and racial inequalities during the national anthem a “son of a bitch.”
During the first months of Trump’s second administration, sports figures largely have been either supportive or silent.
“Activism is something that you don’t really plan for. It’s kind of a response,” Nationals first baseman Josh Bell said. “So you never know what’s going to happen in the future. It’s just a weird time period.”
And still, Robinson’s story remains resonant, as evidenced by both the continued celebrations and the attempts to tear it down.
“It speaks to his enduring legacy,” Kendrick said. “But it also speaks even more so to the fact that there’s still a lot of work left to do in this society as we continue to try and improve race relations in this country.”
Andrew Golden and Chelsea Janes contributed to this report.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
