Jackie Robinson

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia, on the thirty-first of January 1919, the youngest of five children of sharecropping parents. The family moved to Pasadena, California, when Jackie was sixteen months old. He attended UCLA, where he became the first athlete in school history to letter in four sports (baseball, basketball, football, and track) in one year, 1939.

He served as an Army Air Corps second lieutenant during the Second World War. In 1944, at Fort Hood, Texas, he was court-martialed for refusing to move to the back of a segregated military bus. He was acquitted of all charges. He was honorably discharged later that year.

The Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey signed Robinson to the organization in October 1945 on the explicit understanding that he would integrate Major League Baseball. Robinson played the 1946 season with the Montreal Royals (the Dodgers' top farm club) and was promoted to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the tenth of April 1947. He played his first major-league game on the fifteenth of April 1947 at Ebbets Field — becoming the first African American to play in the major leagues since 1884.

He won the inaugural Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, was named National League Most Valuable Player in 1949, and led the Brooklyn Dodgers to six National League pennants and the 1955 World Series championship across his ten-year career. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962 — the first African American so honored.

He retired from baseball in 1957 and devoted his remaining fifteen years to civil-rights organizing, business (he co-founded Freedom National Bank in Harlem in 1964), and political advocacy.

He died of heart disease in Stamford, Connecticut, on the twenty-fourth of October 1972, age fifty-three. Major League Baseball retired his uniform number 42 across all teams in 1997 — the only such universal retirement in the history of the major American professional sports leagues.

He is honored here as the second baseman who integrated American professional sport.