Preface:  Today
Jackie Robinson
 I guess if I could choose one of the most important moments in my life, I would go back to 1947, in the Yankee Stadium in New York City.  It was the opening day of the world series and I was for the first time playing in the series as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers team.  It was a history-making day.  It would be the first time that a black man would be allowed to participate in a world series.  I had become the first black player in the major leagues.

I was proud of that and yet I was uneasy.  I was proud to be in the hurricane eye of a significant breakthrough and to be used to prove that a sport can’t be called national if blacks are barred from it.  Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, has rudely awakened America.  He was a man with high ideals, and he was also a shrewd businessman.  Mr. Rickey had shocked some of his fellow baseball tycoons and angered others by deciding to smash the written law that kept blacks out of the big leagues.  He had chosen me as the person to lead the way. 

It hadn’t been easy.  Some of my own teammates refused to accept me because I was black.  I had been forced to live with snubs and rebuffs and rejections.  Within the club, Mr. Rickey had put down rebellion by letting my teammates know that any who didn’t want to accept me could leave.  But the problems within the Dodgers club had been minor compared to the opposition outside.  It hadn’t been that easy to fight the resentment expressed by players on other teams, by the team owners, or by bigoted threats against me and my family and even out-and-out attempts at physical harm to me.

Some things counterbalanced this ugliness.  Black people supported me with total loyalty.  They supported me morally; they cam to sit in a hostile audience in unprecedented numbers to make the turnstiles hum as they never had before at ball parks all over the nation.  Money is American’s God, and business people can dig black power if it coincides with green power, so these fans were important to the success of Mr. Rickey’s “Noble Experiment.” 

Some of the Dodgers who swore they would never play with a black man had a change of mind, when they realized I was a good ballplayer who could be helpful in their earning a few thousand more dollars in world series money.  After the initial resistance to me had been crushed, my teammates started to give me tips on how to improve my game.  They hadn’t changed because they liked me any better; they had changed because I could help fill their wallets.

My fellow Dodgers were not decent out of self-interest alone.  There were heartwarming experiences with some teammates; there was Southern-born Pee Wee Reese who turned into a staunch friend.  And there were others. 

Mr. Rickey stands out as the man who inspired me the most.  He will always have my admiration and respect.  Critics had said, “Don’t you know that your precious Mr. Rickey didn’t bring you up out of the black leagues because he loved you?  Are you stupid enough not to understand that the Brooklyn club profited hugely because of what your Mr. Rickey did?” 

Yes, I know that.  But I also know what a big gamble he took.  A bond developed between us that lasted long after I had left the game.  In a way I feel I was the son he had lost and he was the father I had lost. 

There was more than just making money at stake in Mr. Rickey’s decision.  I learned that his family was afraid that his health was being undermined by the resulting pressures and that they pleaded with him to abandon the plan.  His peers and fellow baseball moguls exerted all kinds of influence to get him to change his mind.  Some of the press condemned him as a fool and a demagogue.  But he didn’t give in. 

In a very real sense, black people helped make the experiment succeed.  Many who came to the ball park had not been baseball fans before I began to play in the big leagues.  Suppressed and repressed for so many years, they needed a victorious black man as a symbol.  It would help them believe in themselves.  But black support of the first black man in the majors was a complicated matter.  The breakthrough created as much danger as it did hope.  It was one thing for me out there on the playing field to be able to keep my cool in the face of insults.  But it was another for all those black people sitting in the stands to keep from overreacting when they sensed a racial slur or an unjust decision.  They could have blown the whole bit to hell by acting belligerently and touching off a race riot.  That would have been all the bigots needed to set back the cause of progress of black men in sports another hundred years.  I knew this.  Mr. Rickey knew this.  But this never happened.  I learned from Rachel who had spent hours in the stands that clergymen and laymen had held meetings in the black community to spread the word.  We all knew about the help of the black press.  Mr. Rickey and I owed them a great deal.  

Children from all races came to the stands.  The very young seemed to have no hang-up at all about my being black.  They just wanted me to be good, to deliver, to win.  The inspiration of their innocence is amazing.  I don’t think I’ll every forget the small, shrill voice of a tiny white kid who, in the midst of a racially tense atmosphere during an early game in a Dixie town, cried out, “Attaboy, Jackie.”  It broke the tension and it made me feel I had to succeed. 

The black and the young were my cheering squads.  But also there were people-neither black nor young-people of all races and faiths and in all parts of this country, people who couldn’t care less about my race. 

Rachael was even more important to my success.  I know that every successful man I supposed to say that without his wife he could never have accomplished success.  It is gospel in my case.  Rachael shared those difficult years that led to this moment and helped me through all the days thereafter.  She has been strong, loving, gently, and brave, never afraid to either criticize or comfort me. 

There I was the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people.  The air was sparkling.  The sunlight was warm.  The band struck up the national anthem.  The flag billowed in the wind.  It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands.  Perhaps it was, but then a gain, perhaps the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment.  Today as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor.  As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem.  I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world.  In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made. 

 Stamford, Connecticut                                                                                                1972

Guidelines: 

•       Tell your audience what they need to know about Jackie Robinson and how he fought segregation and discrimination,

        Use specific, accurate, and relevant information from the speech to support your discussion,

        Use a tone and level of language appropriate for a feature article for a school newspaper,

        Organize your ideas in a logical and coherent manner,

        Indicate any words taken directly from the speech by using quotation marks or referring to the speaker,

        Follow the conventions of standard written English.

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS