Feb

5

Jackie Robinson Taking a Bat to Prejudice:

Jackie Robinson swinging a bate many New Yorkers leaving home for work on April 15, 1947, he wore a suit, tie and camel-hair overcoat as he headed for the subway. To his wife he said, "Just in case you have trouble picking me out, I'll be wearing number 42."

No one had trouble spotting the black man in the Dodgers' white home uniform when he trotted out to play first base at Ebbets Field. Suddenly, only 399, not 400, major league players were white. Which is why 42 is the only number permanently retired by every team.

Jackie Robinson's high school teachers suggested a career in gardening. Robinson's brother, Mack, had finished second to Jesse Owens in the 200-meter dash at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Whites who won medals found careers opened for them. Mack, writes Jonathan Eig in " Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season," wore his Olympic jacket as a Pasadena, Calif., street sweeper, while Owens found himself racing against horses at county fairs, "one small step removed from a circus act."

To appreciate how far the nation has come, propelled by what began 60 years ago today, consider not the invectives that Robinson heard from opponents' dugouts and fans but the way he had been praised. "Dusky Jack Robinson," as the Los Angeles Times called him, alerting readers to the race of UCLA's four-sport star, ran with a football "like it was a watermelon and the guy who owned it was after him with a shotgun."

 full article here.


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2 Comments so far

  1. Jeff Watson on February 5, 2012 11:16 pm

    Enough of Jackie Robinson, he’s only the PC version of what really happened and wasn’t the first black professional in the regular(not negro) major leagues….We need to give Moses Fleetwood Walker some respect; after all he was the one, with his brother, who really broke the racial barrier in Baseballa couple of generations before Robinson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Fleetwood_Walker

  2. Ed on February 6, 2012 12:06 pm

    The more exposure I have to urban Africans, the more I question some of the premises of the civil rights movement.

    We "celebrate diversity" yet brush 3rd world levels of crime, mayhem, and destruction under the rug. Unless you pay attention to "local" crime you have no idea how bad the problem is.

    The "African" problem is not a USA phenomenon, it is global. African-Americans are in fact far more civilized than their kin in Africa, where rape is practically a sanctioned sport and reported IQ is something around 70 .

    The inability to lift IQ scores after much hand-wringing suggests the problem will not be tractable - Most evidence suggests Intelligence is mostly genetic, and for whatever reason sub-Saharan Africans have less of it than all but perhaps the aborigines of Australia and New guinea.

    Yet, we continue to "expand diversity" with lower IQ stock who (do to racial preferences), will immediately cut in line above the still majority European population.

    Is this a recipe for cultural cohesion and shared values, or ultimately - hatred and disaster?

    It is a given that the elite, in high towers, sheltered neighborhoods, and behind gates, do not give a damn. In fact this is ultimately their plan, or blueprint for the USA.

    They will continue to browbeat the rest of us when we pop up on occasion to complain about what is being done to our communities in the name of "diversity."

    Perhaps the parents of the girl who was recently kidnapped, beaten and raped just blocks from my home by "underprivileged youth" will be more tolerant, as were the parents who won praise from the New Hampshire media when their daughter's head was blown off by Haitian "refuges" .

    Yet at least for me (And I suspect what will be a growing body of more free-thinking individuals) the time for suicidal levels of tolerance at odds with a growing body of scientific and statistical evidence is past.

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