Page 4 - Museum Athlete Book Final 021820

Athlete

Football. Basketball. Track. Baseball. Jackie could have been a great professional player in each, but baseball’s place as America’s

premier sport provided him an enormous platform. Jackie was part of the early generation of black Americans whose athletic
abilities made them attractive to colleges and universities that did not significantly recruit black students for academics.

He followed in the footsteps of his older brother Mack, who won the Olympic silver medal at the 1936 Berlin Games

by being a force both at Pasadena Junior College and at UCLA.

Even more pronounced when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie’s athletic excellence created an emerging template:

sports as meritocracy. Sports, in theory, reflected America’s sense of fairness, and in turn, black athletic excellence would
provide a pathway for equality in all spaces in America. Jackie’s play would force larger questions about racism to be asked: If

blacks and whites could co-exist as teammates, why couldn’t black people be allowed in schools, restaurants, the military, and

in neighborhoods with whites across America? Jackie’s greatness on the field challenged the notion of black inferiority off of it.

2 Jack Roosevelt Robinson: Athlete