On This Day: Jackie Robinson Joins the Brooklyn Dodgers

For over 50 years, beginning in 1890, owners in the top professional baseball leagues had a “gentleman’s agreement” to exclude black players from the field. Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, motivated both by the ideal of racial equality and the desire to win ballgames, wanted to break this agreement and add a black player to his team.

In what he called his “great experiment,” Rickey sought a black ballplayer with great talent and personal character. “I wanted a man of exceptional intelligence, a man who was able to grasp and control the responsibilities of himself to his race and could carry that load,” he explained in a 1956 speech.

He found the perfect man in Jackie Robinson, a former four-sport star at UCLA who played the 1945 season with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League. Robinson had a history of challenging racism; as a U.S. Army lieutenant, he was court-martialed for refusing to sit in the segregated back seats on a military bus.

Robinson played 1946 with the Montreal Royals of the International League, breaking the professional baseball color barrier. “This in a way is another Emancipation Day for the Negro race,” Baz O'Meara of The Montreal Daily Star wrote.

The following spring, on April 10, 1947, his contract was purchased by the Dodgers. “Jackie Robinson, 28-year-old infielder, today became the first Negro to achieve major-league baseball status in modern times,” wrote The New York Times.
 
He made his major league debut on April 15, playing second base for the Dodgers. Throughout the season he faced racial abuse from players and fans, but he followed Rickey’s orders to turn the other cheek.

“Jackie Robinson had to be bigger than life,” writes Hall of Famer Hank Aaron in Time. “He had to be bigger than the Brooklyn teammates who got up a petition to keep him off the ball club, bigger than the pitchers who threw at him or the base runners who dug their spikes into his shin, bigger than the bench jockeys who hollered for him to carry their bags and shine their shoes, bigger than the so-called fans who mocked him with mops on their heads and wrote him death threats.”

Robinson played 10 years with the Dodgers, winning a National League MVP Award and helping the Dodgers to the 1955 World Series. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, his first year of eligibility.

After his retirement from baseball, Robinson became involved in business, politics and social causes. His health was poor, however. He suffered a heart attack in 1968 and became nearly blind from diabetes. On Oct. 24, 1972, he had a second heart attack in his Stamford, Conn., home and died at the age of 53.

Robinson was not the first black player to play alongside white professionals, according to the Web site Negro League Baseball. In the 1880s, several black players competed in prominent leagues throughout the country. But by 1890, an informal “gentleman’s agreement” among team owners and managers had forced black players out of white professional leagues, and into “outlaw” and segregated Negro leagues.

In 1916, Jimmy Claxton would briefly break the color barrier, The Baseball Biography Project writes. Claiming to be a Native American, Claxton signed with the Pacific Coast League’s Oakland Oaks. He pitched in just two games before team officials discovered his black ancestry and promptly released him.

Robinson cleared the way for other black players in the majors, including Larry Doby, Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella, although baseball today has seen declining numbers of African-American players.

A 2007 article from Ebony magazine reported that the number of African-American players in Major League Baseball had dropped significantly. Sports analysts cited both cultural and economic factors for the decline in numbers, including the game's perceived lack of cultural appeal and the scarcity of playing fields in inner cities. Some black players also feel that there is lingering racial prejudice in the minor and major leagues.

CNN Money’s Chris Isidore examined the economic factors closely and determined that MLB’s draft and minor league systems favor white and Caribbean players. “A lot of things have been blamed for the decline, including baseball trailing basketball and football in popularity, especially among inner-city youth, to the lack of blacks in the sport's front offices,” he writes. “But the real reasons behind the decline have more to do with money—the economics of scouting and player development, as well as socioeconomic issues in the U.S.”