JACKIE WOULD SIT WITH KAEPERNICK: KING,
IN AMERICA, heroes who stand against injustice have a way of being hated when they are alive and celebrated to the point of near sainthood when they pass.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has a national holiday. A towering statue of King stands in the National Mall alongside memorials to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. His image and likeness are used in commercials. Conservatives and liberals alike quote him — claiming he’s on their side. When he was alive, for just 39 short years, that was rarely his story. His popularity, if anything, is post-mortem.
Perhaps no sports hero in American history is more universally loved than Jackie Robinson. Robinson is the quintessential American hero — and not only because he broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, but because he was also one of the best to ever play the game. My son Ezekiel and I feel lucky that we have lived in both Los Angeles and Brooklyn. Even my son was born in Georgia like Robinson. We collect Jackie Robinson memorabilia. My son chooses the No. 42 for every sports team he plays on if they allow it.
Robinson served our country honorably during World War II, in spite of being mistreated by bigots throughout his service. A full 11 years before Rosa Parks, Robinson refused to leave his seat on a segregated military bus and ended up being court-martialed. He was later acquitted by an all-white panel and received an honorable discharge.
By the time Robinson began playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he was already 28 years old. He was a grown man who would’ve likely been seen as being slightly past his prime had he been allowed to play Major League Baseball sooner. Nonetheless, for years on end, he endured some of the most outrageous bigotry one could ever imagine.
For all of his sacrifices, Jackie Robinson has become not only a baseball god — but revered as the quintessential American hero. Yet, in his final days, as he reflected back over his life, he said something terribly inconvenient in his autobiography, “I Never Had It Made.”
“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 again, 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.”
There we have it. Jackie Robinson, the World War II vet and barrier-breaking baseball legend said: “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag.”
Now, as every talking head in America piles on quarterback Colin Kaepernick for refusing to stand up for the national anthem, I must ask them this question.
Was Jackie Robinson wrong? Do you hate him the way you hate Kaepernick? Don’t tell me “that was a different time.” It wasn’t 1945, 1955, or even 1965 when Robinson revealed that he could not and would not salute the American flag, but 1972, after the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act had already been passed.
Robinson knew that in spite of the many gains America had made, it too often failed to live up to many of its promises to black folk.
Today, we live in a time that desperately warrants bold actions. Police brutality and injustice are gripping our nation. A bigot is the Republican nominee for President. Unemployment, poverty, and failing schools are still a daily reality in inner cities all over America. If Kaepernick needs to “move back to Africa” or “leave this country,” as some of his harshest critics have argued, then you must also hate Jackie Robinson. I doubt even Donald Trump would admit that though.