Jackie Robinson would say this to VP Mike Pence

The year that he died, 1972, baseball great Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player admitted into Major League Baseball, an Army veteran, said he could not stand and sing the national anthem. And that he could not salute the flag. Imagine that.

I’ve been hearing from readers who say that National Football League players who choose to take a knee during the national anthem are disrespecting the flag, the military and the country. and that sports and politics should not mix.

Jackie Robinson broke the baseball color barrier in 1947.

The NFL, on the other hand, wasn’t fully integrated until 1962. 1962.

Sports and politics have always mixed.

In the early ’60s, the great sportswriter Shirley Povich wrote an article describing the outcome of a game between the Washington Redskins, which had yet to hire a black player, and the Cleveland Browns, then led by Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown. He wrote:

“Jim Brown, born ineligible to play for the Redskins, integrated their end zone three times yesterday.”

Was he writing a sports story or a political story?

Yes.

Over the weekend, Vice President Mike Pence flew from Las Vegas to Indianapolis with the preplanned notion to stage a walkout after members of the San Francisco 49ers took a knee during the anthem. He tweeted: “I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.”

Really? What about soldiers who get captured — in particular a U.S. senator who was disrespected by the guy you work for?

The players who take a knee are acting out of conviction, expressing their concerns about social injustice, as well as their distaste for a president who doesn’t seem to believe in an American’s right to free speech.

They do this prior to the game. When they actually go to work. That is, after the kickoff, there is no protesting.

Pence, on the other hand, not only staged his phony protest while on the job, but he did so at our expense.

What Jackie Robinson wrote in his autobiography in 1972 seems to hold true in Trump’s America. Describing his first World Series he wrote:

“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 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…. 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.”