Jackie Robinson should always be celebrated
had two million people in the ’40s, or three million, whatever it was. We were like our own states, and all the different neighborhoods were like small towns. I come out of all that, what I now think of as the state of Jackie Robinson."
He and his family and the Mets honor the memory of Jackie Robinson with the Jackie Robinson Rotunda at Citi Field. He has also been a friend to the amazing Rachel Robinson for most of his adult life, and lent support to her extraordinary Jackie Robinson Foundation. The great Rachel Robinson is now 95 years old, and remains the First Lady of baseball, all this time after her husband’s death from a heart attack, much too soon, in 1972.
“Rachel has lived her own proud American life,” Fred Wilpon (photo) said. “And become an American hero herself.”
On Sunday, they will honor Rachel Robinson’s husband the way they do each April in baseball, from Citi Field all the way to where the Dodgers now play their games in southern California. The sport will once again become a monument to Robinson’s memory, to the courage and grace he showed, especially across that first season. They will do this in a country where even the President now calls football players, so many African-American, who knelt during the playing of the national anthem “SOBs” for doing that, even though it was Jackie Robinson himself who once wrote in his autobiography of no longer choosing to stand for the anthem, or sing it. “I know that I am a black man in a white world,” Mr. Robinson also wrote. “In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.” In fact, “I Never Had It Made” was the title of the book. In 1997, on the 50th anniversary of her husband’s debut in the big leagues, Rachel Robinson stood on the field at old Shea Stadium, in the next baseball borough over from Brooklyn, stood next to President Bill Clinton that night, and said that the only tribute her late husband really would have wanted “was for a more equitable society.” At that moment the cheers came from everywhere in the ballpark, as if all the way from 1947, honoring her, honoring him.
It will happen again across baseball on this Sunday. His game, and his country, will once again remember No. 42 of the Dodgers, ballplayer and civil rights leader, someone who really did make America great, a great American, representative from the state of Brooklyn, N.Y.