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Jackie Robinson and The Integration Of The United States Essay

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Jackie Robinson: athlete, social activist, hero. These are just some of the words people use to describe Jackie. Robinson was the first person to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball, at the time officially designated a white man’s sport. The blacks and whites played in separate leagues but Branch Rickey, vice president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, wanted to integrate Major League Baseball. At this time in the 1940s the Unites States was still segregated and the Jim Crow Laws still reigned heavily in the south. Integration didn’t start until 1948 when Truman signed Executive Order 9981 which integrated the military. This didn’t occur until after Robinson took the field as the first African-American to play in the major leagues. …show more content…

Jackie was a phenomenal athlete for young kids to look up to. After the start of World War II he served in the military from 1942 to 1944. After the war he returned to his love for baseball, playing in the Black major leagues. He was chosen by Branch Rickey, vice president of the Brooklyn dodgers, to help integrate the Major Leagues. Rickey hated segregation just as much as Robinson and wanted to change things “Rickey had once seen a Black college player turned away from a hotel… Rickey never forgot seeing this player crying because he was denied a place to lay his weary head just because of the color of his skin” (Mackenzie). He was finally able to do something about segregation and help change baseball and the United States for the better. It wasn’t that all the teams were racist and didn’t want a black player but when the major league teams had an away game they would rent out the stadium to the black teams for them to play at. And the executives of teams didn’t want to loose the money that they were making off of the black teams. “League owners would lose significant rental revenue” (“Breaking”). He soon signed with the all-white Montreal Royals a farm team for the Dodgers. Robinson had an outstanding start with the Royals, “leading the International League with a .349 batting average and .985 fielding percentage” (Robinson). After Robinson’s outstanding year he was promoted to the Dodgers he played his first game on

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