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Jackie Robinson is remembered as the man who broke the color barrier in major league baseball and was the first African American inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame (1962). His outstanding career with the Brooklyn Dodgers and his dignity in facing the insults and threats that were hurled at him broke down the racial barriers in "America’s Pastime" and opened the way for black players who followed. In his later years he worked as a business executive and was a spokesperson for civil rights, black athletes and other causes. Although Robinson is often called the first black player in the major leagues, Moses Fleetwood "Fleet" Walker, a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association in 1884, had an Irish father and African American mother who had been a slave. Walker’s brief career, however, did not lead to additional black baseball players in the major leagues; Robinson’s did.
Born Jack Roosevelt Robinson on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia, the future baseball great was the grandson of a slave and the fifth child of a sharecropper. His brother Mack would win a Silver Medal in the 200-meter dash at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, finishing behind Jesse Owens.The children were raised by their mother in a white, middle-class neighborhood in Pasadena, California, after his father deserted the family.
At John Muir High School, he exhibited remarkable versatility as an athlete, playing on the baseball, football, basketball and track teams. His athletic prowess brought him college scholarships, first to Pasadena Junior College and then to the University of California at Los Angeles; the latter school was founded the same year he was born. At UCLA, he became the first and only player ever to letter in four different sports and won All-American honors as a football player. Twice in basketball he led the Pacific Coast Conference Southern Division in scoring. On the track team, he won PCC and NCAA broad jump competitions. Financial hardships forced him to leave UCLA just shy of graduating, and for a short time he played semi-professional football with the Honolulu Bears, a career that ended when America entered World War II. He had left Pearl Harbor, bound for the U.S. mainland, two days before the Japanese attacked Pearl.
Robinson joined the U.S. Army and was promoted to second lieutenant but never saw combat. While stationed in Texas he refused to move to the back of a military bus and was courtmartialed, though he was eventually acquitted and was honorably discharged in 1944.
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