2008 Woodie Awards
In Recognition of Black History Month
Jackie Robinson: a brief profile
Matt Macaulay, Sports Editor
Issue date: 2/8/06 Section: Sports
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As a part of Major League Baseball's 1997 homage to the 50th anniversary of the first day Jackie Robinson stepped foot on the diamond for the Brooklyn Dodgers, #42 was forever reserved in memory of baseball's first black player of the 20th century.
Moses Fleetwood Walker, without any type of legal or documented contract, earned the distinction of being the first black major leaguer in 1884, but by the turn of the century black players had been completely excluded from organized baseball.
Born in 1919, the grandson of a slave and son of a sharecropper, Robinson led a courageous life in which he built a career filled with a surplus of firsts.
Robinson was the first UCLA student-athlete to earn a letter in four different sports in 1941 (baseball, basketball, football, and track), the first black baseball player to sign a professional contract with the Montreal Royals in 1945, the first black baseball player in the modern era to take the field for a major league team in 1947, and the very first recipient of the Rookie of the Year award in 1947.
Robinson's path, of course, was seldom an easy one, as it never is with pioneers.
Before he even celebrated his first birthday, his father left him, his mother, and siblings to fend for themselves. His mother then took the family form Cairo, Ga. to Pasadena, Calif. where she hoped to free her family from the racial prejudice of the South, but soon found that the West hadn't progressed much further in terms of civil rights.
The young Robinson immersed himself in sports of any kind, and was known to be an intense and sometimes violent competitor.
He attended UCLA where he won the Pacific Coast Conference's basketball scoring title two years in a row, became the national champion in the long jump, was chosen as an All-American running back, and, of course, excelled as a baseball player.
He left school prematurely to aid his family's financial woes and played professional football for a short time in 1941 for the Los Angeles Bulldogs.
He was drafted into the Army in 1942 just after the United States became involved in World War II and was sent to a segregated unit at Fort Riley, Kan. Robinson was denied entrance into the Officers' Candidate School on the basis of his color despite his more than adequate education.