Back in the day, Rachel and Jackie Robinson accepted the keys to a car awarded him by Dodgers fans before a game at Ebbets Field against the Giants.
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I originally wrote this column for Forbes in honor of Rachel Robinson as the flame that kept Jackie’s memory alive back in 2020. She’s an incredible 103 now. It was worth updating and repurposing because her words are truer now than ever.
It’s the 79th anniversary Wednesday of Jackie Robinson jogging out to first base at Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers, shattering Major League Baseball’s horrible color barrier forever.
For all these decades. the glue that keeps holding this all together is Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s indomitable widow, who will be 104 years old on July 19, god and the forces that bind us willing.
Imagine that.
Rachael was in the stands that day and recalled the significance of it all in her book, “Jackie Robinson, An Intimate Portrait.”
“In 1947 as Jack took his place in the batter’s box at Ebbets Field, the meaning of the moment for me seemed to transcend the winning of a ballgame,” she wrote. “The possibility of social change seemed more concrete, and the meaning of it more imperative.”
Jackie, of course, did all the on-field work, during his Hall of Fame career that lasted through the 1956 season. After he died at 53 in 1972 the result of a heart attack and raging diabetes, a year later Rachel carried the torch by founding the Jackie Robinson Foundation.
“Jack, with his courage and outspoken principles, he set it up so there was a legacy to carry forward,” she once told me.
Since then, the Foundation has given thousands of college scholarships to minority children. Rachel and Della Britton, the long-time chief executive, are among those who have been the guiding lights to keep Robinson’s memory alive.
“We established it to promote education and the next generation of leaders,” Rachel said back in 2017. “We are so proud of the near 100% education rate of our Jackie Robinson Foundation scholars.”
There was the film, “42,” countless books on Robinson’s life and career, and a museum of Jackie artifacts in lower Manhattan that finally opened to the public on Sept. 5, 2022, after years of fund raising. That fund raising is still ongoing
“We’ve raised enough money to build, but we’re still raising money for it,” Britton told Boomskie on Baseball in 2019. “I was telling somebody today I didn’t want to open this wonderful museum and in a day or two have to raise more money. So I wanted an operating endowment to run the museum. We don’t want people to think we’re done. That’s the concern we have. We want people to be excited about the project.”
For all her efforts, Rachel was honored in Cooperstown, New York, in 2017 with the Buck O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award, the fourth recipient. The honor came 55 years after her late husband had been inducted into the main plaque room of the museum on upper Main Street in the tiny hamlet.
In 1962, the induction ceremony was on the steps of the entrance to the museum. In 2017, Rachel accepted her accolade during a Saturday awards ceremony that is now a regular part of the Hall of Fame induction weekend.
“I have such fond memories of Jack’s induction in 1962,” Rachel said that day. “It was a glorious day for our family.”
Rachel is now the icon, a member of the only husband and wife duo represented in different parts of the museum. The O’Neil statue, honoring the Negro League star and its recipients, is just off the hallway leading to the room where hangs 354 plaques representing the players, managers, umpires and executives inducted into the Hall.
O’Neil finally made it into the Hall proper in 2022, thanks to the Early Baseball Committee, which took a fresh look at excellent Negro League players and pioneers, of which O’Neil certainly was both.
Jackie had played in the Negro Leagues for a short time before he was signed by Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey in 1946 as the first African American to ultimately play in the Majors during the 20th century.
“Buck O’Neil was a staunch champion of baseball and worked to promote inclusiveness in the sport,” Rachel said in her acceptance speech. “So, I’m truly gratified to be associated with your recognition of Buck in this way.”
Rachel received no small assist from then MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, inducted into the Hall the following day in 2017.
In 1997, on the 50th anniversary of her husband playing his first game for the Dodgers, the now Commissioner Emeritus retired Jackie’s number throughout the sport and established the annual celebration of that event.
Ken Griffey Jr. subsequently petitioned Selig to wear Jackie’s No. 42 on the anniversary of that day, and now everyone on the field does wherever Major League games are being played on April 15. There’s good reason for it.
“Martin Luther King called Jackie a Freedom Rider before they had even activated the civil rights movement,” Britton said. “Jackie paved the way to make it easier for all of us.”
If one could turn back the clock, the first place I’d like to go would be in the stands along with the crowd of 26,623 at Ebbets Field on that day, April 15, 1947, when Jackie first played. The Dodgers beat the Boston Braves and Robinson went 0-for-3, scoring the first of 947 runs.
But as Rachel so aptly wrote, that was hardly the point.
“I believe that the single most important impact of Jack’s presence was that it enabled white baseball fans to root for a black man, thus encouraging more whites to realize that all our destinies were inextricably linked,” she said about that day.
Words of wisdom then, truer now more than ever on this 79th anniversary.
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