Jackie Robinson

The Dodgers signing Robinson heralded the end of racial segregation in professional baseball that had relegated black players to the Negro leagues since the 1880s.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American professional baseball player who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, into a family of sharecroppers in Cairo, Georgia.

He was the youngest of five children born to Mallie (née McGriff) and Jerry Robinson, after siblings Edgar, Frank, Matthew (nicknamed "Mack"), and Willa Mae.

His middle name honored former President Theodore Roosevelt, who died 25 days before Robinson was born.

After Robinson's father left the family in 1920, they moved to Pasadena, California.

The extended Robinson family established itself on a residential plot containing two small houses at 121 Pepper Street in Pasadena.

Robinson's mother worked various odd jobs to support the family.

Growing up in relative poverty in an otherwise affluent community, Robinson and his minority friends were excluded from many recreational opportunities.

As a result, Robinson joined a neighborhood gang, but his friend Carl Anderson persuaded him to abandon it.

In 1935, Robinson graduated from Washington Junior High School and enrolled at John Muir Technical High School.

Recognizing his athletic talents, Robinson's older brothers, Frank and Mack (himself an accomplished track and field athlete and silver medalist behind Jesse Owens in the 200 meters at the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics) inspired Jackie to pursue his interest in sports.

At Muir Tech, Robinson played numerous sports at the varsity level and lettered in four of them: football, basketball, track and field, and baseball.

He played shortstop and catcher on the baseball team, quarterback on the football team, and guard on the basketball team.

With the track and field squad, he won awards in the broad jump.

He was also a member of the tennis team.

In 1936, Robinson won the junior boys singles championship in the annual Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament and earned a place on the Pomona annual baseball tournament all-star team, which included future Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Lemon.

In late January 1937, the Pasadena Star-News newspaper reported that Robinson "for two years has been the outstanding athlete at Muir, starring in football, basketball, track, baseball, and tennis."

After Muir, Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College (PJC), where he continued his athletic career by participating in basketball, football, baseball, and track.

On the football team, he played quarterback and safety.

He was a shortstop and leadoff hitter for the baseball team, and he broke an American junior college broad-jump record held by his brother Mack with a jump of 25 ft. 6 1⁄2 in.

on May 7, 1938.

As at Muir High School, most of Jackie's teammates were white.

While playing football at PJC, Robinson suffered a fractured ankle, complications from which would eventually delay his deployment status while in the military.

In 1938, he was elected to the All-Southland Junior College Team for baseball and selected as the region's Most Valuable Player.

Robinson broke the color line when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

During his 10-year MLB career, Robinson won the inaugural Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, was an All-Star for six consecutive seasons from 1949 through 1954, and won the National League (NL) Most Valuable Player Award in 1949—the first black player so honored.

Robinson played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers' 1955 World Series championship.

In the 1960s, he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, an African-American-owned financial institution based in Harlem, New York.

Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

Born in Cairo, Georgia, Robinson was raised in Pasadena, California.

A four-sport student athlete at Pasadena Junior College and the University of California, Los Angeles, he was better known for football than he was for baseball, becoming a star college player with the UCLA Bruins football team.

Following his college career, Robinson was drafted for service during World War II but was court martialed for refusing to sit at the back of a segregated Army bus, eventually being honorably discharged.

Afterwards, he signed with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro leagues from where he caught the eye of Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who thought he would be the perfect candidate for breaking the color line in Major League Baseball.

After his death in 1972, Robinson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his achievements on and off the field.

In 1997, Major League Baseball retired his uniform No. 42 across all major league teams; he was the first professional athlete in any sport to be so honored.

MLB also adopted a new annual tradition, "Jackie Robinson Day", for the first time on April 15, 2004, on which every player on every team wears No. 42.

Robinson's character, his use of nonviolence, and his talent challenged the traditional basis of segregation that had then marked many other aspects of American life.

He influenced the culture of and contributed significantly to the civil rights movement.

Robinson also was the first black television analyst in MLB and the first black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o'Nuts.