From Baseball Icon to Crusading Columnist: How Jackie Robinson Used His Column in the African-American Press to Continue His Fight for Civil Rights in Sports

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study explores how Jackie Robinson continued his fight for civil rights in sports using his newspaper column in the New York Amsterdam News and syndicated in African-American newspapers during the 1960s, after the end of a Major League Baseball career in which he broke the sport’s “color line.” A review of those columns reveals a side of Robinson not typically seen in official histories depicting him as too conciliatory and restrained in his approach to race relations. Robinson came to take almost militant stands, challenging oppression by calling for boycotts of sporting events and event sponsors years before such strategies were adopted by a younger generation of athletes. Robinson was early in his support of Muhammad Ali’s right to refuse military service because of his religion, a backer of an Olympic boycott, and a fierce opponent of Republicans and Richard Nixon, a political party he once belonged to and a politician he had endorsed. Perhaps his most dramatic shift in opinion was that Major League Baseball, the sport he had helped show that integration was possible, had become a model of intolerance because of its failure to promote African-Americans to management positions.