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In April, I was at Dodger Stadium for Jackie Robinson Day. It was a special one: the seventy-fifth anniversary of that moment in 1947 when Robinson smashed the color line.
On Jackie Robinson Day, every player on the field for every team wears number 42, as a tribute to the iconic trailblazer. But this year, the Dodgers wanted to do more than just have the players draped in Jackie’s number. They brought that spirit to the stadium too, giving out 40,000 free Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson jerseys for fans to wear in the stands.
Seeing that sea of people—and it was an incredibly diverse crowd—all outfitted like Jackie was almost too emotional an experience for me to handle.
And then it got more so.
Before the start of the game, driving in on a golf cart from the outfield to the pitcher’s mound and looking amazing, was Jackie’s ninety-nine-year-old widow, Rachel Robinson. To be in the presence of her strength, smile, and vitality was about as moving an experience as I’ve ever had at any ballpark. This was someone who had been through and seen so much, while asking for nothing except, as Jackie called it, “first-class citizenship.”
On July 19, Robinson will turn 100. She has now lived for almost fifty years without Jackie and has spent that time well. She has a master’s degree in nursing, worked in the profession for years, and taught at Yale.
Robinson served as director of nursing at the Connecticut Mental Health Center and as steward of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which has provided support for more than 1,800 young students of color, with a 98 percent graduation rate to show for it. She also raised their three children, lonely work indeed after Jackie passed away at age fifty-three.
Rachel Robinson waves to fans prior to aLos Angeles Dodgers baseball game in 2016.
And yet what Robinson is most known for, amid the doubts, danger, and pressure from all sides, is her critical historical role shepherding Jackie through his years as the great integrator of Major League Baseball. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said of Jackie Robinson that “back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.”
This is true, but Jackie’s loneliness was not absolute and his strength was compounded precisely because of Rachel Robinson.
“Jack and I had known each other for five years before we got married,” she said in a 2013 interview with Sports Illustrated. “That was extremely important because we trusted each other and it helped us to bond during that time. There was such an incredible amount of pressure, it might have driven two people apart. But it had the opposite effect on us, it pushed us together.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Roger Wilkins wrote that Robinson “was not simply the dutiful little wife. She was Jack’s co-pioneer. She had to live through the death threats, endure the vile screams of the fans and watch her husband get knocked down by pitch after pitch . . . . She was beautiful and wise and replenished his strength and courage.”
This meant more than just being there for him in the evenings of Jackie’s first spring training in segregated Florida, massaging his sore arm and listening to his stories of mistreatment by locals and teammates. It meant challenging segregation in his presence: using “Whites Only” bathrooms, bristling for him when they would be sent to the back of the bus, and insisting that he be treated like every other Brooklyn Dodger.
Rachel Robinson is living history and a national treasure. She is also a link to a time of white supremacist terror backed by the legal system. This was an era too many of us naively believed was in the dustbin of history. But if we need to fight the wars of the twentieth century again in the twenty-first, as the U.S. Supreme Court stands poised to repeal decades of progress, we have examples of the kind of courage it will take to steel ourselves going forward.
That courage is and has always been ample in the heart of Rachel Robinson.