Seventy-Eight Years Later Barriers Going Up Again
The Jackie Robinson Museum ©2025 Harold Michael Harvey
Sometime around age five, I fell in love with baseball. It was during the 1955 White Major League Baseball season. Admittedly, at the time, I did not know that there was a baseball league for Negroes. I still love the game today. Baseball has given me so much pleasure, whether playing baseball on the sandlots of Macon, Georgia, or chasing down fly balls in Washington Field at Tuskegee Institute. My happiest days have been playing or watching a baseball game on a diamond or in the stands.
The Jackie Robinson Statue in New Jersey ©2025 Harold Michael Harvey
Almost as early as I could understand the spoken word, I heard adults excitedly exclaim that “Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.” At three years old, I had no idea what the colors in a crayon box had to do with breaking a barrier.
When the men in the community gathered in my grandfather’s yard at day’s end, the conversation turned to baseball and a player named Jackie Robinson. “He broke the color barrier,” several of them would explain as they launched into an account of the latest exploits of Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
During much of the 1950s, my mom spent the summer months in Brooklyn with her cousins, working in New York factories to earn money for college tuition and to raise her two boys. Every chance Mom got, she was at Ebbets Field watching Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers play baseball. Her favorite player was Jackie Robinson.
At the end of the summer, Mom would return to the segregated South with exciting tales of Jackie Robinson running, hitting, sliding, discombobulating pitchers, and frustrating catchers. I sat at her feet and hung on every word of her stories. My uncles were thrilled that their big sister had seen Jackie Robinson play in Ebbets Field.
This is the iconic photo of Jackie Robinson stealing home in the 1955 World Series. Yogi Berra did not come up to block the plate, so Robinson is clearly safe.
Amid segregation, when it seemed that the American Negro would never receive equal treatment with White Americans, Jackie Robinson playing baseball with White boys gave Black America a sense of pride in their equality in relationship to other people and the hope that one day the shackles of second class citizenship would be broken.
Robinson’s story is eloquently told in the Jackie Robinson Museum in Manhattan, New York. Last month, I visited this museum and saw a replica of the historic Ebbets Field. I wondered where Mom had sat as she supported Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Joe Black, and Junior Gilliam in the mid-1950s.
The Jackie Robinson Museum is dedicated to the civil rights movement and the part Jackie Robinson played in it. The tour could easily have begun in 1905 when Major League Baseball sought to void the gentlemen’s agreement and sign William Clarence Matthews to play for the Boston Beaneaters. Matthews, born in Selma, Alabama, and played baseball at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial School and Harvard College, would have provided context to Robinson’s feat 42 years later.
Harold Michael Harvey visiting the Jackie Robinson Museum ©2025 Cascade Publishing House.
Instead, the tour began in 1909 with the Niagara Movement, organized by W. E. B. Dubois and others at Niagara Falls, New York. This led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It chronicles the racist movie Birth of A Nation, screened at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 (the year Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia), the advocacy of Monroe Trotter, and the Boston Riot, which occurred when Trotter and Ida B. Wells Barnett shouted Booker T. Washington off the stage during a visit to Boston. The tour includes every significant civil rights advancement up to Robinson’s death in 1972.
Today, seventy-eight years later, all Americans can use a dose of the inspiration that Black Americans felt on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson ran out of the dugout at Ebbets Field and took his position at first base, the only Black man on the field. Sports often mirror what is taking place in the country. Perhaps on the seventy-eight anniversary of Robinson breaking down the color barrier, some brave athlete will strike a blow for diversity, equity, and inclusion, the attempted removal of which threatens to return the country to the segregated days before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.
Harold Michael Harvey, JD, is a two-time award-winning author for his memoir Freaknik Lawyer: A Memoir on the Craft of Resistance and the historical novel Watch Night, Our Souls Cried out for Freedom: A Narrative History of Bethel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, Macon Georgia from 1863 to 2023. Harvey is a past president of the oldest Black Bar Association in Georgia and founder of the Gate City Bar Association Hall of Fame. An avid baseball fan, he is a voting member of the National College Baseball Hall of Fame. Harvey is an engaging public speaker. Contact Harvey at [email protected].