Jackie Robinson

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia, the youngest of five children. His middle name honored former President Theodore Roosevelt, who had died 25 days before his birth. After his father abandoned the family in 1920, his mother moved them to Pasadena, California, where they lived in two small houses on a single residential plot. Growing up in relative poverty in an affluent area, Robinson was initially excluded from many recreational opportunities and joined a neighborhood gang, but a friend persuaded him to leave it.

At John Muir Technical High School, Robinson lettered in four varsity sports: football, baseball, basketball, and track and field. He also played tennis and won a junior boys singles championship in a regional tennis tournament. After high school, he attended Pasadena Junior College, where he continued excelling in multiple sports, playing quarterback and safety in football, shortstop in baseball, and breaking his brother Mack’s American junior college broad-jump record. He was elected to the All-Southland Junior College Team for baseball and named the region’s Most Valuable Player.

Robinson then attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became a star on the football team. Following college, he was drafted for World War II but faced a court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated Army bus; he was honorably discharged. He subsequently played for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro leagues, where Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey identified him as the ideal candidate to break Major League Baseball’s color line. On April 15, 1947, Robinson started at first base for the Dodgers, ending racial segregation in professional baseball that had existed since the 1880s.