The Ike Blog (Jan. - Apr. 2011) - Eisenhower National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service) The Official Blog of Eisenhower National Historic Site. Upon retiring from baseball, Jackie Robinson became a corporate executive and a civil rights leader. Sadly, he was criticized by young black power advocates during the 1960s for being too accommodating to whites. They seem to have forgotten or failed to ever recognize the courage and fortitude Robinson displayed when facing the constant abuse as a lone black man playing white baseball. Fans regularly taunted him - screaming, cursing, pelting him with objects. Fellow ball players set out to deliberately hurt him - spiking him when sliding into second, hurling the ball at his head. He couldn't stay in many of the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants as his teammates. He received death threats. Yet with great dignity he persevered. I just finished reading Philip Roth's novel, Nemesis, a story of how panic gripped a Jewish neighborhood in Newark during the summer of 1944 when its children started to contract this mysterious new disease called polio and then began, one by one, to die. The novel serves as a reminder of how devastating the disease was, not only to the health of the nation, but to its morale:
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