Scratching the baseball ciphers into my scorecard, the grouch in the next seat asking why I wasn't standing up and rooting, and then the home run lined into the lower deck in left at Ebbets Field. Then jotting the letters HR in the tiny square on Robinson's line. Robinson in the pennant races of '47 and '49 and '50 and '51 and '52 and '53 and '55 and '56. Sometimes beating the Cardinals or the Braves, sometimes losing to the Phillies or the Giants. The impact remains.
Baseball remains a symbol of racism in America, decried still.
Indeed, it was. Yet this sport that Jackie Robinson played with such magnetic force today has been made into a scapegoat by revisionist historians. America had just fought and won a war in which Lt. Jackie Robinson participated. After Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, it would be another couple of years before Harry Truman fully integrated the armed forces in which Lt.