Date: 1 July, 2021 Key Topics: Canadian History, Racism, Social History
It was in 1946 that Jackie Robinson played his extraordinary
summer of baseball with the Triple A Montreal Royals affiliate
of the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was the year prior to his 1947
breakthrough as America’s first ever Black player in Major
League Baseball. Robinson’s achievement is a seminal event
in the history of the sport that was described as America’s
favourite pastime. But breaking baseball’s colour barrier was
also a transformational event in the advancement of the civil
rights movement in the United States. A decade before Rosa
Parks went down in history for her heroic 1955 refusal to give
up her seat and move to the back of a Montgomery city bus,
Robinson refused to give up his seat and move to the back of
a US Army bus when ordered to do so. Twentieth-century
civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr. described Jackie
Robinson as an important contributor to his extraordinary
achievements.
