Jackie Robinson Impact On Society

Jack Roosevelt Robinson, named after the president, Theodore Roosevelt, was born on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia and was raised by a single mother. Robinson was the youngest of his five siblings and was raised in poverty as a result of his father leaving the family in 1920. He then became interested in sports when his older brother won a silver medal in the Olympic Games in 1936. After discovering his athletic talents he went on to play, not just baseball, but several sports in high school and at UCLA where he went to college (“Bio”). Then Jackie went into the military, which was segregated at the time, before continuing to sports career in the negro leagues of baseball because the major league only accepted white players. Branch Rickey, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers noticed Robinson’s skills, and recruited him out of the negro leagues to play of the minor league team called the Montreal Royals in 1946. The next year everything changed when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier of baseball by being the first black person on a major league team when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 (“Bio”). Jackie Robinson became the most

He showed that blacks and whites can interact together and Robinson also altered the way people look at the issue of segregation. A few years after Jackie had broken the color barrier, a Supreme Court case came up called, Brown vs the Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. The outcome of this court case was an enormous hurdle that the black community jumped over because it said that the segregation of public school was unconstitutional(“Robinson Affected”). This led to public schools around the nation to desegregate, only because of Robinson’s perseverance and ability to strive through