It would be remiss of me, as a long time LA Dodgers fan, to not mention that today is Jackie Robinson Day
Jackie Robinson couldn't have known what Branch Rickey's "great experiment" would do to the socio-political landscape in America.
In fact, could anybody have known that putting Robinson, a black man, onto a baseball field with a team of white men would do for America what nothing else had done for race relations since the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson legalized segregation?
"That's almost an impossible question to answer," said Robert Ruck, a senior lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh and an authority on black baseball. "I think that if Robinson's arrival in the Majors had been a chaotic social disaster, it would have made it more difficult for this country to change."
Historians like Ruck see Rickey's experiment, which opened the way for Robinson to break the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, as a trigger to a number of events that followed. It played a significant role, Ruck said, in fueling the move toward integration.
The article is well worth a whole read.
I hope the Padres understand they are supposed to tank tonights game against the Dodgers.
And what position did social conservatives take on the intergration of MLB ??