Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson (31 January 1919-24 October 1972) was an American baseball player and Republican political activist who was best known as the first African-American MLB player.
Biography[]
Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia on 31 January 1919 to a family of African-American sharecroppers. After his father abandoned the family in 1920, the family moved to Pasadena, California during the Great Migration, and he became a multi-sport athlete in high school and served stateside in the US Army during World War II. After the war, Robinson became a professional baseball player for the Kansas City Monarchs, and, in 1947, he broke the MLB's color barrier by becoming its first Black player, starting at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on 15 April 1947 with the now-famous number "42". Robinson was seen as an icon of the Civil Rights movement for his central role in the integration of sports, and he retired from sports in 1956.
Robinson became active in Republican politics as a centrist who supported both civil rights and the Vietnam War; in 1964, he led a walkout from the Republican National Convention to protest the pro-segregation Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater's victory over Robinson's favored candidate, the liberal Nelson Rockefeller; he declared that he now had a better understanding of what it was like to have been a Jew in Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany.
Robinson endorsed Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and permanently became a Democrat, subsequently supporting Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon, whom he had previously supported in the 1960 presidential election. Robinson died of a heart attack at his home in North Stamford, Connecticut in 1972 at the age of 53.