Jackie Roosevelt Robinson

Jack Roosevelt Robinson

By: Wilbert Young JR

Computer Fundamentals 2011CSCI 1000-5

Professor Jenna Miley

Jackie Robinson

Also known as: Jack Roosevelt Robinson, John Roosevelt Robinson, bBaseball player, and black activist. Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia, on January 31, 1919. His parents were Jerry Robinson, a plantation farm worker, and Mallie, a domestic worker. There were five children in the Robinson family: Edgar, Frank, Mack, Willa Mae, and Jackie. Frank, his youngest brother's greatest fan, and Edgar are no longer alive, but Mack and Willa Mae still live in Pasadena, California. Jackie Robinson passed away in 1972, but his dream still lives on in a host of great baseball players. One player in particular is Mr. Willie Harris of Cairo, Georgia, who is now playing for the New York Mets. Mr. Robinson was honored internationally as the central figure in baseball in the 1960's and 1970's , but it was not so easy. He had to climb some hills to get to the top of the mound in baseball . Robinson's first competitive game took place when his fourth-grade soccer team played the sixth graders. Then Next came were football, tennis, basketball, the track team, and table tennis. In athletics he had more freedom to relate to people on equal terms, with less emphasis on race and more on body development, coordination, and performance level. Because of his skill as a football quarterback, .a 400 baseball player, and exceptional broad-jumper, Robinson was accepted as a friend by white team mates, attended the same schools, and visited back and forth in each other's homes. Still, with added age and broadened experience, Robinson saw that athletic success did not guarantee full freedom in the racially and economically unequal American society. Opposing players often reminded him of his race by rougher-than-necessary hits, arguments, and racial slurs.

Robinson won letters in football, baseball, basketball and track at Muir Technical High School and Pasadena Junior College. When he left the latter in 1939, he declined attractive offers from universities nationwide and chose the University of California at Los Angeles, just an hour's drive from his mother's home in Pasadena. Robinson's honors at UCLA were impressive: for two years highest scorer in basketball competition in the Pacific Coast Conference, national champion long jumper, the school's first athlete to letter in four sports, All-American football halfback, and varsity baseball shortstop. He left college in 1941 because of financial pressures, not many units from a bachelor's degree.

Directly after UCLA, Robinson worked for a few months as an athletic director in the National Youth Administration, in Atascadero, California. Driven by a growing, overwhelming desire to play professional sports, Robinson went to Hawaii in the fall of 1941 to join a semiprofessional, racially integrated football team, the Honolulu Bears. On weekends he was a member of the team, and during the week a construction worker. At the end of the short season, he returned to the United States in December 1941, right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that took the nation into war.

In 1942, Robinson was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to a segregated unit in Fort Riley, Kansas, where under existing policy he could not enter Officer's Candidate School. After protests by heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, then stationed at Fort Riley, and other influential persons including Truman Gibson, an African-American advisor to the Secretary of War, black men were accepted for officer training. Upon completion of the course of study, Robinson was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1943.

A racially charged incident

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