LizzieMaine
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Back to baseball: Today in 1947 Jackie Robinson began play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, thus ending racial segregation in MLB.* What a difficult time for him that was. He made the Hall of Fame in 1962 and died in 1972. He was only 53 years old.
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*Well, at least it was the beginning of the end of segregation in MLB.
Robinson was added to the Dodger roster on April 10th thru the purchase of his contract from the Montreal Royals, but it wasn't the biggest baseball story of the moment: the sports press was distracted by Commissioner A. B. Chandler's decision to suspend Brooklyn manager Leo Durocher for the entire 1947 season due to his association with gamblers -- and, off the record, to satisfy the Catholic Youth Organization of Brooklyn and its threats to boycott baseball over Leo's sleazy "love pirate" activities with actress Laraine Day.
Dodger president Branch Rickey chose this precise moment to bring Robinson up to the big club specifically so that attention would be deflected from the race angle -- with the press still flaming brightly over the Durocher crisis, he hoped that little notice would be paid to Robinson, giving him a chance to get acclimatized to the major leagues without reporters pestering him. It worked, to a point -- the front page of the Brooklyn Eagle for April 11th shows no mention of Robinson, although there are several stories on the Durocher situation, including a big photo of a Knot Hole League dinner disrupted by chants of "BRING LEO BACK!" The only mention of Robinson in the entire paper is a one-column story on the first page of the sports section -- a page dominated by Durocher news -- headed "ROBBY MAKES DEBUT WITH DODGERS TODAY." The racial significance of that debut is seriously underplayed -- there is only one sentence in the entire story referring to it, with the rest of the piece discussing the various strategic moves that will result from Robinson's addition to the lineup, starting with the last games of a pre-season exhibition series against the Yankees.
Rickey wanted this kind of soft-pedaled coverage, as did Robinson himself, insisting that Robinson be viewed as just another player on the club and not a racial crusader or pioneer, and most of the coverage in the white press during the 1947 followed that line. The notable exception was the Daily Worker, which had crusaded for years for the desegregation of baseball, and which followed the racial angle of Robinson's presence in the league as closely as any African-American paper did.