Baseball · 1947 · New York, USA
Breaking Baseball's Colour Line
Jackie Robinson takes the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers and ends six decades of racial segregation in Major League Baseball.
April 15, 1947
Debut date
1st MLB Rookie of the Year
Award, same season
1949 (NL)
MVP
On 15 April 1947 Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the Boston Braves, the first Black player in the modern era of Major League Baseball and the end of a colour line that had held since the 1880s. He had agreed, at the request of the Dodgers executive Branch Rickey, not to retaliate publicly against the abuse both men knew was coming, on the field and off it.
It arrived at once and did not let up. Opposing players spiked him, pitchers threw at his head, death threats came through the post, and he was expected to answer only by playing well. He answered by being named the first Rookie of the Year in the award's history that same season.
Robinson went on to a Hall of Fame career and a National League MVP award in 1949. What gets remembered is the walk out to first base on that April afternoon in 1947, a full seven years before the US Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education.
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