Dec 14

Jackie Robinson

JACKIE ROBINSON
 
 
Jackie Robinson  (January 31, 1919 – October 24, 1972) was an American Major League Baseball (MLB) second baseman who became the first African American to play in the major leagues in the modern era.  Robinson broke the baseball color line when the Brooklyn Dodgers started him at first base on April 15, 1947.  The Dodgers, by playing Robinson, heralded the end of racial segregation that had relegated black players to the Negro leagues since the 1880s.  Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.  Robinson had an exceptional 10-year baseball career.  He was the recipient of the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, was an All-Star for six consecutive seasons from 1949 through 1954, and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1949 — the first black player so honored.  Robinson played in six World Series and contributed to the Dodgers’ 1955 World Series championship.  In 1997, MLB “universally” retired his uniform number, 42, across all major league teams; he was the first pro athlete in any sport to be so honored.  MLB also adopted a new annual tradition, “Jackie Robinson Day”, for the first time on April 15, 2004, on which every player on every team wears No. 42.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 

In the article about Cris Williamson in Allmusic, William Ruhlmann offers this concise introduction:  “Just as baseball historians can only speculate about how players in the old Negro leagues would have fared in the absence of segregation in the major leagues prior to the arrival of Jackie Robinson in 1947, so music historians may ponder what status Cris Williamson might have assumed if she had emerged at a time when admitted homosexuals were not subject to exclusion from major record labels.  By the 1990’s, openly gay women artists Melissa Etheridge, Indigo Girls, and k.d. lang were able to maintain major-label contracts and sell records in the millions (although none of them had proclaimed their sexual orientation when they were signed in the 1980’s).” 
 
(January 2014)
 

Last edited: March 22, 2021