A Jackie Robinson Mystery:
A Jackie Robinson Mystery
It was 1949, the year Jackie Robinson would bat .342 for the Brooklyn Dodgers and receive the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award, just 31 months after becoming the first black player in the major leagues.
But on Feb. 14, before the season started, before the crowds poured into Ebbets Field, Mr. Robinson spoke to the Sociology Society at City College in New York.
We’re trying to figure out why.
This photograph, unpublished until now, documents the moment, with the students leaning forward to hear him speak. But what was he discussing? The photo caption offers only a hint, saying that Mr. Robinson was speaking about “his work with Harlem boys’ groups.”
We know that Mr. Robinson coached children at the YMCA in Harlem a year earlier, to help, as he put it, “keep them off the streets.” And it is easy to imagine how his successes and struggles would have resonated with African-American boys and teenagers at a time when racial discrimination was rife. “I had to fight hard against loneliness, abuse and the knowledge that any mistake I made would be magnified because I was the only black man out there,” Mr. Robinson wrote in his memoir, “I Never Had It Made: An Autobiography of Jackie Robinson,” describing those early years with the Dodgers.
But The New York Times didn’t publish an article about the ballplayer’s visit to City College that day.
Now we’re turning to you for help.
Were you there? Do you recognize your face in the crowd of students? Do you recognize someone you know or knew? Do you remember the discussion, or did you hear about it later? Were you or someone you knew coached by Mr. Robinson at the YMCA at 180 West 135th Street?
Please share your story with us. If and when we have answers, we’ll let you know what we have discovered.
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