Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson, born Jack Roosevelt Robinson on 31 January 1919 and living until 24 October 1972, was an American professional baseball player who became the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era when he started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on 15 April 1947, an event that marked the beginning of the end of racial segregation in professional baseball, which had confined Black players to the Negro leagues since the 1880s. Born in Cairo, Georgia and raised in Pasadena, California, he was a four sport athlete at Pasadena Junior College and UCLA, better known at the time for football than baseball, before being drafted during the Second World War and court martialed, then honorably discharged, for refusing to move to the back of a segregated Army bus. He signed with the Negro leagues' Kansas City Monarchs, where Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey identified him as the player to break baseball's color line. Over his ten year major league career Robinson won the first Rookie of the Year award in 1947, was named an All Star six consecutive seasons, and in 1949 became the first Black player to win the National League Most Valuable Player award, later helping the Dodgers to the 1955 World Series championship and entering the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962 in his first year of eligibility. Beyond the field he became the first Black television analyst in Major League Baseball and the first Black vice president of a major American corporation, Chock full o'Nuts, and in the 1960s he helped establish the Freedom National Bank, a Black owned financial institution in Harlem. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1997 Major League Baseball retired his uniform number 42 across every team, the first time any professional sport had so honored an athlete.