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How Did Jackie Robinson Break The Color Barrier

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Jackie Roosevelt Robinson (January 31, 1919-October 24, 1972) was the first black athlete to break the color barrier. He stepped out to play Major League Baseball in the 20th century he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Throughout his long career, Robinson became one of the game's most talented and exciting players, and he also had a .311 batting average. He was also a vocal civil rights activist.

Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia. Jackie was the youngest of five, his whole family was raised in poverty by a single mother. Jackie had attended high school at John Muir High School and he had also attended Pasadena Junior College, where he was an excellent athlete and played: football, basketball, track and baseball. And at that time he was the region's most valuable player in baseball in 1938. But after all that he had served his time in the military from 1942 to 1944, “Robinson served as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. However he never saw combat” …show more content…

“Jackie Robinson is perhaps the most historically significant baseball player ever, ranking with Babe Ruth in terms of his impact on the national pastime. Ruth changed the way baseball was played; Jackie Robinson changed the way Americans thought. When Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, more than sixty years of racial segregation in major-league baseball came to an end. He was the first acknowledged black player to perform in the Major Leagues in the twentieth century and went on to be the first to win a batting title, the first to win the Most Valuable Player award, and the first to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He won major-league baseball's first official Rookie of the Year award and was the first baseball player, black or white, to be featured on a United States postage stamp”(swaine,

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