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When Baseball Mattered - Hank Aaron on Jackie Robinson https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/13/opinion/when-baseball-mattered.html?smid=tw-share
Jackie Robinson meant everything to me. Before I was a teen-ager, I was telling my father that I was going to be a ballplayer, and he was telling me, ''Ain't no colored ballplayers.'' Then Jackie broke into the Brooklyn Dodgers lineup in 1947, and Daddy never said that again.
When the Dodgers played an exhibition game in Mobile, Ala., on their way north the next spring, Daddy even came to the game with me. A black man in a major-league uniform: that was something my father had to see for himself.
Jackie was a college football hero, a handsome, intelligent, talented guy with a lot going for him.He didn't need that kind of humiliation. And it certainly wasn't in his nature to suffer it silently. But he had to.Not for himself, but for me and all the young black kids like me.
In his later years, after blacks were secure in the game, Jackie let go of his forbearance and fought back. In the quest to integrate baseball, it was time for pride to take over from meekness. And Jackie made sure that younger blacks like myself were soldiers in the struggle.
Although Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Willie Stargell, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson & I were trying to make our marks individually, we were on a collective mission. Jackie Robinson demonstrated to us that, for a black player true success could not be an individual thing.
Jackie's spirit is watching. I know that he would be bitterly disappointed if he saw the way today's black players have abandoned the struggle, but he would be happy for their success nonetheless. And I have no doubt that he'd do it all over again for them.
