MLK, Jackie Robinson, and Us

When Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I have a dream” address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, Brooklyn Dodgers great Jackie Robinson was there with his wife and children. Robinson said on that day to the crowd of 100,000, “I know all of us are going to go away feeling we cannot turn back.” King’s speech on that day helped transformed a nation and made him the heir to the equality rhetoric of the founders of America.

A year earlier, in September 1962, Robinson spoke to the Southern Christian Leadership Council’s annual Freedom Dinner in Birmingham, Alabama. In his address the baseball great called Americans to acknowledge that a “race problem” existed. Robinson said of Martin Luther King Jr., “he is a constant marvel to me.” Near the end of his remarks Robinson said,

People used to tell me a lot of things about Dr. King, that he was trying to take over the world, that he was making money on the civil rights issues. I didn’t believe them, of course. I knew this was a dedicated man and that he has made tremendous personal financial sacrifices in the cause. I sort of wondered why people would stoop to talk about him. Then I realized that the world has always talked against great men. The best way to keep from getting talked about is to do nothing. I think every Negro and fair-minded white person ought to throw their arms around him, give him all the backing and support possible and acclaim him for what he is—a great leader of the Twentieth century who is concerned about all of God’s children.

King understood the powerful influence sports had on American culture and admired the courage of Jackie Robinson. In an August 4, 1962 column in the New York Amsterdam News, King wrote of Robinson, “He was a pilgrim that walked in the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” King believed that Robinson breaking the color line in Major League Baseball in 1947, along with his commitment to Branch Rickey of non-retaliation for three years, had paved the way for his non-violent Civil Rights Movement.

A few weeks before his assassination, King told black Dodgers pitching great Don Newcombe, “You’ll never know how easy you and Jackie

[Robinson] and [Larry] Doby and Campy [Roy Campanella] made it for me to do my job by what you did on the baseball field.” Newcombe later said in a 2009 interview with the New York Post’s Peter Vecsey, “Imagine, here is Martin getting beaten with billy clubs, bitten by dogs and thrown in jail, and he says we made his job easier.”

Today, we rightly honor the self-sacrificial efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. whose martyrdom on April 4th, 1968 in the righteous cause of Civil Rights should compel us to add his face to Mount Rushmore. King called America to account for not living up to its own first principles. In his “I have a dream” speech, King declared,

One day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that “children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” and that “one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

We are still not where we need to be in having that dream realized as we celebrate MLK day in 2017. Robinson titled his autobiography I Never had it Made, because he explained, “I won’t have it made until the most underprivileged Negro in Mississippi can live with equal dignity with anyone else in America” (New York Post, August 22, 1960). All of us would do well to live in light of those words. Robinson’s oft-repeated credo was, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other’s lives.” It seems to me that was King’s credo as well.

Robinson and King were different in many ways. Robinson is one of the greatest athletes in American history and King was famously unathletic. Robinson was politically a conservative who often supported Republican candidates while King was a political liberal. Robinson supported the Vietnam War and King vehemently opposed the war. But in the most important ways these two men shared the same heartbeat. Robinson said, “Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.” Neither Robinson nor King wasted their lives. May we not waste ours.

Robinson declared, “There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free” and “The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.” It still is. Let us celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. today on his holiday, but let’s also celebrate those who paved the way before him like Jackie Robinson. In fact, I’d be for Robinson’s face to be added to Mount Rushmore as well. I hope each of us still has a dream because we still don’t have it made.

By |January 16th, 2017|Categories: Blog|Tags: , , , |

About the Author:

David E. Prince is pastor of preaching and vision at Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky and assistant professor of Christian preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of In the Arena and Church with Jesus as the Hero. He blogs at Prince on Preaching and frequently writes for The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, For the Church, the BGEA and Preaching Today

One Comment

  1. […] MLK, Jackie Robinson, and Us A few weeks before his assassination, King told black Dodgers pitching great Don Newcombe, “You’ll never know how easy you and Jackie [Robinson] and [Larry] Doby and Campy [Roy Campanella] made it for me to do my job by what you did on the baseball field.” Newcombe later said in a 2009 interview with the New York Post’s Peter Vecsey, “Imagine, here is Martin getting beaten with billy clubs, bitten by dogs and thrown in jail, and he says we made his job easier.” […]

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