In 1970, two years before he died, Jackie Robinson spoke at his son’s high school graduation.
“In a land where we declare that we have liberty and justice for all,” Robinson said, “it seems that slogan really means liberty and justice for all as long as you do and say what some people want you to do and say.”
Those words ring uncomfortably true today.
Robinson often spoke out on civil rights, challenging both political parties. If you visit the Jackie Robinson Museum, as the Dodgers did when the museum opened in 2022, you see displays on civil rights and economic opportunity and social justice before you get to the baseball showcases.
“Jackie’s passion was civil rights and equality, and more so than baseball,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said then. “It was more of, baseball was just a vehicle for him to use his voice, which is pretty cool to see and actually pretty inspiring.”
In these perilous times, in which “indivisible” has been replaced by “you’re with us, or you’re the enemy within,” Robinson’s team will have the opportunity to celebrate its latest World Series championship at the White House.
Last month in Minneapolis, two American citizens were shot to death on American streets by agents of the American government. In this fragile moment, I asked Roberts if he would feel comfortable visiting the White House as the manager of Jackie Robinson’s team.
“For me, I stand by: I’m a baseball manager,” Roberts told me Saturday at the Dodgers’ fan festival. “That’s my job.
“I was raised — by a man who served our country for 30 years — to respect the highest office in our country. For me, it doesn’t matter who is in the office, I’m going to go to the White House. I’ve never tried to be political. … For me, I am going to continue to try to do what tradition says and not try to make political statements, because I am not a politician.”
Neither was Robinson. In 1944 — three years before he broke baseball’s color barrier and 11 years before Rosa Parks — Robinson refused an order to move to the back of a bus. He was an Army lieutenant, prosecuted by a military court for insubordination and then acquitted.
In the wake of the killings of Renee Good and then Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, federal officials hurried to television cameras and social media accounts. None of the usual admonitions against leveraging tragedy for political purposes. No thoughts and prayers, even, just a rush to dehumanize the dead with labels such as “domestic terrorist” before any investigation.
The last words of Good, to one of those federal agents: “I’m not mad at you.” The last words of Pretti, to someone needing assistance: “Are you OK?”
Jackie Robinson: “The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.”
After the killing of Pretti last week, the BBC exhaustively checked the claims of federal authorities against video evidence from a variety of sources: “None of the videos we have analyzed show Alex Pretti holding a gun. There is no available evidence that he was an assassin who tried to murder federal agents, no available evidence he intended to massacre law enforcement, nor that it was a violent riot, no available evidence that this was an individual who arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”
In Minnesota, the immigration sweeps proceed unabated. The Star Tribune reported Saturday of a local detention facility so overcrowded that a woman had been locked inside a bathroom with three men.
In a suburban Minneapolis incident captured on video, an agent tells a man he must produce citizenship documentation “because of your accent.”
The Huffington Post reported that four children from an elementary school in a heavily Latino suburb of Minneapolis had been shipped to a detention facility in Texas.
This is what America voted for. The “Mass Deportation Now!” placards at campaign rallies in 2024 were held high.
Yet a judge ordered one of those children released Saturday, blasting what he called the “ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
Jackie Robinson: “The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.”
This is not something the Dodgers can dismiss as an out-of-town issue. Federal immigration agents operate in Los Angeles too.
And, since Dodger Stadium has become a must-see Japanese tourist attraction in the Shohei Ohtani era, how much might tourism drop if Japanese citizens could be forbidden from entering the United States without sharing their social media history from the preceding five years and every personal and business email address from the preceding 10 years, as federal officials have proposed?
Jackie Robinson: “To build for leadership, one must base his standing on what is right, not what is expedient.”
I asked Dodgers president Stan Kasten whether the team had decided to visit the White House.
“I don’t have any news for you on that,” he said Saturday.
To skip the trip could be uncomfortable, but the Dodgers would not have to stand on a Washington street in protest, or issue a blistering statement. All they would need to do is decline a photo opportunity.
The Dodgers are free to make their own decision, of course. They’ll be in Washington for their first road series of the season, in the first week of April. Then they’ll return to Dodger Stadium, for the annual Jackie Robinson Day festivities.
For me, going to the White House would feel more expedient than right. If the Dodgers do go, they ought to skip the tributes to Robinson’s grand courage, since they would not have been able to muster up a fraction of their own.
The post In these times, Jackie Robinson’s team should not grace the White House appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
