FROM FACEBOOK
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A young Black man sat crying, rubbing his hands, wishing they were white. One man never forgot that night. And it changed America forever.
In 1909, a college baseball coach named Branch Rickey faced a moment most people would have forgotten within a week.
His team was on a road trip to South Bend, Indiana. One of his players — a talented young Black man named Charles Thomas — was denied a hotel room. Not because of anything he had done. Simply because of the color of his skin.
Rickey argued with the hotel manager. Got nowhere. Finally negotiated a compromise: Thomas could sleep on a cot in Rickey’s own room.
That night, Rickey was woken by a sound he would never forget.
Thomas was sitting on the edge of the cot, weeping. His hands were clasped together, rubbing frantically, desperately, as though trying to wash something away.
“What’s wrong?” Rickey asked.
Thomas looked down at his own hands and said through tears: “If I could just make them white. If I could just make them white.”
A talented young man, hating his own skin because the world had told him — every single day — that he was less than human.
Branch Rickey was twenty-seven years old. He carried that image with him for the next thirty-six years.
By 1945, Rickey had risen to become president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He held one of the most powerful positions in professional baseball. And baseball, America’s pastime, had been racially segregated for over sixty years.
There were no written rules banning Black players. Just a quiet agreement among owners — a so-called gentleman’s agreement — that no one would sign them. Breaking that agreement meant becoming the most hated man in the sport.
Everyone told Rickey it was impossible. Owners would turn against him. White players would refuse to cooperate. Fans in certain cities would boycott. His career could be destroyed.
But Rickey was not a man who made decisions based on comfort.
He was deeply religious. As a young man, he had promised his mother he would never play baseball on Sundays. He kept that promise his entire life — as a player, a manager, and an executive — even when it cost him. His faith was not something he wore on Sundays and set aside the rest of the week. It guided everything he did.
And his faith told him that segregation was a moral failure. A stain on the game he loved. A betrayal of everything America claimed to believe about equality and opportunity.
So Rickey began to act. Quietly. Carefully. Strategically.
He sent scouts into the Negro Leagues to watch Black players. He studied reports. He gathered intelligence. But he was not simply looking for talent. Any number of Black players could play at the major league level. What he needed was something far harder to find.
He needed someone with the temperament to survive what was coming.
Because Rickey understood something crucial: the first Black player in modern Major League Baseball would not simply face skepticism. He would face systematic, daily, relentless cruelty. Pitchers would throw at his head. Runners would spike him deliberately. Teammates might refuse to speak to him. Hotels would deny him rooms. Restaurants would turn him away. Fans would scream the worst words imaginable.
And if that player ever fought back — if he ever lost his composure — segregationists would use it as proof that integration had failed.
Rickey needed someone strong enough to absorb all of that hatred and refuse to return it.
He found Jackie Robinson.
Robinson was twenty-six, playing for the Kansas City Monarchs. He was talented — an exceptional hitter, a brilliant base runner, a sharp and intelligent ballplayer. But what set him apart was everything else. He was a UCLA graduate. A former Army officer. A man with discipline, intelligence, and a quiet, controlled intensity that suggested he could carry an impossible burden without breaking.
In August 1945, Rickey brought Robinson to his office in Brooklyn. What followed was one of the most extraordinary meetings in American sports history.
For three hours, Rickey tested Robinson. He role-played every scenario Robinson would face. He pretended to be the racist hotel clerk. The opposing pitcher throwing at his head. The teammate who refused to acknowledge him. The fan screaming from the stands.
Rickey shouted at Robinson. Provoked him. Pushed him to the edge of his patience — deliberately, methodically — searching for the breaking point.
At one moment, Robinson looked at Rickey and asked directly: “Mr. Rickey, are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?”
Rickey leaned forward and said: “I’m looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.”
Robinson understood. He signed.
He joined Brooklyn’s minor league affiliate in Montreal in 1946. Then, on April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson stepped onto the field at Ebbets Field and became the first Black player in Major League Baseball in over sixty years.
What followed was exactly as brutal as Rickey had predicted.
The Philadelphia Phillies’ manager, Ben Chapman, led his entire team in shouting racial slurs so vile that other white players — on both teams — were visibly shaken. Opposing pitchers aimed for Robinson’s body. Runners slid into him with their spikes raised, trying to wound him. Some of his own teammates signed a petition asking to be traded rather than play alongside a Black man.
Hotels in certain cities refused him. He ate alone in separate locations from his teammates. He endured threats against his life.
Robinson bore all of it. He played. He competed. He excelled.
And he was so undeniably, brilliantly good that every argument against integration collapsed under the weight of his talent and his character.
Robinson won Rookie of the Year in 1947. He helped lead Brooklyn to the National League pennant.
Within years, other teams began signing Black players — not out of moral conviction, but because they realized they simply could not compete while excluding an entire population of talent.
By 1959, every team in Major League Baseball had integrated. The color barrier was gone.
When reporters asked Rickey why he had done it — why he had risked everything — his answer was simple and direct: “Someday I’m going to have to stand before God, and if He asks me why I didn’t let that Robinson fellow play, I don’t think saying ‘because of the color of his skin’ would be a good enough answer.”
Branch Rickey died in 1965 at the age of eighty-three. Jackie Robinson died in 1972 at just fifty-three, his body worn down by years of extraordinary stress. But Robinson lived long enough to see his number honored in ways no one could have predicted.
Today, the number 42 is retired across every team in Major League Baseball — the only number with that distinction. Every April 15, on Jackie Robinson Day, every player in the sport wears 42.
Robinson is remembered as a hero. Rightly so.
But here is what the story often forgets.
Jackie Robinson was brave. Jackie Robinson was talented. Jackie Robinson changed the game.
But without Branch Rickey, none of it happens.
Rickey was the one who saw the moral failure. Rickey was the one who risked his reputation, his career, and his standing in baseball to fix it. Rickey was the one who planned for years, who found the right man, who tested him, who defended him when the entire sport turned against them both.
Not for fame. Not for competitive advantage. Not for publicity.
Because one night in 1909, he watched a young man cry and try to wash the color from his own hands. And he decided that if he ever had the power to make sure no one had to feel that way again, he would use it.
Branch Rickey proved something that history keeps teaching us, if we are willing to listen: the people who change the world are not always the ones who make the headlines.
Sometimes they are the ones who simply decided, quietly and at great personal cost, that doing what is right matters more than anything else.
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Without Branch Rickey and Charles Thomas, Jackie Robinson never gets the chance to break the “color barrier”!
Like all the stories about the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, we never seem to remember the great heroes of humanity.
“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I’d say that instead of “celebrities”, we should celebrate and emulate “the saints” that we don’t hear enough about. I think Branch Rickey is an exemplar to the type of human that we need to learn about;
I hope all my moral challenges are little ones. I’m not sure that I could answer big ones.
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Posted by reinkefj 
Reinke Faces Life 