Why Jackie Robinson’s barrier-shattering breakthrough resonates amid anti-DEI craze
Let’s pretend it’s April 1947, when then-Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey signed a Black player who was soon to break the Major League Baseball color barrier euphemized as a “gentleman’s agreement.”
If that were now, it sure seems to me you could only surmise the action would be portrayed as part of the “tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion” policies the 47th president cited before a joint session of congress last week.
Whatever your political affiliation, it’s hard to think otherwise given the indiscriminate and sweeping scorched-earth enforcement of his executive order squelching anything remotely related to … diversity, equity and inclusion.
And that should give us pause about what the crusade seems to imply.
At least back then, righteousness prevailed when Jackie Robinson debuted with the Dodgers — two years after spending a season with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues — and changed the trajectory of history.
History you feel all around you in the 18th & Vine District and especially in the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
The story of Robinson is “one of the greatest examples of why diversity in the workplace works,” NLBM president Bob Kendrick said.
Because of how it started to advance society, too, with integration of the U.S. military and public education soon to come. In fact, Robinson so engaged the Civil Rights movement that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a 1962 essay for the New York Amsterdam News hailed him as a pioneering force.
That’s why the heart of the concept matters in ways that extend well beyond elements of DEI political-speak.
Major League Baseball opened its doors to all the best players — no longer just the best white players — and …
“What happened?” Kendrick said. “The game got better. Simple as that.”
Maybe it’s an oversimplified analogy, Kendrick said.
But it’s all made him ponder what his hero and mentor, National Baseball Hall of Famer and museum founder Buck O’Neil, used to say.
“When we think about a segregated society, how much did it hold this country back to try to lessen some of the great minds who could have made tremendous contributions in all aspects, not just sports?” he said. “All these other aspects that could have been indelibly changed. But we chose to try and stifle talent and potential.”
To Kendrick, as the steward of what he also considers a civil rights institution needed these days more than ever, the last few years, including the wake of the murder of George Floyd, have made him wonder if he was naive to believe our country had moved past so much of its racially loaded past.
“It seems as though there’s this agenda to stoke fear,” Kendrick said, sitting in the museum lobby last week. “Fear of people who don’t necessarily look like each other.”
The same sort of fear, he reminded, that lurked when Robinson entered the Dodgers clubhouse across the racial divide.
“Particularly then, what we knew about each other, we heard about it from somebody else,” he said. “So somebody else told you I was this way. Somebody told me you were this way.
“And then in the world of sports, we get into an environment where we say, ‘Wait a minute, he’s nothing like that.’ And then, of course, Jackie started to help Brooklyn win, and all of a sudden it didn’t matter what color he was.
“And I think that’s why sports in general have been such a tremendous barrier breaker in our society. Because it is the place that we see each other up close and personal, and it chips away at some of those stereotypes and misnomers.”
Before they had that chance, the Negro Leagues were based on a premise Kendrick often puts thusly: “You won’t let me play with you in the major leagues, I’ll create my own.”
Along the way, the very people who were shunned for so long were remarkably welcoming.
“They didn’t care what gender you were: Do you have something to offer?” Kendrick said. “So it opened its doors to anyone and everyone who could play.”
It was inclusive, featuring women as players, owners and executives.
It was diverse, particularly embracing and traveling to many Spanish-speaking countries — where they’d stay in the finest hotels and restaurants before returning home to treatment as second-class citizens.
Purely by coincidence but apropos of the moment, last month the NLBM unveiled its plans for a “Leaders & Innovators” exhibit to open to the public in late May on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Frank Robinson becoming the first full-time Black manager in MLB — 28 years after the advent of Jackie Robinson (no relation).
Why did it take so long?
“That was the undercurrent of those who believe that we just simply were not smart enough to fulfill those roles,” Kendrick said.
The exhibit will celebrate Negro Leagues inventions such as shin guards, the batting helmet and night baseball as well as Frank Robinson and what the NLBM calls “the brilliant managers of the Negro Leagues who were never afforded the opportunity to showcase their talents after the integration of the game.”
When they were finally allowed to join white players in the major leagues, Buck would at times hear people lament that Negro Leagues players never got to play against the best.
“‘How do you know I didn’t play against the best?’” he’d say.
Fifteen years after Jackie Robinson’s breakthrough, the Chicago Cubs made Buck the first Black coach in MLB.
“But as he would say, ‘I couldn’t stick out my chest because I’m the first Black coach, when I knew all of these other brilliant Black baseball minds who were more than capable of waving a guy home,’” Kendrick said, laughing. “When you put it in that context … the fact that someone believed that the color of one’s skin could dictate whether or not they could play this game, it makes segregation appear to be even more ludicrous than what we already knew it to be.
“And I hope that we continue to chip away at that stigma.”
Including by illuminating what diversity, inclusion and equity literally mean over how the terms have been co-opted.
This story was originally published March 7, 2025 at 10:02 AM.