Breaking Baseball's Colour Line

On 15 April 1947 Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the Boston Braves, becoming the first Black player in Major League Baseball's modern era, ending a colour line that had held since the 1880s. He did it while agreeing, at Dodgers executive Branch Rickey's request, not to publicly retaliate against the abuse he knew was coming, on the field and off it.

That abuse arrived immediately and relentlessly: opposing players spiked him, pitchers threw at his head, and he received death threats through the mail, all while he was expected to answer only with performance. He answered by being named the first ever Rookie of the Year that same season.

Robinson went on to a Hall of Fame career and became a National League MVP in 1949, but it is the walk to first base on that April afternoon in 1947 that is remembered as the moment professional baseball's segregation ended, a full seven years before the US Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling on schools.