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He died 50 years ago on October 24, 1972, at the age of 54, his life cut short by a heart attack. Most Americans know Jackie Robinson as the first Black athlete to break the color barrier in professional sports. Some know Branch Rickey, the general manager and president of the Brooklyn Dodgers team that Robinson played for, as a race trailblazer too.
What most Americans don't know is that both men were bound together not just by a common mission but by a common belief: Both were God guys. They were Christians—Methodists, specifically—bound together by their mutual admiration of their creator.
In a great scene in 42, the 2013 movie about Robinson, Rickey (Harrison Ford) taunts the young athlete with insults and racist jabs. Robinson (played by the late Chadwick Boseman) is slow to anger, and when he finally rises up, he realizes he's being tested. But he isn't certain what the test is about.
"You want a player who's got the guts to fight back?" Robinson asks Rickey.
"No, I want a player who's got the guts to not fight back," Rickey replies. "Like our savior, you better have the guts to turn the other cheek. Can you do it?"
"You give me a uniform. You give me a number on my back. I'll give you the guts," Robinson replies.
It was a powerful scene, but a big question lingered, unanswered: What impelled Rickey to integrate the game he loved? When he accepted the job as general manager and president of a major league team in America's biggest city and the city's most populated borough, there wasn't a Black player in any professional sport, let alone baseball. The NFL was barely a league, and the NBA even less so. Baseball wasn't just the biggest national sport; it was the only national sport.
The denizens of Brooklyn weren't crying out for integration. Indeed, fierce racism and tension existed between and among the many ethnic groups crowded around Ebbets Field when Rickey landed the job in 1942. Rickey arrived in Brooklyn after assembling a team that won six pennants in St. Louis, but he considered his tenure there a failure because he couldn't move the Cardinals owner to integrate the stands, let alone the field. His appetite for changing the status quo in his profession went that far back.
Why did he risk his high-profile job—and his career—to do what he did? "For starters, he was a Bible-thumping Methodist who refused to attend games on Sunday," wrote author Eric Metaxas in USA Today. "He sincerely believed it was God's will that he integrate baseball, and he saw it as an opportunity to intervene in the moral history of the nation, as Lincoln had done."
That reality was echoed in legendary New York writer Jimmy Breslin's 2011 biography of the man. "Rickey carries with him a Midwestern Christian religious fervor as strong as a wheat crop, and a political faith in anything Republican," Breslin's book begins. At the new church Rickey attended after moving to New York from St. Louis, he would sometimes deliver sermons. "In one, he announced he was here to run the Brooklyn Dodgers and to serve the God to whom they prayed, and the Lord's work called for him to bring the first black player into major league baseball," Breslin wrote.
"In [Rickey and Robinson's] historic meeting," Metaxas said, "Rickey pulled out a book by Giovanni Papini, titled Life of Christ. He opened to the passage about the Sermon on the Mount and read it aloud." The Sermon on the Mount, for those not familiar with the event, was delivered by Jesus Christ and can be found in a perennial bestseller called the Bible. Rickey read the words found in Matthew 5:38:
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Rickey then read the words found in Mathew 5-43:
You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
But why did Rickey choose Robinson and not many of the other great Black athletes of his day playing in the Negro League? We learn from Metaxas and Breslin that he chose the young Robinson because he believed in those words too. They both believed that turning the other cheek wasn't just the practical thing to do but the right thing, Metaxas explained.
"Rickey chose Robinson because of the young man's faith and moral character," he wrote. "Rickey knew integrating the racist world of professional sports would take more than athletic ability. The attacks would be ugly, and the press would fuel the fire. If the player chosen were goaded into retaliating, the grand experiment would be set back a decade or more."
And that left just one last unanswered question: Where was Robinson's faith cultivated? And how did he summon the courage to do what he was about to do? "I believe he derived his sense of himself from his mother, Mallie," Rachel Robinson, Robinson's wife, told a reporter.
"His mother was an extraordinary woman: courageous, determined, extremely religious and self-reliant," she continued. "She had been a sharecropper in Georgia. Her husband left her with five small children. So she packed them up and took them to California, all alone. Mallie managed to purchase a home for the family from her salary as a domestic worker. And she created an environment that was filled with positive values, as well as love."
Through it all, Robinson's mom emphasized to her children the deep belief that God would always take care of them. "I never stopped believing that," Jackie Robinson told reporters years later.
When he was a young man, Robinson was involved in fights and some brushes with the law, many prompted by his reaction to racial slights and attacks. In Jackie Robinson: A Biography, author Arnold Rampersad described how the young Robinson was mentored by the Reverend Karl Downs, who wound up being a father figure to Robinson and brought him closer to God.
It was through Downs' instruction that faith seeped into Robinson's consciousness. With it came the same personal moral code taught by most white and Black Protestant preachers of the day. "Faith in God began to register in Robinson as both a mysterious force, beyond his comprehension, and also a pragmatic way to negotiate the world," Rampersad wrote.
As an athlete at UCLA—Robinson was the only athlete in the college's history to letter in four sports—he avoided the drinking and partying. All of which contributed to Rickey's decision to choose Robinson over other players to integrate the league.
In a 1950 newspaper interview, Robinson emphasized his faith in God, and he talked about his habit of kneeling at his bedside every night to pray. "It's the best way to get closer to God," he said. He added with a smile, "And a hard-hit ball."
Robinson was responsible for many hard-hit balls. In his 10 seasons, he led the Dodgers to six National League pennants and a World Series win in 1955 against their crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees. In 1949, he batted .342 to win the league title, and he had a lifetime .313 average. He was also a prodigious base stealer: A video shows him stealing home in Game 1 of the 1955 World Series, just one of 19 times he pulled off that act of base-running virtuosity. He was named the Rookie of the Year in 1947 and the National League MVP in 1949, and he entered the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.
Rickey died on December 9, 1965, in the middle of a speech he was giving while being elected to the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. He was 83 years old. Robinson died of a heart attack seven years later. He was 53.
The slights and ugliness Robinson endured are unimaginable. And they came not just from the fans but from fellow players too. Some intentionally slid into his legs with their cleats—Robinson was a second baseman. Robinson felt compelled to have metal plates sewn into his cap to protect him from pitches meant to do him harm on the plate.
On one particularly brutal day playing the Philadelphia Phillies at home in April 1947, the racial insults coming from the dugout—including the team's manager—were so obscene that Commissioner Happy Chandler issued a severe warning, restraining the Phillies from using "vicious un-American racial remarks" against Robinson, according to Alan Cohen, writing for the Society for American Baseball Research. In his autobiography, Robinson remembers that day, saying that it "brought me nearer to cracking up than I had ever been."
Much has been written, and will continue to be written, about these two great men. But without the driving force of faith in their lives, the story of Robinson and Rickey is not just incomplete; it's incoherent. Leaving Jesus Christ out of their story is like leaving hamburgers out of Ray Kroc's story, race cars out of Mario Andretti's or the Mafia out of John Gotti's.
"A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives," Robinson said not long before he died. One life affected by Robinson's was Martin Luther King Jr., another influential 20th-century leader moved by the words of the Bible and Jesus Christ. "Jackie Robinson made my success possible," King said. "Without him, I would never have been able to do what I did."
Robinson and Rickey, through their mutual love of God, affected millions upon millions of lives. They changed baseball forever. And America too.
