The Ground Ball That Changed America

First of eight parts

Wars can change the world. So can elections, revolutions and great inventions. But sometimes all it takes is a little ground ball to third base.

On the warm afternoon of April 15, 1947, at Brooklyn's Ebbets Field, the Boston Braves' Dick Culler led off a baseball game with a soft bouncer to third. The Dodgers' Spider Jorgensen fielded it and, with a slight hesitation that perhaps was an unconscious nod to posterity, threw to first.

Waiting there in the speckled light, about to leap into history, crouched a pigeon-toed, 28-year-old rookie. The color of his crisp opening-day uniform was the same as Jorgensen's. But unlike the 49 other players, three umpires, two batboys, and handful of coaches, all of whom were white, the rookie's skin was a dark, regal ebony.

The 25,263 fans, many of whom also were black and until that instant had had little reason to trumpet that fact, inhaled as he stretched for the toss. The ball smacked into the rookie's mitt. Umpire Al Barlick snapped a thumb past his right ear. A great roar was unleashed.

The long wait, baseball's public disgrace, was over. The rookie, a handsome, intense Army veteran named Jack Roosevelt Robinson who had been carefully groomed for this pioneering role by Dodgers president Branch Rickey, had become the first black man to appear in a major-league baseball game in the 20th century.

Though he would continue to endure the racist taunts of fans and opponents, a boycott threat by some Dodgers teammates and discrimination in virtually every city he visited - including Philadelphia - Robinson's appearance had transformed a crusade into a reality. Yes, certain teams were slow to integrate, including the Phillies, who broke their own color barrier on April 22, 1957, with the signing of John Kennedy.

The little-used third baseman, who has but five major-league games to his credit, is all but forgotten.

Not so Jackie Robinson.

By playing with a daring dignity that day and for another decade, he would elate and empower blacks, help trigger the seismic changes of the civil-rights era, and force all Americans - even those with no interest in sports - to confront their nation's most confounding problem: race.

"Robinson," said his biographer David Falkner, "was a link, and a crucial one, between despair and a movement."

Now, 60 years later, Robinson's debut is recalled alongside the Emancipation Proclamation and the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision as a civil-rights monument.