“Remembering Jackie Robinson” by Peter Dreier

In ” Remembering Jackie Robinson” by Peter Dreier we get to learn a little bit more about the time when Robinson was hired to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and after. In other words, temporal context is shown in this article. According to Dreier, baseball integration was, in some way,  the beginning of the civil rights movement. “You’ll never know what you and Jackie and Roy did to make it possible to do my job” were the words said to the pitcher of the Dodgers Don Newcombe by Martin Luther King Jr. The article continuous with Dreier talking about the Dodgers manager Branch Rickey and how he wanted to integrate a black baseball player for his team in order to break the color line barrier in that sport and how he decided to choose Robinson. Robinson’s integration to the major league baseball created a change since many more follow. According to the article the Dodgers hired more black players who helped the team in a positive way. In 1953 only six out of the sixteen major league teams had black players but in 1959, the Boston Red Sox which were the last team to integrate black players, hired their first player. The author of the article also adds that in 1975 the Cleveland Indians hired the first black manager and in 1997 there were a total of four managers. In the motion picture “42” only the first 18 months of Jackie’s life after being hire for the Dodgers are displayed, but with this article we could see that more important things happened after those events.