Promises to Keep: How Jackie Robinson Changed America

Sharon’s favorite photograph is of Jackie stealing home during the 1955 World Series. After reaching a base, a runner can steal the next base by running as the pitcher throws the ball (but before the ball reaches the batter) and making it to the next base safely. If the runner is attempting to steal second or third base, the catcher must receive the ball and throw it to the base; the runner is often successful in this scenario. If the runner is attempting to steal home, the catcher must only tag the runner; stealing home is difficult, so Jackie’s successful steal of home highlights his speed and skill.

Because Jackie was a baseball player, Sharon’s biography features many baseball terms. She emphasizes Jackie’s batting average. This statistic measures how often a player gets a hit—that is, hits a ball and reaches base safely. Sharon writes, “In 1949, he led the league in batting with a .342 average and received the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award” (48). This average meant that Jackie got a hit 34.2% of the time. In baseball, any batter who gets a hit 30% of the time is a good player, so Jackie’s average reveals his excellence.

The American Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865, and it was between the Union (states that wanted to outlaw slavery) and the Confederacy (states that left the Union and wanted to form their own country in which slavery would remain legal). Abraham Lincoln was president of the Union, and Jefferson Davis led the Confederacy. Sharon mentions Lincoln and his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which freed enslaved people in the Confederacy. However, Sharon doesn’t explain that Lincoln’s edict had no authority in the Confederacy. Moreover, she omits that Lincoln’s main goal wasn’t to end slavery but to keep all US states together.

Sharon explains Jim Crow laws as a reaction to the Civil War. To maintain the racial inequality that existed before the war, Southern states passed overtly racist laws that separated Black and white people. The bigoted laws restricted Black people to specific neighborhoods, made it difficult for them to vote, and subjected them to harassment and brutality. Sharon devotes a paragraph to the name’s meaning. The term alludes to Thomas Rice, a white entertainer from Maryland who performed a racist caricature known as Jim Crow. The demeaning show came to represent the demeaning laws.

The “Negro Leagues” is an umbrella term that represents the various Black leagues that paid Black baseball players, including the Negro National League, which included the Kansas City Monarchs—the team that Jackie played for in 1945. As Sharon notes, the Negro Leagues couldn’t pay their players as much as MLB players (who didn’t make large sums then either), and the schedules were chaotic since Nego League teams traveled large distances but had unreliable transportation, housing, and facilities.

Sharon presents MLB and the Negro Leagues as categorically separate, but white and Black players did interact. Only the Ball Was White (Oxford UP, 1970), Robert Peterson’s history of the Negro Leagues, describes how Black teams played white teams in exhibition games. Moreover, to make money, white teams rented their stadiums to Black teams, though they didn’t let them use their locker rooms.

While Jackie was the first Black player to play baseball under the codified MLB arrangement, Peterson claims that there were Black players who played professional baseball before Jackie. In the 1870s, a white team in Pennsylvania paid Bud Fowler to play for them. In the 1880s, Fleet Walker arguably became the second paid Black player when the Toledo Stockings became a professional team.

Sharon uses Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) to show the legal acceptance of segregation in the US. She notes that the US Supreme Court upheld a state’s right to pass racial segregation laws, ruling that such laws did not violate the US Constitution. Howard Plessy thought otherwise. Identifying as 7/8th white and 1/8th Black, Plessy thought that he could sit in the white area of a train. The police arrested him, and Plessy challenged the arrest in the US District Court, where Judge John H. Ferguson ruled that the law was constitutional. The Supreme Court agreed, and so did MLB before Jackie Robinson.

The colonies that became the US, and country itself, maintained a system of slavery that lasted for almost three centuries. At the start of Chapter 1, Sharon provides a concise timeline for slavery, marking its beginning and end. She refers to slavery as an extremely “inhumane practice” but doesn’t detail the brutality or identify individuals who continued the violent, lethal system. She doesn’t mention Jefferson Davis or other leaders, like Thomas Jefferson. The third president (1801-1809), Jefferson was responsible for adding “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as an “unalienable right” to The Declaration of Independence (National Archives), yet he had around 600 enslaved people over the course of his life.