Jackie Robinson

This is a research paper SAMPLE on Jackie Robinson. The paper will tell the story of segregation in the Major League Baseball. Custom research papers on baseball topics are Paper Masters specialty.

Although there are a number of other moments featuring themes of futility, Baseball ultimately shows the triumph and the inspiration that many Americans would claim to be part of their collective experience. Actor Ossie Davis, for example, relates a fans eye view of Jackie Robinson's career as the first modern era African American to play major league baseball. Davis' pride in Robinson's achievements underscores a larger issue that had nothing to do with baseball, but everything to do with post-World War II American identity: specifically, racial equality, and its ability to improve society.

Among the annals of the social history of the United States, few figures stand out, with regards to courageous action and landmark achievement, as did Jackie Robinson.Certainly it is difficult to name an individual in Robinson's professional athletics field whose life was able to affect such a dramatic impact on the American social landscape.As eminent scholar Cornel West writes in his foreword the updated edition of Robinson's own autobiography,

Three fundamental events between March and June of 1947 in America changed the course of world historythe Truman Doctrinethe Marshall Plan[and] Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play professional, major league baseball.

The inclusion of Robinson's achievements among the most significant events of the twentieth century is no mere hyperbole. Inarguably, Robinson was the most influential American athlete of the twentieth century and though his life, actions, and example, changed the face of modern American society. Robinson's humble beginnings certainly didn't foreshadow a man marked for greatness.

• Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson was born on January 31, 1919 near Cairo, Georgia.
• Robinson was the grandson of a slave and, born in the deep south little more than 60 years after the abolitions of slavery, Robinson certainly felt the oppression of segregation and de facto bondage throughout his early life.
• His father was a share-cropper, typically struggling to provide for his wife and six children on roughly twelve dollars a month.

Eventually, the grind of providing for such a large family in such a taxing way got to the elder Robinson, and he left for good, Jackie never knowing what became of him.

August Wilson's play, Fences, is an All-American tale of broken dreams and regret. Wilson's protagonist, Troy Maxson, is a former Negro League baseball standout who was born too early and was too old to ever have a shot at the Majors once Jackie Robinson broke the league's color barrier. As a result, his life has turned into one long, torturous "what if". Set in Pittsburgh in 1957, Fences is much more than one man's tale. Troy Maxson represents a generation of African-American men who were born on the cusp of opportunity, just a little too early to reap the full rewards of their forefathers' struggles.