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Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born near Cairo, Georgia, in Grady County, in the early years of the twentieth century. It was not a promising time for an African American to come into this world, especially into Southern Georgia. With the Civil War only a mere fifty years in the past, many former slaves and former slave owners were still living with, and holding onto, their vivid memories of the way of life that had been in their youth. Blacks and whites alike held fast to their resentments and grievances; all around them were ever-present reminders of the great loss of life and property during the war and the following Reconstruction, reminders that kept the wounds open for generations. This was the situation into which Jackie Robinson was born, and he was inevitably influenced and shaped by the forces around him and the history that had come before him.
The victory by the Union forces over the rebel Confederates preserved the United States and freed the slaves, but those events in and of themselves did not instantly produce cultural or political equality—or even basic rights and security for the liberated blacks. Other than the absence of chains, African Americans continued to live very much like enslaved people. This standard of living was enforced by the formal laws of courts, the informal rules of the white majority, and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan via intimidation at best and lynching at worst.
That was the heritage that surrounded Robinson at the time of his birth. His was a life story that had been set in motion centuries before. At the time in world history when the first white settlers arrived on the East Coast of North America early in the seventeenth century, slavery was, and always had been, a common, wide-spread practice imposed on any group or race that fell under the control of a more powerful group or ethnicity. Tragically, America and Americans would be no exception. On August 20, 1619, a Dutch ship anchored off the Colony of Virginia to offer twenty individuals, recently captured on the African West Coast, to the colonists in exchange for provisions. Once those enchained individuals stepped ashore, the stage was set for national conflict and grief because a free people cannot rationally coexist with an enslaved one.
It took only forty-four years before the growing number of slaves in the colonies staged their first rebellion, which occurred in Gloucester County, Virginia, in 1663. Over the next 100 years, slaves rebelled more than 250 times. None of the uprisings, however, were successful, and the participants were executed or whipped and returned to bondage. The larger the number of blacks in the country, the more the whites feared losing control of their chattel. By 1775, the slave population had risen to 600,000—or 20 percent—of the colonial population of 3,000,000. Even though the economies of all the colonies owed much to the institution of slavery, indentured blacks composed about 40 percent of the total population of the Southern colonies where agriculture was particularly dependent on their labor. This was the backdrop of the Robinson family. (Historical Perspective 1.)
The half-century between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century was filled with racial realignment on the parts of all Americans. It was a tumultuous time, a violent time, a dangerous time. It was expectations set against realities, the powerful challenged by the impoverished, traditions rocked by change. These shifts left Americans of all races reeling.
It was against such a backdrop that Jackie Robinson entered this world in the bloodiest months of racial violence to date in the United States. In 1919, thousands of black soldiers returned from combat in World War I, expecting better treatment as a reward for their service and sacrifices. Instead they found an ungrateful white population harboring the same old pre-war biases against them. Many of those mustering out of the service joined the half million or so other blacks who had already migrated from the South to the industrial Northeast and Midwest to fill jobs left open by whites inducted into the army. When white enthusiasm to put blacks back in their pre-war “place” collided with the African American demand for equality, the result was wide scale violence.
Still, on a day-to-day basis, Americans of all races found ways to coexist and work side-by-side. The post-World War I years were prosperous for both white and black workers. Jobs were plentiful and wages, even for blacks, were substantial. Then came the greatest equalizer of all—economic disaster in the form of the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting Great Depression. Suddenly everyone, white and black, faced high unemployment, plunging incomes, and monetary deflation that would not totally recover until World War II.