MLK and Jackie Robinson were friends.
On January 15th, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have celebrated his 96th birthday. King injected himself into the civil rights movement in 1955 but was never involved in sports. At that time, not every Major League Baseball team had Negro players. There was an unofficial quota of four Negro players on each National Football League team. No Negro could be a quarterback, a center or a middle linebacker because it was thought, Negroes lacked intelligence. George Preston Marshall would not hire Negro players for his NFL Washington team until 1962. When King got involved with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, Negro football players could not enroll at a good number of colleges in the south. In 1947, the Cotton Bowl in Dallas wanted Penn State to play SMU in the January 1st, 1948 game but they did not want Wally Triplett to play. Penn State players said we are Penn State. Triplett played. The NFL ended an informal color barrier in 1946 as Los Angeles Coliseum officials told Cleveland Rams owner Daniel Reeves, he could move his team and sign a stadium lease there if he hired Negro players.
The Harlem Globetrotters basketball team was bigger than the National Basketball Association but in the 1950s while the team could entertain on the court in southern cities, the players could not stay at certain hotels or eat at certain restaurants. American Football League players boycotted the league’s planned 1965 New Orleans All Star game because of Jim Crow. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did have a close relationship with Jackie Robinson who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1946 playing minor league baseball in Montréal. King said, “Jackie Robinson made my success possible. Without him, I would never have been able to do what I did.” King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4th, 1968.
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jackie Robinson
