[Draft Post: November 1, 2014
An Unfinished Book Review]
Every April 15, Major League Baseball celebrates Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Players on all thirty teams wear Robinson's #42 (players once chose to wear it, now it's compulsory) and there are tributes at every ballpark to the man who broke – at long last – baseball's 20th Century colour line.
MLB manages (with the complicity of the mainstream sports media) to both pat itself on the back for its inclusiveness while simultaneously ignoring how it worked overtime for decades and decades to keep blacks out of organized ball.