Democracy
Democracy is not a state. It is an act.
John Lewis, just before he died on July 17, 2020
When Jackie Robinson resisted Major League baseball’s no black player rule in 1947, he joined millions of his compatriots who had acted throughout American history to repair America’s broken equality promise.
Baseball’s whites only sign was one breach among too many. Democracy begins not with Congress’s or Prime Minister’s but with the people and how we should think about them. And not just about people as voters but people and the games they play. Or can’t play.
This is how I make sense of Jackie Robinson’s impact on America.
The Promise
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among the are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, America’s Declaration of Independence, 1776
America began with a promise about equality. Differences that mattered in Europe – class, gender, race, religion – were to give way to the only thing that was to count in public life: the dignity of each human being.
The Breach
I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary…The blessings in which you, this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me…This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
Frederick Douglass What to the slave, is the Fourth of July, 1852
In the beginning, America broke its promise by excluding most people from public life. But these exclusions ruptured the promise. So they had to be built upon ideas that served as rationales: those without property were not responsible enough to rule; women were best suited for the household; Catholics were too beholden to the Pope, and blacks were inferior to whites.
Bad ideas succored self-interest and power.
Resistance
The most significant sports story of the century. Baseball and Jackie Robinson have taken up the cudgel of democracy.
A sports reporter about Jackie Robinson’s first professional baseball game, 1946, from Kostya Kennedy, True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson, 2022
America’s equality promise instructed resistance wherever inequality was found. African-Americans resisted America’s home-grown tyranny. Sometimes with white allies, slaves, former slaves, and the ancestors of slaves: fought, organized, wrote, preached, marched, boycotted, protested, rallied, lawyered, prayed, freedom-rode, and died. And migrated, away from terror, toward better lives. From 1890 to 1960, six million black Americans migrated from the American Jim Crow south to Detroit, Chicago, and Pasadena, California. In 1920, one year after Jackie Robinson was born, his mother moved the family from Cairo, Georgia to Pasadena.
Two decades later Robinson strode into America’s consciousness on April 18, 1946 when he played his first professional game as a member of the Montreal Royals, a minor league club affiliated with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Robinson powered, finessed and thought his way to four runs for his victorious team. After homering in his second-at-bat, he bunted safely twice, stole two bases and intimidated two pitchers into balks. 51, 873 fans doubled Newark, New Jersey’s Roosevelt Stadium 25,000 seat limit and saw what one newspaper called The Robinson Experiment.
In 1949 and in his second major league season, Robinson lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to a National League pennant. He topped the league in stolen bases and batting average and was named baseball’s Most Valuable Player. Baseball, mid-20th century America’s national pastime, was a public laboratory of meritocracy. Robinson’s productivity assaulted the lie of black inferiority that America’s whites’ only barriers were built upon.
Democracy as an act of imagination
Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people.
E.E. Schattschneider, Two hundred million Americans in search of government, 1969
America’s Declaration of Independence’s equality promise is built upon an act of imagination about people. It asks us to ignore differences that have always mattered. In favor of what Schattschneider calls the preciousness of each human being.
I imagine that you are like me. You want to be happy. You want to be free. You want to realize your potential.
I imagine all the Jackie Robinson’s who could have played in the major league. Or the Ketanji Brown Jackson’s who could have been a Supreme Court Justice. Or the Barack Obama’s who could have been President of the United States.
The heroes of American democracy are not our presidents or generals but our resisters.
America started with a promise about equality. It immediately broke that promise to most of its inhabitants. That breach had to be repaired. Much of the repair work was done by the excluded many. In 1946, Jackie Robinson joined that illustrious group of resisters.
Resisters know what it is like to be invisible. Thus, they help us see not only them but each other.
