Jackie Robinson, Republican

“On Jackie Robinson Day, Let’s Remember When He Was Fired From the New York Post for Being Too Republican,” Matt Welch writes at Reason. As Kate McMillan likes to say at her Small Dead Animals blog, “I felt a great disturbance in the narrative:”

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Today is the 68th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking Major League Baseball’s notorious de facto ban against players having skin tone a shade or two darker than pure Castilian soap. As is the annual tradition, all MLB players today are wearing Robinson’s #42 in homage.

As I (and plenty of others) have long argued, Jackie’s awe-inspiring legend has, if anything, given short shrift to what a colossally competitive, accomplished, and complicated man he really was. He has as good a claim as anyone else at being the best all-around athlete of the 20th century (he was also a national champion long jumper, league champion collegiate basketball scorer, and All-American halfback at UCLA). He was a prolific if underappreciated author. A passionate and righteously angry civil rights activist. A banker/entrepreneur, active Rockefeller Republican, and the first black columnist for a major non-black newspaper, The New York Post. Which fired him for being too pro-Nixon.* [16 years before Rupert Murdoch bought the paper and it was still left-leaning — Ed]

Wait, what?

Read the whole thing.

* Oh sure. Next you’re going to tell me that Nixon campaigned for civil rights for all in 1960, reminding voters that “the whole world is watching us,” going on to earn “more of the black vote — 32% in his 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy — than any GOP nominee of the past half-century,” and that once elected president eight years later, the first black guest to sleep in the White House was during his administration.

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My, what big airbrushes the left has.

Exit quote, from Robinson himself:

No one will ever convince me that the Post acted in an honest manner. I believe the simple truth is that they became somewhat alarmed when they realized that I really meant to write what I believed. There is a peculiar parallel between some of our great Northern “liberals” and some of our outstanding Southern liberals.

Some of the people in both classes share the deep-seated convictions that only their convictions can possibly be the right ones. They both inevitably say the same thing: “We know the Negro and what is best for him.”

Some things never change.

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