Quote
Originally posted by: forkushV
"There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps, it was, but then again, perhaps, the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made." - Jackie Robinson
Now, this one makes me sad, but I believe I see it more from Jackie Robinson's eyes than in Colin Kaepernick's situation. Robinson withstood outright, overt racial bigotry of the time, standing rather alone in regard to a black player being accepted into white-dominated major league sports. Branch Rickey also withstood a lot of flack himself. It had to be a lonely time for Robinson and his kin, nowhere comparable to now. I'm sad that over time ("twenty years later") Robinson came to (was 'taught' to) feel that he "never had it made", whatever that meant to him. Was it well known that he refused to stand and sing the anthem, or salute the flag? That flies in the face of people black and white who admire(d) him and his athletic prowess and the whole story of his getting into the game, leading a charge so to speak.
Like the song said "You have to be taught, to hate and fear. You have to be carefully taught."
