WICHITA
Rachel Robinson couldn’t give her blessing at first. She told the sculptor: “I’m sorry. I’m not seeing him.” At that point, it had been nearly 50 years since her husband, Jackie Robinson, died and more than 70 since he broke baseball’s color barrier. But an eternal love can see through time. The statue wasn’t right.
Rachel relayed an idea through her daughter, Sharon.
“I’d like to see more of a smile,” she requested.
In the sculptor’s revised work, Jackie flashed a warm smile. He looked relaxed. Posing with a bat over his right shoulder and his left hand on his hip, he looked stately but accessible. Robinson, a seminal figure whose grace and tenacity expedited the racial integration of a shambling nation, stood with purpose.
“That’s my Jack,” his widow said.
In 2021, the statue was unveiled in Wichita, in front of the home complex of local youth baseball association League 42. In no time, it became a local treasure.
Three years later, on a wet and gray January day, the city awoke to a disturbing sight. The statue had vanished overnight, severed at the ankles, leaving only two bronze cleats atop home plate.
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Jack Roosevelt Robinson didn’t believe in his own myth. Too many sports legends are perfectly crafted to make athletics seem like utopia. They’re not, but the caretaking of this fantasy enables a kind of indifference that poisons the pursuit of greater progress. Nostalgia further complicates matters, leading some to trust that the bad stuff was handled long ago and any current problems are exaggerated because society has advanced. But better can be better.
Somehow, that notion is divisive now. A zero-sum mentality creates controversy out of inclusion, corrupting the memory of Robinson and every other sporting pioneer who changed the world.
The progress we’ve made is neither adequate nor permanent. Robinson had an acute understanding of the struggle. He was the son of sharecroppers, born on the James Madison Sasser plantation near Cairo, Ga. His grandparents were enslaved. Yet 28 years into his life, he ended six decades of racial segregation in baseball on April 15, 1947.
Today, we sanitize the moment and reference it mostly as compelling evidence of diminishing racism. It is seen as a conclusion. To Robinson, it was merely one inning in the longest game ever.
“Baseball wasn’t the end goal of Jackie Robinson’s work,” said David Robinson, the youngest of his three children. “It wasn’t what he was trying to achieve. That’s a misunderstanding, and sometimes that’s projected too much. Baseball was part of his struggle to create opportunity for America.
“When he got his opportunity, there was no complacency. He showed what we could do, showed America what it could be. He did not want success to blind us because he knew that, literally, our survival is not guaranteed.”
How we remember Robinson says much about how we view America. It symbolizes our cruelty and our glory, our pain and our resilience. It’s the most important tale in our sports history, a breakthrough of incalculable moral, cultural and financial proportions.
Over the years, we have taken good care of the Robinson dream and ignored much of the reality. With his transformative vision, Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey chose Robinson as a “noble experiment” to integrate baseball because he recognized his combination of talent and temperament. Robinson could overcome the racist taunts and vicious acts. He had learned to suppress his emotions.
But he was not some docile Black athlete grateful just to be tolerated. He was strong. On the field, he kept his cool. Off the field, he became a face and a voice of radical change. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. captured Robinson well, praising him as a “pilgrim” for the civil rights movement and saying of his lonely, courageous, dignified journey: “He was a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the freedom rides.”
Every April, Jackie Robinson Day is celebrated throughout baseball, the signature event of the first month of a new season. MLB retired his number in 1997, and on his special day, every major leaguer wears No. 42. But Robinson wouldn’t care to be another symbol of the embellished good of sport. He was a determined humanitarian, and much of the equality he fought for has yet to be realized.
We make him into our injustice elixir. One annual dose, and everything becomes fair and righteous. It is akin to politicians who trot out King’s tamest quotes on MLK Day, taking a short break from furtively disenfranchising voters. They use the concepts of equality and unity as a generic salve rather than a mission to break systemic patterns that fortify marginalization.
Robinson spent the final act of his life rejecting such deception. Before he died at 53 after a heart attack, he wrote his 1972 autobiography, “I Never Had It Made.” It’s more about his fight for justice than baseball. In it, he went back a quarter-century and, with fresh eyes, retold the story of playing in his first World Series. His words are unsparingly painful and prescient for the modern protesting athlete.
He wrote: “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.”
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When he got his opportunity, there was no complacency. He showed what we could do, showed America what it could be. He did not want success to blind us because he knew that, literally, our survival is not guaranteed.
— David Robinson, the second of Jackie Robinson’s three children
David was just 4 years old when his father retired from baseball. He has learned plenty about his career, as well as his four-sport college exploits at UCLA. But he remembers the activist, the man who never declared victory after integrating baseball. He remembers family dinners with prominent Black leaders and heartbreaking conversations after incidents of racial violence. He remembers domestic marches and international travel. Jackie and Rachel Robinson gave their children a global view, and all those experiences intersected at one theme: participation. Don’t disengage and watch from the bleachers. Live to serve.
“Involvement was mandatory,” David said during a recent phone call from his home in Tanzania. “It has been a wonderful lifetime of commitment.”
In East Africa, David and his family are coffee farmers. He chose the profession as part of an effort to help integrate African resources into the American and global economy. In 1989, he started clearing a forest area in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania to establish a base and join a cooperative of third-generation Tanzanian coffee farmers.
Once the path was clear, the farm needed a name. They decided to call it Sweet Unity.
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John Parsons, the artist behind Wichita’s Robinson statue, shared a lifelong friendship with League 42 founder Bob Lutz. “I can’t mention all the things we did together,” Lutz said, laughing. “But we did a lot.”
Lutz saw his buddy’s artistic talent at a young age. But Parsons became a firefighter. He thought it was his calling. Then in 1979, he was forced to pivot after falling from a tree and breaking his back. Parsons found success in taxidermy, and he also opened a meat-processing plant.
Still, he was an artist at heart. He closed the taxidermy business in 2012 to pursue bronze sculpting.
“I can’t even relate to the talent it took to do that,” said Lutz, a longtime journalist and radio show host. “It’s almost like you couldn’t deter John, no matter what you threw at him.”
Parsons died two years ago. When the statue was stolen, Lutz felt several layers of pain.
He hatched the idea to start a baseball league for inner-city and minority youths in Wichita soon after Parsons turned his full attention to art. During an organizing meeting, someone suggested League 42 as the name. Suddenly, the project was real and full of purpose. If they were going to invoke the number of Robinson, Lutz figured, they had a responsibility to adopt his values, educate the young players about him and show class in everything under the League 42 banner.
“I’m an old man, and this is what I’ve settled on,” said Lutz, 69. “It’s a difficult world. It’s a difficult country. I don’t know where we’re headed. What we’re modeling makes it easy for kids to think things are stacked against them if you don’t have people to say, ‘It’s okay to have dreams.’ I want to be part of helping kids feel they have a fighter’s chance. There has to be a guardian angel in Jackie’s name.”
In 2014, the league debuted with 200 players across 16 teams. Over a decade, the number has tripled to more than 600 kids and 46 teams. It has an after-school enrichment program called Bright Lights, a Passion Project speaker series in which guests discuss what drives them, a Bats and Badges initiative to develop relationships with law enforcement and a Full Count financial literacy curriculum.
But the statue was the symbol that captured all those ambitions in a single glance. Lutz convinced a skeptical board to spend $41,500 on its creation. He trusted his old friend to build it right. For all his skill, Parsons had never done a likeness of anyone, let alone one of the most recognizable athletes in history. But he was determined.
“Here’s the thing about John: He loved challenges,” Lutz said. “He kept moving forward.”
As he gazed upon the vacant space at McAdams Park on Jan. 25, Lutz thought his eyes were fooling him. Jaclyn Evans, an administrative assistant, left their office and crossed busy Ohio Avenue for a closer look. She tried to be optimistic. Maybe a car accidentally hit it. Maybe they just couldn’t see that Jackie had fallen over. But then she arrived at the damaged display.
“It was just pure disgust,” Evans said. “I kind of stood there in complete silence for a while.”
John’s statue was gone. Rachel’s Jack was gone.
After taking some cellphone pictures, Evans walked back across the busy street to give Lutz the official news.
“It felt like it took forever to get there,” she said. “But I’m sure I was speed-walking.”
For the next five days, the city waited nervously for Wichita police to figure out what happened. The nation sat vigil, too. Was it a hate crime? Why wasn’t a statue meant to inspire Little Leaguers sacred?
The police found the statue Jan. 30, seven miles from its League 42 home, broken into pieces and burning in a trash can at Garvey Park. It took another two weeks before police arrested a 45-year-old man, Ricky Alderete, for his role in the theft. On May 9, he pleaded guilty to multiple charges. He will be sentenced in July. Authorities deemed it wasn’t a hate crime because Alderete claimed the goal was to sell it as scrap metal.
His explanation did little to soothe concerns of more sinister motives. Lutz calls it a “racial” incident. It’s impossible to avoid remembering a blatant act of violence that occurred three years ago in Cairo, Robinson’s birthplace. The town was devastated to learn that a historical marker recognizing Robinson had been destroyed by shotgun fire. The words “baseball’s color barrier” and “Negro American” were prominent targets.
Generosity tried to combat the evil. Major League Baseball gave $40,000 to the Georgia Historical Society to help fund a new marker in Cairo. The sport answered the call again for League 42, with all 30 teams combining to pledge $100,000 to erect a new statue. In addition, a GoFundMe campaign raised nearly $195,000 to help League 42.
Before the public response gave him hope, Lutz wanted to quit.
“I couldn’t do this anymore,” he said. “It was gutting. This was the worst thing I can imagine. I was just like, ‘I want out.’ ”
Then a thought entered his mind that struck him with the same jolt as when he heard the name League 42. He asked himself, “What would Jackie Robinson do?”
He knew he couldn’t quit.
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Barbara Cohen, a high school English teacher, wrote the first draft of her second book during spring break in 1973. Six months earlier, after Robinson died, she sent a letter to her brother, Louis Kauder, offering her condolences. She remembered how much he loved Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers and how that attachment allowed him to escape his childhood loneliness.
Kauder, a Washington lawyer, wrote back quickly, and the siblings corresponded several more times, sparking memories and emotions that the sister had to explore. She decided to write her first novel, borrowing from their adolescence to honor her brother, baseball, the need for human connection and, of course, Robinson.
She gave it a simple title of gratitude: “Thank You, Jackie Robinson.”
The 1974 novel is a touching 128-page piece of children’s literature, illustrated by Richard Cuffari, that focuses on the relationship between a fatherless White boy and a Black cook working at the family’s hotel. The book is set in the 1950s, and the boy and the man bond over following Robinson’s exploits. Cohen based it on the friendship she and her brother shared with a man named Wesley Hoagland, who was the chef at the Somerville Inn in New Jersey.
Their mother ran the inn, and they lived there, growing up on a busy highway that made it difficult for other kids to visit. It was often a childhood of isolation — physically because of the highway and socially because of antisemitism — but they had Wesley. And Louis had the Dodgers.
“The book really just poured out of her,” said Sara Cohen, one of her three daughters.
“She loved this book. It was her favorite,” said Becky Cohen, another daughter.
“In writing it, my mother realized she was working through the death of her father,” said Leah Cohen Chatinover, the oldest daughter.
It’s not a heavy book, but it is a deep one that makes you ponder isolation, discrimination, family, friendship and death. Written from the boy’s point of view, it ponders life through the clear and untainted eyes of a child.
The story meant so much to Barbara Cohen that she made her girls vow to read the last four pages at her funeral. After she succumbed to cancer in 1992, the daughters enlisted the help of a family friend, Abe Bunis, who had a big, theatrical voice. Once, when their parents threw a 400th birthday party for William Shakespeare, Bunis recited Hamlet’s soliloquy in Yiddish.
When he shared Cohen’s words, which capture death and the meaning of life so well, it moved everyone who attended the funeral. They still feel the impact of that moment today.
In 1978, it was a story deemed worthy of a televised after-school special.
In 2023, it showed up on a list of books that Duval County in Florida chose not to have shelved in the school district. The legacy of Robinson was under attack, again. This was no burned statue, no marker sprayed with shot. This was not even an official book ban. But right-wing grievance politics have banished stories to shield children from difficult ideas, promoting the false belief that certain truths and diverse perspectives will cause young people to hate the country. The most important story in American sports history somehow isn’t whitewashed enough for some. If Robinson-inspired art merits scrutiny, is there no end to this fear and fragility?
The daughters recalled how much Cohen despised censorship. The manipulation of this precious story — hers and Jackie’s — would have enraged their mother.
“What comes to mind is how completely accepted it was in 1974 and banned in 2023,” Becky said. “That makes me really sad. I wish I could say there was a different kind of divisiveness in the 1970s, or in the 1950s when this book is based, but it just feels bizarre. It made us all feel something has gone terribly backwards.”
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Rachel Robinson is 101 years old. She has lived most of her life as the widow of an icon, protecting his legend and inspiring family and friends to impact others in their own way.
“She never talked to you like you were a child,” said Sonya Pankey, the oldest Robinson grandchild. “My grandmother talked about five-year plans when I was 10.”
Rachel established the Jackie Robinson Foundation in 1973 and served as its first chair before handing the job over to former National League president Len Coleman, who grew up idolizing her husband. Coleman served in that role for 18 years, forging a strong relationship with Rachel. With her warmth and conviction, she has been one of the greatest influences on Coleman’s life. He has watched her stay true to Jackie and to herself, using humor often to lighten the mood after passionate discussions.
“If she gets mad at you, she doesn’t stay mad very long,” said Coleman, 75, who came up with the idea to retire No. 42 from the sport. “It’s not easy being the chairman of her foundation. Her vision is so clear. But after going a few rounds, she’d end the disagreement with a sarcastic, ‘Well, you’re the chairman.’ ”
Rachel meant it, too. She isn’t overbearing, just intentional. She trusts others to find their way. She has endured many hardships, including losing Jackie and their first child, Jackie Jr., at young ages. But she lives neither a bitter life nor a guarded one.
When she was 17, Pankey took a summer-long vacation with her grandmother. They traveled to Italy, England and Africa. It remains a cherished memory, right down to Rachel setting the expectations for the trip. There was one cardinal rule: “We’re going to laugh when something goes wrong.”
When the coronavirus vaccine first became available, Coleman went with Rachel to get their first shots in South Florida. Afterward, they stopped for an oceanside lunch.
“Bring me a chardonnay,” Rachel said to the waiter.
“Wait, we don’t know how bad the side effects are going to be,” Coleman told her. “Maybe we better wait until tomorrow.”
The next morning, she called and greeted him with some friendly sarcasm.
“Mr. Coleman, Rachel Robinson here,” she said. “I’m just calling to make sure you’re all right.”
That attitude connects the indefatigable Robinson family to two resourceful White men from Kansas, to a life-affirming Jewish author from New Jersey, to a generous friend who lives a dream helping preserve his idol’s legacy.
Statues can be defiled. Books can be removed. But the Robinson spirit endures.
The struggle is Jackie’s story. We are challenged to understand it, not erase it.
About this series
Columns by Jerry Brewer.
Photography by Jahi Chikwendiu. Photo editing and research by Toni L. Sandys. Video editing by Joshua Carroll. Video graphics by Sarah Hashemi. Illustrations by Victoria Cassinova. Design and development by Brianna Schroer. Audio production by Bishop Sand.
Editing by Dan Steinberg and Akilah Johnson. Copy editing by Brad Windsor. Additional editing by Brandon Carter, Nicki DeMarco, Courtney Kan, Jason Murray, Matthew Rennie and Virginia Singarayar. Additional illustration reference images by Bettmann Archive and Associated Press.
