FILE – Baseball Player Jackie Robinson with the Montreal Royals club at Sanford, Fla., March 4, 1946. (AP Photo/Bill Chaplis, File)
Bill Chaplis/Associated Press
Oops, sorry, Jackie Robinson.
For several hours Wednesday, you disappeared from history. You were instantly downgraded from national hero to a blank page. Hey, a lot of us would like a fresh start, but that’s pretty extreme.
On the U.S. Department of Defense website, a tribute page to Robinson was taken down. The missing page told of Robinson’s exploits in college, in the military, and as the man who broke through Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947.
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That’s a lot to wipe out, but the DOD scrubbing crew has maniacal energy. Those scrubbers — and the people who order the scrubbing, starting at the very top — make up for with crazed gusto what they lack in intelligence, morality, honesty, integrity, respect for history, stuff like that.
It’s all part of the new governmental policy: Drop bombs first, ask questions later.
Also temporarily wiped off the DOD website, by people who would tidy up a baby’s nursery with a bulldozer, were pages saluting the World War II heroics of the Navajo code talkers and the Tuskegee Airmen. Gone.
Hours later, the pages were restored, with an explanation that is creepier than the original action. The explanation, not an apology, was that these people are still being saluted, but their color has nothing to do with their heroics.
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I’m glad my children are grown. It would be hard to teach them why Jackie Robinson is a national hero without mentioning the subject of race. Kids, Jackie Robinson’s the most important and courageous figure in American sports history because he could really lay down a sacrifice bunt. Such a lost art!
The cleansing of the DOD website has been very thorough. Removed was a photo of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Everyone knows our warplanes were not homosexual.
As for Robinson, it’s right to salute him, the current U.S. President and his DOD leader preach, as long as you don’t get into all the woke crap about how the man fought for racial equality all his life.
But since the key elements of Robinson’s military service and sports career might already be wiped from official government existence, let’s take a moment to see what we were missing.
Robinson was drafted in 1944, during the war. A UCLA graduate and four-sport letterman, he applied for officer training, and was denied. In the strictly-segregated (until 1948) military, there were few openings for Black officers. However, famed heavyweight champ Joe Louis was stationed at the same base and quietly used his influence to get Robinson reconsidered.
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Robinson trained and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. As a morale officer, Robinson fought for equal seating for Black soldiers at the base PX, and was told by a commanding officer, “I just want you to know that I don’t want my wife sitting close to any colored guy.”
Robinson was transferred to a Texas base, Ft. Hood, where outhouses were marked White, Colored and Mexican. One afternoon, after visiting the Black officers’ club, Robinson hopped on a base shuttle bus. He spotted the wife of one of his fellow Black officers in the middle of the bus and sat next to her, chatting. The woman was light-skinned. The bus driver, a white civilian, ordered Robinson to move to the back of the bus.
Robinson angrily refused, and objected to being called the N word.
“I told the driver to stop f—-g with me,” Robinson would explain years later. Military police took Robinson off the bus and into custody, handcuffed and shackled. When a PFC at the scene referred to Robinson as an N-word, he snarled, “If you call me a (N-word) again, I’ll break you in two.”
While the MPs were taking Robinson’s formal statement, the stenographer, a civilian woman, interrupted with questions of her own, such as, “Don’t you know you have no right sitting up there in the white part of the bus?” When Robinson objected to being grilled by a stenographer, the officer conducting the questioning told Robinson he was “uppity and out to make trouble.”
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The court martial, for multiple violations of the Articles of War, lasted four and a half hours. Robinson was acquitted when a key witness was found to be lying about his use of the N-word.
But of course that court martial business had nothing to do with race, so let’s scrub that off the historical records, shall we?
And surely race and racism had nothing to do with the big national to-do three years later when Robinson broke into the big leagues with the Dodgers. His number 42 has been retired forever across MLB because… because he intimidated pitchers with his daring baserunning, maybe?
We know the current President admires Robinson, because he said so recently at a Black History Month press conference, and the current President never lies.
“Jackie Robinson, what a great athlete that was,” the current President said. Apparently, one of Robinson’s pronouns is “that.”
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Yes, what a great athlete that was! And all the Jackie Robinson pioneer business, that’s all woke hokum. If Robinson simmered over racial taunts from opposing dugouts, he must have been the first snowflake.
As a result of the outcry, Robinson is back up on the DOD website, in some form. But the big overall historical purge and cultural cleansing continues. One recent Presidential order opens the door for Federal government contractors to have segregated restrooms, waiting rooms and drinking fountains. Someone is determined to Make America Go Ass-backwards.
Here’s a number I’d like to see retired: 47.
Reach Scott Ostler: [email protected]; X: @scottostler
