I Never Had It Made Jackie Robinson Essay

The book that I read for quarter 2 was called I Never Had It Made Jackie Robinson an autobiography as told by Alfred Duckett. This is a novel that I chose to read for my multicultural as it talks about the life of Jackie Robinson growing up and living in a mostly white world. This story takes place back in the 1940s 1950s a time period where people of Jackie’s race were not treated well. He was born in Cairo, Georgia, yet since he and his wife were constantly moving due to housing conditions being inadequate since they had a growing family. The primary conflict of this book is person vs. society because it is all about how Jackie was treated by the society being the first African American to play in Major League Baseball. It took quite some

He was offered the chance of a lifetime to break the color barrier in baseball, and he did just that. His actions helped change the way people thought of other races. He integrated baseball for all everyone, and if he hadn’t it could have been another twenty years until it happened. Jackie is best described as clever, brave, and quick tempered because he was very clever in the way that he played baseball holding many tricks up his sleeve. He is brave because he took the risk to be the first African American in baseball knowing that it would come with a lot of insults and pain. Also, he was known for his quick temper because in games if there was something that he didn’t agree he immediately jumped off the bench and yelled at the umpire. This is also key to why he got thrown out of several games. Jackie is a dynamic character because he changes the way he thinks about his race, as before he played baseball he knew that African Americans were not treated very well and didn’t think that much about it. However, once he finished his baseball career he became more aware of the scenario and began to fight for African American rights. The next character is a man by the name of Branch Rickey he was a wonderful man who saw the world a little bit differently than most did at the time. He was the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers who was responsible for helping Jackie break the color

Jackie gets through his rough childhood and attended UCLA, and played basketball, baseball, football, and track becoming the universities first four letter man. He also met his future wife Rachel here. After his second year of college he decided that it wasn’t worth graduating, knowing that a scholarship wouldn’t help an African American back during that time. As a result, WWII had just begun and Jackie got recruited to take part in the fight before returning to start his pro baseball career. Once he returned from WWII, he was really into baseball so he decided to try and play. However, back then the baseball leagues were segregated between blacks and whites. So he went to a tryout for the Kansas City Monarchs, and eventually signed a contract with them. Quickly after that though he went to a visit to meet Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Branch wanted to bring an African American into the Major Leagues. At the time this was thought of as insane since the baseball leagues were segregated. However, Rickey didn’t care and he knew that Jackie was the right person for the test. When the two met Rickey discussed with him that he had to have enough guts to take what would be thrown at him and not fight back. After Jackie agreed it was official