Jackie Robinson was the first african american baseball player in major league baseball and one of his best supporters was his mother, Mallie Robinson. Jackie and Mallie had strong personalities that others around them saw. They also had a sense of pride about their family and loved each other, showing it in any way they could. Being african american, they were offended and insulted because of their skin color and their personalities shown through on how they reacted to it.
Jackie and his mother both had strong personalities that they showed in different ways. “According to Jackie’s sister Willa Mae,’We always worried about him because he was so quick to anger if somebody said something that was insulting. I don’t think Jack ever looked
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Jackie was being hit left and right with racism and became a bit of a rebel. “He began getting into trouble with a spirited group of boys called the Pepper Street Gang… Two black men in the community saw what was happening and approached Jackie. One of them was Carl Anderson..Years later Robinson remembered his first meeting with Anderson: … he took me aside and talked to me about the gang… He made me see that if I continued with the gang it would hurt my mother as well as myself… I was too ashamed to tell Carl how right he was, but what he said got to me,”(11-12). When Jackie saw that they wasn’t going to do any good for him or his mother he turned away from all of that. Mallie had also gotten harassed by people when the Robinson family moved to Pepper Street. “But she was not prepared for the conditions blacks faced in Pasadena, where neighborhoods were either all white or all black… The granddaughter of a slave, she keep her composure when she felt insulted or threatened-especially because of the color of her skin- but she never allowed herself to be intimidated. She always made it clear that she was afraid of no one,”(10). Mallie Robinson was a strong woman, even when it was painfully obvious that she and her family weren’t wanted, she wouldn’t show if it hurt her, instead she faced it head on and