ABSTRACT
Many if not most Americans know Major League Baseball universally retired barrier breaker Jackie Robinson’s number 42, a seemingly inevitable recognition of the player’s heroic leading role in integrating the professional sport. Much less well known is that Robinson wrote a weekly column for the Pittsburgh Courier during his groundbreaking first two seasons with the Dodgers. The columns served as part of a public relations campaign by longtime Courier sports editor Wendell Smith, designed to ensure Robinson’s success with the Dodgers and to leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that the twentieth century’s first black Major League Baseball player belonged in Brooklyn, that he had “made the grade,” as black writers often put it.
The “Jackie Robinson Says” column became the first of many journalistic endeavors for Robinson, in newspapers and magazines serving a variety of audiences. This chapter will document Robinson’s many journalistic efforts, which historical scholarship has largely ignored. His work in newspapers and in magazine publishing will be placed into historical context and be read and understood as part of a larger tradition of athletes writing (and ghostwriting) firsthand accounts of the action on the field to which fans want so desperately to get ever closer.
