Jackie Robinson broke the decades-old “color line” in Major League Baseball on April 15, 1947, when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in a game against the Boston Braves. The last time an African American had played for the major leagues in the United States was in the 1880s. Over the following years Robinson endured racial slurs and death threats on and off the field. “Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself,” he later said. “I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me.”
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