Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the United States during the 20th century. On April 15, 1947, he broke the decades-old “color line” in baseball when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers in a game against the Boston Braves. He 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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