Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play Major League baseball outside of a segregated black league, in 1947. He became a living milestone for racial equality and changed the sport of baseball forever. Robinson's remarkable baseball career not only opened doors for other blacks in early baseball history, but also opened many doors for a nation that was struggling to live out the precepts of the 14th Amendment. Born in Cairo, Georgia, in 1919, Jack Roosevelt Robinson was the youngest of five children. He would confront a world of adversity at an early age. Shortly after his birth, Jackie's father, Jerry Robinson, left the family. The remaining Robinsons lived with racial discrimination on the Jim Sasser plantation. Jackie's mother, Mollie, needed to find a better life for her children. A sharecropper family minus the main breadwinner faced destitution. In 1920, she took Edgar, Frank, Mack, Jack, and Willa Mae to live with their uncle, Burton, in Pasadena, California. Uncle Burton's house was too small for the seven of them. Making minimal wages as a single mother, Mollie nevertheless socked away money for a four-bedroom house, with Burton's help. In spite of the restrictive neighborhood that barred blacks from Pepper Street in Pasadena, Mollie persuaded a light-skinned black man to act as if he were buying the house. When the Robinsons moved in, white residents became furious — and threatened to burn them out. However, that did little to scare Mollie out of pursuing her dreams. As an adolescent, Jackie soon found friends, and became a member of the "Pepper Street Gang" — a group of mischievous blacks, Hispanics and Asians. The Reverend Karl Downs, the pastor at Pasadena's Scotts Methodist Church, saw that Jackie was headed for trouble. The Reverend Downs filled the empty, fatherless void in Jackie's life by influencing him ethically and religiously. As a friend and mentor, the minister formed a structure in Jackie, which would eventually see him through high school and into college.
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