Baseball Americana is celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Atlanta GA, Martin Luther King Jr. teaches his son, Marty, how to hold a baseball bat in the backyard of their Atlanta home (that’s daughter Yolanda on the right), November 1964.
A longtime admirer of Jackie Robinson, Dr. King had many connections to the baseball world. In fact, it was King who helped convince Jackie to ignore detractors and take a more vocal role in the civil rights movement (they often appeared together at public events). King once said of Robinson: “[B]ack in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.” (Jackie disagreed with King on some issues, especially the Vietnam War; however, Robinson—who called King “one of the most magnificent leaders the world has today”—devoted an entire chapter of his 1972 autobiography to MLK’s influence.)
