Where center stage began

I posted some of this back on Jackie Robinson’s birthday on Jan. 31, because it somehow seemed very appropriate then. Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith had just become the first two African-American head coaches in the NFL to make it to the Super Bowl. It was also the eve of Black History Month.

But I wanted to dust it off for today, too, because Sunday was the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier. All of major league baseball celebrated that historic date – April 15, 1947 – at games played on Sunday.

In the summer of 1993, I drove down to Cairo and, with the help of a friend, found the old shack where he was born a few miles outside of town.

Here is the column I wrote about my adventure on June 27, 1993. My descriptions of that experience are mentioned in the first chapter of the book, “Great Time Coming: The Life of Jackie Robins, from Baseball to Birmingham” by David Falkner.

ON THE ROAD TO CALVARY -- Highway 111 turns to the south in Cairo. It winds past rich farmland toward Calvary, a town about as deep as you can go without stepping over the state line into Florida.

The directions called for us to cross four bridges, then turn left on a county road. We found the dirt road to the old Jim Sasser plantation about a mile ahead, and we drove slowly through a south Georgia thunderstorm.

I searched the cornfield on the left side of the dirt road. My friend's eyes combed the thicket on the right.

"Stop! There it is!" he shouted. I hit the brakes, and it seemed neither of us could open the car doors fast enough. The remains of the chimney were about 20 feet from the road.

It was all that was left of the house where Jackie Robinson was born.

"I'm getting chill bumps," I told my friend. I suspected his heart was also racing. We found a cornerstone under some wet leaves and a few crumbled bricks on the ground. A crepe myrtle branched out near the chimney.

I tried to picture what the house must have looked like in 1919, the year Robinson was born. I tried to imagine I was now standing on the same ground where he took his first steps as a child.

His father had been a sharecropper. His grandfather had been a slave. I stood near the fireplace that kept everyone warm that winter, when his mother gave birth to him during the Spanish Flu epidemic.

History was not made here. It was born. No other athlete in the 20th century had such a profound social impact. Had it not been for Jackie Robinson, there might not have been a Hank Aaron or a Willie Mays or a Reggie Jackson.

I'm not quite sure why I drove nearly 180 miles in search of Robinson's birthplace. I knew there wasn't much left of it. He only lived in the house until he was 16 months old. After his father deserted the family, his mother put her five children on a train and moved them to California.

She hoped to free them from the shackles of a plantation system that still existed in the deep South nearly a half century after slavery ended.

I guess it was curiosity that led me to the ruins of Robinson's homestead. I knew that many people in Georgia, and even some in Cairo, were unaware he was born here.

A Pennsylvania couple once sent the local chamber of commerce a Louisville Slugger bat Robinson had autographed. But that is pale compared to what you will find in Royston, the home of Ty Cobb. Signs everywhere let you know the Georgia Peach was born in the northeast Georgia town. There also is a small museum.

On the outskirts of Cairo, where the nickname of the local high school team is the Syrup Makers, there is only a chimney hidden by trees on a lonely dirt road. I found it kind of sad Robinson came and went before people here could claim him as one of their own.

When my friend and I stopped at the public library in Cairo to research Robinson's roots, we were told several unsuccessful attempts had been made to locate people who might have known the Robinson family.

So, we drove nine miles in the rain to find the unmarked birthplace of a legend.
I thought a lot about Robinson while driving back to Macon. I thought about how he left that dirt road behind and blazed a trail for millions of other black athletes.

He could have been inducted into the Hall of Fame based on courage alone. But he also proved he was a superb player in his 10-year career with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robinson, who died in 1972, will best be remembered for his ability to endure unspeakable abuse without fighting back when he broke baseball's color barrier in 1947. Even though Joe Louis was the heavyweight champion at the time, the presence of a black athlete at the top of the boxing world did not carry the same symbol of social change Robinson delivered as a black in the baseball arena.

A target of hatred and a victim of ignorance, Robinson must have grown weary of turning the other cheek. The most important lesson for all of us is that he never stopped turning it.

When I got home, I found the words of Roger Kahn, who wrote "The Boys of Summer."

"Like a few, very few athletes, Robinson did not merely play at center stage," Kahn wrote. "He was center stage; and where he walked, center stage moved with him."

But only the memory, along with a few scattered bricks, has been preserved from the place where center stage began.