Ken Burns on Jackie Robinson
BY RYAN BORT
3/27/16 AT 10:48 AM
... he represents the beginning of the modern age of the civil rights movement ... “a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom riders.” When he <made his major league debut> ... Dr. King is still a junior at Morehouse College. Harry Truman hasn’t integrated the military yet. Brown v. Board of Education hasn’t happened. There are not organized sit-ins at lunch counters, although as a teenager Jackie had done that. Rosa Parks is a decade away from refusing to give up a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus — but Jackie did that in 1944 ...
... there's Jackie's Republicanism, supporting and campaigning for Richard Nixon then pulling off when Richard Nixon doesn’t make the call to get King out <of prison in 1960>, and throwing his support to Kennedy ...
... I get a lot of hate mail. "You n*gger lover." Even among friends and scholars, they say, "Why do you focus on race? Why is it always race?" I say, "Look, race is the story of America. It’s our original sin" ... Even when Obama was elected, people said, "Now will you shut up?" I said, "No, no, no, just watch." I held up the cover of The Onion. It said, "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." Watch what will come out of the woodwork ...
... It’s like, "C’mon, Jackie. C’mon, he’s from Kentucky." They’re playing "Dixie" and running up the confederate flag. This represents the worst in us. You don’t want to throw it away. You want to tell the story ... But let's be really honest about what it means: that you live in a country that represents to the world that all men are created equal, but — oops! — the guy who wrote that sentence owned more than 100 human beings, and four score and five years later we started killing each other in such great numbers that all the other wars that we have been involved in do not equal the deaths in that war, to perpetuate an institution that says all men are not created equal ...
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/04/08/ken-burns-jackie-robinson-race-civil-rights-440921.html