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Almost right away, cities in Florida and North Carolina said they would let them play. In Georgia it was a different story, especially in Atlanta.

Atlanta was the home base of the Ku Klux Klan, then and now one of the most active groups in the world who oppose rights for people who are not white. Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge had campaigned for his office by calling for racial segregation.

The stage was set for an important fight about race in baseball and America.

2.

A Hard Early Life

Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, in a small town in Georgia about 200 miles south of Atlanta. He had three older brothers and a sister. Like many African Americans of his time, he was the grandson of slaves. Even though the American Civil War ended slavery more than fifty years before, when Jackie was a baby his family lived in what he called a kind of slavery. His father, who could not read or write, worked on a plantation for about three dollars a week. That equals seventy-five dollars a week by today’s standards. Not long after Jackie was born his father left. Jackie never saw him again.