Documentary Explores Life of Civil Rights Pioneer Jackie Robinson

28 Feb, 2016 By: Stephanie Prange

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Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. said of Jackie Robinson, “He was a sit-inner before sit-ins. He was a freedom rider before freedom rides.”

Indeed, Robinson not only broke the color barrier as the first African-American to play Major League Baseball in the modern era, but he continued to use his celebrity to fight for civil rights until his death at the early age of 53.

That extraordinary life is the subject of the documentary Jackie Robinson, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon and available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download April 12 (order date March 15) from PBS Distribution. It airs on PBS April 11 and 12, timed to coincide with Jackie Robinson Day April 15.

“His story transcends baseball, and it transcends sports, and I think it probably transcends American history,” said filmmaker Ken Burns. “I think it’s something for the ages, his example, his heroic struggle against forces that didn’t want him to succeed.”

After having completed his 1994 series Baseball, which covered Robinson’s groundbreaking sports career, Burns was encouraged to pursue a standalone documentary on him by the famous player’s widow, Rachel, now 93. She, Burns and his co-directors (including Burns’s daughter Sarah) felt that other films about Robinson had not fully explored his story before and after baseball.

“They talk about him breaking the color line, but they don’t talk about the color line, and we wanted to talk about what that meant, and to also, perhaps most importantly, follow him out of baseball into his life after that,” Burns said. “He was a pioneer at the beginning of the modern civil rights era.”

Burns noted that, when Robinson emerged as a civil rights figure, Martin Luther King Jr. was just a junior in college, President Harry Truman hadn’t yet integrated the military, and Rosa Parks was a decade away from taking her seat on the bus. In fact, the documentary explores an incident for which Robinson was court martialed in the U.S. Army and acquitted for taking the wrong seat on a bus, well before Parks’ famous act.

The documentary starts with Robinson’s birth in Jim Crow Georgia in 1919 and follows him through his marriage to Rachel, his baseball career and his involvement in politics.

As he was breaking baseball’s color barrier as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson was spit on, endured epithets and sublimated his own strong personality for the sake of the cause.

“Jackie was already fierce and competitive and outspoken, and he was asked, for the experiment to be a success, that for three years he turn the other cheek, one in the minor leagues and then two in the major leagues,” Burns said. “He was beloved. He was voted one of the most popular people in America, ahead of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who had just won World War II, ahead of Frank Sinatra and Eleanor Roosevelt and behind only Bing Crosby. Go figure. But then in ’49, when he no longer has to turn the other cheek, he returns to his true nature, which is fierce and competitive and argumentative and pushy, and for that he is labeled uppity.”

Like all of us, Robinson wasn’t perfect. He is criticized in the documentary for testifying to Congress against fellow civil rights activist Paul Robeson. In one clip in the film, he blames himself for the death of his son. But what surprised Burns in learning more about Robinson was that it didn’t make him any less of a hero.

“He’s been a hero of mine all my life,” Burns said. “Realizing that we were going to do an in depth portrait, I assumed that the complications might in some way undermine his heroism, but all the complications, the deep dive, made him all the more impressive.”

Unveiling the complex man behind the hero was the documentary’s aim, Burns said.

“We just didn’t want to paint him in the broad brush strokes of the perfect hero,” he said. “In fact, heroism, the Greeks have been telling us for thousands of years, has nothing to do with perfection. It has to do with a person’s very obvious strengths and their perhaps equal, but not so obvious, weaknesses. It is the negotiation between strengths and weaknesses that defines heroism, and that’s what makes Jackie such an extraordinary hero in that negotiation, the better side, the better side of his nature, won.”

In addition to Rachel and the Robinsons’ surviving children Sharon and David, filmmakers interviewed scholars; former Dodgers teammates Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca; Harry Belafonte; Tom Brokaw; and Carly Simon. Jamie Foxx is the voice of Jackie Robinson, reading excerpts from his newspaper columns, personal letters and autobiographies.

The interview opportunity that most surprised Burns was with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

“We were very, very grateful and fortunate that they took the time to do that,” Burns said, noting the parallels between the first couple and the Robinsons.

“You think of the door that Jackie and Rachel were going through in 1947, and it’s somewhat like the door that the president and the first lady went through in 2008,” Burns said, pointing out the essential support that Rachel and Michelle offered as their husbands made history amid opposition.

Burns said Jackie Robinson would no doubt have been delighted at Obama’s achievement, as is his wife Rachel. Still, “There’s a lot of work to be done, and were he alive today Jackie would be pointing out every day that there’s a lot of work to be done,” Burns said.

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