KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The first words of Jackie Robinson's biography, "I Never Had It Made," deftly frame the circumstances of his birth in Cairo, Ga.
"My grandfather was born into slavery, and although my mother and my father, Mallie and Jerry Robinson, lived during an era when physical slavery had been abolished, they also lived in a newer, more sophisticated kind of slavery than the kind Mr. Lincoln struck down."
That included his father having to confront a plantation owner for the opportunity to become a sharecropper, work that author Michael Long described as keeping the Robinsons "virtually enslaved" in a time and place where Jim Crow laws were prevalent and the Ku Klux Klan "terrorized African Americans with impunity."
