Culture
January 1, 1
Gerald Early
Perhaps it would have been more of a surprise, in retrospect, had Tommie Smith not done what he did at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games, considering the times. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, an event that triggered rioting and rebellion in major cities across the United States and for many, black and white, signaled the end of the best hope of the civil rights movement. In June, Senator Robert Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, was murdered in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. He was running because President Lyndon Johnson had stunningly chosen not I guess we really live for good writeups, but not at the sacrifice of our principles. —Jackie Robinson to Caroline Wallerstein, January 3, 1956 It is clear that by the time Jackie Robinson’s final autobiography, I Never Had It Made, appeared, in 1972, the year he died, he saw himself as more than a star athlete. Over half the book is devoted to his career after baseball, when he became something of a black man of affairs or, in the tradition of black propagandists like Hubert H. Harrison and W. E. B. DuBois, a professional race man. Robinson might