Jackie Robinson

More than twenty years after his eighteen-and-a-half-hour documentary series Baseball (1994), and six years since his four-hour Baseball sequel, The Tenth Inning (2010), the master storyteller Ken Burns, joined by his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon, returned to baseball with Jackie Robinson (2016). As most Americans know, Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play major league baseball in the twentieth century when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on opening day in 1947. In the process Robinson courageously broke the racist “color barrier” that had existed since the late nineteenth century. “It is a tale of courage, heroics, and triumph,” writes the late historian Jules Tygiel in Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (1983, p. 206). “Epic in its proportions, the Robinson legend has persevered—and will continue to do so—because the myth, which rarely deviated from reality, fits our national perceptions of fair play and social progress” (ibid.). Tygiel remains correct, and the desire for racial justice clearly animates this documentary

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