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SAN DIEGO, Calif. – “Have you ever seen these letters from Jackie Robinson?”
Former NBA and NCAA Division 1 college basketball coach Michael Brunker – speaking virtually to DCSA government and contractor employees throughout the nation on Jan. 25 – referred to the telegraphs and letters displayed on PowerPoint slides for his audience to read as they listened to Brunker recite the content to and from Robinson – word for word.
Before reading the passages, Brunker described the historical context and events leading up to the correspondence about civil rights issues, actions and legislation taking place from 1958 to 1972.
Brunker – a business, nonprofit, and youth development leader who was named Mr. San Diego in 2019 – answered questions about the letters’ impact on civil rights, politics and plans to carry out non-violent activism in the struggle to end racial discrimination and ensure equal social opportunities for all.
He also encouraged the DCSA audience to research answers to questions about the Jackie Robinson letters.
In terms of specific questions – what did Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say about leadership and civil rights in his correspondence to the man who broke major league baseball’s color barrier, leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to the World Series six times and victory over the New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series?
What did Robinson – who ended 80 years of segregation in baseball and inspired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – address in his letters to Dr. King and four U.S. presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon?
What did the presidents – who considered Robinson’s support crucial – discuss in their letters to the retired baseball star?
The prose focused on civil rights and politics.
In an October 1957 letter, Eisenhower thanked Robinson for his letter addressing desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. While vice president in the Eisenhower administration, Nixon wrote to Robinson about the senate’s vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, promising to introduce a more “effective bill than the watered-down version.”
Although virtual, it seemed that you could hear a pin drop as Brunker read the excerpts and quotes at the event held in observance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day to remember and honor his legacy.
“In most cases when I made this presentation, nobody had any idea that Jackie Robinson wrote letters to four presidents; that he was involved with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. much of his life; and even after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, Jackie kicked it up a notch to continue the civil rights movement,” said Brunker. “My challenge to all of you after this presentation – what will you do?”
Brunker – who transitioned from coaching to nonprofit management when he founded the San Diego Regional Police Athletic League in 1988 – inspired his audience to google and read the Jackie Robinson letters. In addition, he asked DCSA employees in attendance to read and listen to Dr. King’s remarks, including his speech entitled, ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’, delivered in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., on April 3, 1968 – the day before the civil rights leader was assassinated.
“Dr. King and Jackie Robinson were impact players in the biggest game of all – the game of life with everything they said, thought and did with their heart, head, hands and habits,” said Brunker. “There are so many quotes attributed to Jackie Robinson after he played the game of baseball, but he stood in the public eye to make an impact.”
The keynote speaker – executive director of San Diego’s “inner-city” Jackie Robinson Family YMCA for 22 years – recited several of Robinson’s myriad quotes.
• A life is not important except for the impact it has on other lives.
• There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.
• The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.
“Who was alive and remembers the incidents in 1963 – Medgar Evers and the March on Washington,” Brunker asked his virtual audience. “There’s the Nobel Peace Prize that King won in 1964 and the Chicago open housing movement (to put an end to Chicago slums) in 1965. Robinson was 44 years old; King was 34, and I was 11.”
At one point Brunker read an excerpt from a June 15, 1963 letter that Robinson wrote to President Kennedy after the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers – prior to attending Evers’ funeral with Dr. King in Jackson, Miss.
“I therefore implore you in the spirit of your recent magnificent appeal for justice to utilize every federal facility to protect a man sorely needed for this era,” Robinson wrote. “For to millions, Martin King symbolizes the bearing forward of the torch for freedom so savagely wrested from the dying grip of Medgar Evers. America needs and the world cannot afford to lose him to the whims of murderous maniacs.”
The “recent magnificent appeal for justice” Robinson referred to in his letter was Kennedy’s landmark speech delivered to the nation over radio and television a few days earlier that spoke of inequality in moral terms, setting in motion civil rights legislation that passed the year after his assassination.
King called the speech “one of the most eloquent, profound, and unequivocal pleas for justice and freedom of all men ever made by any president.”
In 1967, Robinson wrote a letter to another U.S. president.
“Again Sir, let me thank you for your domestic stand on civil rights,” he wrote to Johnson. “We need an even firmer stand as the issues become more personal and the gap between black and white Americans get wider.”
“Civil rights was on stage - it was huge,” Brunker recounted while explaining the cover of Time Magazine the DCSA attendees saw displayed on PowerPoint. “I lived through a riot in Detroit in 1967 at the age of 15. There you see Detroit on the front page of Time Magazine in 1967. I was a witness to all of this. I saw the National Guard marching down the avenue with the tanks and city blocks in flames – 49 people died.”
Three weeks later, King addressed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. Brunker encouraged his audience to look up and read the entire speech, entitled “The Crisis in America’s Cities”. In it, King delineated the five causes of what sparked the violent urban riots in the “long hot summer” of 1967: white backlash; black unemployment; racial discrimination; the war in Vietnam; and features peculiar to big cities – crime, family problems and intensive migration.
“Here’s another challenge for the chat,” said Brunker to those who were interacting throughout the event over a chat function. “How many of these five (causes of 1967 unrest and violence) do you feel still exist today in the year 2022?
As Brunker concluded his presentation, he paid tribute to the wives of King and Robinson.
“It takes two,” said Brunker. “In the case of Jackie, Rachel Isum Robinson will be 100 on July 19. She attended (and graduated from) the University of California at Los Angeles and New York University. Today Rachel heads up the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which provides scholarships to African American students – full scholarships and mentors.”
He spoke about King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006. Coretta – a Gandhi Peace Prize winner – graduated from Antioch College and the New England Conservatory of Music.
“Both of these women were so instrumental in the walk that Martin and Jackie took throughout their lifetime in terms of raising their families and supporting their work,” said Brunker. “Coretta and Rachel stayed in it (the civil rights movement) after their husbands were called to be with the Lord. Remember, Jackie was called to be with the Lord in 1972 and Martin was called to be with the Lord in 1968.”
| Date Taken: | 02.01.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 02.01.2022 09:13 |
| Story ID: | 413767 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 385 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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