Jackie Robinson (left) and Dodgers President Branch Rickey in 1950. Photo from the Chicago Tribune files.
by Andrew Zajac
Much has been made of the fact that tonight's scheduled acceptance speech by Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama falls on the same date as Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
Our Baltimore Sun colleague David Steele also reminds readers that August 28 also was the date, in 1945, that Branch Rickey met Jackie Robinson and told him he had been picked to break Major League Baseball's color barrier.
As Steele points out in a column this morning , "a straight line can be drawn from Robinson opening the door to the national pastime of a rigidly segregated America to King voicing the ideals of a fully integrated society on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the son of a black father running for the highest office in the land."
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