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Robinson had the guts to speak out against racial injustice after he retired from baseball. In 1963 he traveled to Birmingham to be with Martin Luther King Jr. after four little black girls were blown to bits in the bombing of a church. "The answer for the Negro is to be found, not in segregation or separation, but by his insistence upon moving into his rightful place, the same place as that of any other American within our society," he argued. He didn't back down from his integrationist stance even when more militant blacks called him an Uncle Tom.
You can hardly imagine contemporary black sports superstars taking an equally brave stand on a divisive moral issue. Most are far too concerned with raking in endorsement dollars to risk any controversy. In 1990 Michael Jordan, who occupies the psychological spot that Robinson pioneered as the dominant black athlete of his time, declined to endorse his fellow black North Carolinian Harvey Gantt over troglodyte racist Jesse Helms in a close contest for the U.S. Senate on the grounds that "Republicans buy shoes too." More recently, Jordan brushed off questions about whether Nike, which pays him $20 million a year in endorsement fees, was violating standards of decency by paying Indonesian workers only 30[cents] a day. His curt comment: "My job with Nike is to endorse the product. Their job is to be up on that." On the baseball field or off it, when Robinson came up to the plate, he took his best shot and knocked it out of the park. The superstar athletes who have taken his place, sadly, often strike out.