*Last week, Jackie Robinson’s wife, Rachel Robinson, 100, and son David Robinson, 70, cut the ribbon to officially open the museum dedicated to the baseball great in Manhattan.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony was held on Tuesday, 15 years after it was planned by the nonprofit organization the Jackie Robinson Foundation. Robinson made history and broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.
“The issues in baseball, the issues that Jackie Robinson challenged in 1947, they’re still with us,” David Robinson said, as reported by NBC News. “The signs of white only have been taken down, but the complexity of equal opportunity still exists.”
The museum reportedly boasts memorabilia from Jackie and highlights his activism in the Black community.
READ MORE: ESPN to Celebrate 75th Anniversary Of Jackie Robinson Breaking Color Barrier
Della Britton, president and CEO of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, noted that one wall display titled “Speak out, stand up,” aims to encourage social justice warriors.
“It’s for groups to come in and take on an issue, whether it’s LGBTQ, whether it’s global warming and then — it’s actually also a sort of a museum strategy to get people to stay involved, which is having a competition,” Britton said of the display.
“We want them to learn about him and his life, because there are a lot of people who don’t know,” Britton added. “But we also want them to be inspired, to continue the work, to go forward and to start to get involved and become involved civically.”
Robinson not only made history in professional baseball but off-field as well. He started his own bank to help Black people who were typically denied mortgage loans from white-owned financial institutions. He also established a housing development corporation that built 200 units throughout New York City, per the NBC report.
“There’s nowhere on the globe where a dream is attached to our name — or our country’s name,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Black Enterprise reports.
“There’s not a German dream. There’s not a French dream. There’s not a Polish dream. Darn it, there’s an American dream. And this man and wife took that dream and forced America and baseball to say, you’re not going to be a dream on a piece of paper, you’re going to be a dream in life. We are greater because of No. 42 and because he had an amazing wife that understood that dream and vision.”
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