Though he lived only briefly in Cairo and Grady County following his birth, the community’s celebration of one of the great heroes of American sports — and society — is absolutely worthwhile.

Jackie Robinson’s birthday falls on this week (he would have turned 103). He died in 1972, taken far too early at the relatively young age of 53. What he did in his short time was transformative in a number of ways.

Simply recounting his outstanding athletic achievements is noteworthy enough. He lettered in four sports at UCLA and was a NCAA champion in the long jump. Even though baseball was perhaps his weakest sport in college, he quickly became one of the Major Leagues’ most dominating offensive forces once he took the field.

He was the National League Most Valuable Player in 1949 with a league-leading .342 batting average and a league-best 37 steals, in addition to 124 runs batted in. He played 10 years, amassing a career batting average of .311. Robinson made six All-Star teams and he was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1947.

But it was the first appearance in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in 1947, when he was already 28 years old, an advanced age for a rookie, that changed not just baseball but professional sports and modern society On April 15,1947, Jackie Robinson took the field at Ebbets Field to play first base. He did not record a hit but he drew a walk and scored a run.

And made history. He was the first African-American player to play for a big league team. Though baseball may trail football and basketball in popularity now, at that time, it was the national pastime. The appearance of a Black player in the previously all-white sport was earth-shaking.

But Robinson’s welcome to the big leagues wasn’t easy by any stretch, even in his own clubhouse. But over time, and as other teams and players displayed hostility toward Robinson, his teammates accepted him.

Robinson’s breaking of the color line in baseball pre-dated that of the National Basketball Association’s by three years. Still, not every baseball team quickly followed the Dodgers — it took until 1959 before every team had at least one Black player in uniform. It was just about a year ago that one of the players most associated with the Braves franchise in its long history passed away — Hank Aaron, who also did not let slurs and hostilities from his time in the minors and into major league stardom deter him from becoming one of baseball’s all-time great players, ambassadors and people.

As a permanent tribute to Robinson, who wore number 42 for the Dodgers, no major league player can wear his number again. 

Jackie Robinson didn’t just endure being the first Black player in major league baseball. He thrived and succeeded and he was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, five years after his retirement.

But more than the steals, and the hits and the number of double plays he turned was something that no statistic can measure — his character and his humanity. We hope his contributions to sports and mankind live for centuries more.