"Mr. Rickey, if I could just rub this color off me, I'd be as good as any man."
Those tearful words were spoken by Charles Thomas, the lone African-American player on coach Branch Rickey's 1903 Ohio Wesleyan college baseball team. Thomas had been denied lodging on a trip to South Bend, Ind.
Thomas' words both haunted and inspired Rickey, who would become the driving force behind breaking organized baseball's color barrier.
"It was a lingering sin in his mind," said Branch Barrett Rickey, the 72-year-old grandson of baseball's great innovator.
In August 1945, Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, took the first step toward correcting that sin when he agreed to sign Jackie Robinson, a Negro League All-Star, to a minor league contract. On April 15, 1947, Robinson became the first African-American player in the modern history of baseball.
Nearly 70 years later, Robinson's debut in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform remains a defining moment not only in baseball history but in the nation's civil rights movement.
Rickey was on a mission to end the "gentlemen's agreement" that kept black players out of baseball. "This is a plot, this is a plan," his grandson said. "He recognized who the enemy was. The enemy was us. It was our own biases."
