Jackie Robinson's Original 1945 Montreal Royals and Original 1947
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OLLECTORS CAFE PRESENTS Jackie Robinson’s Original 1945 Montreal Royals and Original 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers Contracts Founding Documents of the Civil Rights Movement OLLECTORS CAFE The Global, Lifestyle, Collectibles Brand is Coming! The Collectibles and Memorabilia industry is a $250+ billion dollar per year global market that is substantially fragmented with no one entity owning more than one half of one percent of market share. Further, there is NO MEETING PLACE for collectors to gather with other like minded collectors socially, and display their passion for their own collections. Lastly, there is no place to purchase all categories of collectibles, under one trusted umbrella, in a safe, AUTHENTICITY INSURED, environment. This is all about to change with the launch of the Collectors Cafe Company, where “PRE-APPRAISED, “PRE-AUTHENTICATED” and “PRE-INSURED” collectibles will be coming soon. 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Press Contact: Gail Holt • Email: [email protected] 646-833-7066 • www.collectorscafe.com 646-833-7066 • www.collectorscafe.com Collectors Cafe • 9 East 8th Street • Suite 118 • New York, NY 10003 A Civil Rights Pioneer One of the most important events in the fight for Civil Rights was not a protest march or sit in, not a public act of defiance or a soaring speech. Instead, it was a private event that took place in a Brooklyn office on April 11, 1947, when Jack Roosevelt Robinson signed his contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers, thereby integrating Major League Baseball. This was a year before President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981 desegregated the Army (1948), nearly a decade before the landmark school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and almost two decades before the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the signing of the Civil Rights Act (1964). The great talk-show host Larry King once introduced the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as “the founder of the Civil Rights movement,” but the Reverend refused to be called that. “I am not the founder of the Civil Rights movement,” he said. “The founder of the Civil Rights movement is Jackie Robinson.” Decades later, when Robinson became the first African-American player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Dr. King called Robinson “a pilgrim who walked the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom. He was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.” 2 646-833-7066 • www.collectorscafe.com Collectors Cafe • 9 East 8th Street • Suite 118 • New York, NY 10003 Documents of Freedom Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration proclaimed the Enlightenment ideals “That all men are created equal,” and that legitimate governments must support the natural rights of the people to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In 1776, the Declaration succeeded in breaking the old colonial order, but it took another 11 years for the Constitution to establish a workable system of government to which certain enforceable guarantees of rights were added by the first ten Amendments. Despite the perfect rhetoric of freedom, African Americans were living in circumstances as unfree, unjust, and unequal as those anywhere in the world. The assertion that the Robinson contracts are Documents of Freedom is not hard to justify. Ira Glasser, for many years Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, explained: “Seven years before the Supreme Court’s [Brown v. Board of Education] decision and nearly nine before Rosa Parks sat down on that Alabama bus, ordinary people all over this country, including small children black and white, participated in and learned from Jackie Robinson’s struggle in a way that was direct, powerful, and enduring. we learned from Robinson himself, from his extraordinary performance under what certainly was, and remains, the most sustained pressure any athlete has ever endured.” Jackie Robinson’s contracts with the Montreal Royals and the Brooklyn Dodgers are not the foundational documents of baseball. Instead, they are more like the Emancipation Proclamation—a chance to return to the founding ideals that had never been realized. Rights and privileg- es that had been fatally restricted by color lines were, with the signing of a paper, finally opened up. It is no surprise that the meritocracy of competitive sports helped pave the way for American acceptance of a greater civil rights movement. Robinson’s contracts pushed the efforts forward. His play forced fans to come to terms with the fact that a black man could compete with, and be accepted by, the greatest white ball players. As he performed heroic feats of sport, many who witnessed the taunts and abuse quickly began to question claims of “racial superiority” made by those who were jeering and threatening Robinson. Ira Glasser’s words again crystallize Robinson’s profound accomplishments: “It is quite possible that for many of us, these were the first images of black humanity we as white children had ever been allowed to see. By the time . Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, those nine-year-olds were twenty-five. Standing there in that huge crowd, we felt we had borne wit- ness to this before. In fact, the March on Washington took place on August 28, 1963, eighteen years to the day of that first meeting between Rickey and Robinson.” Special Consultant to Collectors Cafe For Documents of Freedom Seth Kaller is a leading rare documents expert known for acquiring museum-quality pieces for institutions and building legacy collections for philanthropists. He has handled unique documents relating to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, Washington’s Thanksgiving Proc- lamation, and Lincoln’s Thirteenth Amendment and Emancipation Proclamation. Seth Kaller, Inc. • www.sethkaller.com 3 Collectors Cafe • 9 East 8th Street • Suite 118 • New York, NY 10003 Jackie Robinson’s Biography Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia, in 1919, the youngest of five children. His mother, Mallie, was abandoned by her husband and moved her family to Pasadena, California, where she raised her children by herself. Jack’s older brothers, Mack (who became an Olympic silver medalist in 1936) and Frank, encouraged Jackie to pursue sports. At John Muir High School, Jackie lettered in four varsity sports— football, basketball, baseball, and track—and also played on the tennis team, winning the junior boys singles championship in the 1936 Pacific Coast Negro Tennis Tournament. After high school, Robinson attended Pasadena Junior College and began what would become a lifelong commitment to civil rights advocacy. Upon graduating in 1939, Robinson attended UCLA. He was one of four African Americans on the football team, making the Bruins the most integrated college team in the country at the time. He won the long jump competition in the 1940 NCAA track and field championships, played basketball and baseball—considered his “worst” sport statistically—and became UCLA’s first student-athlete to letter in four sports. While at UCLA, he met his future wife, Rachel Isum. Robinson left UCLA just short of graduation in 1941 to take a job as athletic director for the National Youth Administration, a New Deal project. He then traveled to Hawaii to play semi- pro football for the integrated Honolulu Bears. He returned to California in December 1941, just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was drafted and served in a segregated unit at Fort Riley, Kansas, where he and several other qualified black candidates applied to Officer Candidate School.