In February for Black History Month, USA TODAY Sports is publishing the series ’29 Black Stories in 29 Days.’ We examine the issues, challenges and opportunities Black athletes and sports officials continue to face after the nation’s reckoning on race following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. This is the fourth installment of the series.
You may have heard about the destruction of a bronze Jackie Robinson statue in Kansas. The statue honored the man who broke baseball’s color barrier and one day, it simply went missing, cut from the top of the shoes.
The removal of the statue would generate national headlines and immense outrage. Part of the reason why was because of the affront to what Robinson represented. There aren’t many respected symbols of overcoming and persistence more recognizable than Robinson. There’s also the fact that League 42, named after Robinson’s Dodgers number, paid about $50,000 for it, and the statue was placed in a park, where hundreds of kids play in a youth baseball league.
There’s an ugliness and brazenness to what happened. The news would get even worse. The Wichita fire department found the statue burned to ashes not long after it was stolen. It was totally destroyed.
What happened? Was it a prank that went too far? Was it an act of racism? We don’t know yet.
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“If it turns out it was racially motivated, then obviously that is a deeper societal issue and it certainly would make this a much more concerning theft,” said Bob Lutz, the executive director of the league nonprofit that commissioned the sculpture. “We’ll wait and see what this turns out to be.”
But this is what we do know. The destruction of the statue led to a rallying cry that was united and loud. Everyone came together to decry the destruction of the statue.
Lutz said MLB and its individual clubs would help replace the statue. There’s also a GoFundMe that’s raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In a country divided there was unity over the statue of Robinson.
Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: ‘You can steal the statue but you can’t steal the spirit of what the statue represents! Disheartening end to the stolen Jackie Robinson statue has generated a Robinson-like resolve from the public for good to overcome evil!’
This story is brutal and ugly but in many ways it embodies Robinson perfectly. There was a resoluteness to Robinson and his legend, and this symbol of that legend, has the same unwavering effect.
There’s something else that was stunning to see. The support for League 42 was resounding and appeared to come from people all across the country.
There are some things, a few things, which can unite us all and this was one of them. That’s the good part to come from this ugly moment.