Great post Mike. Thank you.

This was wonderful, Mike. thank you. I, too, have been growing so weary and my hope is almost gone. The hate has always been there ... but it's been stoked and cultivated and is encapsulating too many ...

Thank you, Mike. 

Baseball did indeed help break the color barrier.  I type this wearing my Jackie Robinson T-Shirt and glancing at my framed 8 X 10 plaque of Jackie Robinson on the wall of my "sports den."  But Baseball has no connection at all with Marxism and anti-American philosophy.  Jackie Robinson wouldn't be advocating burning cities to the ground, many of them minority owned.  Jackie Robinson wouldn't be demanding to defund police departments.  I don't know what Larry Doby's thoughts on all this would be.  But I know Jackie Robinson would not be a supporter of BLM, Antifa or any of this.  Jackie was a lifelong Republican.  Anybody that knows anything about Jackie Robinson would know this.  

Respect. Some things are bigger than sports. 

Thank you Mike for your perspective once again.

Baseball did indeed help break the color barrier.  I type this wearing my Jackie Robinson T-Shirt and glancing at my framed 8 X 10 plaque of Jackie Robinson on the wall of my "sports den."  But Baseball has no connection at all with Marxism and anti-American philosophy.  Jackie Robinson wouldn't be advocating burning cities to the ground, many of them minority owned.  Jackie Robinson wouldn't be demanding to defund police departments.  I don't know what Larry Doby's thoughts on all this would be.  But I know Jackie Robinson would not be a supporter of BLM, Antifa or any of this.  Jackie was a lifelong Republican.  Anybody that knows anything about Jackie Robinson would know this.  

I can’t speak to whether or not Robinson considered himself a lifelong Republican or not, but according to this article, he supported Humphrey over Nixon in 1968.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080302110739/http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070603&content_id=2003372&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

I think it’s pretty hard to know what another person’s politics would be, nearly 50 years after his death, particularly someone as complex and thoughtful as him. Both parties have changed in that time, and one thing that seems consistent in his life was that his political preferences evolved according to the current context.

I’ve not read the book edited by the author of this column, but I also found this column an interesting read.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-jackie-robinson-100-politics-mlk-nixon-0131-20190130-story.html

Good stuff Indiana.  Thanks for researching and sharing.  

I have to make a general comment - Jackie Robinson spoke up and suffered a Court Marshall.  He refused to take a back seat on a military bus, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/spring/robinson.html

We can never know what he would do today, but I think we can see his resolve and I suspect that this article about the friendship between Martin Luther King and Jackie might indicate that he would step forward again.  https://www.mlb.com/cut4/mlk-jr-and-jackie-robinson-were-good-friends-c162102154#:~:text=Robinson%20and%20King%20became%20close,been%20traded%20to%20the%20Giants.

As to lifetime republicans/democrats - the parties continue to switch and the resemblance between Lincoln and TR with today's republicans is in name only.  The same as the resemblance between democrats and the politics of Buchanan and Wilson.  Times change.  Parties change.  The Republicans became the pre-lincoln democrats when the dixie-crats walked out of the 1948 convention when Humphrey declared there was no room for racists in the democratic party.  

Do not mistake names for current reality - labels change. 

Mike, you're barking up the wrong tree.  The split in the democratic party in 1948 was between supports of President Truman's military integration and those who rejected minorities in the armed forces.  The Dixicrat party that resulted wwwstood for Jim Crow laws.  The Dixicrats added a plank to their platform legalizing racial segregation.  They were DEMOCRATS...not Republicans.  The 1948 Republican National Committee Platform stated:  Constant and effective insistence on the personal dignity of the individual and his right to complete justice without regard to race, creed or color is a fundamental American principle.  We aim always to unite and to strengthen, never to weaken or divide."  As the Dixicrats of 1948 worked for codified segregation, Republicans said ""We favor the abolition of the poll tax as a requisite to voting.  We are opposed to the idea of racial segregation in the armed services of the United States."  In 1964, 78% of congressional  Democrats opposed passage of the Civil Rights Act  (including Senator Robert Byrd of West Va. aa former KKK "Exalted Cyclops").  Of the "nay votes in the house, 74% came from Democrats.  82% of Republican Senators voted "Yea" for the Civil Rights Act.  Only ONE of the 21 Democrats who voted against the in the Senate became a Republican.  So much for the myth of the big switch.  The better comparison is how far the democrats have moved since John F. Kennedy.  Again, I say that jackie Robinson would have had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter.  He would probably have had feelings similar to Jason Whitlock (outkick.com) or Herschall Walker.  

Mike, you're barking up the wrong tree.  The split in the democratic party in 1948 was between supports of President Truman's military integration and those who rejected minorities in the armed forces.  The Dixicrat party that resulted wwwstood for Jim Crow laws.  The Dixicrats added a plank to their platform legalizing racial segregation.  They were DEMOCRATS...not Republicans.  The 1948 Republican National Committee Platform stated:  Constant and effective insistence on the personal dignity of the individual and his right to complete justice without regard to race, creed or color is a fundamental American principle.  We aim always to unite and to strengthen, never to weaken or divide."  As the Dixicrats of 1948 worked for codified segregation, Republicans said ""We favor the abolition of the poll tax as a requisite to voting.  We are opposed to the idea of racial segregation in the armed services of the United States."  In 1964, 78% of congressional  Democrats opposed passage of the Civil Rights Act  (including Senator Robert Byrd of West Va. aa former KKK "Exalted Cyclops").  Of the "nay votes in the house, 74% came from Democrats.  82% of Republican Senators voted "Yea" for the Civil Rights Act.  Only ONE of the 21 Democrats who voted against the in the Senate became a Republican.  So much for the myth of the big switch.  The better comparison is how far the democrats have moved since John F. Kennedy.  Again, I say that jackie Robinson would have had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter.  He would probably have had feelings similar to Jason Whitlock (outkick.com) or Herschall Walker.  

I do not want to get into a long political discourse here, but perhaps you would like to read this article from the History Channel  - https://www.history.com/news/how-the-party-of-lincoln-won-over-the-once-democratic-south

This paragraph from the text captures the beginning of the change in 1948.  "These defectors, known as the “Dixiecrats,” held a separate convention in Birmingham, Alabama. There, they nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, a staunch opposer of civil rights, to run for president on their “States’ Rights” ticket. Although Thurmond lost the election to Truman, he still won over a million popular votes."