42 is a movie that highlights the amazing career of the first Black professional baseball player, Jackie Robinson. This movie focuses on the injustices Robinson went through being the first Black player in an all-white league. This entire semester we have talked about injustice and this movie does a great job of showing how black people were treated back then.
This movie starts off with Jackie Robinson in an all-black baseball league. He is substantially better than all of the other players, but there were separate leagues because black baseball players could not play with white baseball players. A man by the name of Branch Rickey is bold enough to break down this barrier and send a scout to one of Robinson’s games to ask if he would want to move up to the big leagues. Branch told Robinson that he has to be strong because he will get a lot of haste and backlash for being the first black player in an all-white league. Robinson went on to get multiple death threats and even some of his teammates signed a petition to not play with him. This example of injustice stuck out to me the most because he was getting death threats in the mail just because he wanted to play baseball. Like many other people in the black community, Robinson had to stay strong and deal with all of the injustice he was facing. He even breakdown in the middle of a game because another team’s coach was harassing him.
I think this movie is a great example of how going against the social norm and ignoring racial injustice can make a big impact on the world. Robinson was the first of many black baseball players to make it to the big leagues and it didn’t stop there. Branch Rickey was bold enough to take Robinson into his program and made history by doing so. Other than telling the story of the great Jackie Robinson, I this that the author was trying to show how far our society has come in terms of racial injustice. We went from having baseball leagues separated by race to white males being the minority in the MLB.
