Jackie Robinson’s Legacy Stretches Beyond the Baseball Field

The closest Lauren Underwood ever got here to being a baseball participant was the night time in 2007 when she was requested to throw out the ceremonial first pitch on Jackie Robinson Day at Comerica Park in Detroit. She practiced for days, tossing pitches from the mound of the baseball stadium of the College of Michigan, the place she studied nursing.

She bought fairly good at it, too, in a position to heave the ball over these 60 ft 6 inches immediately into the catcher’s mitt. However when she arrived on the park on the appointed day, she was advised she needed to throw from the grass midway to dwelling plate. Now a consultant for the 14th Congressional district in Illinois, Underwood laughs on the reminiscence.

“I threw it method over the catcher’s head,” she mentioned.

Underwood was by no means a lot of an athlete. She was extra centered on lecturers, and took part within the Lady Scouts. However a major a part of her life has been formed by the imaginative and prescient and legacy of Robinson, a legendary baseball star who helped remodel American society by integrating Main League Baseball and later utilizing his fame as a persistent advocate for social justice and activism.

Because it does yearly, Main League Baseball on Saturday will honor the anniversary of the day that Robinson first broke Baseball’s racial barrier on April 15, 1947. Gamers will put on Robinson’s No. 42 to commemorate his achievement, which helped shift many long-held beliefs about race in the USA.

However Robinson’s legacy goes far past the baseball subject. It additionally extends to a whole bunch of Jackie Robinson Basis students and alumni, like Underwood, who assist to satisfy Robinson’s imaginative and prescient of a extra simply society via their very own accomplishments.

They’re engineers, companions at monetary establishments, docs, attorneys, Hollywood executives and civic leaders like Underwood, who embody Robinson’s dedication to uplift and improve the lives of underserved folks of colour in quite a lot of methods, together with schooling and financial independence.

As a lot as a Black ballplayer right this moment will be seen because the dwelling extension of Robinson’s legacy, so too are the Jackie Robinson Basis students and alumni, even when such a characterization makes Underwood really feel unworthy.

“That makes me somewhat uncomfortable, to be candid with you,” she mentioned, “as a result of he was so nice.”

However Della Britton, the president and chief govt of the muse, mentioned that most of the students in this system do replicate Robinson’s core ideas of civic engagement, particularly Underwood.

“We always inform the students that they’re ambassadors of his legacy and he or she is a quintessential instance of that legacy,” Britton mentioned.

This 12 months marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Jackie Robinson Basis, which was based by Robinson’s widow, Rachel, in 1973, the 12 months after her husband died. Underwood realized of this system when she attended Neuqua Valley Excessive College in Naperville, In poor health. She utilized and was accepted in 2004.

The scholarship program supplies on common $32,000 over 4 years to 242 college students. The group additionally engages and supplies sources for greater than 4,000 different college students as nicely.

This system requires the students take part in neighborhood service that’s logged and overseen by the muse. Underwood, who earned a masters diploma in nursing at Johns Hopkins, accomplished internships in public well being coverage.

College students are additionally required to attend a four-day seminar in New York every year, the place the students are immersed in social abilities instruction, networking and public talking.

Students are sometimes assigned mentors, whether or not alumni or different benefactors, who take the scholars to lunches and supply steerage and assist. As useful because the scholarship was, Underwood mentioned it was the social abilities realized at these occasions that have been notably useful to her. She found and included most of the practices and niceties — many taken with no consideration by kids of elites, and which she realized from mentors and alumni of alternatives and establishments that had by no means even occurred to her, just like the Congressional Black Caucus.

“It gave us publicity to even tell us that these circles exist,” she mentioned, “and navigate them. It created that chance for me as a scholar nurse to see myself in a spot the place there has actually by no means been anyone like me earlier than.”

Earlier than she entered Congress, Underwood, a Democrat, was a senior adviser on the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Providers, serving to communities reply to disasters and public well being emergencies and aiding with the implementation of the Inexpensive Care Act. She determined to run for a seat within the Home of Representatives in 2018.

“I do know Jackie would have been elated about the truth that she is devoted to enhancing circumstances in the neighborhood, notably the meting out of well being care,” mentioned Britton, the president of the muse. “He would have been so pleased with the truth that she used her brilliance and used it simply as he used his movie star to enhance society.”

Underwood spoke on the basis’s latest dinner in March, and mentioned her particular connection to Rachel Robinson, who additionally earned a postgraduate diploma in psychiatric nursing. In her speech, Underwood mentioned she wouldn’t have recognized attain any of her profession targets with out the muse and its community of employees, alumni and donors.

She thanked Rachel Robinson, “for believing in and investing in little ol’ me and placing me on a path that actually started right here with the Jackie Robinson Basis.”

On Saturday at Dodgers Stadium, 50 Jackie Robinson Students will throw out ceremonial first pitches to acknowledge not solely Robinson’s life, but in addition the fiftieth anniversary of the muse.

Wherever these pitches find yourself — within the catchers’ mitts or excessive over their heads — shouldn’t be as vital, to alumni like Underwood, as what led as much as them and what occurs lengthy after.