It has now been 60 years since Jackie Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He is no longer a man but a civic saint, and his story is the story baseball tells America to prove that it is something more than a child’s game. Robinson, the story goes, became the first black man to play in the major leagues because Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ president, wanted to right what was wrong and needed a man who shared his vision of racial reconciliation to do it. While Robinson faced unspeakable hatred, he not only overcame it by the strength of his character, but by his example (and with the help of benevolent white men) proved to baseball and to America how evil segregation was. Thus he came to serve as the apostle of a postracial future.

This is a story fit for a saint, but Jackie Robinson was, thankfully, not a saint. He was far more interesting than that, and so was his story, which the myth gets wrong in every particular. He was, for instance, not the first black man to play in the major leagues, but the first since 1887. Read in that light, the 60th anniversary of his first game at Ebbets Field ties us not just to the end of baseball’s Jim Crow laws, but neatly bisects a 120-year arc from the institution of those laws to our own day. Baseball is our history; all of it worth remembering.

Robinson is often taken for what film director Spike Lee calls the “magical, mystical Negro,” a stock cultural figure who uses his Godgiven talents not on his own behalf but for the benefit of white men, in the service of salving white guilt. The enduring image of Robinson has him facing down the jeers of St. Louis racists with the supportive arm of Dodgers captain Pee Wee Reese over his shoulder. This scene is memorialized in a statue in front of Keyspan Park in Brooklyn, and it captures the essence of the Robinson myth, which is at least as much about white men like Reese and Rickey overcoming prejudice as it is about Robinson, and also paints Robinson as someone whose strength lay in his refusal to fight back against injustice.

This myth ignores Robinson’s radicalism. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I think, live, and breathe black first and foremost.” He was not just a civil rights symbol; he was an active civil rights leader, years before he played at Ebbets Field and years after.

In 1944, as an Army lieutenant, he fought Jim Crow at Fort Hood, Texas, refusing to go to the back of a bus that was segregated against the longstanding policy of the Department of War. He did not fight it down stoically. After a military policeman called him a n— while arresting him on trumped-up charges, Robinson told him that “if he ever called me a n— again I would break him in two.”

Twenty years later, at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, Robinson watched in horror as Senator Goldwater accepted his party’s nomination. Literally a Rockefeller Republican, Robinson identified Goldwater with the completely unrepentant bigotry of the Republican delegates he saw at that convention, one of whom threw acid at a black delegate and another one of whom had to be restrained by his wife from attacking Robinson.

“Turn him loose, lady, turn him loose,” Robinson shouted at the wife, eager to get into a fight. He was not Gandhi.

Robinson would later say that the 1964 convention made him understand what it felt like to be “a Jew in Hitler’s Germany,” and while one turns with contempt from the analogy, the fact that he made the comment shows what an unusually principled man he was. In that even feeling that way, he did not leave the Republican Party. He would even resign from the board of the NAACP in 1967 essentially because he rejected its complete identification with the Democratic Party. He saw that reducing the cause of civil rights to a partisan political issue to be wielded by one party against another would harm black Americans and that the refusal of black voters to actively fight reactionaries from within the Republican Party would reduce them to a mere interest group, an appendage of the Democrats. He had more ambitious visions for the future of the movement, and they were closely tied together with the political beliefs that led him to the Republican Party, and with his experiences in baseball.

Robinson understood something very important, that baseball has yet to fully admit or appreciate. “The most prejudiced of the club owners,” he wrote, “were not as upset about the game being contaminated by black players as they were by fearing the integration would hurt them in the pocketbooks. Once they found out that more — not fewer — customers, black and white, were coming through those turnstiles, their prejudices were suppressed.”

Visionaries like Branch Rickey and Bill Veeck, who came very close to fielding black players well before Rickey did, were partly driven by an admirable desire to fight injustice, but as Veeck cheerfully admitted, they were also driven by a desire to make money by winning baseball games, which they could do more easily if they gave their managers the best talent. This is not a criticism, simply a statement of a plain truth Robinson understood well. He knew that the key to civil rights was not a benevolent, paternalistic white hand, but money. “How much more effective our demands for a piece of the action would be if we were negotiating from the strength of our own selfreliance rather than stating our case in the role of a beggar or someone out for charity,” he wrote. “We live in a materialistic society in which money doesn’t only talk — it screams.”

Bromides? Perhaps. No civil rights leader has been against black men and women owning businesses, enjoying executive power in large corporations, and exercising political power in government. But there was a real battle in Robinson’s day between those who wanted government to break down legal barriers to black self-empowerment and those who thought the government could empower black Americans, and Robinson’s side didn’t win.

If all this takes us somewhat afield on Opening Day, the greatest day of the year and one in which we celebrate baseball for its own sake, there’s nothing wrong with that. Robinson’s vision stretched well beyond the diamond, and his importance vastly surpassed it. Baseball’s pooh-bahs will spend a great deal of money and effort this year praising Robinson on this 60th anniversary, binding him tightly to the game because they believe in his myth and because that myth is useful to them in promoting the game as something that transcends daily realities and forwards a grand historical narrative. I don’t blame them at all, and I’m glad they’ve made him so central to the game’s history and its greatest and most revered figure. I do hope they find somewhere in all the celebration a bit of time for the inordinately complicated and heroic man who stepped onto the green at Ebbets Field 60 years ago, though. He’s more interesting and far more relevant than the saint.

tmarchman@nysun.com