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 University of Michigan, the place she studied nursing.

She obtained fairly good at it, too, in a position to heave the ball over these 60 toes 6 inches instantly into the catcher’s mitt. But when she arrived on the park on the appointed day, she was informed 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 way over the catcher’s head,” she mentioned.

Underwood was by no means a lot of an athlete. She was extra targeted on teachers, and took part within the Girl Scouts. But a big 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 Major League Baseball and later utilizing his fame as a persistent advocate for social justice and activism.

As it does yearly, Major League Baseball on Saturday will honor the anniversary of the day that Robinson first broke Baseball’s racial barrier on April 15, 1947. Players will put on Robinson’s No. 42 to commemorate his achievement, which helped shift many long-held beliefs about race within the United States.

But Robinson’s legacy goes far past the baseball discipline. It additionally extends to a whole bunch of Jackie Robinson Foundation 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 are 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 a wide range of methods, together with schooling and financial independence.

As a lot as a Black ballplayer at present may be seen because the dwelling extension of Robinson’s legacy, so too are the Jackie Robinson Foundation students and alumni, even when such a characterization makes Underwood really feel unworthy.

“That makes me a little uncomfortable, to be candid with you,” she mentioned, “because he was so great.”

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

“We constantly tell the scholars that they are ambassadors of his legacy and she is a quintessential example of that legacy,” Britton mentioned.

This yr marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which was based by Robinson’s widow, Rachel, in 1973, the yr after her husband died. Underwood discovered of this system when she attended Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Ill. She utilized and was accepted in 2004.

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

The program requires the students take part in group 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.

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

Scholars 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 expertise discovered at these occasions that have been significantly useful to her. She found and integrated most of the practices and niceties — many taken as a right by kids of elites, and which she discovered 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 exposure to even let us know that those circles exist,” she mentioned, “and how to navigate them. It created that opportunity for me as a student nurse to see myself in a place where there has literally never been anybody like me before.”

Before she entered Congress, Underwood, a Democrat, was a senior adviser on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, serving to communities reply to disasters and public well being emergencies and helping with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. She determined to run for a seat within the House of Representatives in 2018.

“I know Jackie would have been elated about the fact that she is dedicated to improving conditions in the community, particularly the dispensing of health care,” mentioned Britton, the president of the muse. “He would have been so proud of the fact that she used her brilliance and used it just as he used his celebrity to improve society.”

Underwood spoke on the basis’s current 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 easy methods to 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 putting me on a path that really began here with the Jackie Robinson Foundation.”

On Saturday at Dodgers Stadium, 50 Jackie Robinson Scholars 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 — will not be as vital, to alumni like Underwood, as what led as much as them and what occurs lengthy after.