Sunday, April 15th, will be the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in major league sports in America. Though baseball seems to be leaving the favor of the black community in general, though I can't figure out why, the importance of Jackie Robinson and what he went through can't be overlooked.

What most people know, and what the major media is going to talk about over the next couple of days, is that Branch Rickey came to Jackie Robinson to recruit him specifically as the player to break the color barrier. He told Jackie that it was going to be tough, that teams were going to throw at him, fans were going to call him lots of names, and other players were going to try to spike him. Rickey told him that he needed Jackie to take it, not fight back, and to exhibit nothing but the spirit of a gentleman and a good sport.

What most people don't know is that it came with a caveat; for THREE years. Once those three years was over, Jackie Robinson was a terror to anyone to tried to do him harm, or who got in his way of trying to win games. Some people thought that he had just gotten "uppity" after a certain point, secure in the knowledge that he was now a star, and was acting like a star. What he was acting like was a man, like any other man, who had taken all he had to take for the greater good and finally had the reins released so he could be himself.

I make this point because of stories like this one that are going to be written as people try to relate what he put up with to the Imus story I wrote about a couple of days ago. What it will amount to is a rewrite of history, and I'm not allowing it. What Jackie Robinson had to do, he did for the greater good; a lot of people owe Jackie Robinson a lot of thanks for that.

But this same Jackie Robinson would have come out way before Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton once the story of what Don Imus said about these young ladies came out. Because, in his last years, even though he was going blind and being debilitated by diabetes, he was a fighter for the cause, a big, booming voice for equality and fairness, just as he'd been in his previous life before professional baseball, something else many people don't know anything about.

Jackie Robinson was a fighter. But he could fight in different ways based on the need at hand. Thank you, Jackie, for everything.