Major League Baseball’s opening day, that season in 1947, was like no other. It wasn’t just baseball changing that April. It was, to some Americans, life’s natural order itself — a Black man in a big leaguer’s uniform a stick in the eye of what was supposed to be. So when Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 28-year-old rookie, jogged onto the diamond for the first time in his MLB career, his own team’s crowd hissed racial slurs. The 26,623 New Yorkers at Ebbets Field that afternoon were Dodgers fans, not his. To hell with the color barrier. Red Barber (1908-1992) the Dodgers’ legendary radio announcer and a UF graduate, was in the press box. “Fans waited to see how the Mississippi born announcer would handle it,” historian Rufus Ward wrote in 2022, commemorating the 75th anniversary of that remarkable ballgame. “He handled it by treating Robinson no differently than any other player... That act from a native Mississippian, who was expected to oppose the entry of a Black man into t...