Keller's Comics Corner: Jackie Robinson Day Special
By cmkeller
on Apr 19, 2021, 10:06am EDT
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For decades, April 15 meant only one thing to the majority of Americans - the dreaded annual deadline for filing personal income taxes. But in 2004, Major League baseball changed all that. Now, baseball fans across America look forward to that day to celebrate the anniversary of desegregation of Major League Baseball by looking at their now-useless scorecards and wondering which "42" on the field is which player.
Needless to say, baseball was hardly the only American institution with a racism problem prior to 1947. Comic books had almost no non-white characters, and when they did include any, the results tended to be insulting caricatures. Captain America's sidekick, Bucky - in the comics a teenager to Steve Rogers's adult hero rather than the same-aged partner that Sebastian Stan's cinematic version is - was a member of a "kid gang" group (like the then-popular Our Gang or Dead End Kids) called the Young Allies, which included this most cringeworthy character: