Performance and Reality Race, Sports and the Modern World.

Last year's celebration of the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's breaking the color line in major league baseball was one of the most pronounced and prolonged ever held in the history of the Republic in memory of a black man or of an athlete. Robinson was the man white society could not defeat in the short term, though his untimely death at age 53 convinced many that the stress of the battle defeated him in the long run. In this respect, Robinson did become something of an uneasy elegiac symbol of race relations, satisfying everyone's psychic needs.