WHEN Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers of Major League Baseball, the team’s president and general manager, Branch Rickey, was concerned as to how his new signing would respond to racist abuse.

Robinson had a history of fighting back. 

While in the military he was recommended to be court-martialled for refusing to move to the back of a bus by a driver who enforced racial segregation even on an unsegregated army bus, and for subsequent confrontations with military police related to that incident.