The daughter of Brooklyn Dodgers legend Jackie Robinson is demanding that her father’s image be removed from a recent Donald Trump campaign advertisement, saying that the President opposes the civil rights hero’s values.
‘The Trump campaign is in opposition to all that Jackie Robinson stood for and believed in,’ tweeted Sharon Robinson, the 70-year-old daughter of the Hall of Famer.
‘We’re ins-ulted and demand that his image be removed! at realDonaldTrump.’ The ad titled ‘Say What You Will About America’ features iconic imagery from the 20th century in the US.
Native American football, baseball, and Olympic hero Jim Thorpe are pictured in the opening sequence before a sh-ot of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima in 1945.
‘Say what you will about American, but don’t bet aga-inst us,’ the narrator is heard saying. ‘We fi-ght, we move forward, we pay any price.’ Fifteen seconds into the ad, Robinson is seen swinging a bat as the narrator continues: ‘”Impossible”? We treat that word as motivation. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.’
Sharon Robinson is an author who sits on the board of the Jackie Robinson Foundation and also serves as an educational consultant for Major League Baseball. Jackie Robinson famously inte-grated Major League Baseball in 1947 as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, later becoming vocal civil rights advocate during his decorated 10-year career and after his retirement in 1956.
Initially, Robinson supported Republican candidates for president, such as Richard Nixon in 1960. However, Robinson became d!spleased with the Republicans’ opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and fu-med at the party’s decision to nominate Barry Goldwater, a sta-unch conservative, in that year’s election.
‘I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hi-tler’s Germany,’ Robinson told reporters after leaving the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco. Robinson ba-ttled heart di*ease and di*betes in the early 1970s and passed away of a heart att-ack in 1972 at age 53.
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