"For instance, Branch Rickey wasn't Abraham Lincoln as a Major League Baseball executive. He had social convictions, but mostly the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager wanted to get in front of New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's weekly radio address that aimed to slam New York's three baseball teams for their discriminatory hiring practices.
"We sort of postulated that Branch Rickey reached down and touched Jackie, like Michelangelo," Burns says. "He was supposed to be God, and Jackie was Jesus. Not exactly. ... It wasn't just Branch Rickey alone in the wilderness. It was a black press that had been active for decades pushing it. It was a left-wing press."...
"Why did we preserve these stories over the years and embellish them?" Ken Burns asks. "The only real reason I can think of is because it gave white people skin in the game. They historically could feel singularly responsible for this, rather than deal with the truth: If the black press hadn't strongly advocated over the years, if political pressure outside baseball hadn't coalesced at this time, it never happens."
"Cultural appropriation" can be thrown around loosely. But what greater cultural appropriation is there than convincing a group of people that their resilience was needed, but their liberation was inextricably linked to the goodness of well-intentioned white people?"
http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/15183801/ken-burns-new-jackie-robinson-documentary-kills-myths-civil-rights-legend-mlb
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