April 15 · This Day in America
On opening day at Ebbets Field, a Black man trots out to first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and a line that has stood in the national game for more than sixty years simply ends. Jackie Robinson is twenty-eight, fast, ferociously disciplined, and under orders from himself and his manager to answer every slur and beanball with silence and excellence. He goes hitless that first afternoon but reaches on an error and scores the winning run. The hard part is everything around the game — the hate mail, the spikes-up slides, the hotels that won't have him, the teammates who at first won't either. He endures it on purpose, so the door he walked through stays open. It does. A year later he is Rookie of the Year. Decades later, every team in baseball retires his number, 42, forever.
Source: baseballhall.org
Also on this day · 1912
In the small hours, the unsinkable ship slips beneath the North Atlantic two and a half hours after striking ice; more than 1,500 die for want of lifeboats. Among them is John Jacob Astor IV, one of the richest men in America, who saw his pregnant young wife into a boat and stepped back. The disaster reshaped American maritime law — enough lifeboats for every soul, a radio watch kept around the clock, an ice patrol that still sails today.
Source: www.history.com