The History of Jackie Robinson West Little League

Mrs. Annie Haley recently shared in a TV interview that she and her late husband started the Jackie Robinson West Little League Team because their son, wanted to play baseball. The Haleys went to work and organized the team in 1971. The team was originally for the boys on the block. The block grew to the next block and the next block, the block grew to a community. The parents began to participate as did the neighborhoods. And the son grew up to be a coach and the wonderful young men, won the championship last year only to have the title taken away.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015, was unforgettable in Chicago for all the wrong reasons. The city woke up to the news that Jackie Robinson West had been stripped of its Little World Series title, then spent the rest of the day drowning in an unbearable noise chamber of hot takes on morality, race, the sanctity of youth sports and the arbitrary lines of residential boundaries. Chicago was eating itself on many of the same issues that had chewed away at the city for a generation, only now these problems were repackaged and projected onto the downfall of the feel good story of the summer.

It's probably hard to understand why this is so emotional if you weren't around Chicago in July and August. You needed to see the way people came together on State Street outside of the Chicago Theater to watch Jackie Robinson West's final game, just one of many watch parties around the city. You had to see the yellow t-shirts, the balloons, the dancing, the general happiness this team provided. At a certain point, Jackie Robinson West's run in the Little League World Series stopped being a sports story and started to feel like a cultural event. The players were too young to know anything about Chicago's ugly history of racism and segregation, but the context was essential to their triumph. When they returned to the city, the team was treated like conquering heroes. It's what makes the news of February 11th and the suffocating reaction to it all the more disheartening.

These young men were able to achieve such success and garner overwhelmingly positive media coverage. This, during a time when most African American young men are being portrayed negatively in the news, particularly in their hometown of Chicago, where street violence runs rampant. JRW not only reignited America’s past-time, the love of baseball back into the hearts of the African American community; just as their namesake, they crossed racial “boundaries” and became the pride of America, a testament of the American dream of being rewarded for honest, hard work.  

We will fight to restore the United States Championship to Jackie Robinson West.