On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers, forever changing baseball and society.

Robinson was Black, and the integration of all-white major league baseball was perhaps the most important story about civil rights in the years immediately following World War II.

The integration, Jules Tygiel wrote in his groundbreaking book “Baseball’s Great Experiment,” “captured the imagination of millions of Americans who had previously ignored the nation’s racial dilemma.”

As Martin Luther King Jr. famously put it, Robinson “was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”

Major League Baseball celebrates the anniversary of Robinson’s historic debut on April 15 annually as “Jackie Robinson Day” in stadiums and ballparks across the nation.

But in my view, those celebrations will fall short if they don’t address how Robinson confronted white supremacy with class and dignity during a time before he joined the Dodgers, when his own minor league manager once asked, “Do you really think a nigra is a human being?”

I’ve written or edited four books about Jackie Robinson. When I give a lecture or a talk about him, I often mention that he was a Republican.

Given the modern-day opposition that the Republican Party has toward civil and voting rights protections – and the teaching of racism in American history – this invariably provokes an audible gasp from the audience.

Robinson, who lived from 1919 to 1972, was a Republican when millions of other Blacks were Republicans.

Back in those days, the GOP still hung on to its mantra that it was “the party of Abraham Lincoln,” the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

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