VOA慢速英语 Jackie Robinson, 1919-1972: The First Black Player in Modern Major League Baseball

　　Jackie Robinson, 1919-1972: The First Black Player in Modern Major League Baseball

　　ANNOUNCER:

　　Welcome to PEOPLE IN AMERICA, a program in Special English on the Voice of America. Today Shirley Griffith and Rich Kleinfeldt tell about a man who changed professional baseball in the United States. Jackie Roosevelt Robinson was the first black man to play in modern major league baseball.

　　(MUSIC)

　　VOICE ONE:

　　After World War Two, many Americans still believed that people of different races should not mix.

　　In some parts of the country, blacks and whites lived in separate areas and went to separate schools. Blacks who tried to change the system risked being beaten or killed.

　　Blacks were not permitted to play on professional baseball teams or in any other major league sport. No black man had played for a major league baseball team since eighteen eighty-four. In that year, American baseball organizations agreed to bar blacks. That began changing when Jackie Robinson played his first game for New York's Brooklyn Dodgers on April fifteenth, nineteen forty-seven.

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