Redford Plays Baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers

how about someone new for a change, not every movie has to have 20 A-listers

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Will Smith and Jamie Foxx would be bad choices for the role of Jackie Robinson. They're good actors, but not right for the part. Give a younger actor like Derek Luke a chance to tackle that role.

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If anyone loves the game of baseball, I guess "Bird Legs" should be involved. It isn't about his Heavy Hitter status as a Hollywood favorite, it's his life long love for the game! Batter Up! Go RED..get'er done! A horseman who knows the story lines.. CasinoCwby@aol.com

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How about another great athlete to portray Jackie Robinson - Emmitt Smith, a great football player has personality and he can dance up a storm.

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How many Jackie Robinson movies are they going to make??....I got two of them in my crib now.....Will Smith, Jamie Foxx are both too old to play a young Jackie Robinson what is the problem with getting a young actor???

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What about Jamie Hector? He's awesome on The Wire, let him step up to the plate.

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Tony Todd. He's a Minor Leaguer turned actor who is the spitting image of Jackie and is in talks for the role. He already played Jackie in an episode of "Cold Case" and has been in a half dozen other baseball roles, starting with "Little Big League." The one playing Jackie has to actually play well, and Tony's a level above Will Smith or Jamie Foxx. Good actor, too.

http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0865114/

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Branch Rickey is among those few and special people, those unique visionaries, who educate millions of people and, through courage and sheer force of will, persuade them he is right. Rickey is among those unique humanitarians who “make goodness attractive to others,” as noted in a eulogy delivered during his 1965 funeral services. Working tirelessly, without government incentive or intervention, he and Jackie Robinson were an odd couple, a white lawyer and a black athlete. Yet, they changed the face of baseball, and the face of America, a year before Pres. Harry Truman desegregated the military in 1948; seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954; eight, almost nine years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her Montgomery, Alabama, bus seat in 1955; 10 years before President Dwight Eisenhower utilized the 101st Airborne to enable the Little Rock Nine to attend Central High School in Little Rock, in 1957, as required by the Brown decision; 16 years before Martin Luther King, Jr. his memorable I Have A Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial during his 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; 17 years before Congress and the President adopted the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and 18 years before Congress and the President adopted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When Rickey and Robinson first began their discussions in 1945, they were opposed by 15 of the 16 major league franchises and by the former federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was then commissioner of baseball. Only Rickey’s team, the Brooklyn Dodgers stood with him. Rickey told Robinson, “Jackie, We’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, very few newspapermen. And I’m afraid that many fans will be hostile. We’ll be in a tough position. We can win only if we convince the world that I am doing this because you are a great ballplayer, and a fine gentleman.” And win they did, for baseball and for America.

Ira Glasser wrote “But before all that happened -- more than two decades before the civil rights legislation of the sixties and more than ten years before the Supreme Court's 1954 decision -- a quiet drama was beginning in a small office in Brooklyn, New York, a drama that one observer later would call ‘perhaps the most visible single desegregation action ever taken.’ According to one veteran of the civil rights movement, it ‘helped lay the predicate for the Supreme Court's decision.’"

Who is Ira Glasser? It is doubtless very safe to say he is no conservative right winger. He worked with the American Civil Liberties Union for 34 years and served as its executive director for 23 years until he retired in 2001. Very simply, Glasser says, Rickey, along with Robinson, was a precursor of the civil rights movement. (Glasser, “Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson, Precursors of the Civil Rights Movement,” World and I (March 2003).)

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