IN April 15 1947 Robinson changed much more than baseball
Body: Jackie Robinson couldn't have known what Branch Rickey's "great experiment" would do to the socio-political landscape in America.
In fact, could anybody have known that putting Robinson, a black man, onto a baseball field with a team of white men would do for America what nothing else had done for race relations since the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson legalized segregation?

"That's almost an impossible question to answer," said Robert Ruck, a senior lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh and an authority on black baseball. "I think that if Robinson's arrival in the Majors had been a chaotic social disaster, it would have made it more difficult for this country to change."

Historians like Ruck see Rickey's experiment, which opened the way for Robinson to break the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, as a trigger to a number of events that followed. It played a significant role, Ruck said, in fueling the move toward integration.

Yet perhaps no socio-political event in the first half of the 20th Century was as fraught with risk as this one.

"I don't see why a top-flight Negro ballplayer would be so anxious to play in the white leagues when he is doing so well in his own organization," Atlanta Journal sports editor Ed Danforth is quoted as saying at the time in historian Jules Tygiel's book "Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy."

Even facing such intractable critics, black Americans and the black press had continued to call for integration -- but not just in sports. They argued that democracy wasn't a black-white issue; their issue became one of equality.

How do people who had long been viewed as inferior prove they are an equal? They needed a defining moment, an event in history that so crystallized their equality that nobody cou