Just Mercy

Director Destin Daniel Cretton

 

Bryan Stevenson

 

Actor Michael B. Jordan (left) with Bryan Stevenson

 

JUST MERCY            B                   

USA  (136 mi)  2019  d: Destin Daniel Cretton                     Official site

The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving.

— Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (354 pages), 2014

Inspired by real events, the film follows the aspiring career of Harvard educated lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Michael B. Jordan from Fruitvale Station (2013), soft-spoken and reserved, always showing restraint, formally dressed in a suit and tie, adapting his 2014 published memoirs by the same name, growing up in a poor rural community, initially working out of a private residence before setting up practice of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, a law office providing free legal representation to prisoners condemned to death row in the state of Alabama who have been denied access to a fair trial.  According to the film, Bryan Stevenson has worked to release 140 death row inmates in Alabama, where one in 9 death row inmates have been exonerated based on wrongful convictions, resulting in exonerations far higher than for any other category of criminal convictions, where perjury/false accusations and official misconduct are the leading causes of wrongful convictions, which typically go unchallenged by the court appointed lawyers, exposing poor blacks to an unequal judicial process where justice for the poor almost never happens, as it’s reserved instead for the wealthy elite who can pay for it, effectively dividing the nation into two separate and unequal factions where the law is applied differently, disclaiming the inscription engraved into the U.S. Supreme Court building that promises “Equal Justice Under Law.”  Made by the director of Short Term 12 (2013), Hawaiian filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton integrated his own personal experiences from working at a group home for at-risk teenagers in pursuit of altering our perceptions of kids stuck in a dehumanized system struggling for survival.  Here he examines the inequities of the death penalty when empowered and administered by Jim Crow ethical standards, where obtaining a conviction by law and order district attorneys supersedes any pursuit for the truth, as this is the political platform they run on to get elected, making the community a safer place to live, which all but excludes the black community, where residents historically are forced to live in fear of the police and the authoritatively repressive judicial system where innocent men routinely get charged and convicted for crimes they never committed.  Added to the mix are prisoners who did commit crimes, but were sentenced with greater severity due to an inherent bias leveled against blacks.  The effects of racism, such a prevalent condition in our society, continue to exist on so many levels, yet the place where its impact is felt the most is the judicial system where blacks continue to be warehoused into lengthy periods of incarceration at record levels, where there aren’t enough lawyers assisting the poor, and racial minorities are routinely excluded from jury service, particularly in poor rural counties, making it difficult to put an end to these reprehensible and often antiquated practices.  Major cities are not immune from this same racial differentiation, as blacks nationwide are 30% more likely than whites to be sent to prison for committing the exact same crime (Sentencing Commission Finds Black Men Receive Longer ...).  While this film shines a light to expose the inequities, accentuating trials that are marked by blatant racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct while highlighting the damage done to families and communities, yet this inherent racial bias has simply become a routinely accepted standard deeply entrenched into the fabric of the judicial system in America, where the death penalty is a direct descendant of lynching.  By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings for the first time.  Two-thirds of people executed in the 1930’s were black, yet even after the African-American share of the South’s population fell to just 22% by 1950, 75% of people executed in the South were black.  More than eight in ten lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, as did more than eight in ten of the nearly 1500 executions carried out in this country since 1976 (Death Penalty - Equal Justice Initiative). 

One of the inherent flaws of the Hollywood system is there aren’t enough black filmmakers given the opportunity to make films like this, so the stories continue to be told by people outside the black community, offering a more stereotypical vantage point and a decidedly different emotional texture, where the structure of the film itself becomes stereotyped as a crusader movie, where in this case the “white savior” has been replaced by a “black savior,” yet in Alabama, the ultimate decisions are rendered by white judges from one of three appellate courts, the state Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, and Court of Civil Appeals, totaling 19 judges, where there is a noticeable absence of black judges in such prestigious positions, (Why Aren't There More Black Federal Judges in Alabama ...).  One of just five states that hold partisan, statewide elections for judges (in a state that is nearly 70% white, where judges boast during their campaigns about the number of death sentences they’ve imposed), since 1994 every black candidate for the state’s 19 appellate judgeships has lost to a white candidate, with the courts remaining all-white and all-Republican (including 41 of the state’s 42 elected district attorneys), where according to a 2012 report, white judges are four times more likely than minority judges to dismiss race discrimination cases.  Despite overwhelming evidence to suggest bias that stems from the days of slavery to Jim Crow to lynching, where the original commerce conducted in Montgomery, Alabama was in enslaved people, the location of Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative office is just steps away from where they once held massive slave auctions, bringing people off the boat, parading them up and down the street in chains, becoming the most active slave-trading space in America for almost a decade, with dozens of cast-iron historical markers celebrating aspects of the Confederacy.  Little has been done historically to humanize the criminal justice system, with this film providing a face for viewers to empathize with, as one of the most incendiary cases is that of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), known as Johnny D, sentenced to death in 1987 for the murder of an 18-year old white girl who worked as a clerk in a dry cleaning store in Monroeville, Alabama, based solely on the questionable testimony of a white convict, Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson), ignoring multiple black alibi witnesses at the trial, which lasted just a day and a half.  While the jury sentenced him to life imprisonment, the judge (aptly named Robert E. Lee Key) overruled the jury and sentenced him to death, with judicial override accounting for 20% of the people currently sitting on death row in Alabama, a practice that was outlawed by the state in 2017, yet the state persists in executing people on death row prior to the implementation of the law.  Despite the flimsy evidence to convict, McMillian lost all his prior appeals for a new trial.  By the time Stevenson meets him in prison, he’s lost all hope, showing little interest in a wide-eyed Ivy League lawyer from the north who knows nothing about the ways of Alabama.  The tone of the film resembles IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967), pitting the legal sophistication of Stevenson against the antiquity of southern racism, where humiliating blacks and instilling fear is a way of life, fueled by a venomous culture of white supremacy that historically produced lynchings and killings, yet established in heinous acts just how blacks are treated in the Jim Crow South.  In contrast, Atticus Finch, the white court-appointed lawyer portrayed by Gregory Peck in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962), was voted as the greatest hero of all American cinema in 2003 by the American Film Institute, AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains - Wikipedia, where the courtroom sequence of the film adaptation was set in a courthouse in that same Monroeville, Alabama that remains the town’s main tourist attraction.  Even in the UK, a 2016 literary survey voted Atticus Finch the most inspiring character in literature (To Kill a Mockingbird's Atticus Finch voted most inspiring ...).  And therein lies the problem with films like this, as the white idealization is overwhelming, requiring a Messiah-like figure to stand up to centuries of appalling racial animosity, making audiences feel good, but the entrenched systematic bias continues, where mass incarceration of black people actually defines the era we are currently living in.

While Stevenson has consistently been recognized as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America, awarded a MacArthur Grant among a multitude of distinguished honors and awards, Brie Larson stars as Eva Ansley, adding Southern flavor as the local girl who becomes the operations director, described by Stevenson as “fearless and smart,” who’s been there since the beginning working side by side with Stevenson (actually starting on her dining room table), working long hours into the night, assisting him on his exhaustive research, providing administrative duties while handling the reporting and accounting of their federal funding.  While not an attorney, she’s a mom committed to rectifying what she sees as terrible injustices happening within her community, with most content to allow racial transgressions to continue unabated, but she feels a moral obligation to do something about it, to be on the side providing social justice.  While the film has a formulaic structure to it, the authenticity of the characters stand out, where the best moments are often reduced to small extended scenes in tiny rooms or prison cells, intimate conversations that don’t overreach, becoming remarkably poignant and quietly affecting, offering a deeply ingrained understanding of just who and what we’re dealing with.  Whether it be Stevenson’s visits to Holman Prison or the time spent with each of the death row prisoners he meets, their images are seared into the viewer’s imaginations, becoming permanent fixtures, with each telling their own story of how they became ostracized and rejected by society, stripped of any self-worth, dehumanized, often doubting their own innocence, as that guilty verdict has been drummed into their consciousness.  Stevenson’s role is to take each of these essentially dead souls and bring them back to life, challenging the negative stereotypes, where it’s easy to pass judgment, showing another side, one that viewers can relate to.  He starts by visiting McMillian’s family living on the outskirts of town, mirroring similar visits made by Atticus Finch, where one gets the feeling so little has changed for these families since the Civil Rights era of the last 50 years, where progress was granted to a few, yet a large majority in rural America were left behind, the living examples of a separate but unequal society.  While they’ve essentially taken away all that matters to McMillian, what’s clear is no one in his community thinks he did it, while the white community is in near unanimous agreement that he did.  So when a black lawyer starts poking around with these unsettling, racially tinged cases that already led to a conviction, the white community resents someone stirring up all these ancient memories, as they rest easily, content to lock him up and throw away the key, believing the case is closed.  Rafe Spall is Tommy Chapman, the newly elected white District Attorney, yet he shows no inclinations to reopen the case, believing Stevenson is alone and isolated, where he is perceived as no threat.  But the more he looks into these cases, the more he becomes convinced these cases are a travesty of justice, filing legal briefs bringing new evidence into light that question the legitimacy of the verdict, yet appeals courts in Alabama rarely overturn the convictions of death row inmates.  While there are setbacks along the way, and frequent intimidation tactics that recall the times of antiquity, one central focus of the film is witnessing in stark detail the execution of a prisoner, a chilling reminder of what this is all about, as Alabama consistently has one of the highest execution rates in the United States, executing 11 people convicted by juries of a life sentence, overridden by judges and instead condemned to die.  It’s an emotional tearjerker fraught with heartbreak and personal anguish, as setbacks are built into the system, creating an underlying feeling of helplessness and systematic malaise, but Stevenson and his crew persevere, growing his practice, hiring more staff, eventually accomplishing the unimaginable.

Walter McMillian - Equal Justice Initiative

'I went to death row for 28 years through no fault of my own ...  Anthony Ray Hinton endured almost three decades behind bars on death row, wrongly convicted by Alabama’s racist judiciary system, telling his incredible story to Chris McGreal from The Guardian, April 1, 2018

Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society | People ...   Chris Hedges interview with Bryan Stevenson from Smithsonian magazine, December 2012

Bryan Stevenson and the Legacy of Lynching | The New Yorker  Jeffrey Toobin, August 15, 2016

Jackie Robinson

JACKIE ROBINSON – made for TV              A-                   

USA  (240 mi)  2016  Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon         

Jackie Robinson PBS page

A return to form for documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose earlier film BASEBALL (1994) barely covered the life of Jackie Robinson, despite nearly 19-hours in 11 exhausting episodes, so this is a more extensive portrait, becoming analogous to an exploration of the changing race relations in America, as Robinson’s life is characterized not only by the abject horrors of the journey, but the ability to transcend prejudice and bigotry with an extraordinary talent on the playing field.  Targeted with death threats and venomous race-baiting, Robinson was living out the last vestiges of the Jim Crow era in the South where blacks could not stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants as whites, so traveling with the team became a lonely and particularly isolating journey, where these laws were designed to humiliate and punish blacks for their supposed inferiority.  Robinson’s stature, however, transcends sports, as he almost single handedly dispelled the notion of black inferiority, where his Hall of Fame career spoke for itself, becoming a role model for courage and grace, both on and off the field as he opened doors, calling into question the senseless injustice of a segregated white and black America, becoming a good will ambassador for integration and equality, an advocate for Civil Rights, where his life serves as a personal and professional inspiration, posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.  What’s particularly noteworthy in this film is the distinguished presence of Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s surviving widow, who at age 93 remains as sharp and alert as ever, as her own perceptions add an extraordinary dimension to the complexities of her husband’s life, as she shared most all of these moments with him along the way.  First Lady Michelle Obama notes in the film, while sitting alongside President Obama, “I think that’s a sign of his character that he chose a woman that was his equal.  I don’t think you would have had Jackie Robinson without Rachel.  To go back and have refuge with someone who you know has your back, that’s priceless.”

Born Jack Roosevelt Robinson (where his middle name was in honor of the President who died just 25 days before he was born), the youngest son of a sharecropper and the grandson of slaves, Robinson was 14 months old in 1920 when his father abandoned the family, so his mother moved her five children from the small town of Cairo, Georgia to Pasadena, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, where she found work as a maid.  Moving to an all-white neighborhood, the family faced constant harassment, including burned crosses on their front yard, but they refused to move.  The neighborhood pool was for whites only, where blacks, Asian, and Latino kids could use it once a week on “International Day,” where the pool was drained and scrubbed cleaned afterwards before opening again the next day for the exclusive use of whites.  Robinson learned early on that athletic success did not guarantee acceptance in American society, as his older brother Mack was an exceptional athlete and a track standout, earning a Silver Medal in the 200 meters at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, finishing just 0.4 seconds behind Jessie Owens, yet the only job he could find afterwards was as a street sweeper and ditch digger, despite having a college education.  Jackie attended Pasadena Junior College, playing alongside mostly white athletes, before transferring to UCLA, becoming the school’s first varsity athlete to earn letters in four sports, football, basketball, baseball, and track, winning the national title in the long jump at the 1940 NCAA Men's Track and Field Championships.  Ironically, baseball was Robinson’s “worst sport” at UCLA, hitting only .097 in his only season, although he went 4-for-4 in his first game and stole home twice.  Twice he led the Pacific Coast League in scoring in basketball, while he was such a threat to score in football, one of only four blacks on the team, that a rival coach from Oregon claimed, “I guess you’ve got to have a mechanized cavalry unit to stop this guy.”  He was a football All-American and, along with Jim Thorpe, a contender for the greatest all-around athlete in American history.  Robinson left school in 1941 once his baseball eligibility ran out, without graduating, against the wishes of his future wife, Rachel Isum, who he met as an entering freshman when he was a senior.  

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Robinson was drafted and applied for Officer Candidate School in Fort Riley, Kansas, where blacks were routinely rejected at the time until the intervention of Heavyweight Boxing champion Joe Louis, who was also stationed there, eventually led to his acceptance, quickly leading to a personal friendship between the two men.  Robinson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1943, became engaged with Rachel shortly afterwards, and was reassigned to Fort Hood in Texas.  It was there that a white Army bus driver ordered Robinson to move to the back of a military bus, which he refused, more than a decade before Rosa Parks refused a similar request in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, which led to his arrest and a recommended court-martial, adding on additional charges, including insubordination and public drunkenness, though Robinson did not drink.  Robinson, who described himself as “the kind of Negro who isn’t going to beg for anything,” was eventually acquitted of all charges.  The court proceedings, however, kept him stateside, while the unit he was assigned to, the 761st "Black Panthers" Tank Battalion, was the first black tank unit sent into combat during the war.  As most of the military training facilities were located in the Deep South, the black trainees were forced to train over several years, while whites were being sent overseas after just a few months, making them subject to hostile acts of violent racism, including beatings and even murder.  Rachel graduated from UCLA in 1945 with a degree in nursing and the couple was married a year later, a year before he broke into the big leagues, as he was instead playing baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues, offered an obligatory tryout with the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, which was largely a political show to appease black newspapers and desegregationists, with no intentions of ever giving him a shot, as he was routinely subjected to racial taunts throughout.  The Red Sox were actually the last team in Major League Baseball to sign a black player in 1959.  While there were other black players with bigger names, like Josh Gibson and Satchel Page, it was Robinson who was selected, largely for how solidly grounded he was with a stable marriage.  After a lengthy discussion with Branch Rickey, Brooklyn Dodger President and General Manager, who “was looking for a soldier,” according to Rachel, where he famously lays down the law, explaining the turn-the-other-cheek scenario in the first few years requiring Robinson not to respond to the racial animosity that would inevitably come his way, telling him “I want a ball player with guts enough not to fight back,” Robinson was assigned to the Montreal Royals as the first black player in the Brooklyn Dodger farm club of the International Leagues, where he led the league with a .349 batting average while also being named the Most Valuable Player.

Rachel Robinson recounts the ordeal of reporting to Jackie’s first spring training in Daytona, Florida just two weeks after their wedding, where the trip amounted to their honeymoon, flying from Los Angeles to New Orleans, where they were bumped off their connecting flight to make room for white passengers, leaving them stranded at the New Orleans airport where none of the restaurants would serve them.  Anticipating this, Rickey met them there offering a bucket of fried chicken, which they graciously accepted, making it last throughout their ordeal.  Eventually taking a flight to Pensacola, Florida, with a connecting flight to nearby Jacksonville, they were ordered off the plane to make room for two white passengers.  With little recourse, they boarded a bus for Jacksonville, where the driver, calling him by the racial slur “boy,” ordered them to move to the back of the bus, as the front seats reclined, but not in the rear.  After a long and arduous journey through a part of the country where blacks who challenged discrimination were often jailed, beaten, or murdered, with six blacks lynched in 1946 (Lynching Statistics), and more than 20 others were rescued from angry mobs, they finally made it to Daytona Beach, where Robinson was so angered and humiliated that he was ready to quit.  Only after talking to journalists Wendell Smith and Billy Rowe from The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper avidly following his story, was he convinced that he had to endure these indignities so others after him would have opportunities that were closed to him now.  Robinson, the only player allowed to bring his wife, was not allowed to stay with his teammates in the same hotel, so instead the newlyweds stayed in the home of a pharmacist and influential black politician, Joe Harris, known as the “Negro Mayor of Daytona Beach.”  Making matters worse, only Daytona Beach allowed him to play on the field, and even there he received death threats, while in nearby towns, the Sanford police chief threatened to close the facilities if Robinson appeared, and in Jacksonville the team arrived only to find the stadium padlocked.  During his time in the Negro Leagues, Robinson displayed a defiant spirit, sitting at a segregated lunch counter at Woolworths where he would not move until he was served, refusing to sit in the balcony at movie theaters, the designated area for blacks, while also refusing to buy gas from gas stations that prohibited blacks from using the rest room facilities.  Of interest, in the same year of 1946, Robinson’s backfield teammate at UCLA, Kenny Washington, became the first black player to sign a contract with the NFL in the modern (postwar) era.  The following year, just days before the start of the season, Robinson was called up to the major leagues at the relatively advanced age of 28, starting at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making his major league debut at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947 before a crowd of 26,000 spectators, which included 14,000 especially excited black fans.  50 years later, the city of Sanford issued a public apology to Jackie Robinson and proclaimed that day Jackie Robinson Day.  Major League Baseball followed suit officially retiring his number on April 15, 1997, adopting a tradition of Jackie Robinson Day in 2004 where baseball celebrates his legacy every year on April 15th, a day many players elect to wear number 42 in his honor.  The last player to wear the number 42 year-round was New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera, an All-Star Panamanian pitcher who retired after the 2013 season.    

Early in his career Armed Forces veteran Robinson was called upon to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1949 as a stark contrast to singer and black activist Paul Robeson’s claim that black Americans wouldn’t fight for their country, where he was largely duped by reactionary conservative politicians to undermine a man with a huge black following in Robeson, leading to his eventual blacklisting, this at a time when Robinson was still not allowed to shower with his teammates, forced to accept a locker off to the side in the corner of the clubhouse.   But others coming up after him looked to Robinson with hope, thinking now they might get a chance, where the weight of carrying an entire race on one man’s shoulders is never really fathomable to the rest of us, where he certainly felt the weight, according to Rachel, as “He knew if he failed that social progress was going to get set back.”  Described by New York Post sports journalist Jimmy Cannon as “the loneliest man I’ve ever seen in sports,” the only way he could fight back was to do well on the field and help his team win, something he did brilliantly throughout his storied career.  As President Obama notes in the film, “Jackie Robinson laid the foundation for America to see its black citizens as subjects and not just objects.  It meant that there were 6, 7, and 8-year-old boys who suddenly thought a black man was a hero.”  While there is famous footage of Robinson at age 36 stealing home in the 1955 World Series, there is also a considerable post career look at his life after baseball, where he served on the board of the NAACP, supported Richard Nixon in the 1960 Presidential campaign, as he attended the 1960 Democratic National Convention, where he heard reports that Kennedy was serious about civil rights, but after seeing him prominently sit arch-segregationist Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus on stage with him, Robinson walked out in disgust, but he later praised Kennedy for the action he took on civil rights, and was disappointed and angered by the conservative Republican opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, eventually becoming a voice for black economic progress, but had his run-ins with Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and other black activists that felt he was out of touch with the movement, calling him an “Uncle Tom.”  A lifelong Republican because the Democratic Party’s Dixiecrat wing ran his family out of Georgia, he became one of six national directors for the unsuccessful 1964 Presidential campaign of Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller in New York, leaving the Republican Party convention completely demoralized when the nominee chosen was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, where Robinson witnessed firsthand, “out of thirteen hundred delegates, 15 were black, and of those 15, one had his credentials revoked and another had cigarettes put out on him by Goldwater supporters,” claiming in his 1972 biography I Never Had It Made that he now had “a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany,” eventually switching parties and supporting Hubert Humphrey against Nixon in 1968.  According to director Ken Burns, “Robinson was there in 1960 and 1964 when the two parties switched sides on the Southern white vote, and that’s a huge moment in American history.  He witnessed it firsthand.”

With Keith David delivering the narration, and Jamie Foxx reading from Robinson’s letters or columns, we get a fuller picture of just what drove the man, as he continued to fight against racism and rail against inequality well after his career was over, where he worked as a business executive, the first black to serve as vice president of a major American corporation, helped found a minority-owned bank, wrote a regular newspaper column, and was politically involved.  Delving more into his family history and the relationship with his wife and children, eventually buying a house in Connecticut, we hear the voices of his now grown daughter Sharon and his son David as they reveal a deep sense of anguish felt by their father at his inability to connect with the emotionally distant Jackie Robinson Jr. who had a history of drug abuse, yet was well on his way to an apparent recovery before a car accident took his life at the age of 24, where there is an unseen backside exposed like never before, making him all the more vulnerable and human, as his life is anything but perfect or heroic.  Even as a player, Robinson didn’t always remain quietly passive, becoming more aggressively argumentative after his first few years, challenging umpires and opposing players, where his innate personality opened up, but his outspokenness drew the ire of once-adoring fans and beat writers who preferred his passivity and accused him of being “uppity” or ungrateful, where his own black teammate Roy Campanella felt his combativeness on the field was often divisive and hurt the team.  “Without that anger, you don’t get Jackie Robinson,” suggests sportswriter Howard Bryant, while according to Rachel, “He was not an angry black man.  He was an athlete who wanted to win.”  Robinson, who spent his entire Major League career (1947 to 1956) with the Dodgers, was voted Rookie of the Year in 1947 and Most Valuable Player in 1949, when he won the National League batting title with a .342 batting average, becoming an All-Star for six consecutive seasons beginning in 1949, receiving more votes that year than any player except Ted Williams.  With a .311 career batting average, he led the Dodgers to six pennants, helped win a World Series in 1955, and was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.  While Brian Helgeland’s Hollywood movie 42 (2013) offers a glimpse into the racism and discrimination that Robinson encountered, even from his own teammates, during his Major League career where more than a third of the league’s players at that time hailed from former Confederate states, this film offers a much more extensive portrait behind the scenes of a man who endured the neverending assault of racial attacks to lay the groundwork for the acceptance of blacks in America, fighting tirelessly for more black managers and executives in the game of baseball, where Martin Luther King Jr. called Robinson “a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides,” eventually becoming an active spokesperson and fundraiser in the Civil Rights movement, joining King at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the March on Washington in 1963 attended by 250,000 people hearing King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech.  He’s a man that helped blacks believe that things they could not imagine were now possible, where Robinson took the hateful insults, racial slurs, death threats and abuse and made it just a little bit easier for the next person of color to become the “first” or second in their school or workplace.  Again, according to Burns, explaining his overriding interest in making the film, “Jackie Robinson is the apostle of our better selves and is the apostle of the better angels of our nation.”