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Ken Burns talks about the Jackie Robinson we didn't know

“Baseball” filmmaker’s two-night documentary focuses on the man behind the myth.

Jackie and Rachel Robinson with their children - Jackie Jr., David, and Sharon - by the pool at Grossinger's Resort in New York, from Ken Burns' documentary "Jackie Robinson" on PBS.
Jackie and Rachel Robinson with their children - Jackie Jr., David, and Sharon - by the pool at Grossinger's Resort in New York, from Ken Burns' documentary "Jackie Robinson" on PBS.Read moreCourtesy of Rachel Robinson

We may think we know the story of Jackie Robinson, who 69 years ago this week broke baseball's color line in his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Ken Burns is betting we don't.

On Monday and Tuesday, at 9 p.m. on WHYY12, the filmmaker who brought us 1994's Baseball revisits the late pioneer in the revealing four-hour documentary Jackie Robinson, the deeper portrait for which Robinson's widow, Rachel, now 93, had long pushed.

It's not that Burns had neglected her husband in Baseball.

"He was in every episode, all nine episodes. His impending influence, his birth, his early life, his baseball career, a little bit of post-baseball career, his death. But Rachel approached me a few years afterward and said, 'He deserves to stand alone,' " Burns said in an interview in January.

He didn't disagree, but, busy with other projects, he urged her to consider other filmmakers.

She did, yet, dissatisfied, she kept returning to Burns, who eventually said yes, producing Jackie Robinson with his daughter, Sarah Burns, and son-in-law David McMahon, who together wrote it.

"I'd always been aware that we'd encrusted him - not just us, but everybody - with the kind of barnacles of sentimentality and nostalgia. As we do in our media culture, we find a simple trope. You know, the turning the other cheek, the Christlike figure. And he's become for us a statue that's covered in pigeon s-. And it's time to just sort of tell a much more complicated story that resonates with today," Burns said.

"Everything that we're talking about today, integrated swimming pools, 'driving while black,' Trayvon Martin, church burnings, and killings - all of these things are a part of the Jackie Robinson narrative," he said.

Robinson, most remembered for the period in which he agreed to hold his tongue while suffering abuse at home and away - notably from the Phillies and their fans - spent many more years, before and after, fighting injustice.

"I think we attach him to [Dodgers general manager] Branch Rickey and we give him a white mentor, and we have the Pee Wee Reese story" about Reese embracing Jackson in Cincinnati, "which isn't true," Burns said.

The documentary "explodes a lot of stuff," he said, but Robinson emerges looking "even more complicated and better."

That includes his marriage to Rachel, a partnership so strong that Robinson "would say to the reporters, what 'we' did on the field, not the royal we, but he sort of felt that Rachel and he did everything together," Burns said.

"Among other things, this is a multigenerational story of an African American family, which you don't get too often. And it's also a love story, which documentaries are not [usually] interested in. You know, documentaries are about politics, and politics remain, to me . . . kind of superficial," he said.

"This is about really deep American stuff, but I love the love story between Jackie and Rachel."

So do President and Michelle Obama.

They appear together in the film to talk about Jackie and Rachel and about the importance of having a haven from the indignities of racism.

"I think that's a sign of his character, that he chose a woman who was his equal. I don't think you would have had Jackie Robinson without Rachel," says Michelle Obama, while the president, catching her drift, flashes a grin.

Rachel Robinson, who accompanied Burns to a PBS session at the Television Critics Association's January meetings, is a retired nurse and educator.

She told reporters that Major League Baseball should go beyond the April 15 celebrations of Jackie Robinson Day.

"They've given out T-shirts and sweatshirts and various things for people to take away, particularly children. There is a lot more that needs to be done, and that can be done, in terms of the hiring, the promotion. We're talking about very few [black] coaches, very few managers," she said, echoing a point her husband, who died in 1972, made decades ago as he played a longer game, one that was always about more than baseball.

When Burns was working on the original Baseball, "we used to say . . . [it] was a sequel to The Civil War. People thought we were crazy. I said, 'Look, the first real progress in civil rights is Jackie Robinson. You don't need to necessarily always know your history through presidential administrations, punctuated by wars,' " Burns said.

"The bottom-up social history . . . whether it's women or labor or race, sometimes tells us volumes more about who we are than the kind of sanitized, top-down version."

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