Jackie Robinson in Montreal

It was a fair expectation. The Robinsons had recently experienced extreme racial prejudice during spring training in deeply segregated Florida, so Rachel anticipated the same treatment as she rang the doorbell. Instead, the landlady answered the door smiling, welcomed her in, showed her around and even insisted that the couple use her linens, china and glassware. “She was not discriminating against me,” Rachel noted in a 2005 interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project (NVLP), a series of interviews with Black leaders in the United States. “She was welcoming me in a very different way.” As it turns out, this was just the beginning of a relationship with the city that would change her husband — and baseball — forever. 

Eighty years ago, on April 18, 1946, Jackie Robinson broke Minor League Baseball’s colour barrier when he stepped up to the plate as a member of the Montreal Royals. Black athletes hadn’t been able to play in Minor or Major League Baseball since the 1880s, but that era ended on Oct. 23, 1945, when Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey signed Robinson to a Minor League contract to play for the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal. 

Robinson later said it was the friendly reception he received in Montreal that helped him become the legendary player he was with the Dodgers — where he would be a six-time All-Star, win National League Player of the Year and help the team win the World Series in 1955. In an interview with Star Weekly in 1957, Robinson said, “I owe more to Canadians than they’ll ever know. In my baseball career they were the first to make me feel my natural self.” 

Kids like Mitzi Melnick and Chuck Este — then 15 and six, respectively — were dazzled by Robinson. Melnick, who later had a son, Mitch, who became a sports-radio personality, would take the streetcar with her friends to watch the Royals at Delorimier Stadium. She later recalls in True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson by Kostya Kennedy, “Robinson was the player we were there to see. He got a standing ovation every time he got a hit. He just brought such excitement, the way that he played. You would be watching him and you would also be looking around and connecting with the other people there with you, like, ‘Isn’t this great?’ ” 

“People headed out to the park, expecting him to do something magnificent,” Este, who became a baseball player signed by the San Francisco Giants organization, adds in Kennedy’s book. “And we would wait for them to come back and tell us if he did. He was like our version of Maurice Richard.” 

The fact that Montreal was chosen as the city to integrate Minor League Baseball gave a special sense of pride to the people who lived there, especially to Black Montrealers. “For us that year it was different, it felt different,” recalls Montrealer and future Canadian Football League player Ivan Livingstone, who was 15 in 1946. “As soon as you got near the park, you got the energy. There were not a lot of Black people in the stands, but we gained a level of respect. I remember people smiling at us, as if we were associated with Jackie, as if we had something to do with it! And the truth is, we kind of felt like we did have something to do with it. Like we were on the inside.” 

“In the alleys all of the youngsters playing ball wanted to be Jackie Robinson”

After the victory, the Montreal crowd rushed the field and chanted Robinson’s name. “Jackie came out and the crowd surged on him,” wrote reporter Sam Maltin in the Pittsburgh Courier. “Men and women of all ages threw their arms around him, kissed him and pulled and tore at his clothes, and then carried him around the infield on their shoulders, shouting themselves hoarse. Jackie, tears streaming down his face, tried to beg off further honors.” 

After he changed, the crowd still followed him and chased him down the streets, wanting to touch him one last time. “When I hear of bad things that are happening in other places — where people are fighting or being violent and are trying to exclude African-Americans — I think back to the days in Montreal. It was almost blissful,” Rachel Robinson told the Globe and Mail in 2013. 

In 1948, Robinson reflected on his time in Montreal in his other autobiography, My Own Story: “As my plane roared skyward and the lights of Montreal twinkled and winked in the distance, I took one last look at this great city where I had found so much happiness. ‘I don’t care if I never get to the Majors,’ I told myself. ‘This is the city for me. This is paradise.’ ”  

“There were not a lot of Black people in the stands, but we gained a level of respect”