Over a decade preceding the civil rights movement, with the help of Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in professional baseball. By doing so, Robinson became one of the most influential figures in sports history by paving the way for minority athletes to be successful for generations to come. Jackie Roosevelt Robinson began to break color barriers from the beginning of his heroic life. In 1920, his mother Mallie Robinson packed up Jackie and his four siblings and moved to Pasadena, California in search of a safer environment due to the fact that georgia had become quite violent towards blacks with the emergence of the Klu Klux Klan and other white-supremacy groups. Pasadena being dominantly white residents. Biographer David Rampersad depicts the Robinson family’s new life begining in a “shabby cold water apartment with three small rooms, and with a tin tub as a kitchen sink near the railroad station” (Rampersad 18). Only a few weeks later, the family was able to move with Burton Thomas, Mallies Brother-in-Law, into a roomy house on 45 Glorieta Street. Although this area was primarily white, it also formed the center of Pasadena’s small black population (18). As Robinson reached his teenage years, he became quite close to neighborhood children. This group comprised of mostly all minorities such as African, Mexican, and Japanese immigrants. All of whom came from poor families and had plenty of free time; they came to be known as the “Pepper Street Gang.” Although Jackie seemed to be at the head of the gang, one of his friends, Ernie Cunningham claimed that “Jackie wasn’t a very likable person, because his whole thing was just win, win, win, and beat everybody” (33). Each of the kids excelled in a sport or two, but Jackie sometimes took it too far when it came to competition and the desire to win, which hindered a couple of his friendships. Pasadena did not have much juvenile delinquency or any real signs of danger. Jackie reminisces, “There was no drugs, no smoking, no liquor, no beating up anybody, nothing of that nature” (34). Robinson continued to state that “we never got into vicious or violent crime, but indulged instead in pranks and petty theft,” such as snatching balls from the golf course and selling them back to the players, and swiping fruit at produce stands (34). It was also at this time where young Jackie grew to understand the weight of Jim Crow laws and he became increasingly intense about it. Especially when it came to the local YMCA, which denied membership to all blacks, despite many attempts by Robinson. The YMCA had beautifully new sports facilities and instead of telling young Jackie “No,” the staff would accept his application which gave him hope, but would only stall and frustrate him (35). At 18 years old, Jackie enrolled at Pasadena Junior College where his natural athletic ability would surpass all competition. Throughout high school, Robinson relatively stayed the same slim weight of only 135 pounds, which caused most people write him off as un-athletic. But he set his sights on the three sports he loved, baseball, basketball, and football. He also planned to compete in track and field against his brother Mack who had won silver in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 (41). In just two years in junior college, Robinson transformed from 135 pounds, to 175 pounds with broad shoulders and reaching his max height of just under six feet tall (55). This transformation would set the stage for collegiate success at UCLA. In 1939, Jackie moved on to enroll at UCLA, where surprisingly, he promised that he would only play football and compete in the broad jump. He decided that he wanted to make education a priority, instead of attempting to be a four sport athlete. Also, his main athletic aspiration at the time was to be on the US olympic team for the broad jump in 1940, but that goal had been shattered due to the raging war in europe, which pulled the US out of the olympics. In addition, this promise was short lived when Jackies oldest brother, Frank, died of a motorcycle accident in the summer of 1939. Jackie was so shaken by this that he felt that the only relief could come from sports. Robinson later became the first UCLA student ever to letter in four sports in the same season, dominating in football, ba