42

Today as a class we went to see the movie of  the year so far in my opinion, "42". We didn't just watch the movie though, we have to blog about it and answer some questions, so here we go. The first question requires to analyze two opposite cultures in the movie, from a regional perspective. The two examples I'm going to use are California and New York. California wasn't in the Civil War hence they didn't have an issue with colored people, California a very accepting culture. Whereas areas such as Brooklyn still had Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were laws that justified blacks being treated as second class citizens. Such as not being allowed to be served at restaurants or using certain bathrooms. Places like California that never had an issue with blacks never had such laws meaning they didn't have a hard time getting rid of them; where Brooklyn did have trouble with it.

The second thing I have to blog about is talking about two examples in the movie of characters that had a struggle with changing their culture towards Jackie Robinson. One character was Eddie Stanky, he was second baseman on the team and just like everyone else on the Dodgers didn't want to play with Jackie Robinson. However, when the Dodgers were playing the Phillies and the manager was yelling insults to Jackie Robinson and Eddie finally heard enough of it and stood up for him. It took Eddie a while and no other teammates said anything, but he did.

Another example would be Pee Wee Reese. One of the Dodger games was in Cincinnati which was almost like a home game for Reese. He got a hate letter about him playing with Jackie. But then he finally overcame the racial wall and put his arm around Jackie on the field and took in all the boos from the crowd, and finally an applause came.

42 is a great movie and I would recommend it to anyone, because its very inspirational and meaningful.

http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/stats/alltime/rosters/brooklyn_dodgers/1947/byPOSN_ABRV.html