Rachel Robinson, with a story all her own, deserves a celebration, too

Jackie Robinson died young.

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Weakened by heart disease and diabetes, the retired ballplayer and civil rights titan died on Oct. 24, 1972, at the age of 53. Robinson was survived by his two living children, Sharon and David, and his wife, Rachel, to whom he’d been married since 1946. As a sport, a people and a nation mourned the loss of an icon, the Robinson family faced the absence of a father, a husband, a friend.

Sharon, David and especially Rachel were simultaneously handed a weighty responsibility: the preservation of a legend’s legacy. As the inscription on Jackie’s tombstone at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, so powerfully reads, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

In the 53 years since Jackie’s death, Rachel Robinson has carried out that mantra to the absolute fullest.

In July, she will turn a remarkable 104 years old. That means Rachel has lived longer — decades longer — in the afterglow of Jackie’s life than she did by his side. In that time, she has kept his flame burning, in the vivid retellings of Jackie’s trials and triumphs, in the heartfelt recollections of their marriage and in the community work she has overseen as part of the Jackie Robinson Foundation.

Rachel Robinson’s story is intrinsically linked to that of her husband. It is also a story all her own.

“I know that every successful man is supposed to say that without his wife he could never have accomplished success,” Jackie wrote in the preface of his autobiography, “I Never Had It Made.” “It is gospel in my case. Rachel shared those difficult years that led to this moment and helped me through all the days thereafter. She has been strong, loving, gentle, and brave, never afraid to either criticize or comfort me.”

Rachel Isum was born on July 19, 1922, in Los Angeles, just miles away from the UCLA campus where she would, 19 years later, meet Jackie.

“The word that was out that I’d heard about him was: Big man on campus,” Rachel admitted during a 2016 panel. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s terrible, that’s going to bring an egotistical creature to me.’”

Instead, she fell in love with Jackie during their first meeting. They dated for two years and announced their engagement in 1943 while he was serving in the Army. They married three years later, in 1946. Why didn’t they marry sooner?

“I’d seen girls get married and not finish college or get married and get pregnant and not be able to finish college,” Rachel explained in a 2010 interview. “I was dead set on I was gonna finish, and that was my priority, and nothing else was going to interfere with that.”

Rachel Robinson (left, pictured here with Billye Aaron, the wife of Hank Aaron) is a mother, nurse, professor, philanthropist and activist, in addition to being the wife of Jackie Robinson. (Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Jackie Robinson Foundation)Eugene Gologursky via Getty Images

Throughout Jackie’s most tumultuous times, Rachel was a rock, there by his side as he broke baseball’s color barrier. While pregnant, she traveled with him for most of 1946, the oft-forgotten year that Jackie spent with the minor-league Montreal Royals before making his debut with the Dodgers in 1947.

“Often I would come home tired, discouraged, wondering if I could go on enduring the verbal abuse and even the physical provocations and continue to ‘turn the other cheek,’” Jackie wrote of that trying first season of professional baseball. “Rachel knew exactly how I felt and she would have the right words, the perfect way of comforting me. Rachel’s understanding love was a powerful antidote for the poison of being taunted by fans, sneered at by fellow players and constantly mistreated because of my blackness.”

As Jackie journeyed through his big-league career, enduring a storm of racist hatred on the path to history, Rachel ran the household, raising three children while putting her own career on hold. But two years after Jackie retired from baseball in 1956, becoming an executive at a coffee company, Rachel enrolled in a psychiatric nursing program at New York University.

With their kids still in school, Rachel would prepare dinner and put them to bed before studying late into the night after her husband had fallen asleep. She received her master’s degree in 1961 and soon thereafter helped to establish the first psychiatric day hospital in the nation, helping mentally ill patients work through their difficulties. She was later recruited by the Yale School of Nursing to be an assistant professor and the director of the university’s community mental health center. 

She worked there for seven years, leaving only upon Jackie’s death in 1972.

It was a time of great tragedy for Rachel. The couple’s eldest son, Jackie Jr., died in a car accident in 1971. In 1973, Rachel lost her mother, Zelle Isum. All three — Jackie, Jackie Jr. and Zelle — are buried alongside one another in the family’s plot in Brooklyn.

In 1973, Rachel began her next act, redirecting her focus and talents toward preserving Jackie’s legacy and pushing for social justice. That year, she established the Jackie Robinson Foundation, a not-for-profit focused on providing educational opportunities for minority students in need of financial support. As recently as 2024, Rachel has been a consistent presence at the ballyard on Jackie Robinson Day, a league-wide tradition first held in 2004 to celebrate her husband and champion the foundation’s efforts. The organization has donated more than $95 million in grants and direct contributions to more than 1,700 Jackie Robinson scholars.

Rachel, at 103 years old, still serves on the board.

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