Column: MLB Can Do More to Honor Jackie

Brooklyn Dodger infielder Jackie Robinson poses in May 1952. (AP Photo) (Dg - AP)

-- Setting aside a day each year to honor Jackie Robinson is wonderful. So is Major League Baseball's decision to retire his No. 42 across the league. Those tributes, however, are easily forgotten once April 15 comes and goes.

If baseball really wants to pay tribute to Robinson and the legacy he left us, every team should crack open their considerable wallets on Sunday and write a check to sponsor a Jackie Robinson Foundation Scholar. Same goes for all the gazillionaires whose career paths would have taken a different turn if not for Robinson.

You really want to honor the man who changed baseball for the better? Then help his foundation level the playing field outside the ballpark.

"It's a way that I think perpetuates the dream of an authentically inclusive society," said Della Britton Baeza, president and chief executive officer of the Jackie Robinson Foundation.

"That's what Jackie wanted: `Just give me an opportunity, and I'll show you I belong here.'"

A year after Robinson died in 1972, his wife Rachel started the foundation and the scholars' program. The idea was to give underprivileged minority students money for college along with a support system to help them succeed at the highest levels.

Students receive $6,000 per year for tuition at the college of their choice. Each March, all of the scholars go to New York for 4 1/2 days of networking and leadership seminars. They're also exposed to cultural events like plays, ballets and operas.

"Every internship, every job I've had the last four years, I've gotten from the networking skills I learned from the Jackie Robinson Foundation," said Judge Gardner III, who already has an engineering job lined up after he graduates from Washington University in St. Louis this spring.

The foundation's 97 percent graduation rate is more than double the national average for minority students, and well above the average for all students.

More than 1,100 scholarships have been awarded, including 266 this academic year. Graduates have gone on to become, among other things, a classical pianist, a partner at Goldman Sachs and the attorney for the Boston Red Sox.

One scholar, Marcus Ellison, was homeless for a brief time while growing up in Maine. Now he's the president of a real estate development firm. He also started a nonprofit program that provides tutoring and college prep services to low-income high school students, and talked Bates College into giving a scholarship to one of the students.

All that, and Ellison is still a senior at New York University.