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The city was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ minor league, AAA team. It was also a wildly open place. In 1946, it jitterbugged with gangsters, cabaret singers, burlesque performers, restaurateurs, impresarios, poets, hockey stars and thousands of Jews, Blacks, Arabs, Italians, Irish, Frenchmen and Englishwomen; all of them kneeling at the altar of possibility in a mid-century era struggling to move past the sorrow of its war-torn first half. If the rest of Canada was temperate-minded and careful and Protestant and straight, Montreal in 1946 was beyond any of the country’s — or continent’s — imaginings; safer — if no less corrupt — than Chicago; more beautiful than Toronto or Vancouver; and more progressive, and multi-racial, than New York City. Here, Rufus Rockhead ran the first integrated jazz club in North America while Lili St Cyr played sold-out shows at the Gayety, every night like New Year’s Eve. It was against this backdrop that the greatest story in the history of pro sport began; a story that would change and affect the way we live.

Hector Racine was the Royals’ sartorial and wise Quebec-born president. Where other white minor league owners would have been loath to allow a black athlete on their all-white team, Racine embraced the challenge. He personally shepherded the Royals through spring training that year, where the team was met with resistance and bigotry every step of the way. In Sanford, Fla., the police chief threatened to cancel the game if Robinson played. In Jacksonville, the team arrived to find the stadium padlocked, and matches were suspended due to racial pressure from the KKK, who threatened to hunt Robinson down and string him up from the bleachers. Racine’s memories of the times aren’t so much about the triumph of integration, but rather the fear that this great experiment of athletic integration would fail terribly, and a unified playing field would remain a dream.