When Time magazine conducted a poll in 1947 with the aim of identifying the most popular person in the United States, Bing Crosby came out on top. Close behind was Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who, earlier in the year, had become the first African American to compete in the major leagues. Not everyone had cheered that seismic event. Some teams threatened to strike rather than play against a team including Robinson. Individual opponents greeted his appearance on the field with shouts of “Hey, nigger, why don’t you go back to the cotton field, where you belong?” That, and much worse.

Robinson channelled his anger into performance. Outwardly he bore the insults with a stoicism strengthened by his prior experience of racism as a teenager in Pasadena, when a sheriff pulled a gun on him for daring to swim in a municipal pool, and while serving with the US forces in 1944. As an infantry lieutenant at Fort Hood in Texas he had been court-martialed after challenging the driver of an army bus who commanded him, in contravention of a military anti-segregation order, to move to the back. The charges against him were later dismissed.

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Three years later, in his rookie season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he attracted enough votes in Time’s poll to put him second in the country’s affections only to a vastly successful entertainer, and his emergence was taken as a sign that things were changing for black people in the US, however slowly and painfully. Eight years later the civil rights movement would get its next significant boost when Rosa Parks, taking a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, refused the driver’s instruction to give up her seat in the “coloured section” of his vehicle to a white customer after all the seats in the white section had been taken.

Who would win such a popularity poll in today’s US? Donald Trump, probably. But close behind might come Colin Kaepernick, the American footballer whose gesture of protest against the deaths of innocent black people at the hands of the police turned into the “take a knee” movement which so quickly provoked the US president into a tantrum of distorted patriotism.

What Kaepernick’s place in the headlines demonstrates, of course, is that the United States’ racial problems did not disappear on 15 April 1947, when Robinson left the Montreal Royals, a minor-league team, to sign with the mighty Dodgers. He was 28, and the war had already taken what should have been some of the prime years of a sporting career that began when he became the first UCLA student to represent the college in four sports: baseball, basketball, gridiron football and track, in which he became the national college long-jump champion. At the time, baseball was thought to be the weakest of his disciplines.

On Robinson’s arrival at the legendary Ebbets Field his manager, Leo Durocher, moved swiftly to suppress unrest among some of his other players. “He’ll put money in your pockets,” Durocher assured them, adding a threat to trade any player who continued to protest. Among those who gave their unstinting support was the shortstop Pee Wee Reese, a future hall-of-famer, who had been raised in Kentucky and had never previously shaken hands with a black man.

Robinson’s first home game was attended by 26,623 people, more than half of whom were black. “No American,” the sports writer George Vecsey claimed in his 2006 history of baseball, “has ever carried the weight of racial progress, plus his own career, as publicly as Jackie Robinson did.”

Despite the antagonism he encountered inside and outside the major-league ballparks, Robinson prospered in Brooklyn, winning six National League pennants and, in 1955, the World Series, beating the New York Yankees – including Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra – by four games to three. By then, at 36, he was past his best, and for the deciding game he was omitted from the starting lineup for the only time in his seven World Series appearances, replaced at third base by Don Hoak.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colin Kaepernick, centre, and his former San Francisco 49ers team-mates Eli Harold and Eric Reid take a knee during the national anthem in 2016. Photograph: Michael Zagaris/Getty Images

Robinson’s great gift had been stealing bases. “Perhaps the most exciting of all moments in baseball,” Roger Kahn called it in The Boys of Summer, his portrait of the early-50s Dodgers. “Robinson could steal and bunt and hit and run,” Kahn wrote. “He had intimidating skills, and he burned with a dark fire. He wanted passionately to win. He charged at ball games. He calculated his rivals’ weaknesses and measured his own strengths and knew – as only a very few have known – the precise move to make at precisely the moment of maximum effect. His bunts, his steals and his fake bunts and fake steals humiliated a legion of visiting players. He bore the burden of a pioneer and the weight made him more strong.”

Robinson retired in 1956. At the end of the following season, having been refused permission to build a new stadium in Brooklyn to replace the ageing Ebbets Field, the Dodgers’ owner – a property developer named Walter O’Malley – moved the club lock, stock and barrel to Los Angeles. They played in the Memorial Coliseum until Dodger Stadium, built on a parcel of land formerly known as Chavez Ravine and purchased from Mexican immigrants panicked into selling their homes cheap, opened in 1962.

This week the LA Dodgers began their attempt to win a sixth World Series title since a relocation that is still mourned in Brooklyn. In Wednesday’s opener against Houston Astros they won 3-1 in their own ballpark, thanks to the pitching of Clayton Kershaw and home runs from Chris Taylor and Justin Turner. On Wednesday the Astros responded with a thrilling 7-6 victory to tie the series, which moves back to Houston for game three on Friday.

Kahn, who became close to Jackie Robinson while covering the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune in 1952 and 1953, celebrates his 90th birthday on Monday. The Boys of Summer remains the best book on sport ever written in the English language. His friend died 45 years ago this week, aged 53, of complications associated with the diabetes that had helped to bring a premature end to his career at the top. “If one can be certain of anything in baseball,” Kahn wrote, “it is that we shall never see his like again.”

Come the third week of December, it would represent a fine tribute to Robinson’s great achievements if Kaepernick’s quiet but hugely resonant protest earned him the BBC’s overseas sports personality of the year award. You’d pay to see Trump’s face then, wouldn’t you?