As these photos make clear, Robinson’s decade in major-league baseball was just one act in a remarkably rich and complex life — one of vision, fortitude, dignity and endurance — shaped by the currents and contours of American history even as it recast them.

There was also Jackie the boy, grandson of slaves , hauled cross-country as a toddler from a life of sharecropping to the promise of Pasadena by a determined single mother, a Great Migration pioneer.

And Jackie the amateur athlete, his college exploits chronicled by a booming black press . When The Pittsburgh Courier’s Randy Dixon wrote about the injustice of a segregated sport passing up a star in 1941 — “Exhibit A in So-Called Democracy, the Case of Jackie Robinson” — he didn’t even mean baseball. Robinson had just dazzled in an exhibition between college all-stars and the Chicago Bears, outshining a roster studded with N.F.L. first-round picks.