But when the players were taken to Sanford, 40 miles away, for workouts, a local white supremacist who said he represented a hundred others accosted a visiting African-American sportswriter, Wendell Smith, and warned, using a racial slur, of serious trouble unless Robinson and Wright left town fast. Wanting to avoid a dangerous eruption, Rickey abruptly moved all of his players back to Daytona Beach.

Later, when the Royals returned to Sanford for an advertised exhibition game, the city’s police chief appeared and prevented Robinson (whom the Baltimore Afro-American sportswriter Sam Lacy called “a man in a goldfish bowl”) from playing.

When the Dodgers and the Royals went to Cuba (where they had also trained in 1941 and 1942) the following year, Robinson expected, as he later wrote, that a “country of non-whites” would not replicate Florida’s “racist atmosphere.”

But he was furious to discover that while white Dodgers stayed in the luxurious waterfront Hotel Nacional, and while white Royals stayed at a new military school, he and his black teammates — Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe and Roy Partlow — would bunk at what The New York Sun called the “musty, third-rated” Hotel Boston. Rickey confessed to Robinson that he had asked for the segregated rooms, explaining, “I can’t afford to take a chance and have a single incident occur.”

By 1948, with Robinson a full-fledged Brooklyn Dodger, Rickey and a fellow part-owner of the team, Walter O’Malley, opted to confront the spring training problem head-on by taking over a decommissioned naval air station in sleepy Vero Beach, Fla., which soon became a national baseball landmark called Dodgertown.

Although Robinson found Dodgertown “like being confined to a reservation,” the camp, with its own barracks and dining halls, would liberate the team from Jim Crow. Players called their new baseball diamonds “Ebbets Field No. 2.”

But Dodgertown itself could not solve the larger problem of racial separation in the Grapefruit League. More than a decade after Robinson joined the Dodgers, black players for other teams were still shunned by many Florida hotels and restaurants. African-American spectators in West Palm Beach were forced to enter the baseball park by slipping through a gap in the stadium fence.