American?
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This blog is a hodge podge of anything I happen to feel like writing or sharing. Enzo is short for Vincenzo, my birth name. Feel free to comment if you're so inclined. Or even if you're not leaning.
After a spring training in the segregated South, newlywed Rachel Robinson went to look at an apartment in a white neighborhood in Montreal. A French-Canadian woman who spoke English welcomed her to the home.
''She received me so pleasantly,'' Jackie Robinson's widow recalled. ''Then she poured tea for me and agreed to rent the apartment to me furnished and she insisted I use her things -- like her linens and her china. It was an extraordinary welcome to Canada.''
The event will be attended by the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Montreal's mayor and Robinson's daughter as part of Black History Month.
Robinson, now 88, recalls arriving in Montreal after having survived the Jim Crow South during spring training in Florida.
There they were met with racism at every turn: on whites-only flights, in hotels and restaurants and ballparks. In some cities, they were chased out of town. The couple was twice bumped off airplanes while trying to get to Daytona.
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"This is especially a special moment," said Sharon Robinson, the couple's daughter, who is vice-chairman of the Jackie Robinson Foundation. "I had never been to the home where my parents lived, so this is an emotional experience.
"My mother and father had such positive memories about their time in Montreal," she said. "To have it recognized where they lived in a neighbourhood that welcomed them and supported them then is quite emotional. I'm from Chicago and baseball was a very important part of my life growing up and this part of baseball was particularly important to everybody in the United States," Jacobson said. "So it's an honour to be here and to be able to celebrate this and in particular to be able to celebrate what the people of Montreal did and what they showed to Americans at a time when we weren't particularly as tolerant as we ought to have been."
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