He broke the color line in April of 1947. The card came a year later, in the first postwar set printed in color — and so the photograph of Jackie Robinson arrived in candy stores as one of the first color images of a Black ballplayer most American children had ever held in their hands. The set broke a line of its own, and it did it by simply putting him in it.
Ninety-eight cards, each a little under two and a half inches wide, each a player set against a flat block of color. Robinson's is yellow. The Leaf Gum Company was not a careful printer — the set is remembered as much for its faults as its firsts, and this card is among its most difficult: the color plates drifted, the inks sat heavy or thin, and the registration wandered often enough that a Robinson with clean edges and true color is genuinely hard to find. The very quality that makes the set historic is the quality it executed worst.
The set broke a line of its own, and it did it by simply putting him in it.
Leaf also became the first major issue to skip-number itself: the checklist runs far past the number of cards that exist, forty-nine of them printed in short supply, so collectors chasing the set were hunting numbers that in some cases were never there at all. Robinson is not among the short prints. He did not need the help.
What he was doing while this card sat in a wrapper is the part worth keeping in mind. Rookie of the Year in 1947, the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1949, and through both seasons the recipient of a volume of abuse that most men would not have survived professionally, under an agreement not to answer any of it. The card records none of that. It is a young man in a blue cap against a yellow field, printed slightly out of register by a gum company in Chicago — which is exactly how the most consequential American story in the sport first reached a child's pocket.