Jackie Robinson

The significance of his hometown, Cairo, Ga., is not lost on Willie Harris. It was also the birthplace of a fellow named Jackie Robinson, whose career with the Brooklyn Dodgers changed the face of baseball forever. "It's a great honor to be from the same city," said Harris, the Bowie Baysox second baseman. "There is a lot of history there, the library has a whole section on Jackie Robinson and my senior year the baseball field was named after him. "A lot of people don't know the importance of Jackie Robinson, but me being from there, I am not one of them.

An attorney for Michael Austin convinced a judge yesterday that enough questions about his murder conviction are unresolved that a thorough review of old evidence and new should determine whether he was wrongly convicted. "I think it's safe to say there is enough information presented to the court to warrant continued judicial attention," Judge John Carroll Byrnes said during a hearing in Baltimore City Circuit Court. "I intend to give it just that." Austin, who was led into the courtroom with hands cuffed behind his back, was convicted of felony murder in 1975 and is serving a life term at the Maryland House of Correction.

MIAMI -- It is, at the very least, a lead that gets your attention. "For the past year and a half," it says, "I have been having an affair with a pro baseball player from a major-league East Coast franchise, not his team's biggest star but a very recognizable media figure all the same." Brendan Lemon wrote those words. He's the editor of Out, one of the nation's most widely read gay-interest magazines, and that's how he begins his column in the May issue. Mr. Lemon's unidentified friend is apparently so deep in the closet he sleeps on a hanger.

There was Jackie Robinson, the baseball player. And then there was Jackie Robinson, symbol of the color barrier and an icon of the civil rights movement. There is Sharon Robinson, who was only 6 years old when her father retired from baseball. And then there is Sharon Robinson, keeper of the flame. Being the child of a legend is a full-time job for Sharon Robinson. Literally. She has worked for Major League Baseball since 1997 as director of educational programming. As such, she travels the country teaching schoolchildren the values her father lived.

Calling the murder conviction of an East Baltimore man "a terrible wrong," former Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said yesterday that he would urge the state's attorney to help free him. Attorneys for Michael Austin, whose conviction based on false testimony and flawed evidence was chronicled in Sunday's Sun, expect to file papers this week in Baltimore Circuit Court asking a judge to review his case. Patricia C. Jessamy, the Baltimore City state's attorney, will decide whether to oppose the review, which could lead to Austin's freedom.

BREAKING BASEBALL'S COLOR BARRIER February is African-American History Month, and www.4Kids.org honors Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to break baseball's color barrier. Learn all about Jackie's inspiring life at the AFRO-Americ@ Web site at www.afroam.org / history / Robinson / intro.html. You can read about Jackie's start in sports at UCLA where he excelled in football, track, baseball and basketball. Kid Quest: In what year did Jackie Robinson sign a minor league baseball contract with the Dodgers?

FOR FIFTH-GRADERS at Friendship Valley, baseball and spring training have become more than something to watch on television. It's their language arts assignment. This spring, pupils will spend six weeks reading about the national pastime and writing reports. In April, pupils will tour Oriole Park at Camden Yards. "We always start with the Negro leagues for Black History Month," said Pat McTighe, whose fifth-graders will finish their language arts unit in about two weeks. Last week, her pupils heard a presentation from David Seibert, Western Maryland College's baseball coach.

THE END OF the World Series will close out the baseball season. It also will bring to a close Leonard Coleman's ten-ure as National League president. His departure from Major League Baseball will remove the game's highest-ranking African-American, further eroding the increasingly tenuous connection African-Americans have to a sport responsible for one of the most memorable and important historical symbols of black emancipation -- the signing of Jackie Robinson...

THE MIRACLE OF Sam Lacy isn't his age, which is 95, or his sports column in the Afro-American newspaper, which has been running since the Roosevelt years, or the delight Lacy takes in showing up for work in the pre-dawn darkness, writing his piece, and then heading out to the links for nine holes of golf.It's his new autobiography, "Fighting for Fairness," and the remarkable tone that reflects Lacy exactly: He gives us the facts, and his own cool logic, and leaves aside what must have been his own fears, and anger, and awful loneliness.

It is spring training 1948, and Jackie Robinson is dogging it. The Brooklyn Dodgers' Rookie of the Year arrives four days late and 15 pounds overweight, and spends much of practice joking with reporters.Sam Lacy is not among them. To the sports editor of the Baltimore Afro-American Robinson appears blase, indifferent. And fat. Disgraceful, writes Lacy, the lone scribe - black or white - to rebuke the Dodgers star for his "lackadaisical attitude" and for "laying down" on the job.Within a week, Robinson is his old self - lean, focused and bent on proving Lacy wrong.