Jules Tygiel is Professor of History at San Fransisco State University and author of Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (Oxford University Press, 1983), for which he won the Robert F. Kennedy Book award in 1984. He is also the author of several articles on Jackie Robinson and baseball in academic and popular journals and magazines such as American Heritage, Journal of Sport History, Sports Illustrated, and Baseball History, and, most recently, he edited The Jackie Robinson Reader (Dutton/ Signet Publishers, 1997).
Dr. Tygiel will make a 50 minute biographical presentation of Jackie Robinson, a man who, according to Tygiel, "clearly exhibited a life of selfless devotion to his community." Robinson not only courageously broke the color barrier in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but after his baseball career he was a tireless devotee of the Civil Rights Movement.
Jules Tygiel earned his B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1969, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1973 and 1977 respectively. He has taught United States history at the University of Tennessee, the University of Virginia, and San Francisco State University. He is currently a National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Professor at Albright College in Reading Pennsylvania.