My unit will help students to identify positive role models for their lives and is intended to guide my students into a world of reading. Students will to study the lives of great sports figures to learn what it takes to gain success and serve as a role model for others. Students will learn about the life of Jackie Robinson, what gave his life meaning, and his lifelong struggles to make life better for others. There has been a long line of marvelous athletes in baseball who served as role models for children, but Jackie Robinson's significance in sports was not only as an athlete, but as a pioneer and major influence on American society as a whole. Jackie Robinson was the first African American to integrate major league professional baseball. Jackie Robinson's role in sports was initially extremely difficult because of what appeared at that time to be an insurmountable mountain of racial prejudice to be scaled by African Americans, not only sports, but in all facets of American life. Therefore, Mr. Robinson knew he not only had to be able to outperform his peers daily on the diamond, but he also had to be able to cope with the indignities of being a Black man in what was then a "white man's sport" both on and off the field.