#Jackie Robinson would support George Floyd protests, son says

If trailblazing baseball icon Jackie Robinson were alive today, his son said his socially conscious dad would have given a thumbs up to the protests following the killing of George Floyd — with a caveat.

“I am sure he would support the protests against murder and understand the [deep] feelings created by 245 years of legalized enslavement and 155 years thereafter of injustice, brutality and discrimination,” Brooklyn-bred David Robinson wrote in an email to The Post. “But I believe that he would advise that protest had to be matched and surpassed by love of family and work to fulfill our human potential.”

It was 73 years ago that Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in April 1947 and forever changed race relations in the United States.

Robinson noted his father’s grandmother, “my great grandmother,” was born a slave.

“His mother for most of her life was a sharecropper, domestic servant and a single parent,” Robinson, 68, said. “While anger and rage were natural emotional reactions to his history and the history of millions of his fellow Americans, he learned to evolve as a human being, as my father, to allow love of family to become his dominant life-force.”

David Robinson operates the Sweet Unity Farms coffee co-op in Tanzania. Its profits have been invested back into projects from water management and irrigation to solar panels for electricity.

In 2018, David returned to his hometown when the 500 block of MacDonough Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant was renamed Jackie Robinson Way. Jackie resided at 526 MacDonough St. from 1947 to 1952.

David Robinson and his family were at Citi Field April 15, 2018, for “Jackie Robinson Day” as the Mets and every MLB player donned Jackie’s retired No. 42 to honor his legacy.

This Father’s Day, Robinson wished “to send hearty greetings and best wishes to all the fathers and families in America. My hopes for all fathers, myself included, is that we strive to work and learn to become better role models for and supporters of our children and our families within our homes and in our communities.”

One fond memory of his own father is of the many times he took David fishing.

“Although he did not like to fish, I remember us one day alone in a small boat in the middle of a huge lake in Canada. The shore was a great distance away, but there we were without another boat in sight, David Robinson wrote. “His efforts on his son’s behalf were all the more inspiring because he did not know how to swim.”