As Major League Baseball hosts its season openers this month, it is important to note April 15, 1947 was the first Jackie Robinson Day. Recently April 4, 1968 marked the tragic anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ brilliant second baseman, shattered baseball’s color line when he first took the field 75 years ago. The iconic civil rights leader, King, was 39 years old when he was murdered in Memphis 54 years ago this month.

King and Robinson were both iconic figures that generations revered across racial, socioeconomic and geographic identities. But both legendary men have been enshrined in oversimplified myth so that some salient lessons of their struggles may have been obscured.

Robinson played with an intensity that became legendary for competing with fervor. He demonstrated excellence on and off the field, and changed not only his sport, but the racial landscape of the country. He retired at the end of the 1956 season, preferring to start a career as an executive for the Chock full o’ Nuts coffee company rather than accepting what he believed was a demeaning trade to the crosstown New York Giants.

Like King, Jackie Robinson died too soon. Robinson died in 1972 at the age of 53 of a heart attack, and he was also a diabetic. His life after baseball was reportedly full of frustration; he reportedly lamented the lack of leadership opportunities for African Americans in the sport that had made him famous.

 The prominent myth of Jackie Robinson started as early as 1950, with the feature film “The Jackie Robinson Story.” In this myth, Dodger president and General Manager Branch Rickey dictated the “turn the other cheek” philosophy by which Robinson would have to play.

Through hard work and stunning athleticism alone, he would win over America. Although Robinson understood the limitations of his public persona, he struggled mightily against it, commenting in his 1972 autobiography, I Never Had It Made that from an early age he preferred payback over turning the other cheek.

The brilliance of King’s public life stretched for nearly 15 years through impossible circumstances. He changed jobs, started a family, went to jail, gave speeches that moved the world. He faced setbacks, opposition, and was bugged by the U.S. Justice Department because of his association with alleged Communists, including trusted adviser Stanley Levison.

The myth of King became enshrined in a national holiday after many years of political pushback. Michigan Democratic Congressman John Conyers first proposed a federal holiday just days after King’s 1968 assassination. Only in 1983, as the twentieth anniversary of the March on Washington loomed, did the holiday finally become law.  Twenty-two senators voted against the holiday, after a dilatory filibuster from North Carolina’s Republican Senator Jesse Helms.

For some, this myth reduces the complexity of King’s work to that of a colorblind dreamer, attributed to a single speech that he delivered in 1963. Yet this speech, what many claim is the finest uttered by an American in the twentieth century, can also frame King as both a pragmatist and an idealist.

Yet every year political leaders try to subvert King’s intent. President Ronald Reagan, who signed the holiday into law in 1983, usurped King’s plea in a radio address in 1986 in a speech that opposed racial quotas.

Recently while grilling now confirmed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearings,  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) evoked King’s supposed colorblind vision while attacking Jackson for views he believed advocated critical race theory.

Robinson died before any Black American was provided an opportunity to manage a baseball team. Three years after Robinson’s death, Frank Robinson (no relation) finally broke baseball’s leadership color line when he became player manager for the Cleveland Indians on April 8, 1975.

Robinson went to his grave embittered that the Republican Party —the Party of Lincoln— had become hostile to African Americans. The 1964 Republican National Convention, where Barry Goldwater emerged as the nominee, was so racially charged that Robinson claimed that he knew what it was like to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

To be sure, both King and Robinson were complicated and had flaws—as does every human. Each had many allies and incredibly strong wives who spent decades devoting their own lives to cherished memories of their husbands and their work.

In 1968 Coretta Scott King set up the King Center to promote her husband’s nonviolent philosophy. She remained a tireless protector of her husband’s memory until her death in 2006.

Similarly, Rachel Robinson, who will turn 100 this July, established the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which promotes educational opportunities for racial minorities and preserves her husband’s legacy.

W. E. B. Du Bois famously warned that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” At the end of that century, perhaps in part to the narrowing of the myths of both King and Robinson, far too many people naively believed that the country had conquered that problem.

Now more than two decades into the 21^st century, it may be time to revise the narratives.

Focusing particular scorn on the late Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved, the Republican campaign for Virginia governor recently released a commercial full of code words and racial posturing, all under the guise of “parents’ rights.”

As Glenn Youngkin uses red herring issues to mobilize voters, it is worth remembering the lessons of Indianapolis’ 1971 mayoral race. Short-term political gains might be made by playing to hot-button issues centering on race and public schools. In the long term, not only might those reactionary issues fail to resonate, but the consequences for a community and a political constituency can be brutal.

In 1971, Indianapolis Democrats made an unorthodox choice: They would challenge the Republican incumbent from the right. Using a picket fence in his campaign literature, Democrat John Neff accused his opponent of forcing white suburban families to endure the frightening spectacle of interracial education.

Placed in charge of the Neff campaign was Ralph Murphine, an outsider affiliated with the nationally renowned Matt Reese & Associates. Murphine insisted that the election could be won by playing to the fears of populist reactionary voters. Taking a cue from 1968 third party presidential candidate George Wallace, the Democratic mayoral campaign attacked technocratic experts and the forces of consolidation. The galvanizing issue: busing, which played to the racial fears of metropolitan voters.

Neff’s campaign also found a Wallace surrogate, the exotically named Ja Neen Welch. Welch had gathered attention as a “Wallace girl” during the 1968 presidential election, touring with the candidate as part of an effort to appeal to a kind of chauvinism that relied on sex appeal.

In 1971 Welch showed up on the West side of Indianapolis campaigning for Neff. Her presence, combined with the White Picket fence imagery, and a message of “Neff for your neighborhoods” made it clear: the Neff campaign believed that it could use symbols and code words to appeal to the alienated white working-class voters who had found Wallace so attractive.

It may have done so, but at a considerable cost. Scores of influential African Americans, many of whom were previously Democrats, voted for Republican incumbent Richard Lugar. For instance, Dr. Frank Lloyd, one of the most visible and successful physicians in the city, held an October press conference endorsing Lugar. Denouncing Neff’s xenophobic racism, Lloyd counseled other liberals to join him in voting for Lugar. The Indianapolis Recorder, the city’s African American newspaper, similarly counseled its readers to vote for the young Republican.

On November 2, 1971, Indianapolis voters overwhelmingly rejected Neff and elected Lugar, awarding him nearly sixty percent of the vote. The local Republican Party had run an energized and efficient campaign, full of enthusiasm, big ideas, and quality candidates. The Democrats, on the other hand, had run on fear, innuendo, and reactionary localism.

Moreover, the effects of Democrats’ misguided – and ugly – campaign strategy reverberated for decades. The city of Indianapolis embarked on a sports strategy that helped to rebuild a downtown core, but it avoided confronting trenchant issues of race, economic opportunity, and the manifold problems in public education. As for Neff, his political career never recovered. He died in a plane crash in 1974, and his party did not capture the mayor’s office again until the end of the century.

To be sure, 2021 is not 1971. Nevertheless, as Youngkin and other Republican hopefuls attempt to motivate anxious suburban and exurban voters by pandering to their worst instincts, they not only pander, they provoke fear.  The noisome politics of resentment can push people to the polls. They also can render opposition parties to the dustbin of irrelevance.