The Simon Wiesenthal Center says that racial epithets scrawled on a statue of Jackie Robinson are an attack “on all the values of social progress and equality” that the baseball legend stood for.
The organization yesterday condemned the vandalism and urged police to quickly apprehend the perpetrators.
Authorities are investigating swastikas and hate speech scrawled on the statue of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese outside Coney Island’s MCU Park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones. The white Reese publicly befriended the black Robinson, helping to break baseball’s color line in 1947.
The words “Heil Hitler,” an expletive and racist epithets were discovered Wednesday scrawled on the statue in black marker.
The Cyclones marked the return of pro baseball to Brooklyn, which lost the Dodgers to LA in 1957.