Last month, Major League Baseball (MLB) celebrated Jackie Robinson Day, an annual event that the league debuted in 2004. Every April 15, each player wears Robinson’s number, 42, to honor the day he broke the baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

For years, many have embraced an oversimplified image of Robinson as a stoic man who endured racist abuse with grace and dignity. In his book, Reclaiming 42: Public Memory and the Reframing of Jackie Robinson’s Radical Legacy, David Naze aims to fill in the politics scrubbed from this narrative while breaking down the sanitized version of Robinson that has permeated the public memory. What emerges is a complex, defiant figure, as opposed to a simplistic symbol of frictionless racial progress. “Often we forget the details of one person’s legacy, either because of the passage of time or because we were never really taught about those details in the first place,” Naze writes.

A lifelong activist, Robinson participated in the World War II–era “Double V” campaign — the effort among black Americans to wage a war against fascism abroad and racism at home — refusing to move to the back of an Army bus in 1944. After his retirement from baseball in 1957, Robinson was a fixture at civil rights demonstrations and, along with Martin Luther King Jr, was named an honorary chairmen of the Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, DC, the following year.