Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography

by Long, Michael G.

  shatter this barrier.

  With Jim Crow on their backs, blacks in Pasadena knew their place

  and condition all too well: they were unemployed or underemployed,

  comparatively poor, and often segregated from whites. Blacks certainly knew they were not supposed to live on all-white blocks. But Mallie

  never cared much for customs or laws that trampled on her freedom,

  and she was not about to start doing so in her new life outside the

  South. So it was virtually unremarkable, at least to those who knew her well, when she boldly stepped over the red real estate lines drawn by Jim Crow.

  She faced immediate and fierce resistance from many of her white

  neighbors. They initially sought to buy her out, but that plan failed miserably when Clara Coppersmith, the only person with the financial

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  21

  wherewithal to execute it, threw her support behind Mallie, who quickly made sure that the Robinson children did chores for Coppersmith

  without pay.

  The neighbors, refusing to surrender, then burned a cross in the

  Robinsons’ front yard, but that neither scared Mallie away nor forced her to restrict her children to the house and the yard. Fearful of blacks wandering freely, neighbors then called the police to report on the

  travels of the Robinson children. One of the neighbors even told the police that his wife was so afraid of blacks that she had not come out of their house since the Robinson family had moved into the neighborhood. When the white police officer passed this troubling news

  on to Mallie, she replied ever defiantly, “I’m afraid she’ll be in that house a lifetime.”11

  Living at 121 Pepper Street, as far as Mallie was concerned, was

  nothing less than God’s will for her life. “Take one step toward God, and he’ll take two toward you” was one of her favorite expressions, and in her mind she had taken that one step when she had purchased the

  house. Having taken two steps toward her, God was now her constant

  companion as she endured the suffering caused by her neighbors,

  and because she felt God was always by her side, she also trusted that everything would one day be OK. Mallie Robinson’s faith made her an

  eternal optimist.

  With confidence in God, Mallie stayed put, demonstrating the

  importance of standing up for what is right, and even followed the

  biblical counsel to overcome evil with good, a tactic that proved relatively successful. Jackie Robinson biographer Arnold Rampersad sug-

  gests that the white residents of Pepper Street eventually accepted the Robinson family because of Mallie’s generous response to their own

  economic needs. “At one point,” he writes, “she even made the Rob-

  inson home a relief center,” sharing leftovers that a local bakery and milkman regularly gave the Robinson family.12 In the face of such free bounty, Mallie’s neighbors found it increasingly difficult to demand that she leave the neighborhood.

  That did not happen overnight, of course, and Mallie sometimes

  resorted to other methods, as she did when confronting a cranky neighbor who kept the balls that young Jackie and his friends accidentally kicked or hit into her yard. The neighbor insisted that all balls that landed in her yard were now her property. Mallie agreed that the boys had no business knocking the ball into the woman’s yard, but she also called the wrath of God down upon her prickly neighbor. “You treat

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  JACKIE ROBINSON

  children this way,” Mallie warned, “and one day God’s going to knock you out of your senses.”13

  Mallie also made sure to fortify her children with racial pride. Underlying her own resolve to stay put on Pepper Street was a deep sense of confidence in the color of her skin—a fervent spiritual conviction that God had made her black, that God wanted her to be black, and that

  her divinely created blackness was a wholly positive characteristic. She sought to instill this same pride in her children so they could withstand the racist taunts and jeers that came their way on Pepper Street and elsewhere in Pasadena.

  She bequeathed racial pride to her children mostly by modeling and

  teaching, with one of her more creative lessons centering on the story of Adam and Eve. In Mallie’s telling, Adam and Eve were originally black but “turned pale” when God caught them eating the forbidden apple

  in the garden of Eden.14 After God scared them so much they turned

  white as ghosts, Adam and Eve gave birth to two sons, one black and

  the other white. The skin color of the black child, of course, witnessed to God’s original hopes for humanity.

  Under Mallie’s spiritual guidance, young Jackie grew proud of the

  color of his skin, believing that God had intentionally created him

  black and that his blackness was no reason for shame. Like his mother, Jackie also stood up for himself, though in different ways, in the face of discrimination and prejudice. At the age of eight, for example, he responded in kind to a girl from across the street who shouted “Nigger!

  Nigger! Nigger!” while he was sweeping the sidewalk.15 The words stung sharply, and Jackie yelled back that she was “nothing but a cracker,” a reply that prompted the girl’s father to burst through their front door and engage in an hour-long rock battle with Jackie.16

  Jackie did not seem inclined to kill his enemies with kindness. But

  Mallie continued on, determined to show Jackie another way, arguably a better way, and she eventually shared leftover baked goods and milk even with those who threw rocks at her children.

  For young Jackie, Mallie Robinson was a model of strength, cour-

  age, resolve—and sacrifice. When there was little food to share among the family, and none to offer the neighbors, she would go without so that her children could eat. And when there was no food or money in

  the house, she would bite her lip and send Jackie and his sister Willa Mae to school without any lunches. “We would get to school so hungry we could hardly stand up, much less think about our lessons,” Jackie later stated.17 But their teachers at Cleveland Elementary School, Miss

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  Gilbert and Miss Haney, rose to the occasion and regularly offered

  Jackie and Willa Mae sandwiches for lunch.

  Mallie continued to sacrifice, and on rare occasions she was able

  to offer her children something special. When Jackie graduated from

  Washington Junior High School in 1935, she celebrated his accom-

  plishments with a special gift. As he recalled the occasion, it was “one of her happiest days . . . and through some miracle she was able to get me my first real suit.” It was something Jackie had wanted, and his

  mother’s surprise brought tears to his eyes. “I remember I cried a little when I saw it,” he recalled, “and my mother said she always believed the Lord would take care of us. Right then and there I never stopped believing that.”18

  Education was important to Mallie, whose formal studies had

  stopped at sixth grade, and equally important was her children’s religious education. Mallie made sure her children attended the local black church, Scott Methodist Church, so they could be instructed in the

  ways of faith. “She had me in Sunday school and church all the time,”

  Jackie later recalled, “and she brought me up a Methodist.”19

  Her abiding hopes for all her children—that they would have faith

  and a solid education—were rooted in her own experiences with her

  father. As a slave in his childhood years, Washington McGriff had

  never learned to read. The lack of an education pained him, and as he grew older he dreamed of being able to read the Bible before he died.

  One day, he dared to share the dream with his yo
ung daughter, and

  when Mallie was just ten years old, she took it upon herself to give him reading lessons on the porch after school. That moving experience left her wanting to educate her own children, and to educate them in the

  ways of faith.

  Jackie did not like attending church, and he told his mother so, suggesting that he could be a decent person without showing up for Sun-

  day morning worship. But Mallie would have none of it. “If you plant a crop and don’t cultivate it, nothing grows,” she explained. “That’s the way with religion; it dries up if you don’t tend it.” Nevertheless, Mallie was not overly forceful, and when the minister at Scott Methodist tried to arrange for Jackie to be baptized, she put the brakes on. “Jack’s got to be sincere,” she told her minister. “He’s got to understand what this means and believe in it.”20

  In his teenage years, Jackie was more interested in the Pepper Street Gang than in formal religion. Not comparable to today’s violent

  street gangs, the Pepper Street Gang consisted of youths from poorer

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  JACKIE ROBINSON

  families—blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics—and their main

  purpose was to hang out together and, when not just standing around, to engage in pranks and petty thefts. Their favorite targets were fruit vendors and local groceries, places with food for growing boys.

  As a leader of the gang, Jackie once enlisted his friends to spread

  thick black tar all over the lawn of a holdout neighbor still giving the Robinsons a tough time because of their skin color. When Mallie

  learned of the prank, she was not pleased, to say the least. “God watches whatever you do,” she had often told him. “You must reap what you

  sow, so sow well.” And now Mallie herself had the perfect reaping in mind: she demanded that Jackie and his friends remove the black tar

  from the lawn. “How we going to get it off?” they complained. “I don’t care,” Mallie said, “just get it off.”21 Like her watchful God, she supervised the scene as the boys cut the tarred blades with scissors or washed them with kerosene and rags.

  The pranks and thefts often landed members of the Pepper Street

  Gang at the local police precinct, where Captain Hugh Morgan would

  use his training in psychology to point the boys in a better direction.

  Jackie first got to know the police precinct when he decided to protest segregation at the community pool by swimming in the local reservoir, forbidden territory for swimmers of any color.

  As Jackie’s confrontations with the police increased, so too did his experiences with Jim Crow in Pasadena. Although an outstanding athlete at the integrated John Muir Technical High School, Jackie con-

  tinued to experience racial segregation at the YMCA, which denied his application for membership, and at local movie theaters, restaurants, and businesses. Local whites enjoyed cheering for him on the sports

  fields and courts, but many could still not stomach the thought of

  admitting him to other shared public spaces.

  Robinson, rather than exploding at the injustices, followed the example of his older brother Mack, who had placed second to Jesse Owens

  in the 200-meter dash at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and channeled

  most of his anger into sports, excelling at football, basketball, track, baseball, and tennis. In his senior year, the local newspaper reported that there was no better athlete at Muir than Jack Roosevelt Robinson.

  After graduating from Muir, Jackie enrolled at Pasadena Junior Col-

  lege, where the tuition was free, the facilities were integrated, and the racial climate was relatively progressive. Jackie’s athletic prowess attracted national attention while he was a PJC student, but racial troubles continued to plague him in Pasadena’s downtown. In January 1938, he

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  acquired a police record when he was arrested on charges stemming from an incident in which he and his friend Jonathan Nolan had angered a

  police officer. The details of the incident remain vague, but it seems Nolan’s singing of “Flat-foot Floogie” had infuriated the officer, and the subsequent protests of the two young men resulted in a night in jail.

  Yet again, Mallie was not pleased, and when she spotted Jackie walking home the next morning—she had hit the streets in search of him—she

  scolded him as if he were a grade-schooler. “You’d just as well bring me a switch,” she said.22 At home, Mallie picked up the phone and chewed out the police for not letting her know that Jackie was in jail all night.

  Mallie worried about Jackie. She had done nearly everything she

  could. She had instructed him in her faith that God made all people

  free and equal. She had taught him about the helpfulness of constant prayer and an abiding trust that God would provide. She had stressed the importance of work and a solid education in and outside the

  church. She had instilled racial pride in him and showed him the value of overcoming evil with good. She had sacrificed for his material and emotional well-being and demonstrated that suffering could redeem

  individual lives and create freedom. She had passed along the virtues of courage and strength, perseverance and resolve, sacrifice and hope. She had even wielded the switch and thrown in a few divine threats here

  and there.

  Jackie was not unmoved by all this. “Besides having faith in my

  mother,” he later stated, “I came to realize through her that I had a lot of faith in God. I came to know that for sure when I was pretty young.

  There’s nothing like faith in God to help a fellow who gets booted

  around once in a while.”23

  Still, Jackie worried Mallie. She feared, above all else, that his aggressive temperament would get the better of him in situations of racial injustice and that he would end up hurt. In fact, when she discovered that he had not slept in his bed and went looking for him, she found herself imagining that white students at a rival school had taken him

  “for a ride” in retribution for having lost both a basketball game and an on-court fight in which Jackie was the star player and fighter.24 Her imagination turned out not to be true, but when Jackie was later sentenced to ten more days in jail, Mallie worried again, even though the presiding judge suspended her son’s sentence.

  But then something happened that eased her anxiety: Jackie found a

  best friend in the new minister of Scott Methodist Church. Her son’s life was about to take a turn for the better.

  2

  “To Seek to Help Others”

  The Spiritual Influence of Karl Downs

  In January 1938, the Rev. Karl Downs stopped his car and rolled down the window at the street corner where Robinson and his friends were

  hanging out.

  “Is Jack Robinson here?” he asked.1

  No one answered.

  Downs was only seven years older than Robinson, but he looked

  nothing like the Pepper Street Gang members. He was a natty dresser, the kind who wore business suits, and he had a scholarly appearance, with round glasses that heightened the effect.

  He was also assertive.

  “Tell him I want to see him at the junior church,” he said before

  driving off.2

  Karl Everett Downs was born into a pastoral home in Abilene, Texas,

  in 1912. His father, the Rev. John Wesley Downs, served as a minister and district superintendent for the Methodist Episcopal Church, and

  his mother, Lucretia Hollis Downs, made sure to steep young Karl and his nine siblings in both church and school.

  Downs showed considerable talent as a student and earned a bach-

  elor of arts degree at the all-black Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, where his interest in music suggested a promising career as an orchestra leader. But he chose the pulpit over the podium and earned a divinity deg
ree from Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta.

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  JACKIE ROBINSON

  While a Gammon student, Downs displayed his academic

  prowess and progressive politics by penning a sharply worded article for The Crisis, the main publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The pointed piece

  criticized college students, especially blacks, for being too timid when facing racial problems. “A downtrodden race, crushed by hardships of severity, looks ardently for its salvation to come from its best prepared men and women,” Downs wrote. “The contemporary Negro students

  cannot hope to make any contribution to this cause unless they shake from their shoulders the shackles of timidity which have grown into

  their lives as a result of slavery’s influence.”3

  Like other ambitious black seminarians from the South, Downs

  then traveled north to bolster his credentials at Boston University, where the social gospel movement, sparked by the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, had found a welcoming home since the turn of

  the century. Rauschenbusch, a liberal Baptist theologian, had authored several influential books that called for Christians to leave behind a narrow focus on individual salvation in heaven and to start establishing peace and justice on earth. For Rauschenbusch and his followers, salvation was social, not just individual; it was about saving society, right here and now, from violence and economic injustice.

  By the time Downs finished his master of sacred theology degree

  in 1937, he was theologically evangelical and socially progressive,

  reflecting both his black church tradition and the liberalism of Boston University.

  Downs then became educational secretary of the Board of Missions of

  the Methodist Episcopal Church, a position that placed him in the company of nationally and internationally known Christian leaders, including the famous evangelist E. Stanley Jones, with whom he made plans

  to travel to India. The national position also gave Downs a number of public speaking opportunities, allowing him to polish skills that would serve him well when he accepted the pulpit at Scott Methodist Church.