The Black Bruins: The Remarkable Lives of UCLA's Jackie Robinson, Woody Strode, Tom Bradley, Kenny Washington, and Ray Bartlett

by James W. Johnson

  Southern Branch recognized that college football was the most popular sport in the country, and it wanted to take part in it. College football outranked Major League Baseball because baseball teams were limited to the East Coast and Midwest. Professional basketball was still a dream, and college basketball was in its fledgling state. With a built-in fan base of students and alumni, universities and colleges drew large crowds in their communities. The Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) was no different.

  The football game on a college campus was the highlight of almost a weeklong spectacle of bonfires, pep rallies, homecoming parades, bands, and card stunts leading up to the hard-hitting action. Postgame parties brought the week to a close. Southern Branch wanted a piece of the action.

  Its desire to shoot for the big time in football came with the hiring of forty-five-year-old Bill Spaulding as its coach and athletic director in 1925. He had been coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers the previous three seasons, and his record had been 11-7-4. Previously Spaulding—nicknamed “Bunker Bill” because of his love of golf—had coached fifteen years at Western State Teachers College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he had only two losing seasons. Spaulding had also been the head basketball and baseball coach.

  At Western State Spaulding had black running back Sam Dunlap, who had been turned away by the University of Michigan because of his race. Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne called Dunlap one of the most talented players he had ever seen. In 1915 Culver Military Academy refused to play Western State if Dunlap played. He sat out the game, even though the school president said he would support him if he wanted to play. In another instance, Spaulding kicked a player off the team when he refused to play alongside Dunlap.

  Two years before Spaulding’s arrival, Southern Branch had fielded a black player, Jefferson Brown, who lettered at least two years in football and boxing. Little is known about Brown except that he “played an excellent game at end, and considering his light weight he was an offensive player of great ability.” Next to him in a photo from that time is another African American, but it is unknown whether he was an athlete.

  As Southern Branch coach, Spaulding received a five-year contract at $10,000 a year. He was soft-spoken and rarely raised his voice, but he could be persuasive. Never did he scold or ridicule his players; he maintained a good sense of humor even when they lost. He became a beloved figure on the UCLA campus. (The Bruins’ football practice field south of Pauley Pavilion is named for him.)

  In the same year that Southern Branch hired Spaulding, the school also decided it needed a campus. The California Board of Regents agreed to build a new campus in Westwood, and it opened in September 1929. Writers for the Works Program Administration’s Federal Writers Project described the new campus as follows: “[UCLA] stands in extensive lawns crowning a broad terraced elevation overlooking rolling valleys, plains, and low hills. Behind the blue-misted Santa Monica Mountains form an irregular skyline with ice plant, but lack the ivy and venerable shade trees of older institutions of learning; the grouping of these building has the efficiency and orderliness possible only when a full grown institution is transplanted to a new site.”

  On the first day of practice for the 1925 season Spaulding had the woefully out-of-shape Bruins running ten-yard wind sprints, up and back. If they didn’t like that, they had to run a quarter mile around the track as a penalty.

  Immediately Spaulding put together three straight winning seasons, including victories over Pomona, Occidental, and Whittier. In his first season the Cubs’ record was 5-3-1, despite an 82–0 shellacking by the Stanford University Indians. “Phew,” said Spaulding. “What a track meet. But we will be back.” The game was scheduled too early because we weren’t ready,” Spaulding said after the game. While the team was gaining some notice, USC was referring to the Southern Branch school as “the Twig.”

  The university’s goal was to join the PCC, but the Cubs had a long way to go. In 1926 Spaulding didn’t do much better, finishing 5-3. After accumulating a 6-2-1 record in 1927, the Cubs felt they were ready to join the PCC. The conference thought so too, and UCLA started the 1928 season in the PCC. During that period Southern Branch changed its name to the University of California at Los Angeles and the team name to the Bruins. But the Bruins were still overmatched. They lost their only four conference games but won four out-of-conference games and tied one. Stanford manhandled the Bruins 45–7, and the two teams didn’t play again for four years. The Bruins were outscored by their PCC opponents 129–19 but trampled their other opponents 152–7. One oft-told story had it that the team was so bad against its PCC competition that Spaulding had the players spend ten minutes on workouts and two hours of practicing goal-line stands. Once during a game at the University of Oregon, the Bruins reportedly punted from behind their own goal line twenty-three times. “What they lacked in size they made up in slowness,” one wag wrote.

  Perhaps the lack of decent facilities hurt the Bruins. When they moved to Westwood, their practice field was no better than their previous field, and it left a lot to be desired. It was described as a “large-size honest-to-God dust bowl, in which a short player might get lost after dark and have to be searched for with dogs and flares.”

  In 1929, before the Bruins were to play USC for the first time, Spaulding said they “were not likely to be slaughtered as some folks suspect. I would not be surprised if there was no score in the first half.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. USC, which would later become UCLA’s cross-town rival, ran up 712 yards of rushing. By halftime the score was 32–0. The Bruins lost 76–0 before thirty-five thousand fans. One of the UCLA players remarked, “I think we had eight or ten people on our whole team who could have made [the USC] squad.”

  The results the next year against USC were not much better, the Bruins losing 52–0. The two schools agreed not to play again until 1936. (Spaulding never did beat the Trojans; he did have one tie before “retiring” to handle the athletic director’s job after the 1938 season.) PCC schools pummeled the Bruins, and it wasn’t until 1929 that they won their first conference game, beating Montana 14–0 before forty thousand spectators at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. “It helped us in getting kids to come to UCLA,” one player said.

  Beginning in 1928 USC and UCLA shared the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, drawing big crowds to see the games as the sport’s popularity exploded. (The Coliseum was built in 1923 in Exposition Park, across the street from the USC campus, at a cost of more than $950,000. It held 75,000 spectators. In 1930 it was expanded to seat 101,000. It also became the home of two Olympic Games.)

  In 1931 UCLA played Northern California powerhouse, the St. Mary’s Gaels, and pulled off a 12–0 upset. The victory proved big because UC Berkeley hadn’t been able to beat the Gaels and USC had lost to St. Mary’s earlier in the season 13–7. “That was the making of UCLA,” said fullback Norman Duncan. The Bruins’ record that year was 3-4-1. It was not much improvement, but they were more competitive. In 1932 the Bruins won their first five games, including one over Stanford, but then lost four of their last five to finish 6-4.

  In 1933 the Bruins’ record was 6-4-1 but was notable because an African American played for UCLA for the first time: “Sad Sam” Storey, a transfer from Los Angeles Junior College, played guard. The Los Angeles Times wrote that “the big colored boy has so impressed Spaulding to date that Bill thinks the fellow may be just what is needed to put a lot of dynamite in the Bruin offense.” The Times also ran a photo of Storey with arms up, trying to break up a pass. The caption read, “It looks as though the theme song should be ‘All God’s Chillun Got Wings.’”

  In announcing his plans for Storey, Spaulding pointed out that he had coached Sam Dunlap at Western State. “The best player I ever coached was a Negro and oddly enough his first name was Sam,” Spaulding told the Los Angeles Times. Storey’s grandson recalled in 2014 that his grandfather had told him that “all the racism he experienced from UCLA and other teams seems unreal in today’s terms, but he
said it was normal back then.” He said his grandfather made third-team All-PCC. He said Spaulding implied that if Storey had been white, he would have been an All-American.

  By 1935 Spaulding’s Bruins had improved enough, at 4-1, to finish in a three-way tie for the PCC championship with Stanford and UC Berkeley. UCLA was slowly getting better against tough PCC competition and was willing to take a chance on recruiting five black football players over the next three years. Five black players on the same team? It was unheard of in those days, especially with the racial divide that existed across the country.

  While UCLA may have been more progressive toward minority students than most other universities, not all was perfect on the Westwood campus. It is a delusion to think otherwise.

  Bill Ackerman noted that in the mid-1930s the political activities of a minority of students “tended to create an impression of disloyalty to California and to the country. University officials then restricted the use of campus facilities for political purposes.”

  As Jackie Robinson’s biographer Arnold Rampersad pointed out, there were three UCLAs: the original old campus downtown, the one at Westwood, and the one for black students. Because Jackie Robinson lived in town, he attended the commuter school, the old campus, where he joined no more than fifty other African American students. If blacks experienced the most racism on campus, they were not alone. They were joined by Asian American and Jewish students, who complained they were left out of social life.

  Although Tom Bradley grew up not far from Woody Strode, it is doubtful they would have known each other until they attended UCLA because Strode was three and a half years older than Bradley. Bradley may not have known Kenny Washington until they met on the football field in high school. Bradley may have known Jack Robinson in those years. Curtis Howard, a mutual friend, told an interviewer simply that “Bradley also knew Robinson.”

  Bradley has said he knew Robinson, Strode, and Washington, who were teammates on the track team, but it is clear that he didn’t spend much time with them. When he wasn’t studying or involved in extracurricular activities, he was on the track training year round. “We really didn’t socialize much,” he said. “There wasn’t a heck of lot of social activities for us.”

  Bradley was one of two blacks on the relay team. The other, Tom Berkley, became a respected attorney. As noted, Robinson, Strode, and Washington were Bradley’s teammates at one time or another. Robinson primarily participated in the broad jump, Strode the shot and discus and was a perfect fit for the decathlon, and Washington also put the shot.

  Robinson tended not to take part in campus activities as some of the other players did. Social gatherings were pretty much off limits to the blacks, but nor did Robinson join organizations representing African Americans. Robinson also was bothered by the fact that the school newspaper, the Daily Bruin, referred to the black players by their race; he thought such references meant they weren’t completely accepted by the student community. He remarked once that he was treated like a hero when playing in front of a huge crowd on the football field, but as soon as the game was over, he was simply Jackie Robinson, the Negro.

  Blacks could not live in Westwood, were not welcomed at student parties, and were denied campus jobs. The Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) never had a black member, nor were there any black professors on campus. Black athletes were somewhat of an exception to the rule. They were treated more favorably, particularly because the campus knew that they would help lift the school’s sports program onto a par with other PCC schools. “UCLA was the first school to really give the Negro athlete a break,” Bartlett said.

  During the 1940s barbers in Westwood refused to cut African Americans’ hair. Those in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps were severely disciplined for showing up late for muster one time. They explained that they had had to go to Santa Monica to get their required weekly haircut and couldn’t return in time. That brought down the wrath of the American Youth for Democracy (a youth wing of the Communist Party) and the Daily Bruin, which put pressure on the barbers. Marches through the streets of Westwood got the barbers to acquiesce to student demands.

  Bill Ackerman noted that when UCLA elected its first black student body president, Sherrill Luke, in 1949–50, it signaled “the explicit progress of racial acceptance” on the campus. (Luke also was the school’s head yell leader. He went on to become a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.) While Luke’s election was a milestone, others preceded him in student politics. Kenny Washington was one of them. He sat on the Student Council in 1941 and became embroiled in the controversy over the school’s theater production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As Ackerman put it, “Outside distress was agitated by concern over the use of racial stereotypes in the play based on the famous novel.” Washington was appointed head of a committee to investigate. “Kenny was a really terrific youngster,” Ackerman said. “He was liberal-minded and full of common sense.” Washington’s committee issued a report saying that the play was not degrading to blacks and that it was “simply a play full of grand entertainment.”

  5

  Obstacles to Overcome

  “Somewhere behind the Sambo masks superimposed by a racist culture were the actual young black athletes.”

  —Michael Oriard, King Football

  Of the thirty-eight African Americans playing football at major universities in the late 1930s, most never started a game. The prevailing factor in whether a black would start a game was that he had to be greatly superior to the white player he would replace. That was a rare occurrence. That three blacks started for UCLA in 1939 was extraordinary and helped move college football a step closer to integration. Jackie Robinson didn’t start the opening game in 1939. He had to prove his worth, and once he showed his talent in that first game, he started every game thereafter except when he was injured.

  In 1936 Edwin Bancroft Henderson, the African American civil rights activist, physical educator, and sports historian, noted, “To make a success in team athletics, the colored boy must be superior. Sometimes color aids him by marking him conspicuously in the course of the activity, but frequently it identifies him as the bull’s eye for the shafts of the opposition.” That certainly was true of the UCLA blacks, who often faced teams whose players tried to hurt African American players by kneeing them or rubbing their faces in the lime chalk lines on the field. Certainly they heard racial taunting from the sidelines as well. Although it didn’t appear to be the case at UCLA, blockers purposely failed to do their jobs so that blacks running with the ball were stopped cold for no gain

  Virtually all of the black players who suited up for major universities were based in the North and Midwest. They often were subjected to the indignity of being left at home when their teams traveled to Southern schools, in a “gentleman’s agreement” between the two schools. They also would be held out of games when Southern teams traveled north to play. In 1930, when the Ohio State Buckeyes were to play Navy in Maryland, Ohio State officials proffered that they planned to protect a black player from the “unpleasant experience of probable race discrimination manifested in a Southern city.” College administrators used that lame excuse over the next thirty years.

  The gentleman’s agreements began to fade in the mid-1930s. Roy Wilkins, who was then editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, noted that in a 1936 game between the University of North Carolina (UNC) and New York University (NYU) in Yankee Stadium an NYU black played almost the entire game. “The University of North Carolina is still standing and none of the young men representing it on the gridiron appears to be any worse off for having spent an afternoon competing against a Negro player. It is a fairly safe prediction that no white North Carolinian’s daughter will marry a Negro as a result of Saturday’s play, much to the chagrin of the peddlers of the bugaboo of social equality.”

  Wilkins, who later became the NAACP’s executive director, saw the UNC-NYU game as a momentous development. If those two schools could play without incident, so could others
, especially if Northern schools demanded it, and racial equality could be attained. Such play was about to take place in the West when UCLA and its black players took on four Southern schools—the University of Missouri, Texas A&M, Southern Methodist University (SMU), and Texas Christian University—all in Los Angeles.

  As Michael Oriard pointed out in his book King Football, the national press usually ignored the benching of black players, as did local newspapers. Only some of the biggest black newspapers, such as the California Eagle, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier, brought the benching to their readers. The Communist Party’s Daily Worker also denounced the situation, Oriard wrote. The black newspapers turned their wrath on the Northern schools but not the Southern colleges.

  Henderson almost presciently saw the steps UCLA was taking when he wrote, “If Negro athletes do contribute to racial respect, and despite its nature, it is conceded by many that they do, then it behooves educators and racial agencies for uplift to make great social use of athletics.” It was unlikely that the Bruins had integration in mind when they recruited five African Americans; in a more practical sense they were seeking players who would lift their success on the gridiron to higher levels.

  African American players also suffered the indignities of being compared with animals or being endowed a peculiar anatomical structure that gave them an advantage over white players. Henderson noted that an Ohio State University study “had shown with painstaking research, tests, and X-rays of the body of [the 1936 Olympic track star] Jesse Owens that the measurements of Owens [fell] within the accepted measurements of white men.” That controversy still exists today. A Google search of “blacks’ vs. whites’ athletic ability” will turn up dozens of links to sites discussing whether black athletes have special physical attributes that whites lack.