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

by James W. Johnson

  Next up for the Bruins were the Stanford Indians and their tricky quarterback Frankie Albert. Soon after the Bruins arrived in Palo Alto, Robinson and Bartlett went to a nearby restaurant with their teammates. The restaurant manager asked the black players to leave. “I’m sorry,” the manager said, “but you can’t eat in here.” Bartlett and Robinson walked out hurt and angered. The white players sat dumbfounded for a moment, and then one by one they stood up and poured their glasses of water over their food and marched out of the restaurant en masse. The incident brought the team closer together. “Either we would eat with the team,” Bartlett said, “or they wouldn’t eat there.” Said teammate Ned Mathews: “If they didn’t fit, we didn’t fit and that’s the way it went. . . . We didn’t worry about what color a player was. They were just players to us, important players.”

  Before the game, Stanford’s assistant coach called Robinson “just about the best sprinter on the coast, and he’s a great ball carrier. He’s rugged and can play just as hard and long as anyone. We are scared to death of him.” Late in the game, UCLA was trailing 14–7, with the Bruins’ touchdown coming on Robinson’s 52-yard run. Next Robinson intercepted an Albert pass on the UCLA 30-yard line and returned it to the Stanford 20, where Albert brought him down with a shirt-tail tackle. The Bruins went on to score, and Robinson kicked the extra point to tie the game 14–14. That’s the way it ended.

  Stanford coach Tiny Thornhill called Robinson “the greatest backfield runner I have seen in all my connection with football—and that’s some twenty-five years.” He said that before Robinson was through, he would rank with the great runner Red Grange.

  The following week against the University of Montana at home, the Bruins prevailed 20–6. Robinson didn’t carry the ball once; instead he was used as a decoy that allowed Kenny Washington to score all three of UCLA’s touchdowns. Robinson was limited to a 33-yard punt return. The Bruins record now stood at 3–0-1.

  Robinson bristled over being used as a decoy on several occasions. In the first five games of the season he carried the ball just ten times. He thought he needed a bigger role in the Bruins’ offense. Coach Horrell defended using Robinson as a decoy. He said when Robinson went into motion toward the sidelines, he took two defenders with him. “Who’ve we got that can take out two defending players with one block?” he asked.

  One teammate, Buck Gilmore, recalled that Robinson “got a poor shake at UCLA. In my estimation, it should have been him playing tailback instead of Washington.” Gilmore said that before one game, Robinson “was down in the dumps. He never complained about anything, but he told me he was going to quit the team.” Robinson asked Gilmore, “What the hell am I doing here?” Gilmore, who was a co-captain, felt it was his job to “smooth things out.” He told a trainer about Robinson’s laments, and the trainer passed them on to Horrell. After that Robinson began getting the ball more often.

  Along the way the black players were picking up nicknames—most of them racially motivated—as they attracted sportswriters to their feats on the gridiron. To describe Washington newspapers used such nicknames as “Kingfish,” a character in the Amos and Andy radio show that was popular at the time. (One juxtaposition of a picture and an article in the Los Angeles Times nine years later stands out, although inadvertently. Washington was referred to as the Kingfish in a headline. Next to the article was an unrelated photograph of a fisherman displaying a 191-pound, 5-foot long black bass caught off Port Orange, Florida.)

  Woody Strode was a “Negro Adonis.” A black runner was referred to as a “sepia runner.” Others were “Senegambian speed merchants,” “dusky speedsters,” and “the midnight express twins.”

  Bob Hunter of the Los Angeles Examiner called Washington and Strode the “Goal Dust Twins,” an idea he gleaned from a box of soap powder, Fairbank’s Gold Dust Twins. The box used a stereotypical picture of two black kids doing household chores together. “Kenny and I didn’t really pay any attention to it,” Strode said. Tom Bradley did. He wrote a letter to the editor of the California Eagle that said such nicknames “denigrate only Negroes. . . . We can only have a true democracy when all races are forgotten and each man is accepted as a man offering real contributions . . . to the progress of our country.” Later, when Robinson joined the Bruins, he, Washington, and Strode became the “Goal Dust Trio.”

  Black players also were called the “dark angels of destruction.” On one occasion Washington was referred to as “Shufflin Kenny Washington,” an allusion to the black characters of minstrel shows. On at least two occasions Strode’s name was printed in the Los Angeles Times as Woody “Boo” Strode. “Boo” was a racial epithet shortened from the slang word “jigaboo.” A black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, called Robinson the “cyclone-gaited hellion.”

  Braven Dyer, the Los Angeles Times columnist, wrote about Washington in black vernacular when he first moved up to the varsity:

  The lad’s a wow in boldface caps, but it’s mostly what he doesn’t do on the football field that impresses me. He doesn’t overwork, he doesn’t get excited, he doesn’t get those black steel muscles busy until it counts. In short, Kenny has the complete relaxation of his race. You never saw a member of his race eat a po’k chop and then go into a heavy campaign of worrying about where his next one is coming from. No, sah, he may bear down on the po’k chop, but when it’s gone he just unlaxes until the next po’k chop comes along. Well K. Washington plays football like that, if you see what I mean.

  That’s not to say that all nicknames were bad. “Jackrabbit” Jackie Robinson defined how he could scamper. “General” Kenny Washington linked him to the country’s first president and denoted leadership. Certainly, though, the nicknames used by white newspapers were far more demeaning than any used in black newspapers.

  In their next game, against the University of Oregon, UCLA surprised the Ducks at home. The highlight of the game came when Washington threw a pass to Robinson, who faked two defenders and, in the words on one reporter, “sent [them] flying on their faces with a series of hip-jiggling feints” before he crossed the goal line for a 66-yard play. He also scored on an 83-yard run down the sidelines. Oregon coach Tex Oliver remarked, “I guess you’ve got to have a mechanized cavalry unit to stop him. He runs as fast at three-quarter speed as the average player does at top speed, and he still has that extra quarter to draw up.”

  Then Robinson was injured during a practice on November 1 and missed games against UC Berkeley and the University of Santa Clara and was used sparingly in his return against Oregon State. When he was injured, one sportswriter wrote, “Bruin stock went all the way up and down the fluctuation scale.” A team doctor said about Robinson, “The boy who has brought the Bruins out of hot water in every major game this year had turned his right knee.”

  Questions arose whether the Robinson’s injury had been accidental or on purpose. Hank Shatford, a Daily Bruin sportswriter, wrote that Robinson was injured “when this guy came over and hit Jack on the side. He hit him on the leg, just dove in with his shoulder pads. He did it on purpose, no question in my mind. I know the guy well. The coaches were furious. There were some players on that team who weren’t fans of Jack Robinson.” The Los Angeles Examiner reported that “Robinson was tackled viciously near the sidelines [by reserves] and arose limping. Ray Richards, line coach, was actually white about the mouth and Babe Horrell and Jim Blewett were shaky for the rest of the day.”

  While there were racial overtones to that incident, it may well be that Robinson’s personality also played a part. As noted, he tended to be aloof. “To be honest, Jackie Robinson was not that well-liked. . . . Jackie was not friendly. . . . He was very withdrawn. Even on the football field he would stand off by himself,” Strode remarked. He wondered whether Robinson’s trouble with the police and his brother’s death were also responsible.

  Because of Robinson’s arrests and sullen demeanor, some whites saw him as “the stereotype of the lawless, shiftless black buck.” Bill Ackerman, U
CLA’s athletic director, told Strode years later that “Jackie always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. . . . Maybe he was rather ahead of his time in his thinking with regard to the black’s situation. I think it hurt him emotionally to see how some of his friends were treated. The result was he kept pretty much within himself.”

  One rumor making the rounds was that Robinson and Washington were locked in a bitter feud and that they got into a knockout, drag-down battle one day. Robinson laughed at the mere idea that he would take on Washington. “At least you can give me credit for having common sense,” he said. “And nobody with common sense is going to fight a big guy like Kenny Washington.”

  Robinson may have been upset that he had to take a backseat to Washington. Certainly they were two different personalities. “As far as the general public was concerned, I mean the local yokels,” Strode explained, “Kenny was it. He was the main drawing card. He became quite a celebrity; people would stop him on the street to say hello. He was a handsome, clean-cut kid. He had a broad nose, warm, kind eyes, and a smile that lit up his whole face. He had a really good sense of humor. People loved to hang out with the guy. Kenny was a real class guy.”

  With Robinson hobbling from a sore knee, Horrell moved Bartlett from end to right halfback, but he too missed a game later against the Santa Clara Broncos because of a blood clot in a leg. The Bruins didn’t seem to miss Robinson when they beat their upstate cousins, the UC Berkeley Golden Bears 20–7. The Bruins could have used a healthy Robinson against their next two opponents. They battled to a scoreless tie with Santa Clara (each team had four chances to score) with Robinson on the bench and a 13–13 standoff with Oregon State, a game in which he was not at full speed.

  The Chicago Defender estimated nine thousand “members of the Race” attended the game against UC Berkeley, including the girlfriends of Washington, Robinson, and Strode. A description of what each of the women wore accompanied the article. For example, Washington’s girlfriend wore a “smart blue skirt with matching hat and contrasting accessories and a sport coat of varied color shadings, predominately blue.” The article referred to Washington’s girl as his “lady love,” Robinson’s as a “heart beat,” and Strode’s as a “young chiropodist.” They also listed several prominent blacks “who came to see the sepias take the day,” including bandleader Count Basie and his “songbird” Helen Hume.

  Without Robinson Santa Clara ganged up on Washington, often with two or three Broncos pounding on him. He still managed to gain 81 yards on 21 carries. Santa Clara coach Buck Shaw had nothing but praise for the speedy back. “Every time you get the Bruins in the hole Washington gets them out.” Washington played the entire game and was so tired at the end that UCLA trainer Mike Chambers decided the Bruins’ star player should spend the weekend in a local hospital. Robinson was angry after the game because he didn’t get to play, but the Bruins were avoiding further injury to their elusive halfback.

  Robinson was back in the lineup for the Oregon State game, but he was still feeling the effects of the injury and was a bit rusty. The Los Angeles Times reported that he “looked woefully weak defensively.” The paper said he let the Beavers get behind him on pass plays and that when he recovered, he missed tackles. He admitted after the game that his legs weren’t strong after the layoff.

  Robinson was back to full strength for the Washington State game. With the Bruins trailing 7–6 in the fourth quarter, he caught a short Washington pass and “snaked his way down the sidelines and then into the center of the field, evading four Cougars on the way and going over for the touchdown standing up.” The 20-yard gallop put the Bruins up 13–7. Soon afterward he dashed 36 yards to put the game out of reach. On a final TD drive, Robinson twisted and turned his way to runs of 29 yards and 32 yards as UCLA won 24–7. “Jackie was well past the scrimmage line before the harassed Cougars woke up to the fact that he had the ball,” the California Eagle reported.

  The Bruins were undefeated except for the three ties but had yet to face their cross-town rival, USC. The winner would go to the Rose Bowl. An event preceding the big game created a minor furor. To celebrate homecoming and the game, the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity on the USC campus erected a display of racial and ethnic bigotry to mock the Bruins’ team. The fraternity created three grass huts and “gaudily painted figures of black savages wearing football helmets peering out of the huts. Another hut was labeled the Cantor and Cohen Food Shoppe, Inc., that referred to two Jewish players on the team. A ship replicate was placed in front of the huts with the name “S.C. Slave Ship.” The fraternity members also “nailed grotesque figures to a giant palm tree in the center of the lawn” that bore the jersey numbers of Washington, Robinson, and Strode. In addition, effigies of the Jewish players were hung from the tree. The California Eagle, which was the only newspaper to publish a story about the display, called it Nazism, saying it was “one of the most flagrant displays of Hitlerism ever offered under the aegis of an American university group.” Among those protesting the display were the NAACP and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The university administration forced the fraternity to remove the display. In its place the fraternity put a “censored sign.”

  USC students burned the effigies of the three black football players, Woody Strode recalled. When Strode was told about the burning, he replied, “That’s because we’re going to kick their asses tomorrow.” He recounted in his memoirs that he didn’t think the burning was racial. “That was fear,” he said.

  Alongside that controversy another one arose: Would an African American play in the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1916? Blacks were looking forward to showing the nation that an integrated team playing in the Rose Bowl would be a step toward advancing the race. The California Eagle reported that “UCLA’s democratic football team should be a hint to local promoters of professional football and baseball teams. Fans turn out to watch talent, not red talent, or blue talent, but TALENT.”

  If the Bruins beat USC, the players would pick the opposing team for the Rose Bowl. That, wrote the Pasadena Star-News, would put them in “a very embarrassing position for to date the outstanding eleven in the nation is Tennessee.” The University of Tennessee Volunteers were unlikely to step on the field with black players as foes. There certainly had been incidents that would back up such a likelihood. For example, Northern teams would not play black players against a Southern team if the Southern team asked. Or the Southern team could refuse to play if the Northern school would not agree to bench its African Americans. The New York Times’s esteemed sportswriter Allison Danzig wrote from Knoxville that he had heard from “parties in a position to know that Tennessee will not play in the Rose Bowl if UCLA, with its three colored stars, is the host team.” There was no chance that the UCLA black players would sit out the game. Danzig asked Tennessee coach Bob “Major” Neyland what he would do if UCLA beat USC. He “side-stepped the issue by turning aside to speak to friends,” Danzig wrote.

  Later Danzig, Neyland, and Tennessee supporters gathered at a Knoxville hotel to get updates on the UCLA-USC game. Volunteers coaches were rooting for USC to win or get a tie while listening to the game on the radio. When USC moved the ball, cheers broke out, leaving no doubt they were rooting for USC to win the game, a reporter for the Knoxville News-Sentinel wrote.

  The California Eagle saw such a game as having an impact beyond that of who would win the game. Its sports editor, Cullen Fentress, believed an integrated game would be good for the nation because it “is the most logical medium through which to effect world peace and all it implies.” If nothing else, he wrote that if UCLA got into the Rose Bowl, it would “prove to this nation that its peoples can play together in the most approved manner as sportsmen, upholding as they do so the democratic principles as outlined by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”

  The Pasadena Star-News wrote that the black UCLA players “could not qualify under the strict eligibility rules made necessary by Tennessee’s geographic location.” A Los Angeles Tim
es columnist speculated that Tennessee probably would not play UCLA.

  The 1939 USC-UCLA game started a tradition that lasts today. The UCLA Alumni Association gave the student body a 295-pound bell that cheerleaders were to ring after each Bruin point. Two years later it was awarded to the winner of the rivalry. But on the first matchup with the bell in use, it didn’t ring once.

  A record crowd of 103,303 turned out at the Coliseum, still the largest crowd to watch a game between these two undefeated teams. USC was a 14-point underdog. It was estimated that fourteen thousand African Americans attended the game. Sam Lacy, the sports editor of the Washington (DC) Afro-American, noted that the game would be “overrun with sepia flesh.” People across the nation were taking notice of this UCLA squad.

  The game ended 0–0, and the Trojans went to the Rose Bowl because they had fewer ties during the season. USC won the national championship by beating Tennessee, and UCLA finished ranked no. 7 in the country.

  If it hadn’t been for Robinson, the Bruins would have fallen. USC’s All-American Grenny Lansdell slipped into the Bruin secondary and looked to be on his way to a touchdown when Robinson came out of nowhere to tackle Lansdell, who fumbled at the 2-yard line. Woody Strode picked up the ball and ran out to the 13-yard line before he was tackled. It was the first fumble the Trojans had committed all season. The Los Angeles Times wrote “The ball shot off the Trojan’s chest like it had been blown from a gun barrel. No man’s arm could have withstood that blow from Robinson’s body.”

  The Bruins had a chance to win the game with five minutes left. They had the ball at their own 20-yard line. Washington threw an 18-yard completion to Strode and then hit Robinson with a pass to the USC 26. Then Strode pulled down a pass at the 15. A pass and two rushes put the ball on the 3-yard line. Three plays later and the Bruins had lost a yard. Field goals were rare in those days. In the huddle the Bruins took a vote: five wanted to go for the touchdown and five for the field goal. Quarterback Ned Mathews cast the deciding vote: go for 6.