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

by James W. Johnson

  He was hired by Charles Matthews, considered to be the dean of black lawyers in Los Angeles. Matthews saw a promising career ahead for Bradley if he stayed in law, but law was no more satisfying to him than his years on the police force. He thought public service “was going to be more exciting and more satisfying to me.”

  Bradley joined the liberal California Democratic Council and became active in the City Council’s Tenth District. In June 1961 a group of businessman urged Bradley to seek appointment to the vacant seat from that district on the council. One of them, Bishop H. H. Brookings, thought Bradley was the “right person at the right time. He was a moderate and forthright individual, a lawyer and competent about city government. He had strong support in the black community and credentials that brought him support from the white constituency as well.”

  Bradley agreed to seek the appointment, but he was just one of thirteen candidates, some of whom were African Americans. He thought he might have more influence in that position than on the police force or as a lawyer. He collected seven thousand signatures supporting his appointment, but the council appointed a conservative white Republican. Bradley was convinced he had been rejected because he was black. It was a slap in the face to all blacks who had been passed over. Bishop Brookings remarked, “We are delayed, but not defeated.”

  Two years into practicing law Bradley again sought (this time in an election) the City Council Tenth District seat, which represented a multicultural constituency in the Crenshaw area of central Los Angeles. A campaign worker, Maury Weiner, commented on Bradley’s strengths and weaknesses: “Blackness in and of itself was considered radical. His not being publicly associated with any great controversial cause . . . was a plus [because] the insiders knew of his conscientious efforts, but the general public did not. There was very little negative stuff they could throw at Tom Bradley.” Among the campaign workers and supporters were athletes and fraternity members from Bradley’s UCLA days.

  Prejudice, however, followed him on the campaign trail. One black precinct walker, Leroy Berry, remembered when he (Berry) would walk up to houses and residents would open a small window in the front door to see who was there and then slam the window shut without opening the door. “They were really disturbed that blacks had moved into their neighborhood,” Berry said. “A black person coming to the door and ringing the bell reminded them that blacks had invaded their community.”

  This time the voters spoke, not the City Hall politicians. Bradley won the election by a two-to-one margin over the Republican who had earlier been appointed over him. He became one of three blacks elected to the fifteen-member council. (The others were Billy Mills and Gilbert Lindsay.) African Americans now had some political clout. Weiner thought Bradley may have been the first black elected to office from any predominantly white constituency in any state west of the Mississippi River. After Bradley won the election, a blind campaign worker heard on the radio that Bradley was an African American. He called Bradley over to him and told him that was the first time he knew Bradley was black. “That said a great deal to me,” Bradley said, “because it was the way in which we tried to run the campaign; not on the question of color, just on the basis of the issues, of qualifications, and what I’d like to see done in the district.”

  Bradley had said during the campaign that the police department had taken “great strides” in working to end discrimination, but once on the council he became a strong critic of the police force. “Some police officers are bigoted,” he stated, but “it is not a majority, but a small minority. I think the public should be aware of it. I think there is obvious segregation in the Los Angeles Police Department.”

  Much of Bradley’s term in office was spent criticizing the police department, especially during the Watts Riots in 1965, even though Watts was outside his district. Blacks were rioting because of police brutality, overcrowding, and high unemployment. Bradley became the voice of opposition to Mayor Sam Yorty and Police Chief William H. Parker. Blacks were outraged when Parker blamed the riots on “monkeys in a zoo.” Yorty was not much better, blaming the riots on Communists “for agitating Negroes with propaganda over police brutality.”

  At the same time Bradley tended to hide behind his stoic demeanor. “One of the most difficult [things] to learn in dealing with Tom Bradley is that you go in and he listens with a sphinx-like expression and you don’t know whether anything you have said has registered and you certainly don’t know whether he agrees with your assessment of the situation,” said Anton Calleia, a top assistant to Bradley. Bradley lacked charisma, a shortcoming that was often met with criticism. Once a student who was referring to this shortcoming asked Bradley whether he was a black Gerald Ford rather than a black John Kennedy. Bradley shot back, “I’m not a black this or a black that. I’m just Tom Bradley.”

  Slowly but surely Bradley was making his mark as a city councilman. He was often at odds with Yorty, who Bradley believed was showing a lack of direction and vision. In 1969 Bradley decided to take on Yorty, the Democratic mayor who had been elected in 1961 with strong black support. The odds were against Bradley. Initial polls showed he was not well known outside his district, and the field of thirteen challengers—two congressmen were running, for example—made the chances daunting. But Bradley was working eighteen-hour days lining up support for his race. Contacts made while he was a police officer helped a great deal. Meanwhile, Yorty was putting minimal effort into his reelection campaign.

  In Los Angeles primary elections are open—that is, all candidates (Republican, Democrat, or whatever) run, and the top two vote getters run against each other in the general election. As election results came in on April 2, 1969, Bradley was showing surprising strength. At final tally he pulled off a stunning win with 42 percent of the vote while Yorty came in second with 26 percent.

  If Bradley had won a majority of the vote, he would have been elected outright, but he had to face Yorty in a runoff. Campaign organizers were fearful that Yorty was capable of rebounding. “I knew, as did Bradley and the staff, of Yorty’s history of negative campaigning and ruthless smearing of any opponent. I knew that he would run a racist campaign,” Maury Weiner said.

  Weiner was right. The race proved one of the most bitter in the city’s history. Yorty painted his opponent as a dangerous radical, alternately of the black power or Communist revolutionary variety. The charges were not plausible, but they resonated among fearful voters. Bradley refused to lower himself to Yorty’s mud-slinging level, but his not responding may have cost him the election. Bradley was ahead in the polls until the “constant, vicious campaign of . . . fear” began catching on. Yorty predicted—among other racial attacks—that if Bradley were elected, white police officers would quit and blacks would take over the police department. The voters bought it; Yorty was reelected by 55,000 votes out of 850,000 cast.

  “The voters have approved corruption in government and racism in America,” former mayor Norris Poulson remarked. “The city now has an awful black eye.” Bradley pledged to work with Yorty to end the “bitterness and divisiveness,” but Yorty rejected Bradley’s attempt at reconciliation. Yorty commented, “The attempt to form a racial coalition and conduct a partisan campaign for the nonpartisan office of mayor was certain to be divisive. This attempt has been rejected by voters and it is time to forget recrimination and work for the best interest of our self-governed city.” Even the John Birch Society joined the fray. Its leader, Robert Welch, called Bradley’s defeat the biggest setback for the Communist Party in fifty years.

  No sooner was the race over than Bradley decided he would take on Yorty once again in four years. “I pledged to myself that I would do whatever I needed to, to ensure that the next time I ran, people would know me for my record, for what I could provide the city,” he said. He was relentless in pointing out for four years, whether in council meetings or on the campaign trail, that the city lacked leadership. Yorty kept up his attack on Bradley, to which the councilman replied on one occasion, �
�We ought to be tired of a mayor of the city who every time he opens his mouth has an oral bowel movement.”

  In formally announcing his intention to run for mayor in December 1972, Bradley admitted that his “low-profile campaign” in 1969 had been a mistake. . . . I think a much more vigorous and hard-hitting campaign is necessary. We plan to engage in that kind of campaign.” And it worked. Bradley again finished on top of the nonpartisan ballot with 35 percent of the vote (down from 42 percent in 1969), and Yorty increased his percentage from 26 to 29 percent. Bradley’s lower total was in part due to the fact that powerful state legislator Jesse Unruh also was in the race. He took votes away from Bradley by garnering 17 percent of the total. Again a rematch was on between Bradley and Yorty.

  Little changed in Yorty’s campaign, with attacks on Bradley’s honesty and integrity still evident. This time Bradley answered the charges and switched the talk to the issues facing the city. He outspent Yorty by a two-to-one margin, and the polls began to show a shift. When the results came in, Bradley had won by 100,000 votes and 56 percent of the total cast. “I iz da may-your,” Bradley jested with his press secretary. Later he summarized: “Yorty failed to realize that time had not stood still. People knew me and what I stood for. His old tactics simply didn’t work. . . . [He] failed . . . to motivate the fears and hate in people. The racial campaign didn’t work because people were interested in the issues and the vision of what the city could become to all people, and not scare tactics.”

  When Bradley moved into the mayor’s office, he found all files had been shredded and all cabinets emptied. A staff member found one key with a note attached. It said, “Here is de key to da Mayor’s office, Sapphire.”

  Now it was time to begin a program that would see Los Angeles transform “from a conservative, provincial city to one of the most diversified and inclusive cities in the world.”

  21

  Leaving Athletics

  “It would be a shame if [Washington] were to be forgotten. I know I never will forget him.”

  —Jackie Robinson

  In 1950, when Kenny Washington was thirty-one years old, the New York Giants baseball team offered him a tryout after a recommendation by former Los Angeles Rams teammate Tom Harmon, the Heisman Trophy winner at Michigan. They had played together on a softball team, and Harmon was impressed. Washington was confident he would succeed despite the fact that he had played only semi-pro baseball after leaving UCLA and that he had not played in two years. He had been working out five days a week for five weeks and had lost 22 pounds to get his weight down to 210 pounds. “I feel great. My legs never felt stronger,” he said.

  Washington said that if his batting eye was as good as it was when he was laid off, “I’ll make the team. I’m not too worried about my hitting.” He preferred playing the infield, “but I think my chances will be better in the outfield. I am larger now than when I played regularly. But, I am stronger.” The Chicago Defender wrote that Washington “may have been one of the game’s biggest name players and home-run hitters today” if he had been allowed to play in the 1940s. Giants manager Leo Durocher was eager to see Washington play. “I hope he can make it,” he said. “I’ve got only eight outfielders on the roster and I’ll probably carry seven during the season so he stands a good chance.”

  The chance came too late. Three weeks into spring training, a scout told the Los Angeles Times he doubted Washington would make the team. “Kenny can hit a fast ball as far as the greatest sluggers, but his throwing arm is just so-so and he has only fair speed. All those years of football took too much out of him.” The scout did say Washington might make it in AAA baseball, a step down from the Major Leagues.

  Five days later Durocher dropped the news. Despite the fact that no one had worked harder in training camp than Washington, his lack of experience would keep him off the team. “Make no mistake, Kenny can really rap the ball,” Durocher said. “But his speed is only fair and I’ve been disappointed in his throwing. His fielding has been adequate.” Durocher also thought he had “a fine chance” to play for a Pacific Coast League (PCL) team. “Some . . . club is missing a bet if it doesn’t give him a trial.”

  Washington did play for the PCL’s Los Angeles Angels, but he appeared in only nine games, failing to get a hit in nine at bats. He struck out four times and walked once. Apparently he appeared only as a pinch hitter and played but three games in the field, at third base. He had four fielding chances and made an error on one of them. He was released and never stepped on the playing field again. After Washington’s failed tryout with the Giants, his participation in professional sports was over. Washington said in 1952 that he came within twenty-four hours of going into baseball at the same time as Robinson. He had agreed to play football for the Los Angeles Rams on March 21, 1946, a day before Robinson called him to say that Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey wanted to have a look at him too. “I never regretted joining the Rams,” he said, “but I often wonder how I’d have done in baseball when I was young.”

  It was time for Washington to settle down. He took several jobs, including one as a scout for the Los Angeles Dodgers, a sales representative for a wholesale food company, and a public relations representative of a scotch whiskey company, and he became active in civic affairs in Los Angeles.

  Between 1941 and 1950 Washington appeared in seven movies, including The Jackie Robinson Story. In 1949 he acted as a physician in the acclaimed and controversial movie Pinky, about a light-skinned African American woman (played by Jeanne Crain) passing for white. It was the top-grossing film of the year. Crain and two other women who had starring roles in the film, Ethel Barrymore and Ethel Waters, were nominated for Academy Awards. In other movies Washington appeared alongside such actors as Rex Harrison, Burt Lancaster, Victor Mature, Bette Davis, and Bruce Cabot.

  Washington became active in the Republican Party, supporting Congressman Richard Nixon in his landslide defeat of Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in their bid for the U.S. Senate in 1950. According to Nixon’s biographer Roger Morris, Nixon spent election night at Washington’s home playing music and trying to relax. In 1952 Washington took a stab at politics, entering the race for the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors. He finished third with 18,261 votes, not enough to qualify for the November ballot.

  In 1956 UCLA retired Washington’s No. 13 jersey, and he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. The hall noted that Washington “was nearly unstoppable. In 1939 the running back played five hundred and eighty of six hundred minutes and led the nation in scoring. That same season he became the first UCLA player to be named an All-American.”

  In December 1970 Washington was honored by about one thousand friends from sports, entertainment, business, and government at the Palladium in Los Angeles. Among the attendees were Mike Frankovich, who had played football at UCLA in the early 1930s and had gone on to become a major movie producer; comedian Bill Cosby; and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. Funds raised were to help defray Washington’s medical expenses. He was suffering from polyarteritis, a serious blood vessel disease in which the small and medium-sized arteries become swollen and damaged. “I can take a little exercise, walking around, but I get tired pretty easily,” he said. “I think I’ll whip it.”

  When Woody Strode heard about Washington’s illness, he grabbed a plane from Italy, where he was making spaghetti westerns, to be by his side. Strode couldn’t believe how skinny his friend had become or how pasty and ashen he looked. His eyes were sunken in, and he had dark circles under them. “They’d lost their spark. . . . I had to hold the tears back,” Strode recalled. During other visits he could see Washington fading. “I sat and cried as I watched him getting weaker and weaker because Kenny was always the Big Bad Wolf, the Kingfish.” Washington died on June 24, 1971, at the age of fifty-two, of polyarteritis after thirteen days in the hospital. “I just wasn’t prepared for him dying,” Strode said. “That was one of the saddest moments and saddest days of my life.”

 
Bob Waterfield, who had also played at UCLA and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his years with the Rams, called Washington the best football player he ever saw, “and that includes everybody I ever knew. He also was a great gentleman. If he had come into the National Football League directly from UCLA, he would have been, in my opinion, the best the NFL had ever seen.”

  When Robinson heard of Washington’s death, he remarked, “I’m sure he had a deep hurt over the fact that he never had become a national figure in professional sports. Many blacks who were great athletes years ago grow old with this hurt.” Strode wrote years later, “I guess you’ve got to feel a little sorry for yourself when you’re one of the greatest football players of your day and you don’t get a chance to show it. . . . But Kenny was never bitter.”

  A. S. “Doc” Young, a columnist for the Chicago Defender, wrote a week after Washington’s death, “He wasn’t one to complain. But he knew life, too, had curved him. He was born too soon. He died early. Life beat him up. Death kicked him when he was down.”

  Many former teammates and sports figures attended the funeral, including Don Newcombe, Buzzy Bavasi, Tank Younger, Rafer Johnson, and Strode. “You’ve never seen more people at a funeral in your life,” Strode recalled. Politicians and UCLA people also were in attendance. Robinson didn’t attend, probably because his health was in a sharp decline at the same time. Not only that, but his son Jackie Jr. had died a week earlier in an auto accident.

  Ray Bartlett was the least heralded of the five athletes but led an extraordinary life of community service in Southern California. After the war, Bartlett returned to Pasadena and began a twenty-year career as a policeman, the second African American to join the police department in Pasadena. He eventually became a detective in burglary but not before being “passed over for promotion eight times” by his superiors “because of prejudice” in the department.