USC’s hostility toward African Americans rose to new heights with the opening of UCLA. Several athletic officials uttered racial statements, including track coach Dean Cromwell, who said the black track star was so good “because he is closer to the primitive than the white athlete. It was not long ago that his ability to run and jump was a matter of life and death to him in the jungle. His muscles are pliable and his easy-going disposition is a valuable aid to the mental and physical relation that a runner and jumper must have.”
The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League led a call for Cromwell’s dismissal “for asserted anti-Semetic [sic] and anti-Negro utterances” in the fall of 1936. In a speech to the German-American Alliance, Cromwell said he wished he “could only be that handsome boy Hitler in New York for one hour” so that he could deal with the overwhelming “foreign population” in the city.
Unfortunately that was the pervasive thinking of the time. A syndicated newspaper columnist, Hugh S. Johnson, wrote in 1938, “The average of white intelligence is above the average of Black intelligence, probably because the white race is several thousand years farther away from jungle savagery. But, for the same reason, the average of white physical equipment is lower.” Commenting on Jessie Owens’s exploits at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, when he won four gold medals and set three world records and tied another, the Atlanta Journal’s O. B. Keeler wrote, “Our fastest runners are colored boys, and our longest jumpers and highest leapers. And now, our champion fighting man with the fists is Joseph Louis Barrow.” Northern and Southern U.S. newspapers and commentators attributed the prowess of the black athletes to their “jungle ancestry” as opposed to their intelligence and strong work ethic, which led to their athletic prowess.
Such were the obstacles African Americans had to overcome to establish their right to step onto the playing field with racial equality. Progress was slow, coming in small increments. However, a significant move forward came with the recruitment of the five UCLA teammates. It was as important a step as had been taken at that time. Yet even so it was a far cry from bringing an end to the prejudice. But the awareness it spurred cannot be discounted and certainly would have helped to give Henderson more hope that the country was moving in the right direction toward racial parity, slowly but nonetheless steadily.
6
A Sorry Season
“Simply one of the most ridiculously perfect human specimens to ever walk the Earth.”
—Author Todd von Hoffman on Woody Strode
Woody Strode had followed USC as a youngster. “Back then it was always USC; they were the machine,” Strode recalled. USC and Notre Dame, both private institutions, were the predominant football schools in America. Neither seemed interested in recruiting black players. USC had two African American players under coach Howard Jones—Bryce Taylor and Bert Richie. One story had it that Jones vowed he would never have another black player on his team after Richie allegedly became involved in a scandal with a white woman. Strode followed USC football “because they had the only football team that amounted to anything.” But he also knew he wasn’t going to be playing there. He noted that the powerful members of the USC Alumni Association, which recruited players, “didn’t seek us out.”
UCLA officials invited Strode to look over the campus when he graduated in 1934. “I didn’t realize that going to UCLA was a rare step for a black kid,” Strode said. But he “took one look at the place and said, ‘This is where I want to be. Tell me what I have to do.’” It wasn’t easy going for Strode. But he was hooked on Westwood.
The UCLA officials told him he would have to take his high school courses over again at UCLA’s extension school. Jefferson High School had ill prepared him for the rigors of university academics. He spent two and a half years in the extension school trying to meet the academic requirements that UCLA demanded. Apparently UCLA thought enough of Strode’s athletic abilities that it was willing to wait for him to qualify. That’s how he wound up playing with the other African Americans who were three or four years younger than he.
“There was no bullshit from upstairs,” Strode said. “We had to work to get our grades before we could play football.” Strode noted that most non-qualifying athletes were sent to military prep academies to prepare for UCLA, but because he was an African American, the academies wouldn’t take him. “So UCLA put me under an umbrella and hid me out in [nearby] Bel Air,” where the school owned a house donated by a wealthy alumnus. There he lived with three players on the team.
Strode almost flunked out. “I needed to get a C average to get into the university, and I was far from it,” he explained. He received special tutoring, which helped him get through that first semester. Then he decided to buckle down. “I concentrated hard and somehow I maintained a C average,” he said.
But Strode told his parents he wanted to quit because he was exhausted, and he had accomplished at least something. His parents would have none of it. So he enrolled in UCLA in 1936, the same year as Kenny Washington, who had no trouble on the academic side. Strode was twenty-one and three years older than Washington, but they hit it off right away. “I needed a running mate, and we became very close, like brothers.” They became lifelong friends. Looking back on his years at UCLA, Strode recalled that going to UCLA was the best thing that happened to him. And he found the school to his liking. “We had the whole melting pot . . . and I worked hard because there was always the overriding feeling that UCLA really wanted me.”
Coach Spaulding and a graduate manager, Bill Ackerman, took in one of Washington’s high school games and were sold on him. Washington was of average speed but ran with great power and shifty moves. He could run over tacklers despite being pigeon-toed and knock-kneed. He also had a strong straight-arm. And apparently he had no problems meeting admission standards.
In those years freshmen weren’t allowed to play on the varsity, and the Bruin freshmen had their own games against similar teams. It didn’t take long for Strode and Washington to encounter racism. “We started to hear some whispering among our teammates, ‘There are some players on the varsity saying they don’t want to play with any niggers.’” They learned that most of the talk came from a big tackle, Celestine Moses “Slats” Wyrick, a blond, blue-eyed farm boy from Oklahoma. (Wyrick later became an actor in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Andy Hardy’s Private Secretary, both in 1941. He died at age thirty, a day after World War II ended, when he was accidently electrocuted while in the U.S. Army Air Corps.) His teammates told Strode that Slats wasn’t going to play with him. “He called you a nigger, Woody.”
The next year, when Strode moved up to the varsity, Wyrick told Coach Spaulding he wouldn’t play with Strode. “I can’t play next to a nigger because my folks would disown me,” Wyrick said. Spaulding thought he knew how to handle the situation. He put Strode on the defensive side of the ball to square off against Wyrick, who was one of the biggest lineman in college football in the 1930s at 6 feet 4 inches and 215 pounds. On the next play during a scrimmage, Strode knocked Wyrick off his feet. “You black son of a bitch,” Wyrick yelled at Strode. Strode jumped on top of Wyrick and began throwing punches. The coaches stood idly by and watched until they finally pulled Strode off Wyrick. “Slats and I became good friends after that,” Strode said. “He had no respect for Negroes, but I stood up for myself and he respected that.” That was the only problem he had with his Bruins teammates.
Strode said that when he and Washington were on campus, they “didn’t feel racial prejudice at all. Whether we had blinders on or what, I don’t know.” He said when he was growing up he didn’t know that football wasn’t integrated. “We never thought about that. . . . When I got to UCLA I had the same right as any other student.” He credited Bill Ackerman for creating a positive atmosphere. “We were not ostracized from anything.”
Strode was nobody to fool with. He had chiseled his body with thousands of pushups. (Few athletes lifted weights in those days. Coaches thought the extra weight would slow them down.) He had virtually
no body fat. Jim Murray, the Pulitzer Prize–winning sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in 1991 that Strode “was one of the most magnificent physical specimens ever to walk on an athletic field—or anywhere else.”
Not long before the 1936 Olympics, where black athletes including Jack Robinson’s brother Mack excelled, the Nazis sought out Strode to model for paintings for their Olympic art show. He had previously modeled for painters at a fee of twenty-five dollars a week. Once Strode was contacted by Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker who became famous for her documentary on the 1936 Olympics. She had seen a photograph of Strode and brought an artist with her to Los Angeles to paint Strode’s physique. They measured him from to head to toe using calipers. “We saw your picture, but we couldn’t believe it,” Riefenstahl said. “You have the greatest physique of any athlete we have ever seen.” Strode maintained that physique throughout his long and successful movie career. The artist painted two pictures of him, commissioned by Hitler. One showed him putting the shot, the other the discus.
Los Angeles Times columnist Murray wondered whether Strode might have been the best athlete among the five black Bruins. “Robinson’s drive made it unlikely anyone short of Ty Cobb could have combined motivation with sheer talent any more successfully than Robinson,” Murray wrote. Strode’s “speed, loping change of direction and long arms made him a natural for basketball,” Murray added. “But it wasn’t an economically attractive sport in those pre-NBA days. College recruiters didn’t want to win any Final Fours, they wanted to win Rose Bowls.”
Strode was in training to compete in the decathlon in the 1936 Olympics but couldn’t go because UCLA required that he take a summer course so that he could meet the requirements to enter UCLA as a freshman. “I don’t know if I could have won a gold medal,” he said. “but I had become a pretty good all-around track man.” Strode would have acquitted himself well if he had made the U.S. Olympic team in the decathlon. He put the shot fifty-plus feet at a time when the world record was fifty-seven feet. He also high jumped 6 feet 4 inches, and the world record was 6 feet 10 inches. He threw the discus more than 161 feet when the world record was 172 feet 2 inches. “The only event I had trouble with was the pole vault, and I learned to pole vault eleven feet,” Strode remarked.
Despite the presence of Washington and Strode, the Bruins had a poor season in 1937, with a record of 2-6-1, and they still hadn’t beaten USC. If anyone stood out on that team, it was Kenny Washington—for his skill and his color. The future would be looking up.
Washington made his presence felt in the first game of the 1937 season. The second time Washington touched the ball, against the University of Oregon, he sprinted for a 57-yard touchdown. The Bruins won 26–13. United Press reported that UCLA was sparked by Washington, “who defied the superstitions of his race and wore a huge golden ‘13’ on his blue jersey.”
The Bruins weren’t so fortunate in their October 9 game against the Stanford Indians, although they were favored. In preparation for the game, Stanford coaches put burnt cork on the face of their scout team halfback so he would look like Washington. UCLA threw seven interceptions—only one by Washington—in a disheartening 12–7 loss. The Indians stopped the Bruins’ running game as they focused on Washington, who gained few yards. It was a tragic day for Washington off the field, but he didn’t know it until after the game. His uncle Lawrence was killed in an auto wreck on his way to watch his nephew play.
In a game against the Oregon State University (OSU) Beavers on a rainy October 16, Strode showed that he was a man playing among boys. Not only was he two or three years older than a vast majority of the players, but he was also a tough, aggressive player. The Los Angeles Times referred to Strode in flattering terms after the game. “The towering Negro sophomore not only scored UCLA’s touchdown but turned in a defensive game that defies description. He made at least 80 percent of the tackles and caught runners from behind time after time after they had pierced the secondary zone.” In the OSU game Washington proved he was more than just an offensive player. His interception, which he returned 48 yards, set up the touchdown pass to Strode in the 7–7 tie. Murray described Strode’s toughness on the football field this way: “He was strong enough to strangle a horse and fast enough to catch one. . . . Woody played clean, but so hard that some halfbacks got a nosebleed just looking at him over a line of scrimmage.”
Strode remembered that during a game against the Washington State University (WSU) Cougars on October 23 a racial incident occurred against Kenny Washington. The big back was running along the Cougars’ sideline when emotional WSU coach Babe Hollingbery called Washington “a nigger,” according to Strode. “You didn’t call Kenny Washington a nigger without a reaction,” he commented. “Kenny stopped the whole proceedings and went after the coach.” A fight broke out. “But,” Strode said, “that’s how we were taught, to defend ourselves.”
Strode recalled that “we ran into a few problems on the road. . . . They used to mark the field and sometimes when they had Kenny down they’d try to rub [lime] in his eyes. Kenny would come back to the huddle and say, ‘That son of a bitch tried to hurt me.’ . . . Some players would insult me. They’d call me nigger and I’d fight over that. We had white kids on our team that would react to nigger just like I did. We got so beat up, but it was like a badge of honor.” But, Strode said, “if Washington knocked a guy down he’d pick him up after a play was over. He’d hit you; he had no compunction about hitting you; he’d knock you on your ass and then he’d pick you up.”
One of the biggest challenges UCLA faced in 1937 with the black players was an opportunity to play the SMU Mustangs on November 20. SMU coach Madison Bell had no problem playing a team with black players. He had competed professionally against black stars like Fritz Pollard and Paul Robeson. Bell saw this as an opportunity to show that his team was worthy of playing in the Rose Bowl. UCLA saw a chance to reap a financial reward for attracting SMU to the Coliseum. The Bruins went so far as to offer to bench the black players if SMU insisted. As noted, Southern schools often refused to play against black players.
Bell would have none of that. He wanted Washington and Strode to play, and the Mustangs players agreed. They figured a victory over the Bruins without the two black stars “would be a hollow triumph. We figured we wouldn’t get much credit for beating UCLA without Washington and Strode,” Bell said. “They are the best men they have, so we voted unanimously that they be permitted to play in the game.”
The game between a team with two “dark boys,” as the SMU student newspaper described them, and a team of white Southerners also would have great fan appeal. Norman Borisoff, editor of the Daily Bruin, recalled that during the game it seemed like eleven Mustangs would jump on Washington at the same time. “I don’t know how Washington survived,” he said. “And maybe the worst thing was that it was just accepted in those days.”
Let’s concede that it often took more than one tackler to bring Washington down. But eleven? And if the opponents had racial tendencies, the pounding got worse. “It made you sick to your stomach to watch,” Borisoff said. SMU players said that “it didn’t make a difference whether UCLA used white players or Negroes.” Washington said years later SMU was the cleanest-playing team he had ever faced. “They sure played it hard, but they never were dirty,” he said. The Bruins lost 26–13 to the powerful Mustangs, although Washington threw a 45-yard TD pass to Strode.
Washington and Strode received their due. Coach Bell called Washington “one of the best players I have ever seen.” Dallas Times Herald reporter Horace McCoy wrote about Washington and Strode: the “two black boys were everywhere; they were the entire team; they were playing with inspiration and courage, and they cracked and banged the Mustangs all over the field.” Describing a brilliant run Washington made, McCoy wrote, “In that moment you forgot he was black. He wore no color at all. He was simply a great athlete.” At game’s end Mustang fans gave the players a standing ovation.
Sever
al newspapers, particularly black ones, noted that SMU had played “fair and hard” and indicated that the game showed “the sun is breaking through” on the racial issue on the football field. The following year Wendell Smith, the most influential black sportswriter of that era, interviewed the Mustang coach, who told him, “I don’t believe in drawing the color line in sports.” Bell went further and even predicted that sometime in the future Southern white schools would recruit black players.
On November 27 in a game at the Los Angeles Coliseum, UCLA led the University of Missouri Tigers 7–0, with the Tigers slowly marching down the field, but then Washington went to work. He intercepted a pass at the 10-yard line and ran 87 yards down the field. Just as he was being tackled, he heard Johnny Ryland, a teammate, holler, “Give me the ball, give me the ball.” Washington looked to make sure it was a Bruin calling for the ball and, just as he was about to hit the ground, lateraled it to Ryland, who ran in for the score. That touchdown gave the Bruins a 13–0 lead and put the game away with just ten seconds left to play. Coach Bill Spaulding remarked, “Wasn’t that last touchdown play a thriller? The boys showed some pretty good downfield blocking, and Ryland and Washington put on an exhibition of headwork.”
During the game Washington returned from a minor injury and got the Missouri players looking “awful mad.” After Washington ran a play, “the entire Tiger line piled up on the Negro.” Quarterback Ned Mathews recalled that the game was hard played by “some redneck Missouri players riding Washington pretty good and they would take chalk from the sidelines and rub it in his face,” a familiar cheap shot. The Los Angeles Examiner noted that after the season the Missouri players put Washington and Strode on their all-opponent team. The Examiner sportswriter concluded that such a move was “the top gesture of the year in fellowship and neighborliness.”
The Black Bruins Page 6
