Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  An even larger crowd, about forty thousand—thought to be the largest to that date in junior college sports history—saw undefeated Pasadena crush hated Compton. A “phenomenal” Jack Robinson was involved directly in all of the Bulldogs’ twenty points. Duke Snider, the future baseball star, then a young spectator from Compton, recalled a play when Robinson caught the ball after a kickoff, “reversed his field three times, and returned it for a touchdown. It was as dazzling a piece of broken-field running as you could ever hope to see.” “Have you ever seen anyone, anywhere, play better ‘heads-up’ football than Robinson?” Rube Samuelsen asked his Pasadena Post readers. “He is an opportunist of the first water. He thinks out there. He can evade a tackler with rare finesse. He has athletic sense, in doing the right thing at the right time as few sports stars do. He is a ‘natural’ athlete in the fullest sense.”

  In San Francisco, before a huge, expectant crowd, Jack disappointed no one. On his first carry, he sped 75 yards for a touchdown. On another play, he humbled a defensive end with a feint that left the player sprawled on the turf, then sped 55 yards to score. After a punt return that rocked the stadium, he fired two deft passes for touchdowns. Robinson left the game to an ovation seldom accorded a visiting player. He was superb again on Homecoming Day in November before a huge crowd of loyalists in the Rose Bowl against Glendale. On the last play, with victory assured but his team anxious to preserve its scoring average of 33 points per game, Jack took off on an astonishing 85-yard sprint that made the final score 33–6. In the next game, his last as a Bulldog, Jack said farewell with a masterpiece. Setting up behind his own goal line in punt formation, he gathered in the hiked ball, then raced 104 yards for a touchdown against a muddle of disbelieving Caltech players.

  After a season of eleven wins and no losses, in which he scored 17 touchdowns and 131 points, Jack was showered with adulation; along with Ray Bartlett of PJC, he was named to the all-Southland first team by the Kiwanis Clubs of Southern California. He was the center of attention when the Associated Women Students of PJC sponsored their annual football banquet for the Bulldog team. Coach Mallory, awarding nicknames to his departing seniors, dubbed Jack “Gift from Heaven.” And on December 6, he won the honor that had eluded him in 1937, the Most Valuable Player of the Year award given by the Pasadena Elks. Proudly Jack accepted a “gold” football and a year’s stewardship of the trophy. His popularity among the Bulldogs was clear when the team itself, in a surprise, awarded a custom-made trophy to Coach Mallory. On the trophy, high on a pedestal above tiny statues of the rest of the Bulldog starters, was a taller statue of Jack, dynamic in a broken-field running pose.

  AS JACK’S ATHLETIC accomplishments mounted, so did interest in him among those colleges and universities willing to recruit and start a black player; he himself recalled “a number of colleges putting out feelers, offering athletic scholarships.” Jack Gordon remembered Fresno State, in central California, offering Jack all sorts of inducements, including a set of new tires for the ancient car that had come into his possession. Jack recalled that the college with “the most attractive scholarship” was “very far” from Pasadena. Probably this was the University of Oregon; but Jack knew by this point that Mack was probably not going back to the Ducks, and he also was less than enchanted with the rain and cold he associated with the town of Eugene.

  Several top schools, committed to Jim Crow, were out of the question. A Stanford alumnus, according to Robinson, offered to pay his college expenses anywhere as long as he did not attend a school in Stanford’s conference; attending Stanford itself, of course, was out of the question. The University of Southern California, located in Los Angeles, as prestigious as Stanford but with an even greater sports program, sometimes took blacks. Its acclaimed football coach, Howard Jones, had praised Jack lavishly at the Elks banquet. But Jack heard Jones’s eulogy with mixed emotions. “We all knew USC had the best athletic program and the best teams,” Ray Bartlett recalled. “They were the team in almost every sport in southern California. But we knew we would just sit on the bench over there. Howard Jones was a good coach, but he was a very prejudiced man.” Hank Shatford recalled that USC offered Robinson “a real good scholarship,” with “some benefits that he probably wouldn’t get at UCLA.” But he, too, knew that the Trojans had only “token blacks” who seldom got to play, “which was disgusting.”

  Helping Jack make this important decision was his loyal, loving brother Frank, “my greatest fan.” Frank loved to scout opposing teams for Jack, to warn him about this or that player, help him plan his attack or defense, and loudly cheer him on during games. To the two brothers, UCLA made the most sense. The institution was young and its sports programs on the whole weak. But its coaches seemed eager to have Robinson enroll and genuinely determined to use him. Tuition was free, the annual administrative fee only a token sum, and Jack could continue to live at home while commuting to the village of Westwood, the site of the campus. Above all, Frank would be near, and “I didn’t want to see Frank disappointed.”

  On December 1, UCLA became even more attractive to Jack when the school announced that Edwin C. “Babe” Horrell would be its new head football coach. The name Horrell was almost synonymous with sports in Pasadena; the main playing field at PJC was Horrell Field, named after Babe and his brothers. All had been outstanding Bulldogs; after starring in even more sports at PJC than Jack, Babe Horrell had gone on to become an all-American center at the University of California, Berkeley, on its celebrated 1924 “Wonder Team.” Horrell was “high class, cultured and civilized,” according to one of his black players. “He always dressed right; he always talked right.” Another family member, Jack Horrell, a top sprinter on the current Bulldog track team, had given money publicly to help send Jack to the NAAU track meet in Buffalo. By Christmas, Jack’s mind was made up. On December 13, Rube Samuelsen reported on a visit by the Oregon head coach to the Bulldog campus but warned his readers in the Post: “Don’t bet any money that Jackie will NOT go to U.C.L.A. At this writing the Bruins are Robinson’s No. 1 choice and I can tell you straight that Jackie would be welcomed on the Westwood varsity next fall.”

  Jack would leave PJC at midyear, but not before one last round in basketball. Now well known statewide, he was lionized at a state tournament in Modesto. “He made a decided hit with tournament fans,” according to a reporter, “who cheered his every move. The versatile Negro youth was hailed as the best sportsman and the sensation of the event.” With the Bulldogs reaching Christmas undefeated in conference play, Robinson was a stifling defender, a constant threat to score, and a determined fighter. In a key game against Compton, when PJC trailed at halftime for the first time all season, “Compton’s old bugaboo in every sport, Jack Robinson, was the man that brought about the Compton loss.” When the winning streak ended and a PJC victory over Los Angeles Junior College became essential, he stepped up again. Before a howling crowd that included his brothers Frank and Mack, Jack sank a free throw with twelve seconds remaining to give the Bulldogs a victory. Scoring 26 of his team’s 49 points, he also broke his own record for the most points ever by a Bulldog in a game. “The phenomenal Negro athlete,” the Post reported, “played one of his best games, dropping shot after shot as the bewildered Cubs attempted to guard him.” Winning its next two contests, PJC took the conference crown.

  On February 4, against Glendale, Jack played the last game of his two-year career as a Bulldog. Just before he left the campus, he gained one more significant honor: induction into the junior college’s most respected honor society. On January 27, before the assembled student body, Jack and nine other students received a gold pin to mark their acceptance into the Order of Mast and Dagger; each semester, Mast and Dagger tapped a few students who had performed “outstanding service to the school and whose scholastic and citizenship record is worthy of recognition.” A group picture of the chosen students, including Jack, made the front page of the Pasadena Post. While Jack’s sporting exploits had won him this honor
, his induction also showed an appreciation by his peers at PJC of his strength of character. On the campus, to the mass of students, Robinson was a respected figure, acclaimed and yet modest, as the journalist Shav Glick (also tapped that day) recalled almost forty years later: “To them he was a quiet, capable student who became a superstar on the athletic field.”

  Away from the campus, however, life was another matter. The cheering crowds and his honors and awards could never make up completely for the humiliations that came with being a young black man in a city hostile to people like him. On January 2, Jack had further painful proof of where blacks stood in Pasadena when his oldest brother, Edgar, was beaten by two policemen, then charged with resisting arrest and violating a city ordinance. The ordinance barred individuals from placing chairs along the annual Tournament of Roses Parade without a license (the chairs were then rented out for four or five dollars each).

  According to Edgar, two policemen accosted him about the rental of certain seats. When he reached into his pocket to retrieve a license (for which he said he had paid four dollars on December 30), one officer knocked him down. Next followed, according to a newspaper report based on Edgar’s statement, “a free-for-all scuffle, in which his eye was blackened, his arms twisted and bruised.” Denied medical treatment or a chance to call home, Edgar pleaded guilty to the charges and paid a ten-dollar fine. At the city hospital, the staff refused to treat him. Edgar then went to the office of the chief of police to lodge a complaint. “Before he had an opportunity to say anything,” according to the newspaper, “he said he was ordered out, ‘before you are clubbed on the head,’ these words reputedly said by the chief himself.”

  Apparently, the police also robbed him. He was carrying $60 when arrested, but at the station only $36.55 was counted out as belonging to him. The two policemen vanished from the record; they might have come from Los Angeles, Edgar thought, because he had to direct them to the local police station and because (so he said) they told him at one point that “we don’t allow Negroes in Los Angeles to make this kind of money.” Protests against the police proved a waste of time. The Pasadena branch of the NAACP passed a resolution of protest to the city police department and offered it documents detailing other accusations “of flagrant discrimination and brutal treatment of colored citizens in Pasadena by the police.” The NAACP was ignored. Apparently, the only newspaper to mention its move, or Edgar’s arrest, was the black-owned California Eagle.

  This incident, and other episodes like it, eventually made Jack loathe Pasadena. Some of his childhood friends, including Sid and Eleanor Heard, who never left the city, became reconciled to its faults. But Jack’s final response was different. “If my mother, brothers and sister weren’t living there,” he declared, “I’d never go back.” His resentment went deep. “I’ve always felt like an intruder, even in school. People in Pasadena were less understanding, in some ways, than Southerners. And they were more openly hostile.”

  Early in February, just past his twentieth birthday, Robinson took his first bold steps away from home when he began to commute daily between Pasadena and Los Angeles to attend classes at UCLA. In the next two years, he would grow in maturity in many ways, but he would also be forced to endure even more embittering incidents that led him to resent the city of his youth. As always, however, he looked with hope to the future; and in the winter of 1939, the future for Jack Robinson was UCLA and its promise of national glory.

  CHAPTER 4

  Blue and Gold at UCLA

  1939–1941

  I certainly hope that Friendship continues on and on.

  —Jackie Robinson (1941)

  ON FEBRUARY 15, 1939, ending “the wild rumors that have been running rife regarding his future plans,” Jack Robinson drove his 1931 Plymouth from Pepper Street in Pasadena to Vernon Avenue in downtown Los Angeles to begin his formal association with UCLA by enrolling at the Extension Division of the university. There, he would complete the requirements for full entry to the university in Westwood in the fall.

  At UCLA, where its new football coach, Babe Horrell, saluted Robinson as “one of the greatest open-field runners I have ever seen,” the student newspaper added its endorsement. Quoting the PJC track coach to the effect that Robinson was the state’s “outstanding all-around athlete,” the California Daily Bruin also foresaw no academic problems for the recruit, although his transcript showed deficiencies in algebra, French, and geometry. “Judging by his previous scholarship record,” the Bruin declared, “Robinson should have little difficulty in making good in Extension Division.” But Jack himself then shook up reporters—and, no doubt, at least two coaches at UCLA—by announcing that he would no longer strive to be a “four-star” athlete. Instead, he would compete in football and the broad jump only, because the strain of competition in four sports was too great. “And besides,” he added, “I think I should study. That is why I chose UCLA. I don’t intend to coast so that I can play ball.”

  Jack’s decision meant only one thing, really: he had set himself the goal of following in Mack’s footsteps and making the U.S. Olympic team in 1940. Already some experts were hailing him as the finest broad jumper in the United States. With time now to train for the event, he was expected to earn a spot on the team easily.

  For Robinson, the next few months were a respite from the intense athletic activity of the previous two years. In the spring, he stuck to his promise and emphasized his studies. Taking courses in English, French, physiology, and physical education, he also finished work in algebra and geometry started at Muir Tech. If he attended spring football training in Westwood in March, he did so as a spectator. He also played no basketball for UCLA. However, suiting up for an Alpha Phi Alpha team in a statewide league of Negro fraternities, “the Black Panther,” as the California Eagle dubbed him, scored 25 points in leading the Alphas to a victory.

  The spring passed quietly, if with one major change on Pepper Street. His mother completed the purchase of the house and land at 133 Pepper Street, next door to 121 Pepper Street. With this purchase, Mallie moved into 133 accompanied by her niece Jessie Maxwell; she left 121, the larger house, to an assortment of family, including Jack, Willa Mae, Edgar, and Frank and Maxine and their children. The summer began well, with yet another sports triumph for Jack when, over the Fourth of July weekend, on the tennis courts at La Pintoresca Park near his home, he won the men’s singles and doubles titles in the tenth annual championship tournament of the black Western Federation of Tennis Clubs. Opponents crumbled before what one observer called “his wickedly unorthodox style, characterized by lightning speed and uncanny judgment.” In the men’s singles final, faced with his “devilish placements, speed, and a merciless little cut, used in net play,” his veteran opponent “quietly folded up.” Teaming with a friend, Jack then took the doubles title. In the entire tournament, neither he nor his doubles team came close to dropping a set. “The amazing thing about Robinson’s performance,” the observer marveled, was that although he “only plays tennis in the summer vacation months … [he] nevertheless ran rough shod over players who are devoted to the sport year round and for years on end.”

  But within days of these victories came the worst blow of Jack’s life to that point. At about 6:25 p.m. on July 10, his brother Frank was riding his motorcycle along Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena when a woman driving a car in the opposite direction turned across his path to enter a service station. Frank braked hard and swerved to avoid the car, but its left front fender snagged his machine. Frank, along with a passenger behind him, went flying. They struck a parked car so hard that the impact left a huge dent in its body. With only bruises, his passenger walked away; Frank was knocked unconscious. An ambulance sped him to Huntington Memorial Hospital, where doctors found that he had fractured his skull and broken several ribs as well as a leg and a thigh. The accident had also ruptured his liver, spleen, and kidney and punctured his left lung.

  Jack was playing cards at the home of a friend when he heard the ne
ws. Rushing to the hospital, he heard to his horror that Frank was near death. In tears he called home and broke the news to his sister, Willa Mae. “Mama was living next door then on the corner,” she recalled, “and I hollered out the window. I didn’t think what I was doing, so the whole neighborhood heard and everybody came running.” Fleeing the hospital, Jack went home and fell sobbing into bed. Frank, who had regained consciousness, lingered for several hours. Jack Gordon remembered him cursing in his pain, and Mallie recalled his deep groaning as he begged her to turn him over so he could die in peace. A few minutes after midnight, he was gone. On July 14, he was buried in Mountain View Cemetery. “I was very shaken up by his death,” Jack wrote later. “It was hard to believe he was gone, hard to believe I would no longer have his support.”

  Jack sought relief from sorrow in sports—mainly tennis, golf, and baseball. Playing for the Pasadena Sox, a racially mixed team made up of past and present PJC players and sponsored by the Chicago White Sox, he helped to lead his team to victory in the California State Amateur Baseball championship. Near the end of August, in the championship game in Brookside Park, Jack scored his team’s first two runs, stole four bases, started one double play, and had five assists. On this team Jack was one of three black starters, and probably the outstanding player on the field—a fact hardly lost on the major-league scouts who attended the game. At one point, the California Eagle called the play of the three, and their easy acceptance by the many white spectators, “the biggest argument for the participation of the Negro in major league baseball.”