Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  But even as this mixed team advanced smoothly, a harsher spirit prevailed elsewhere. In a fight that would last nine years, NAACP lawyers finally took on the city over segregation at the swimming pool in Brookside Park. That year, a superior court judge, setting aside arguments by the city that “swimming offered the opportunity of certain intimacies like marriage and that the races should be separated,” placed the NAACP petition on the court calendar. The legal battle was joined. (Later that year, a court ruled against the plaintiffs, but on the basis of a legal technicality. When the plaintiffs appealed and, years later, won their case, the city closed the pools to everyone.) This legal battle was of more than passing interest to Jack. Either at this point, or after some other protest about the city pool, Mack and all other recently hired black workers were fired in revenge by the city manager. The summer of 1939 also saw the founding of the Pasadena Improvement Association. On July 1, the association, endorsed by every important business and real-estate organization in Pasadena, was incorporated. Its explicit goal was to restrict the “use and occupancy of property” in the city of Pasadena “to members of the White or Caucasian Race only.”

  As racial discrimination in Pasadena took this nasty turn, Jack himself became caught up in yet another dangerous episode involving the city police. On September 5, he was in his aging Plymouth, coming home from a softball game in Brookside Park, with Ray Bartlett and other friends riding playfully on the running boards, when he pulled up at the corner of Mountain Street and Fair Oaks Avenue. Although Jack would tell the story somewhat differently, Bartlett remembered clearly that a car driven by a white man came up alongside, “and the man said something about ‘niggers’ to us, and I popped him with my glove, slapped him in his face.” When the man shot his car forward and pulled over, Jack pulled up behind him. “I thought me and this guy were going to have a fight,” Bartlett recalled. “But Jack got right in the middle of it, as usual.” Out of nowhere, according to Jack, a crowd of young blacks quickly gathered. When the white man saw the youths, “he turned pale and backed away, saying that he didn’t want to fight or even start anything in this neighborhood.”

  Just then, a motorcycle policeman, John C. Hall, pulled up. By this time the crowd had grown, according to a police report, to “between 40 and 50 members of the Negro race.” Scared not so much of the police but of his strict mother, Bartlett decided to slip away. “So I withdrew,” he recalled. “But not Jack. He just wouldn’t back down. He was just stubborn.” When Officer Hall tried to make arrests, his “suspects” kept melting away into the crowd. Suddenly he drew his gun on Robinson, who alone refused to run or hide. “I found myself up against the side of my car,” he said later, “with a gun-barrel pressed unsteadily into the pit of my stomach. I was scared to death.”

  Charged with hindering traffic and resisting arrest, Robinson was hauled off to jail, where he spent the night without being allowed to make phone calls. Finally he was able to reach John Thurman, his old PJC baseball coach. The next morning, before an acting police court judge, he pleaded not guilty to both charges. His case was set for September 19. After paying bond in the amount of twenty-five dollars, he was set free.

  The charges took on added seriousness because of the suspended ten-day jail sentence hanging over Jack’s head since January 1938 on condition of good behavior for two years. Most likely, he would have to appear before the same judge who had sentenced him the previous year.

  At UCLA and within the Pasadena court system, Babe Horrell and other Bruin loyalists swung into action; Robinson had to be saved for UCLA. Someone described in the press only as “an attorney prominent in sports circles in the state” sent a petition to “city officials” urging that Robinson be allowed to forfeit bail, enter a plea of guilty, and depend on the mercy of the court. On October 18, the case was finally heard. Jack, who understood it was to be continued, was absent. On his behalf, one of his friends (“another Negro youth of about his age”) so informed the court, which proceeded to settle the matter. Judge Herbert Farrell of Alhambra, filling in for the police court judge, Kenneth C. Newell, who had sentenced Robinson in 1938, accepted the advice of the prosecutor and allowed a change of plea from not guilty to guilty, along with the forfeit of Jack’s bail. Asked by a puzzled reporter about the suspended sentence, the prosecutor ventured the opinion that “the police court had no right to suspend a sentence for longer than six months.” Without comment, the Star-News revealed that the deciding factor had been the prominent sports attorney’s request “that the Negro football player be not disturbed during the football season.”

  Jack understood what had happened: “I got out of that trouble because I was an athlete.” He remembered being fined fifty dollars in absentia and that UCLA paid the fine; he also recalled that he got back his forfeited bail of twenty-five dollars, presumably from UCLA. “I understand, and was told as fact,” Ray Bartlett recalled fifty-six years later, after a career in the Pasadena police force, “that Babe Horrell got ahold of Kenny Newell, the judge, and told him what the situation was, and Kenny Newell handled it from there.” But the change of plea, offered without his knowledge, rankled Jack. Also disturbing to him was the vivid reaction of the press: “Didn’t the newspapers come out with a big blast and paint it up pretty, though!” As a result of this bad publicity, Jack recalled, his first few weeks as a full-time student at UCLA were uncomfortable; the suggestion that he was a sort of thug persisted for a long time: “This thing followed me all over and it was pretty hard to shake off.”

  Later, Jack would call this episode “my first personal experience with bigotry of the meanest sort.” Blocking traffic and resisting arrest were not the worst charges that could be leveled at a young man, but to him they stemmed from a white policeman’s hostility to blacks—not to mention a white motorist’s casual contempt for young black men having fun. Some press accounts treated the matter humorously, but Jack did not laugh. These accounts exploited the stereotype of the lawless, shiftless black buck, which further offended and hurt him. Finally, he knew that he was lucky to have had powerful whites willing to speak up for him—or lucky to have physical gifts that these whites prized. With that sad knowledge he registered for classes at UCLA.

  UCLA WAS YOUNGER THAN Jack himself. In 1919, the University of California, Southern Branch, had opened on Vernon Avenue as a two-year school; its four-year program started only in 1924. In 1926, the permanent campus in Westwood was dedicated on land that once was home to the Shoshone Indians and still possessed much of its pristine beauty. Wild chaparral covered the hills, sycamores and live oaks gave shelter in its leafy canyons to timid black-tailed deer and jackrabbits, and a charming stream flowed through from Stone Canyon on its way to the Pacific Ocean. The next year, the school changed its name to the University of California at Los Angeles. UCLA had then expanded at an amazing rate, but in 1939 the campus consisted mainly of five handsome, commodious buildings set amidst rolling fields. Workmen paved the first parking lot at the university in 1940.

  In 1939, the student body stood at about ninety-six hundred, almost all of them undergraduates. “There were really two UCLAs,” Hank Shatford, the PJC sportswriter who also enrolled there in 1939, recalled. “The bigger UCLA was a commuter school, with kids living all over the greater Los Angeles area. Then there was the other UCLA, much smaller, made up of students like myself who lived in Westwood and could take part in the evening life. For us, it was really wonderful.” As a commuter, Jack belonged to the first UCLA; as a “colored” student, he also belonged to a third UCLA, inhabited by a handful of black students, perhaps no more than fifty in all, as well as a group of Asian-American students, who were hardly more welcome than the Negroes.

  Although racial barriers were unknown officially at UCLA, a small wave of self-examination that fall in the pages of the Bruin exposed some injustices. Behind this self-scrutiny were an enlightened Bruin editor, the University Religious Conference, and the respected president of the University Negro Club, Tom Bradley
, a Bruin track star in the half-mile and a future mayor of Los Angeles. A Japanese-American student complained that students like him despaired of ever being included in the social life of the campus. Jewish students also knew a degree of ostracism; Shatford remembered friends in Pasadena taunting him about going to “JewCLA.” As usual, blacks had it the hardest. They could not live in the village of Westwood; they also were not expected at any “socials,” or student parties, except those put on by the black club, the Sphinx; and certain jobs, such as work in the campus bookstore, were also denied them. No black had ever been admitted to the advanced course in military training at UCLA. And there was no black professor or instructor at the university, as the Bruin itself noted.

  Still, in comparison to many other places UCLA was a friendly place for the black student, and the gifted black athlete was welcome. Eager for fame, the university placed a premium on athletics; but in several sports UCLA was the doormat of its conference, which included USC, Stanford, and Oregon as well as its parent institution, the University of California in Berkeley. Out of zeal to close this gap, but also because the young university was on the whole more democratic, UCLA reached out to black athletes when other universities turned their backs on them. “UCLA was the first school to really give the Negro athlete a break,” according to Ray Bartlett, who also enrolled in 1939. “In the 1930s, the minority population was all pro-UCLA.”

  Going out for football, Jack joined a UCLA squad coming off its most successful year ever, having played in its first postseason bowl game. On that team, and returning for the last season of his glorious four-year Bruin career, was the most beloved player in the school’s history, the halfback Kenny Washington. A Los Angeles native, Washington would become the first UCLA all-American. Another black star was the tall receiver Woody Strode, whose magnificent, statuesque body (he competed also in the shot put and discus events) would eventually take him into the movies. The heralded Robinson became the third member of what the press quickly dubbed the “Gold Dust Trio.” Under a large photograph of Jack filling out his registration forms aided by two assistant coaches, the Bruin spelled out his promise: “Pasadena and Westwood faithfuls pin great hopes on Jackie and predict great things of his passing and elusive running that have made him the greatest open field runner in junior college circles.”

  On the night of Friday, September 29, before about sixty-five thousand spectators in the Los Angeles Coliseum, the major stadium of the 1932 Olympics and UCLA’s home field, the Bruins took the field to open the season. Their opponent, the all-white Texas Christian University, was expected to win; the TCU Frogs were the top-ranked team in the nation in 1938. But UCLA prevailed, 6–2. The Texas players freely admitted that Washington and Robinson were something else. “We’ve never run into anything like them,” the TCU center conceded, “and I hope never [to] again.”

  The next week, the Bruins scored another upset, defeating the University of Washington, 14–7, in Seattle; this time also Jackie Robinson, as the press was now calling him, lived up to his star billing. Down by seven points in the third quarter, the Bruins rallied behind Jack’s magnificent 65-yard punt return to the Huskies’ 5-yard line, which one dazzled reporter called “the prettiest piece of open field running ever witnessed on a football field.” According to the Bruin, the Washington players “were unanimous in their statements that Robinson is the greatest thing they have ever seen. He twisted, squirmed, refused to be stopped.” The Washington fans, too, showed their admiration, and their own class. When Robinson, battered and bruised, limped from the field at the start of the fourth quarter, “the fans rose as a man and gave him a greater ovation than any Washington man received that day.”

  Robinson’s fighting spirit surged again the following week in Palo Alto against Stanford and its great quarterback Frankie Albert. Jack’s brilliant 52-yard run had led to the sole Bruin touchdown; with only six minutes left, UCLA faced almost certain defeat after Albert’s second touchdown pass of the game. “Three thousand Bruin rooters gave up the ghost right then,” one reporter noted, “but Mr. Jack Robinson was there, and Mr. Jack Robinson saved the day.” When Albert rashly tried another pass, “Jackrabbit Jack jumped fully three feet off the ground, grabbed the ball and hot-streaked it 50 yards upfield to the Red 20.” Robinson made “a phenomenal catch of a rifle toss” by Washington, and then the Bruins scored with a plunge over the goal line. On the extra-point try, the hike was poor and the ball sailed high before the holder brought it down; but Robinson, “never lifting his eyes, booted it through the uprights.” The game ended in a tie, but for UCLA it was the same as a victory.

  Against Montana, Jack did not carry the ball once. Coach Horrell’s strategy was to use him as a decoy to set up passes or slashing runs by Kenny Washington and another gifted back, Leo Cantor. This time the strategy worked; Washington scored all three touchdowns in UCLA’s victory. One moment of glory for “Jackrabbit Jackie Robinson—El Bruin’s greatest threat”—came with a 33-yard punt return. The next week, Robinson dominated in a win at home over powerful Oregon. In a play that covered 66 yards, he caught a pass from Washington, then humiliated two defenders: “Mr. Robinson took the ball on the Oregon 23, sent [the defenders] flying on their faces with a series of hip-jiggling feints, and trotted over for the touchdown.” On another run, Robinson “swung wide around left end, then cut inside the end—and broke wide again for the sidelines. This time he didn’t do any feinting—no tricky work—just speed, blinding speed that left a flock of Webfoots in his wake.”

  Now Jack was being hailed locally as “the greatest ball-carrier in the nation.” Even more remarkably, this praise came when, with Coach Horrell’s decoy system, he had carried the ball only ten times in the five Bruin games. Jack had lived up to all expectations. Thus, on November 1, when he was knocked down in a Bruin practice and lay motionless on the grass, his coaches saw their season’s hopes in sudden jeopardy: “Bruin stock went all the way up and down the fluctuation scale,” as one sportswriter put it. The team doctor determined that “the boy who has brought the Bruins out of hot water in every major game this year had turned his right knee.”

  Jack missed the next two games. Then, used sparingly against Oregon State, he stirred the crowd with one of his specialties, a reverse around left end, for 31 yards. Next, against the Cougars of Washington State, Robinson was back at full speed. With the game tied in the fourth quarter, Robinson caught a pass, “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.” He sparked another touchdown drive with dramatic runs of 29 yards and 32 yards; cleverly, “Jackie was well past the scrimmage line before the harassed Cougars woke up to the fact that he had the ball.”

  UCLA was undefeated (but with two ties) when they played their final game of the season, against USC, for the Pacific Coast Conference championship and a place in the Rose Bowl. The record crowd of 103,352—said then to be the largest crowd ever at a football game—witnessed an epic struggle in the Coliseum that ended in a scoreless tie. At one point, USC seemed certain to score. Its all-American Grenny Lansdell raced “past our secondary before we knew what happened,” a Bruin recalled. “Then suddenly Jackie Robinson came flying out of the corner.” Robinson hit Lansdell so hard that the Trojan fumbled away the ball for the first time that season. The teams ended the season tied for first place—but USC, with fewer ties, went to the Rose Bowl.

  Playing in a system that limited his use as a running back, Robinson had managed to compile some amazing statistics. Kenny Washington had carried the ball 141 times for an average run of 5.23 yards; on only 40 carries, Robinson had averaged an astonishing 11.4 yards. Had Robinson not missed two games, UCLA almost certainly would have gone to the Rose Bowl. But despite their success on the field, both Washington and Robinson were slighted in postseason honors. Jack was only a junior; but Washington, a senior commonly regarded as the finest football player in Bruin history, was left off many all-Ameri
can teams. He was also not included in the nationally prestigious annual East-West benefit game for the Shrine Hospital for Crippled Children on January 1 in San Francisco; no black player had ever been invited to the event.

  Among a few teammates, Jack’s success inspired some resentment. After the Bruin published a story by Hank Shatford entitled “Jack Robinson—Better than Grange” (“his open field running has been likened to that of Red Grange and nearly every other historic ball carrier”), a white football player confronted the writer. “ ‘White man, you’re a black man,’ he told me,” Shatford recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t care what you say. What I wrote in the column is truth.’ ” A few days later, Jack sustained his knee injury in practice. To Shatford, the injury was no accident. Robinson had clearly pulled up at the end of a play 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 knew the guy well. The coaches were furious. There were some players on that team who weren’t fans of Jack Robinson.”

  Throughout the fall, despite his success, Jack remained sensitive about his arrest and its effect on his reputation. Rumors spread about his alleged bad behavior. In one story, he and Kenny Washington had a fistfight in an alley, in a clash of titanic egos, or two black bucks. The story had no foundation; Washington was sweet and easygoing, and Robinson joked that he was too smart to pick a fight with a man of Washington’s size and strength. At least twice that fall Robinson lauded “the Kingfish” or “King” Washington to reporters. In the Eagle, he asserted that “Kenny is a really great player and if the rest of us in the backfield give him 100 per cent support he’s going to get the honors he deserves.” And in the Bruin, he praised Washington as “the greatest athlete he has seen.” Still the rumors persisted—not simply about Robinson and Washington, but about Robinson in particular.