Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Woody Strode, who left UCLA that year, remembered Robinson as somewhat unhappy at UCLA. “Jackie was a very intelligent and good-looking young man,” Strode wrote, who had “steely hard eyes that would flash angry in a heartbeat.” Jack was “not friendly” and seemed “very withdrawn. Even on the football field, he would stand off by himself. People used to ask me, ‘Why is Jackie so sullen and always by himself?’ ” A proper answer would have had something to do not only with his arrest but also with his brother Frank’s tragic death. In addition, the fact that Jack did not drink liquor or chase women, and was religious, made him an oddball to many men. Among the bevy of young black women in Westwood, he saw no one he really cared for; and at UCLA, as at PJC, he was cool to the friendly overtures of white coeds.

  Despite Strode’s observations, other students saw him as well adjusted to Westwood. As a reporter traveling with the Bruins, Hank Shatford sometimes roomed with Jack on the road and found him affable: “It was a real treat to be with him, to be in the same room with him, to talk about the game and one thing or another. At PJC and at UCLA he was very popular. Gee, all my crowd thought the world of Jack. I never heard a nasty word from my friends about him.” Several people tried to make life easier for the handsome, likable football star. UCLA offered no formal athletic scholarships, but friends or “boosters” of the football team and other teams found ways of helping players meet their expenses and have a little extra money to spend. For example, Jack now commuted to and from Pasadena not in his aged Plymouth but in a Model A Ford of more recent vintage that somehow he had managed to acquire. Later, such arrangements would have come under the scrutiny of the governing body of collegiate sports; but in 1939, young UCLA was only doing what older schools had been doing for years.

  He held at least two part-time jobs that year. Along with other varsity athletes, he worked as an assistant janitor in Kerckhoff Hall, the center of student activities at UCLA. Jack’s other main job was at Campbell’s Book Store, which specialized in used textbooks, on Leconte Avenue in Westwood. Its owners, Robert and Blanche Campbell, were transplanted Nebraskans who had become major boosters of Bruin athletics by hiring Bruin athletes, including blacks, at their store. The future Nobel Peace Prize–winner Ralph Bunche had worked at Campbell’s when he was a star basketball player on three championship teams before graduating summa cum laude in 1927; Kenny Washington and Tom Bradley also worked there. The Campbells had even helped to scout Robinson in Pasadena for UCLA.

  To the Campbells, Robinson was a dependable, charming young man. He “was always eager to cooperate,” according to Bob Campbell. Before the season was over, Jack and the Campbells were good friends; the couple helped provide a bridge to the adult white world of Westwood and beyond. Ray Bartlett believed that the Campbells had arranged for Jack to get his Model A Ford (“They had loaned me twenty-five dollars, interest-free and without security, to help me buy mine, and when I paid them back, they were shocked”). At the annual Bruin football banquet in the spring, which Jack’s mother attended, she sat with the Campbells at their invitation.

  Other people, including various coaches and administrators, obviously liked and respected Jack; they would still be enough in his life seven years later to attend his wedding, just as Bob Campbell, more than thirty years later, would fly overnight from Los Angeles to New York in 1972 to attend the funeral of his former young employee. By the end of the fall of 1939, Jack’s intense grieving for his brother Frank and his outrage at his treatment by the Pasadena police had begun to subside. Not only his success on the football field but also his mother’s lessons about striving onward and upward, in addition to his religious faith, especially as stimulated at Scott United Methodist Church by Reverend Karl Downs, had seen him through.

  ROBINSON’S RESOLVE TO compete only in football and the broad jump did not last long. He was now much less interested in the broad jump. His dream of going to Helsinki for the 1940 Olympiad had ended on November 30, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland as the war in Europe started by Nazi Germany raged on. The 1940 Olympic Games were canceled. Moreover, the Bruin basketball coach, Wilbur Johns, badly needed help: coming into the season, the Bruins had lost twenty-eight consecutive conference games. Johns had seen Robinson lead PJC to an amazing upset of the USC freshmen. “When the Headman saw Robinson almost single-handedly cause the defeat of S.C.’s terrific frosh five,” the Bruin noted, “he was sold on the boy.”

  Although Johns admired Robinson, coach and player soon clashed. Johns’s system of play, patient and stationary, was ill suited to Jack’s physical gifts. Early in January, after UCLA struggled in two games, the Bruin noted tartly: “Jack Robinson, who is nothing more than a wasted robot in a set-up offense, knows the game and would really utilize his speed and deceptiveness in a fast break.” Perhaps Jack himself had whispered this criticism to the Bruin; at some point he challenged Johns by skipping practice. According to Bob Campbell, Johns thought Jack “a very willing worker” who was “trying to do too much.” Summoning Robinson to his office, Johns laid down the law. Thereafter, the two worked well together, and Robinson would later praise Johns as one of his best coaches ever. “He encouraged me a lot,” Jack recalled, “and praised me when I needed it most.”

  In mid-January, conference play started with a two-game visit to Palo Alto to play Stanford; the result was two losses but an improving Bruin team, which now sported a fast-breaking style. “Easily the best man on the floor,” Jack scored 23 of his team’s 28 points in the first game and 12 of the Bruins’ 36 in the second. Soon, the Bruins ended a 31-game losing streak at Berkeley. As the season progressed, Robinson became locked in battle with Ralph Vaughn of USC, hailed by Life magazine as the best player in the country, for the individual scoring title in the nation. In another game against UC-Berkeley, according to one reporter, Jack turned in “the best individual performance ever seen in the Bruin gym.” Above all, his style fascinated watchers, as he eschewed static play in favor of dazzling drives to the basket for layups. Reporters marveled at his unusual blend of speed, sinuous body control, and deception. “On one series of individual maneuvers,” one puzzled writer noted, “Jack tried no less than three series of feints to get a set-up.” Nibs Price, the Berkeley coach, offered his opinion: “Robinson has more natural talent, speed, and spring than any man in the conference, including Ralph Vaughn. Furthermore, if he had played the amount of basketball that Vaughn has, Robinson would probably outscore the S.C. forward twofold.” (Price then proceeded to leave Robinson off his all-conference team. Admitting “the speed and shooting ability of the Bruin Negro,” and conceding that “Robinson is a great natural athlete,” he chose another player in his place on the basis of “basketball ability alone.”)

  Jack ended the season with 148 points to Vaughn’s 138, but he was clearly far more concerned with what the Bruins accomplished as a team in their finest season in many years. Late in the season, at home against Stanford, with the crowd yelling at Jack to shoot, shoot, he had patiently frozen the ball and sacrificed points for himself in order to prevent a Stanford rally. “Schools cannot teach that type of sportsmanship from a textbook,” Wilbur Johns would declare. “I wonder if we can teach it at all.”

  On March 10, with very little practice, Jack joined Ray Bartlett and the other players for his first baseball game at UCLA. His debut was a triumph. “The phenomenal Negro athlete made a terrific impression on the fans,” a reporter wrote. At shortstop, Jack was flawless; at the plate, he got four straight hits; and he stole four bases, including what the reporter called “a sensational steal of home.” The reporter summed up Robinson’s start: “The amazing rapidity with which he got his batting and fielding eye speaks well enough for his ability as a baseballer.”

  Unfortunately, this turned out to be the high point of Jack’s season. Two days later, Bruin baseball descended into farce, with Jack in a leading role. On the brink of a defeat, and with an icy gale blowing and the sun sinking fast, he came in to pitch against visiting Berke
ley. “I can’t see the plate!” Robinson screamed to the umpire, as he fastidiously threw wild pitches while the irate Bear players howled in protest. The ploy worked; the game was called, and defeat averted. But the gods had their revenge: Jack sank into what seemed to one observer “a permanent batting slump” (even as Ray Bartlett emerged as the leading Bruin batter). Once, the Bruin even referred to a certain weak team’s hitting as “colder than Jackie Robinson’s batting average.” But his fielding remained steady, and his intrepid base running helped the Bruins win more than once. Against USC in April he broke up a double play so decisively that a fight almost broke out; an admirer called it “the kind of a behind-the-scenes play that you don’t hear about now, but means plenty at the time.” More often than not, however, UCLA went down to defeat. On May 1, the season ended with a loss to USC, in what the Bruin called “a long, sad afternoon” for the hapless team. When the season ended, Jack had a dismal average of .097. With a teammate, he shared the lead for the most errors committed by a Bruin.

  In February, Jack had let it be known that he would not go out for the track team. But in April, as baseball ended, he teased his fans by filing an application to take part in a triangular track meet. He did not participate; then, casually, he jumped 23 feet 4 inches in practice. The Bruin coach was impressed, but cited Jack’s lack of commitment in leaving him off the UCLA team to the important Fresno Relays in May. Two weeks before the Pacific Coast Conference championships near the end of May, he announced that Robinson would be allowed to compete “provided he met the regular training schedule.” Forced into a jump-off against three Bruin regulars, Jack won a spot. At the championships in the Coliseum, he then soared to a new conference record of 25 feet (only one American jumped farther that year). In June, jumping indoors because of rain in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he won the NCAA title.

  Jack now became the first UCLA student ever to letter in four sports in the same season. (Some would call him the second; in 1923–1924, when the school was known as the University of California, Southern Division, Burnett “Cap” Haralson lettered in the same four sports.) A banner headline in the Bruin, “ ‘I Do Not Choose To Run!’—Jackie Robinson,” proposed Robinson for the Presidency of the United States. The story, based on a mock interview of Robinson by Lenny Safir, the droll satirist at the Bruin (and the brother of William Safire), sent Robinson up as Superman, whose gifts knew no limits.

  JACK ENDED THE SCHOOL YEAR solidly installed as a student. At a time when a C average was more than enough for graduation, in his first semester he earned C’s in courses in education, geology, and history (two courses); in the second semester, he earned C’s in two more history courses, in Spanish, and in military science. He earned two A’s that year, in physical education.

  Relaxed and reassured, he enjoyed the summer of 1940. On weekends he played golf and tennis, but he also made some money. Probably through Bill Ackerman, the powerful graduate manager at UCLA who had overseen his recruitment in 1938, he found a lucrative job in the property department at the Warner Bros. film studio. For the first time in some years, he played neither baseball nor softball in Brookside Park. Perhaps he was eager to rest after nine months of physical stress; perhaps he was bored by his old Pasadena routines.

  Toward the end of August, he returned to the UCLA campus in eager anticipation of the fall football season. He was back barely a month or so when he found himself falling in love with a seventeen-year-old freshman from Los Angeles, Rachel Isum.

  Jack had seen her first in the milling cluster of brown students in their chosen corner of Kerckhoff Hall, and now and then in the parking lot on sun-drenched mornings when she drove in from West Los Angeles with her carpool of girlfriends in her old Ford V-8. Five feet five inches tall, she somehow seemed even taller; her face was brown, with rounded cheeks, her hair long and worn usually in carefully massed curls. Her smile was open and friendly, but she was studious; he often saw her poring over her books on a bench in the sunlight. For a while, Jack admired her from afar but did nothing about his feelings. For one thing, he was still going with the tall Pasadena beauty Bessie Renfro. Finally he confided his interest to Ray Bartlett, who had never met Rachel but needed no formal introduction to any young woman. “He talked about this girl and how nice she seemed,” Bartlett recalled. “And so one day I said, ‘Haven’t you met her yet?… No? Well, come on! You’d better meet her before classes really get going and she disappears.’ And I introduced him to her.”

  Rachel Annetta Isum, just past seventeen and a June graduate of Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, lived at home with her parents and a younger brother, Raymond, at 1588 36th Place; sometimes an older half-brother, Charles Williams, also stayed there. In many respects, her parents were unusual. Her father, Charles Raymond Isum, a second-generation black Californian, had been a bookbinder with the Los Angeles Times for more than twenty years. A former sergeant in the U.S. Infantry, he had retired from the Times with a severe heart condition brought on after he was gassed by the Germans in France in November 1918. After his retirement, his wife, Rachel’s mother, had been forced to find work for herself. Now Zellee Isum was a self-employed caterer, with clients in Beverly Hills and Hollywood; on Saturdays she also worked in the huge employees’ cafeteria downtown at the Los Angeles Public Library.

  Both parents were children of the West and the Southwest. Zellee’s father, C. T. Jones, had come from Atlanta; her mother, Annetta Garza Jones, was from Houston. They had lived as pioneering entrepreneurs in the Southwest, where Zellee grew up; at one point, C. T. Jones had apparently owned the largest café, a pool hall, and a theater on the main street of Nogales, on the Mexican border, as well as many acres of land thought to be rich in silver. Zellee had grown up well-to-do in Arizona and, for a while, Mexico; she spoke Spanish fluently. For two years she had studied at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Then the family businesses began to fail. About this time, Zellee eloped with a man who turned out to be worthless, except for the birth of her first child, Charles Williams. After C.T.’s death, his widow, Annetta, moved to Los Angeles to be near her daughter and her new family.

  Rachel’s charm and drive had everything to do with the way her parents had brought her up. “My father was sick for a long time,” she recalled. “He could do very little without being exhausted, which was hard on a man who had been a sportsman, gregarious, really popular. He was often near death. But he was tender and loving, and seemed to favor me over my brothers.” Her mother, too, loved her, but set lofty goals and strict standards for her daughter. In preparing for her career as a caterer, she asked Rachel to assume many tasks in the house, including cleaning, cooking, and shopping. “My mother wanted a lot from me, but she also gave me a lot,” Rachel said. “She had impeccable manners, and when she spoke she was articulate and very careful about what she said; she was proper, always proper, and she expected the same of me.” Rachel learned about the importance of personal grooming, from meticulous coiffure to garments that aspired to elegance rather than flash. In addition, she had to be self-sufficient. Her first job outside the home was at the public library, where her mother provided food. “By the time I was ten,” Rachel said, “they had me in a black uniform with a little white organdy apron. I got fifty cents every time I helped. I liked helping, but I also loved the fifty cents. I think that was the whole point.”

  At home, she washed and scrubbed and polished to meet the meticulous standards set by her mother. Zellee also assigned her the task of taking care of both her younger brother and her father, so that drudgery and love came together, arm in arm. An electric bell alerted her when her father, who had his own bedroom, was in trouble: “He needed me so much that I felt I was like his guardian angel. I watched him and watched over him all the time.” At times she felt oppressed, but she seldom rebelled. She and her mother became close. Zellee loved to cook, and she taught Rachel her secrets. They also loved music, both at home, where Rachel had her upright piano and the treasured violin someone had sold to her mothe
r’s father as a Stradivarius (it was not), and at Saturday concerts of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Once, gloriously, they heard there the contralto voice of Marian Anderson.

  As Rachel became a woman, her mother had watched her vigilantly, and especially when boys were around. “She had nothing to worry about with me,” Rachel later insisted, “but she worried. I had a boyfriend named Eddie, tall and sweet, who arranged his classes so he could walk me to school and come home from school with me. We would talk on the phone for hours or sit on my steps. My mother watched from all sorts of doors and windows. But I gave her nothing to worry about. I let Eddie kiss me only when he had met my two terms: I had to be sixteen, and he had to join my church. I was sixteen, and he joined Bethel AME on 35th Street, so I let him kiss me. That’s what I was like in those days!”

  Rachel also had the residue of a nagging adolescent unhappiness about her body. She had been too tall; towering over boys in elementary school, she had felt unfeminine. Her cheeks were too round, not hollow like those of the reigning beauties. Her breasts were too large too soon, so that she walked on campus with her books pressed against them. Her hair was too thick, too stiff: “All my sorrows were there in my hair, the endless trouble and grief”—the hot straightening comb, the burns. Her skin was too brown, according to the perverse color-and-caste thinking of the day: she was darker than her mother, who was darker than her mother. Once, the mother of a pale-skinned boy down the block almost closed her front door on Rachel, who never went there again. Also hard had been her mother’s insistence that Rachel play the violin in public as a small child. “Encouraging me to appreciate and love music and to play, that was fine. But making me perform at six and seven, before I was ready—that was traumatic. I was a very shy child. Still, I was happy and loved, and self-confident in many ways.”