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

by James W. Johnson

  As his competitive nature started to show, Robinson once confronted a quarterback from a rival school before a game. He didn’t introduce himself. He simply said, “I heard you were lucky in your last game. How are you gonna go ninety-eight yards for a touchdown against us?” Then he turned and walked away. Early day trash talk.

  During this time he became more and more aware of “a growing resentment at being deprived of some of the advantages the white kids had.” Because he and his friends had little access to the municipal pool, they would swim in a nearby reservoir. One day they heard a booming voice say, “Looka there—niggers swimming in my drinking water.” They were escorted to jail at gunpoint before they were sent home.

  Robinson, Ray Bartlett, and their friends would go to the movie theaters, “but we could only sit in certain places,” said Bartlett, who had known Robinson since they were seven years old. “I never thought much about it . . . , but Jackie knew how the world really worked back then. What he saw bothered him. It bothered him much more than the rest of us.”

  “They weren’t out to do trouble,” Willa Mae said. “They just were a bunch of kids who enjoyed being together and mostly playing ball games.” Bartlett and Robinson became lifelong friends who went through grade school, high school, and college together and stayed in touch over the years.

  Bartlett was born in Pasadena and lived most of his life there. His father, Vincent, sold real estate, and his mother, Fay, was a nurse. When his mother told him the racism he faced would “all change one day,” he didn’t believe her, Bartlett recalled. “But I felt that things could be changed through the system. That’s what I worked for.”

  Robinson said his mother always maintained her composure. “She didn’t allow us to go out of our way to antagonize the whites, and she still made it perfectly clear to us and to them that she was not at all afraid of them and that she had no intention of allowing them to mistreat us.”

  Eventually the white neighbors began to accept the Robinsons, mostly out of respect for Mallie, who worked so hard to nurture her family despite daunting odds. Said Bartlett: “I can’t think of any way that growing up [in Pasadena] helped Jackie. I really can’t.” Robinson wrote later in life that when he left UCLA, he “didn’t want anything to do with Pasadena.”

  Robinson could have become a juvenile delinquent had it not been for two men who shared his mother’s values. One was a mechanic, Carl Anderson, who took him aside to tell him that following the crowd didn’t take guts but that he had to show courage and intelligence to walk away. That was a lesson that proved extremely valuable to Robinson when he broke the color barrier in baseball many years later. The other man was the Reverend Karl Downs, a young minister where Mallie attended church. Robinson grew to trust Downs, often going to him for advice. “He helped ease some of my tensions.” Over a period of ten years, Downs offered Robinson advice that he found useful while attending junior high, high school, and UCLA. “I’m not sure what would have happened to Jack if he had never met Reverend Downs,” Bartlett said years later.

  Downs watched Robinson play football on Saturdays and then made sure that Robinson taught a Sunday school class the following morning. Robinson agreed to teach the class because he respected Downs so much. He would rather have slept in after a grueling football game on Saturday night, “but no matter how terrible I felt, I had to get up. It was impossible to shirk duty when Karl Downs was involved.” Years later Rachel Robinson recalled how Downs helped Robinson change his life. “The religious beliefs that Karl helped stimulate in him would strengthen his ability to cope with all the challenges he would face in his life,” she said.

  Across town thirteen-year-old Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode was starting at McKinley Junior High School, where his athletic ability began to develop. Because he was five years older than Robinson and lived in a section of Los Angeles called the East Side, Strode and Robinson most likely never crossed paths until they arrived at UCLA.

  Strode was born in Los Angeles on July 25, 1914, to parents who had emigrated from New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1900. They too were looking for the Promised Land. He had a brother, Baylous Strode Jr., who was two years older. (In his autobiography, Goal Dust, Strode does not give the first names of his parents. It is likely his father’s first name was Baylous.) His father was a brick mason and his mother a homemaker. His father earned his high school diploma at night.

  Strode’s three given names came from President Woodrow Wilson and Los Angeles district attorney Tom Woolwine. “Well, I had to get rid of that title,” he said. “‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode!’ It was like a goddamned announcement. So I cut it down to Woody Strode,” he wrote in his autobiography. His lineage was a mix of African American and Native American, a heritage that gave him a distinct look that would pay huge dividends in his adult years. His great-grandfather married a Creek Indian, and his grandfather, a Blackfoot. His mother’s mother was a slave who was part Cherokee. “That’s how close the Indians and the slaves were in those days. They were both downtrodden in America,” Strode wrote.

  Strode was born four years after his parents moved from New Orleans. His parents raised Strode to be color-blind. They never talked about race. “He saw the white people out here were different from the white people where he came from,” Strode wrote about his father. “He wanted me to fall into their path. That’s why he never talked about race.” It was this upbringing that separated Jackie Robinson from Strode in their attitude toward race relations in the 1930s and beyond. Their attitudes also differed because of where they lived. Strode lived in a predominately black area, with some Germans, Italians, and Mexicans mixed in, while Robinson resided in a poor neighborhood that was surrounded and dominated by a wealthy white enclave. “I think that’s why Jack had a little more hate going than the rest of us,” Strode said.

  Strode attended the Holmes Avenue Grammar School across the street from his house on the East Side, later to be known as South-Central, and not far from the Los Angeles Coliseum. Today the East Side is more than 90 percent Latino. The school was run by a black principal, Bessie Burke, the first black teacher in the Los Angeles schools.

  Strode remembers playing in the Los Angeles River and catching crawdads in the unfortunately named Nigger Slough (now named Dominguez Slough). But he spent most of his time on the playgrounds where city workers taught youngsters basketball, football, and baseball, along with other sports. He played baseball and basketball, but his first love was football. “I was one of the gorillas (linemen). My athletic ability didn’t begin to show up until I hit McKinley Junior High School.” While attending McKinley, he would play sports at lunchtime and recess. It was that love of sports and his athletic ability that brought him together with Robinson and another talented athlete, Kenny Washington, who would become his best friend.

  2

  The Kingfish and Woody

  “The two finest football players as backs that I ever had the pleasure of playing with were Kenny Washington and Whizzer White.”

  —Former UCLA quarterback Ned Mathews

  Kenny Washington grew up in white, middle-class Lincoln Heights—the “Heights” as it was called—an Italian community with a few Irish here and there. The Heights sat on the hills of the East Side, across the Los Angeles River from downtown. The Washington family may have been the only African Americans in the community. Today Lincoln Heights is more than 70 percent Latino. When Woody Strode met Kenny for the first time, he thought he was Italian; he had an accent that was half Italian, and his English wasn’t too good. “I used to make fun of him because I couldn’t understand him,” Strode said. But, he added, Washington was a good student. Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray wrote in 1961 that because he was raised among Italians, Washington “logged more lasagna than a regiment of Mussolinis.”

  Many of the men who lived in Lincoln Heights worked for the railroad as engineers, firemen, brakemen, or switchmen. Those jobs weren’t available to African Ame
ricans, so Washington’s grandfather worked as a cook for the railroad. His grandmother Susie raised him and was a janitor at a nearby grammar school. Washington’s grandparents had three sons: Julius, Roscoe (better known as Rocky), and Edgar. Edgar married Kenny’s mother, Marion, when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. The marriage crumbled when Edgar began seeing another woman. That’s when Kenny moved in with his grandparents.

  Edgar, who was known as Blue, lived the high life, chasing after girls and following the bright lights. From 1919 to 1961 he appeared in eighty-seven films, mostly bit parts, including cowboy movies with Ken Maynard and Tom Mix, and he had a small role in Gone with the Wind. “[As an] African American character actor [he] typified Hollywood’s racist treatment—and views—of blacks in the 1930s as an easily frightened, wide-eyed, menial type. His career declined as the image of the black male became more [respectable] in an increasingly race-conscious age,” notes the Internet Movie Database website. Blue also appeared in The Birth of a Nation and the original King Kong. One of his best friends was Frank Capra, the film director, producer, and writer.

  Blue was making seventy-five dollars a day acting when other African Americans were making ten to fifteen dollars a week. He would disappear for days at a time, spending money and having a good time, and then coming home broke. He also earned a living boxing and playing baseball. He fought in open-air boxing arenas in Southern California and played as a pitcher and fielder for such black baseball teams as the Kansas City Monarchs, the Chicago American Giants, and the Los Angeles White Sox.

  Kenny Washington derived his considerable talent from his father, who stood 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. Blue was described as a “ruggedly charismatic character, whether knocking heads, bruising baseballs or performing his own movie stunts.” Said Strode: “Athletically, Blue had the ability to do just about any damn thing he wanted. He was a hell of a baseball player, a big powerful man, playing outfield, [pitching] and first base.” As a pitcher he had a deceptive underhand delivery. But liquor led to Blue’s downfall. For example, he was released from the Chicago American Giants because he had “too much King Alcohol under his belt. No place on a ball team for those who want to get soused. . . .” Blue Washington faced his share of racism while playing baseball. The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Oregon, reported that “a big, black-skinned gem’m’m named Washington was having the time of his shoe-shining life out there in the box for the Negroes.”

  If grandmother Susie Washington was the woman who raised him, Kenny Washington’s “father” was his uncle Rocky, a Los Angeles police officer, one of only a handful of African Americans on the force. He also became the first African American lieutenant, despite rampant racism in the department. Rocky provided the discipline that Susie needed when Kenny ran afoul of the rules. “If Kenny got in trouble, Rocky would carry out the orders. . . . He’d whip Kenny’s butt,” Strode stated. Rocky was always there for Kenny, offering advice throughout his career. “Rocky was level-headed, the kind of guy that always had his feet on the ground,” Strode said. “Rocky got a lot of praise for the way he brought up Kenny.” (Rocky’s wife, Hazel, was a business partner with the actress Rosalind Russell and was one of the first licensed black hairdressers in Hollywood.)

  The Washingtons lived two blocks from the Downey Avenue Playground, where Kenny played all sports, including boxing, but football and baseball were his two main loves. He had one setback when he was ten years old: he broke both knees in a bicycle accident, and those knees would bother him throughout his athletic career. When he played with the Rams, Tom Harmon, a teammate and the 1940 Heisman Trophy winner, described Washington’s running: “He had a crazy gait, like he had two broken legs. He’d be coming at you straight, and it would look like he was going sideways.”

  Strode called Kenny the original “Crazylegs,” a name that had been stuck on Rams’ receiver Elroy Hirsch when he played at Wisconsin in 1942. The Los Angeles Times described him this way: “As a broken-field runner he had a straight arm that felled giants and a de-step that looked like an adagio dance. Speedy and a good blocker, he also had a slingshot pass that for accuracy and distance surpassed anything Jim Thorpe ever threw.”

  Not far from where Woody Strode grew up, another black youngster was gaining attention for his athletic skills in football and track: Tom Bradley, the future mayor of Los Angeles. Unlike Strode and Washington, Bradley was not a California native. The grandson of slaves, he was born in Calvert, Texas, on December 27, 1917, the son of Lee and Crenner Bradley, whose families had moved there in the 1880s. Calvert, which lies between Waco and Houston, was the state’s fourth largest city at the end of the nineteenth century because it boasted the world’s largest cotton gin. For cotton was king and held the promise of sharecropping to earn a living.

  The Bradleys worked grueling eighteen-hour days picking cotton in one-hundred-degree temperatures, climate changes including droughts and drenching storms, and a widely varying price for cotton. When Bradley ran for governor of California in the 1980s, he looked out a car window at a cotton field as he drove through the Central Valley of California. He turned to a fellow passenger and remarked, “That was enough.” I never did fill that twenty-pound sack.” His parents lost five children in infancy during those times, leaving only an older brother and younger sister as Tom Bradley’s siblings. They all worked in the fields to help out.

  In 1921 the Bradleys gave up and left Calvert for Dallas, where Lee Bradley took any job he could find and Crenner worked as a maid, but still they couldn’t make ends meet after two years. Finding a good job was difficult. Lee was limited by his fifth-grade education, and Crenner had finished only the third grade. Then came the lure of California. They piled into their old car and began the trip west, sleeping in their car because no motel would take in blacks, and they were turned away at restaurants. They ate bologna and mashed potato sandwiches as they made their way to Somerton, Arizona, not far from the California border, where they moved in with relatives. Lee Bradley went on to California to find work. At the age of six, Tom Bradley began school.

  In Somerton, Bradley developed a love of reading. While other children were out playing ball, he could be found reading a book. His parents taught him the value of a good education. “Seeing me read all the time, my parents, especially my mother, nurtured this desire to work hard, to study hard,” Bradley said.

  His mother told him the family was “going to a place where it didn’t matter what your name was or where you lived,” he recalled. “She told me California was a special place where people judge you on what you did, and nothing else.” Within a year the Bradley family joined Lee in Los Angeles, even though he had been unable to find work. Eventually he found a job as a porter on the Santa Fe Railroad and later as a crew member on ocean liners that plied the coast from Seattle to Los Angeles. He was gone from home for long periods of time.

  The family settled in Los Angeles’s East Side but moved as many as four times in one year, probably because they could not afford the rents. And two more children joined the family. Bradley’s mother found work as a maid. “She made so many sacrifices to keep the family provided for,” Bradley remembered.

  When Bradley was ten years old, his father deserted the family, a major trauma in Bradley’s life. Coupled with the moves to four different homes and four different schools, it is unlikely Bradley felt very secure in his childhood and adolescence. “Many black men in America leave their families, either of despair or desperation,” James Lee Robinson Jr. wrote in his doctoral thesis about Bradley at UCLA in 1976. “They cannot stand to see their families do without, so they simply leave.”

  Bradley’s father helped out the family when he could, but Crenner still was having a hard time making ends meet. “We were so poor that when our shoes wore out we’d shove cardboard in the bottoms, and by third period by running over the school grounds the cardboard would wear out and my socks would come slipping out,” Bradley remembered. (As an adult,
when Bradley saw a sale on socks, he’d stock up on them until one day he realized he had about two hundred pairs.) The Bradleys desperately needed help at one point. “Public assistance during the Depression was not an unusual thing,” Bradley recalled years later, “and it just seemed that everybody we knew in one way or another received some kind of help.”

  Although Bradley was close to his mother, she was virtually an absentee mom. She worked day and night to feed her family. Bradley took over the role of father and mother, keeping his siblings in line. This “desertion” also took its toll. “She left home every morning to attend to somebody else’s children, to take care of somebody else’s home, and left us there to struggle alone. . . . That was the only way we could make it.”

  When Bradley was about ten years old, he experienced racial prejudice in the West Temple area, an integrated neighborhood on the East Side. One day his friend Billy, a white boy, told Bradley his parents forbade him from playing with the other “colored children” on the block. The experience shocked him. “I remember feeling hurt and thinking how terribly wrong it was,” he said. “And I think he was hurt by it, too. . . . I think as young as I was, that I decided then and there that I never wanted racial feelings on my part to color my own reaction to other human beings.”

  To his good fortune, Bradley fell under the mentorship of a teacher, Pearl Briley, who pushed him to excel in school. That changed when he attended Lafayette Junior High School, where minorities were discouraged from pursuing their dreams. A counselor tried to steer him into vocational courses instead of preparing him for college. He refused. It was “one of my most depressing memories,” Bradley recalled. But he never faltered and refused to give in to racial prejudice. Bradley continued to show a love of reading that singled him out as the most studious of the children, the one his family pushed to get a college education. “They stressed the importance of education on me from as early as I can remember.”