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

by James W. Johnson

  To help with bills Bradley delivered newspapers, at two cents a copy. When he wasn’t working or going to school, he spent a lot of time alone. “I was pretty much a loner during my leisure hours and spent much of my time reading or working on homework,” Bradley recalled. A friend, Alfred Goodlowe, said, “He never hung around with us.” Another friend, Bill Elkins, said, “I never saw Tom have a fight with another boy.”

  In the junior high years Bradley’s athleticism began to develop. He would play sports at the Central Recreation Center, urged on by a well-meaning coach who recognized that the tall, lanky Bradley had more talent than other boys his age. “Perhaps it was these centers, whose role is so often overlooked as an important force in youngsters’ lives,” Bradley recalled, “where the program play-yard director influenced me to begin working toward all my goals in life.” He called it a “critical turning point in my life.” It was in these centers that Bradley realized he could attend college if he could earn an athletic scholarship. “So I quit my job as a paperboy to concentrate on athletics.” That would prove to be a good decision; his athletic career put college within reach.

  3

  The High School Years

  “Yeah, he’s good enough.”

  —UCLA football coach Bill Spaulding on whether to offer a scholarship to Kenny Washington

  In 1935 Jackie Robinson enrolled at the John Muir Technical High School. His brother Mack and sister Willa Mae also were students at Muir Tech, which had once been a vocational school but had long since become a traditional high school. It was one of two Pasadena high schools, both of which had a predominantly white student body.

  In the spring Robinson, all of 135 pounds, had such great eye-to-hand coordination that he manned the shortstop position as a freshman for the Muir Tech Terriers. He also participated (with Mack) in the broad jump, later to be renamed the long jump, and the high jump. His baseball team made it to the finals of a regional tournament in Pomona, and he showed great promise in the broad jump.

  The following fall Robinson turned out for football on a team that went undefeated. He played behind brothers Bill and George Sangster, two of the best athletes in Pasadena history. He played a little at quarterback in the single wing, an offense that was fashionable at that time. As soon as the football season ended, Jack turned out for basketball, where his quickness, ball handling, and team play showed his athletic versatility. His team fell short of the league championship on the last game of the season.

  In 1936 in the conference championship football game against Glendale, Robinson was deliberately kneed as he rose from being tackled on the opening kickoff after the whistle blew. The kick took the wind out of him and broke two ribs, forcing him out of the game that Muir eventually lost. “It was a bigot’s reminder that he intended to drive me off the gridiron, singlehandedly,” he said. His substitute wound up throwing three interceptions, and Glendale won 19–7.

  Robinson was winning people over to his side with his athletic prowess despite his race. The Pasadena Star-News begrudgingly finally conceded that Jack Robinson “for two years has been the outstanding athlete at Muir, starring in football, basketball, track, baseball, and tennis.” At the same time, Robinson was getting a reputation as cocky, too aggressive, arrogant, and uppity. Because he was a terrific athlete, opponents often resorted to derogatory remarks about his race, his ancestry, and his economic status to get under his skin, but such remarks only spurred his competiveness.

  Robinson graduated at midyear and didn’t play baseball in the spring. Because he had turned five years old on January 30, 1919, he was allowed to enter grade school and high school in midyear. It meant he graduated in midyear 1937. A day after his eighteenth birthday, he enrolled in Pasadena Junior College.

  Jack’s childhood friend Ray Bartlett recalled that Robinson saw sports as his way out of poverty, although sports hadn’t help his brother Mack. “Jack was an extremely competitive person and a very determined athlete,” Bartlett said. “He fought the racism in the community very bitterly. . . . We took a lot of name-calling in those days. . . . Jack was dedicated to being the best athlete he could possibly be because he saw that as an escape.” In addition, Bartlett said, “Every time we played anybody, I don’t care what it was, whether it was a pickup game, win was all Jack knew, and I remember when we thought things were sort of down, he was the guy that kept us going, really.”

  Across town four and a half years before Robinson started high school, Woody Strode enrolled at age sixteen in Jefferson High School, standing 6 feet 1 inch and weighing 130 pounds. String bean that he was, he nonetheless went out for football. “I was so skinny the only thing that stayed on me good was the helmet,” he said. Strode played end because he was too light to play on the interior line and too slow for the backfield. End would be his position for the rest of his football career, a position he grew into.

  Strode sat on the bench for two or three games until the first-team end suffered an injury. The coach put him in, and Strode commented, “I was like a wild man.” He remained first team for the rest of his high school days. In those days players were on the field for defense and offense, and Strode wound up playing as many as fifty-five minutes of a sixty-minute game. The Los Angeles Examiner reporters raved about Strode’s talents. “He haunts his end like a departed spirit, taking out four men on one play if needed be,” one wrote.

  In the offseason Strode used track to keep himself in shape for football season. He participated in the shot put, high jump, and high and low hurdles. He consistently won shot-put and high-jump events throughout the city. He also was named all-state in the low hurdles. “By the time I was a senior I was all-state in everything,” he recalled. By that time he had grown to 6 feet 3 inches and weighed 175 pounds and had greater speed, strength, and coordination.

  Strode was named to the all-city football team and then team captain. He received five university scholarship offers: UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, the University of Oregon, Loyola, and UCLA. But most African Americans weren’t offered a high school education that prepared them for college. They were taught trades such as shop, printing, and industrial math that would get them ready for a job.

  In his autobiography Strode made no mention of any discrimination in high school. That may be primarily because he attended a school whose enrollment was mainly African American. But nor did he mention any discrimination by other teams against which he played in Los Angeles.

  Strode caught the attention of UCLA football coaches, who he said were not recruiting African Americans but rather the best athletes. Strode recalled that he barely knew that UCLA’s new campus in Westwood existed when he was in high school. One of UCLA’s biggest boosters was the actor Joe E. Brown, who actively recruited Strode. But Strode would have to clear one big hurdle before he could enroll: he would have to make up several classes to qualify for UCLA.

  When Kenny Washington entered Lincoln High School, he was tall, lanky, and somewhat awkward. Lacking strength, Washington stayed off the football field until his junior year. Instead he excelled at baseball in all four of his high school years. Then his weight blossomed to 175 pounds. Once he stepped on the gridiron, there was no stopping him.

  In his junior year Washington uncorked a pass in one game that traveled 60 yards before the receiver caught it. He also returned an interception 95 yards and scampered 70 yards on offense, both for touchdowns.

  The next year Washington’s team, the Tigers, went undefeated and won the city championship. His teammates were well aware of Washington’s value to the team. “The kids on the team loved him, and they took care of him,” Strode noted. “If Kenny pulled a muscle, hurt his knee or something, the whole football team [mostly white] would come over to his house, put hot packs on him, rub him down and make sure he was all right.”

  In one game during the championship season, Washington led Lincoln to a 27–0 victory over Garfield; in that game the Los Angeles Times described him as “tall, gaunt and oh, so color
ed.” In another game Fairfax had stopped Washington cold in the first half, but in the second half he engineered five touchdowns that “left the Colonials and the customers stunned.”

  Before the championship game the Los Angeles Times called Washington “perhaps the greatest and most unorthodox back that has ever performed for a Los Angeles high school.” Against Fremont High, “Hustlin’ shufflin’” Washington accounted for all but 4 yards of offense for Lincoln. The “Black Beauty” gained 173 yards from scrimmage.

  In the spring Washington helped the Tigers to the city championship in baseball while leading the league in batting and hitting a home run in the championship game. He was named all-city in both sports for his junior and senior years. To this day he is still considered to be one of the greatest high school football players in Southern California history. He also found time for the shot put, finishing second in the all-city track championships in 1936.

  Washington knew he was a good football player, and he had set his sights high when he finished high school: he wanted to attend Notre Dame. But Notre Dame didn’t want him. Next was the University of Southern California but to hear Woody Strode tell the story, the USC Trojans only wanted Washington to sit on the bench so that he wouldn’t play with any other team. His high school coach, Jim Tunney, was a Loyola University graduate, and coaches tried to get him to persuade Washington to attend school there. Tunney wanted him to go to UCLA because he would get more national recognition. Washington followed his advice.

  Tom Bradley was perhaps more ambitious than the other four athletes who ended up at UCLA. Robinson, Strode, Washington, and Bartlett were primarily interested in sports. While Bradley loved track and was quite good at football, he saw sports only as a path to a college degree. Bradley always was a studious type who attracted a great many friends, perhaps because he was taller, stronger, and more athletic than they were. Nonetheless, he was somewhat of a loner, as we have seen.

  The other four athletes gave little thought to attending secondary school anywhere except their neighborhood high school, but Bradley began looking at choices for the next level after the eighth grade. “I lived in a community where many of the youngsters just had no hope, and they turned to many things,” Bradley said. “Some to a life of crime. Some were simply social misfits. Some with great talent had no way to use that talent, and they became disillusioned, frustrated, wasted.”

  Bradley admitted that others had tried to get him to join them in criminal activity, but he declined. “I knew what was necessary for me,” he said. “It was clear that I had to disassociate myself from those who didn’t have ambition and those who would turn to illegal activities.” He saw the answer at Polytechnic High School, one of the city’s best schools. He wanted a “clear break, to try to find some new identification, new associates.” He could have chosen Jefferson, Strode’s former high school. Instead he decided on a predominantly white school of thirteen hundred students with only one hundred and thirteen African American students and a handful of Hispanics and Asians. It helped that he was recruited by track coach Ed Leahy. “At that time a number of the young fellows that I associated with were either demonstrating, in my mind, a lack of ambition, or in some cases they were beginning to get into some trouble with the law, and I just felt that it would be healthier and better for me to break off that kind of regular association by going to a different school,” Bradley recalled.

  Bradley had high expectations for himself, but a school counselor wasn’t encouraging. He was told not to attend college and instead to seek a career with the post office. “This was presumed to be the most promising future to which black youth could aspire,” he explained. “‘Don’t settle for being a janitor,’ I was told—‘aim high. Become a postal carrier.’ However misguided, this advice was in fact quite commonly dispensed to even the bright black students then.”

  While at Poly, Bradley ran into no serious racial conflicts but soon learned that African Americans had no access to various service organizations. His leadership abilities became evident when school officials chose Bradley to mediate whatever racial conflicts did arise. He decided to run for the presidency of the Boys League—the equivalent of student body president—“an unheard of thing” for a black student to seek in a predominately white school. As a campaign issue his opponent pointed out that whoever was elected would have “to represent the student body downtown and should be properly dressed.” Bradley conceded that point “because I really didn’t have a suit to my name.” He wore his brother’s suit, even though it was too big for his lanky frame. He surprised himself by winning the election. Years later he remarked, “I had the audacity to run for an office on that campus when we had to have separate clubs. The service clubs on campus wouldn’t accommodate the young Negro no matter how popular, no matter how great his achievements.”

  Later Bradley broke another barrier when he was selected to join the Ephebians, an honorary society whose membership was based on academics and leadership qualities. “We never knew what Tom was doing in those days; he certainly was not out in the streets with us. . . . I guess he was back there studying,” his friend Alfred Goodlowe remembered.

  After Bradley was admitted to Ephebians, “it was the beginning of the end to racial discrimination at the school,” his biographers J. Gregory Payne and Scott C. Ratzan wrote. “After that, no one really dared to try to keep a student out because of color or creed.”

  At the same time Bradley was running track and playing football. He recalled only one racial incident, in which there was name calling by players from another school, “but that was of no consequence.”

  Although Bradley was an all-city football player as a tackle, his first love was track, particularly the quarter-mile, which fit his loner personality. He was the city track champion in the 440-yard race in 1935 and was the runner-up in 1936. One article in the Los Angeles Times leading up to the all-city championships was revealing. It started off by proclaiming, “Africa Speaks! Eight chocolate-colored kinky-haired athletes from Jefferson charge into the Coliseum . . .” to participate in the races. The writer referred to their skills as “black magic.” He probably thought it was “black magic” when Bradley won his race, the 440.

  4

  The Little Brother

  “There is no question of our making a very favorable showing in Southern California sports if we make conscientious efforts in that direction.”

  —Dr. Fred W. Cozens, UCLA’s first football coach

  UCLA football got its start in 1919, the year the school (then known as the Southern Branch of the University of California) took over the two-year teachers school, State Normal School, on Vermont Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The campus was “out in the weeds and wildflowers,” not far from where the Santa Monica Freeway cuts through it today. Because it was a teachers college, women outnumbered men six to one among the 1,338 students. One class had a 17-to-1 ratio of women to men. The student newspaper advised its male readers, “Select your seventeen. Girls, start early and avoid the rush. And do your duty, boys.” The school was the poor little sister of the University of California at Berkeley and lived in its shadow for many years. The school’s provost, Ernest Carroll Moore, told students, “You must do twenty-five percent better than Berkeley in order to be recognized at all.”

  In 1924 the school became an accredited four-year institution, and the student population reached 4,418. It was not until the fall of 1937 that male students outnumbered coeds, 3,579 to 3,509.

  Nineteen diehards turned out for the first day of the first season of football practice on a sawdust-covered dirt field. Their uniforms were described “as variegated as those worn by Coxey’s Army [a group of unemployed workers who marched on Washington to protest the lack of jobs in 1914]. Some hopefuls appeared in the olive drab of the military, some in paint-stained overalls, some in about-to-be discarded pants and sweaters.”

  The Los Angeles Times reported, “And now, the southern branch of the University of California lets out
a yip to let the world know that it is up and doing in the world of football.” The first coach was the affable Dr. Fred Cozens, who had transferred from the UC Berkeley campus. The Cubs, as they were known, played an eight-game schedule—and not very well. In their first game, on October 3, 1919, they were trounced 74–0 by Los Angeles Manual Arts High School. The team had practiced for two weeks and hadn’t scrimmaged. As the school had just opened its doors as a two-year institution, most of the players were freshmen. A few were servicemen starting school after World War I.

  The team finished 2-6 that first year. Over the next five years, coached by two different men, the Cubs remained woeful. They won 4 games, lost 23, and tied 4 over that period. In 1920 they were outscored 224–21, and in 1921 opposing teams ran up the scores to 214 to the Cubs’ 14. They had never beaten Pomona, Occidental, or Whittier. They lost to Whittier on November 20, 1920, 103–0. It didn’t help that the Cubs also were being raided by their “big brothers” up north for their best players. With such a record and such obstacles the school was never going to reach the pinnacle of big-time college football. By 1924 Southern Branch was working on its third coach with little improvement. The school even changed the mascot’s name to the Grizzlies in the hope that it would live up to its name. That didn’t help either. Its record was 0-5 with 3 ties. It was time for more change.