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

by James W. Johnson

  UCLA still had two postseason games in Hawaii. UCLA posted lopsided wins over the Hawaii All-Stars (46–0) and the University of Hawaii (32–7) in the fourth annual Pineapple Bowl (for its first three years it was the Poi Bowl) in Honolulu. The Bruins ended the season with a 7–4-1 record.

  The two games in Hawaii were a homecoming for two UCLA players, Francis and Conkling Wai, of Hawaiian, Chinese, and Caucasian descent. The Wai brothers became close with the black players because of discrimination they all faced. Francis Wai, who was the “Asian Jackie Robinson,” was later killed in World War II. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously in 2000, the first Chinese American to receive the award. He also was named to the UCLA Athletic Hall of Fame for basketball, football, track and field, and rugby.

  Apparently it was frowned upon for Hawaiian athletes to go to the mainland to play, and the University of Hawaii players were going to let the Wai brothers know about it. During the game the brothers were injured. Conkling Wai’s nose was smashed on the first play of the game, and Francis suffered a shoulder injury. Neither played the rest of the game. Strode didn’t take this lightly, according to the Honolulu Advertiser. “Midway in the second period, Woodrow Wilson Strode, stellar visiting end, was chased from the field and the Uclans [were] penalized half the distance to the goal for [his] using his dukes too freely.”

  Spaulding took twenty-five of his favorite players on the Hawaii trip, which lasted from December 15, 1938, until January 11, 1939. They traveled on the luxury liner SS Masonia for four and a half days. When they arrived, they stayed at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach. Strode remembered walking around Honolulu and seeing “people darker than us. Polynesians and Orientals, all manner of mixed breeds. They walked around with no restrictions.” When he returned home, Strode told his mother, “I saw the people free.”

  While attending a luau on the beach, Strode noticed a girl looking at him, dressed as he was in a tweed suit, his hair “gassed and shining. . . . I could see in her eyes she loved me.” The girl was Princess Luukialuana Kalaeloa, who was one of the hula dancers hired to perform at the luau. Her name meant “May the rays of sunrise forever shine on you.” She was a “beautiful native girl, with dark skin and eyes that shone.” At the end of the luau, Kalaeloa put a lei around Strode’s neck and invited him to a party, but Strode didn’t go. “I was too afraid of the interracial scene.” Later she showed up at the ship as it was leaving to take the team back to Los Angeles. She made Strode promise they would meet again. And they did. Two years later they were married, an event that touched off more interracial trouble. Meeting Kalaeloa would prove to be life-changing for Strode later on.

  The Wai brothers had a chance meeting with Academy Award–winning director John Ford on Waikiki Beach that indirectly led to Strode’s movie career. The brothers saw a lonely looking Ford walking on the beach, and they invited him to join them for a drink. He accepted. When he was in Los Angeles, he looked up the brothers. It turned out that Ford’s daughter was a friend of Princess Kalaeloa. Ford met Strode and was taken with his movie actor’s physique and handsome face. Later on Strode appeared in several of Ford’s movies.

  11

  High Expectations

  “Take away the Negro stars from the UCLA team and you would not have a team.”

  —Pasadena Star-News

  While he was being hailed as an “outstanding all-around athlete,” Jackie Robinson told newspaper reporters that he was going to focus on football and the broad jump in track. Playing four sports would be too difficult, Robinson said. “And besides, I think I should study. That is why I chose UCLA. I don’t intend to coast so that I can play ball.” Such comments led to speculation that Robinson may have been limiting his sports so he could more clearly focus on the broad jump for the 1940 Olympics.

  When Robinson enrolled at UCLA in 1939, he began taking advantage of the team’s training table. For a youngster who often had little to eat, the bounty on the training table was a feast. He and Ray Bartlett chowed down.

  Robinson concentrated on his studies that spring, limiting his sports activity to playing basketball in a statewide league of Negro fraternities. “The Black Panther,” as the California Eagle called him, scored twenty-five points in one game at a time when team scores ran no higher than thirty or forty points. During the summer he found time to win the men’s singles and doubles championship in the Western Federation of Tennis Clubs, which was restricted to blacks. He and his doubles partner never lost a set during the tournament. Again the Eagle chimed in, noting his “devilish placements, speed, and a merciless little cut, used in net play.” One observer said, “The amazing thing about Robinson’s performance was that although he played little tennis he nevertheless ran roughshod over players who are devoted to the sport year-round and for years on end.”

  Brother Frank Robinson never got the chance to watch Jackie play at UCLA. That summer tragedy struck the Robinson family. A car plowed into the motorcycle Frank was driving, critically injuring him. He died the next day. “It was hard to believe he was gone, hard to believe I would no longer have his support,” Robinson said. Frank’s death put him in the doldrums, during which he was often aloof. The impact of Frank’s death on Jackie was misread by those who at times questioned his attitude and dour disposition.

  Robinson kept busy that summer also playing golf and baseball, awaiting the start of the school year. Robinson made golf look simple. He shot a 90 at Pasadena’s Brookside Park the first time he played the game. He also played badminton competitively against Pasadena’s Dave Freeman, who became a world champion. Ray Bartlett recalled that Robinson also excelled at soccer and handball. “At lunchtime, we’d have a little time and get into these games. Was he good? He was good at any game he took up. I think maybe soccer and handball required these moves everybody later saw in baseball, but I don’t know. He was just an outstanding athlete from the start.”

  Robinson found himself in trouble with the law on September 5 before he took his first class. He, Ray Bartlett, and other friends in Jackie’s car got into a shouting match with a white driver who had called them niggers. When they pulled over, the white man soon was surrounded by a group of forty to fifty young black men. “Well, I’m the only white guy here, and I’m not foolish enough to try to fight all of you,” he said. About that time, a motorcycle policeman arrived and drew his gun on a young black man who had just rushed up to see what was going on. Robinson jumped between the two men and urged the black man to calm down. But the policeman pushed Jackie up against the side of his car with a pistol pressed against his stomach. “You can’t explain anything to a man who thinks that no Negro is up to any good and that the best place for him to be is in jail,” Robinson commented years later. He was taken to jail, where he was held overnight on charges of hindering traffic and resisting arrest. The next day he posted a twenty-five dollar bail and was released after pleading not guilty.

  The significance of the arrest was that Jackie had been given a suspended ten-day jail sentence for an earlier infraction on the condition that he behave himself for two years. The more recent incident happened within a year, so he was looking at jail time. That could have jeopardized his playing football at UCLA.

  UCLA wasn’t about to let that happen. Coach Babe Horrell and UCLA boosters hired a prominent attorney to fight the charges. When the case was heard, Jack pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of obstructing a sidewalk, and the resisting arrest charge was dropped. He forfeited his twenty-five dollar bail, and he was released without further punishment. The Pasadena Star-News wrote that Robinson’s light punishment could have been attributed to the attorney, who requested “that the Negro football player be not disturbed during the football season.” Robinson admitted, “I got out of that trouble because I was an athlete.”

  Nevertheless, Robinson was unhappy with the publicity the case attracted, and he was uneasy on the UCLA campus for a few weeks after. Newspapers used sports jargon to sensationalize the case. One headl
ine read, “Gridiron Phantom Lives Up to Name.” The story then continued: “City officials and UCLA’s gridiron opponents were warming the same mourner’s bench yesterday—and pondering the futility of trying to out-maneuver Jackie Robinson, the Bruins’ pigskin-packing phantom.” Robinson found it difficult to live down such stories, and they led to his somewhat standoffish behavior at UCLA. The event hung heavily over Robinson during the season and years beyond. “This thing followed me all over and it was pretty hard to shake off.”

  Robinson made up for his classroom deficiencies and was looking forward to the fall semester and the start of the football season. Expectations for another successful year were high after the best season in UCLA’s history.

  The high expectations for the football season drew a lot of press attention, particularly from black publications, because of the presence of five African American players as practice began. The Chicago Defender printed a photograph of Woody Strode with the headline “A Bronze Hercules,” as he threw a discus in track. Robinson also was featured when he arrived on the first day of football practice. The California Eagle noted that five black players was “the largest number ever to play on a single university team” that did not belong to a black school. The Eagle wrote just before the Bruins’ first game, against Texas Christian University (TCU), “We will devote a lot of space to the UCLA entry because it is the only major institution on the coast on whose football squad there are [five] Negro athletes. We hope that in the future other institutions follow the Westwood lead.”

  A great deal of the excitement was pinned on Robinson’s talents. “All Jackie did at Pasadena,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in a stereotypical manner toward blacks, “was throw with ease and accuracy, punt efficiently and run with that ball like it was a watermelon and the guy who owned it was after him with a shotgun.” Ray Bartlett pointed out that Robinson “had the abilities to duck and dodge and stop quick and stop cold. It’s just amazing what he could do with his body if he had a little room to do it in.”

  Robinson “was the first of the Gale Sayers/O. J. Simpson/Eric Dickerson–type running back, Woody Strode wrote in his memoirs. “He had incredible breakaway speed coupled with an elusiveness you had to see to believe. He could change direction quicker than any back I had ever seen. Stop on a dime: boom; full speed in the other direction. They didn’t have to do a lot of blocking for him because he was so instinctive. He was shifty and quick and would just outmaneuver everybody.”

  Coaches were singing Bartlett’s praises as well. They called him an underrated player for whom they had high hopes, The Los Angeles Times described him as “a sticky pass snatcher and a capable interference smasher-upper.”

  When Robinson joined Washington and Strode, white publications dubbed them the “Gold Dust Trio.” The threesome took the field for the first time on September 29 against the Horned Frogs of all-white TCU, an archconservative Disciples of Christ–affiliated institution. The Horned Frogs had been the nation’s top-ranked team in 1938 and were expected to be a powerhouse again in 1939. They agreed to play UCLA—black players included—because they knew a TCU victory would appear weak without UCLA’s best. Declining to play against them would hurt TCU’s hoped-for Rose Bowl appearance.

  Just before the TCU game the Los Angeles Times reported that Johnny Wynne had left school without an explanation. Wynne had been a star at Manual Arts High School and then had been a starting halfback on UCLA’s 1938 freshman team. Perhaps he was disappointed in the lack of playing time and he saw himself falling behind Robinson and Bartlett.

  The Bruins trotted onto the Los Angeles Coliseum field in front of a crowd of sixty thousand spectators. Curiously Washington, Strode, and Robinson were left out of the starting lineup. The reason remains a mystery, but perhaps the trio was left on the bench at the start of the game as a token response to TCU’s dislike of playing against blacks. They weren’t out long. The TCU game was the first showing of the new UCLA coach’s offense. Horrell had implemented reverses, double reverses, and split bucks (plays designed to go against the grain).

  Although the Horned Frogs were expected to win, the Bruins handed them a 6–2 loss, ending TCU’s fourteen-game winning streak. TCU players lauded Washington and Robinson, one exclaiming, “We’ve never run into anything like them, and I hope never [to] again.” Robinson handed out some praise for his teammate as well: “That boy Kenny is a really great player and if the rest of us in the backfield give him one hundred percent support he’s going to get the honors he deserves.” TCU’s coach Dutch Meyer was almost in awe of Robinson and Washington. Robinson “is a threat every time he takes that ball. So is Washington. Oh how he can pass.”

  For all the hoopla over blacks and whites competing on the football field UCLA left its only black player, Clarence Mackey, home in 1941, when the Bruins, still under coach Horrell, traveled across the country to play the University of Florida. Mackey was one of four UCLA players to lead the team in scoring. Apparently UCLA and Florida had agreed several years earlier to a stipulation that no blacks would play in the game. UCLA signed the agreement because at that time no plans existed for a black to be on the team. But Mackey transferred from a junior college, a move that UCLA hadn’t expected. Coach Horrell took Mackey aside and essentially told him, “You won’t be able to go.” The Daily Bruin wrote that Mackey and several other players wanted to work to make money for Christmas. As Charles H. Martin wrote in Benching Jim Crow, “The callous decision . . . reveal[s] that West Coast colleges were not above selling out their black players in order to schedule games against southern teams in major intersectional games.”

  12

  A Disappointing End to the Season

  “I guess you’ve got to have a mechanized cavalry unit to stop this guy Robinson.”

  —Oregon coach Tex Oliver

  UCLA’s victory over TCU gave credence to expectations that the Bruins were on the right track for a successful season. Their next opponent, the University of Washington, sent Ralph Welch, a top assistant, to the TCU game to scout UCLA. He reported that “Jack Robinson is as good as he has been touted, being dazzlingly shifty. The addition of Robinson to the UCLA backfield also adds effectiveness to Kenny Washington’s play, giving the Bruins two of the fleetest backs in the conference.”

  UCLA came through with a 14–7 victory over the Huskies after trailing 7–0. Robinson got the Bruins on track by returning a punt 65 yards to the Washington 6. The Bruins scored from there to tie the game. The California Eagle wrote the return was “the prettiest piece of open field running ever witnessed on a football field.” The UCLA Daily Bruin cited Washington players as saying that Robinson was “the greatest thing they have ever seen. He twisted, squirmed, refused to be stopped.”

  A Seattle Times sportswriter described Robinson’s punt return this way: “Into midfield went the speedster. He slid past a dozen reaching Husky arms to hug the south sideline and was clear of the pack with a couple of protectors about him when he passed the Washington forty-yard stripe. Twenty yards along [Dean] McAdams [the punter] angled over and cracked Robinson hard enough to make him stumble. Another ten yards and Bill Marx caught up, spilling Jack on the six-yard line. From there, it wasn’t difficult for UCLA to rush for the tying touchdown.” Said Husky coach Jimmy Phelan, “That run of Robinson’s beat us. Until that occurred we had the game well in hand.”

  Robinson also caught a 43-yard pass from Washington and was part of a 52-yard pass play that featured three laterals. When Robinson left the field in the fourth quarter, Huskies fans gave him a standing ovation. One sportswriter could not resist writing, “There will be fried chicken and watermelon on the dining car table [on the way back to Los Angeles.]”

  Local newspapers were finally acknowledging after the Washington game that the Bruins had black players on their team. Or maybe as Woody Strode put it, “Nobody wrote, ‘A unique thing is happening in Los Angeles: the blacks are playing the whites.’” Los Angeles Times sportswriter Paul Zimmerman wrote, “Footba
ll is the great equalizer. You have to throw racial prejudice out the window when a couple of gentlemen like Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington do the things they do.”

  The California Eagle took to the editorial pages on November 2, 1939, to describe the effects the black players were having on the game—in a sociological vein as much as a discussion of points on the scoreboard. The editor lauded Robinson and Washington as “glorious symbols of rising Negro Youth, harbingers of a new era of economic, political and social recognition.” They would be “stalwart torch bearers in the forward march of Racial Progress (!),” the editorial concluded. If the mainstream press saw it that way, it didn’t write about it.

  Across the country sportswriters started to sing the praises of the three African American players, particularly writers on black newspapers. If the white papers mentioned race in their articles, it was only rarely, certainly a newsworthy event. The black newspapers were celebrating the feats of players who were the same color as a vast majority of their readers.

  In the California Eagle, the Chicago Defender, and the Washington Afro-American, black newspapers told their readers that given a chance, black athletes could compete fairly and evenly—or better—with their white teammates. For example, the Defender proudly wrote that three blacks were in the game “at one time” during the TCU game, while Robinson and Washington “almost single-handedly” led the Bruins to the victory, the Los Angeles Examiner wrote. The Daily Bruin remarked, “Our Bruins have just finished astounding the football world for the second week in a row. Saturday’s ball game was just a little too much Washington (Kenny), Robinson and UCLA and not enough Washington (University).” The UCLA Magazine wrote that the black athletes “oozed class from the moment they trotted on the greensward.”