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

by James W. Johnson

  Robinson then sought a job in professional football, but not the in the NFL, where some of his all-star teammates, such as Heisman winner Tom Harmon, would ply their trade. Robinson landed a spot on the semi-pro Los Angeles Bulldogs’ roster of mostly white players. He played one game before pulling up lame in the first quarter and sat out the rest of the game. A week later he and Ray Bartlett received offers to play for the Honolulu Bears, a semi-pro football team. They would work construction during the week and play football on Sundays. Robinson received $100 a game plus the construction job money. “The construction job was a very important part of the package,” Bartlett remembered. “We could use the extra money, because we were both trying to help our mothers. But because the construction job involved defense, it also meant we wouldn’t be drafted—at least, not yet.”

  Robinson and Bartlett were treated like heroes by Hawaii football fans; Robinson had his picture on page one of the Honolulu Advertiser, which called him the “Century Express.” Nonetheless, Robinson and Bartlett were barred from staying at Waikiki hotels; instead they were housed at Palama Settlement, a social service agency in Honolulu.

  The team worked by day, practiced by night, and played games before crowds of as many as twenty thousand on Sunday night. But construction work didn’t suit Robinson. “Jack didn’t like to work,” Bartlett noted. “Jack didn’t last long on the job. Either he quit or was fired.”

  Robinson continued to play football, however, and his star quality brought legions of fans to games. Promoters called him “the sensational All-American halfback” in publicity for the games. Robinson was his typical hip-swiveling self, but his passing faltered. Then he hurt his leg, and the Bears found themselves on the losing side of their record. By December attendance had dwindled to less than six hundred a game.

  Robinson headed home on December 5, 1941, by ship. Bartlett stayed on Oahu for another month. Robinson remembered he was playing poker on the ship when he heard of the Pearl Harbor bombing. “We saw the members of the crew painting all the ship windows black,” he said. That was to reduce the light and thus ward off possible attacks by air or submarine. Robinson knew that when he got home, that he was likely to be drafted, and he was willing to do his part.

  On December 7 Bartlett was about twenty-five miles from Pearl Harbor when the Japanese began bombing Oahu. “I saw a plane flying low above where I was sleeping. When I looked up I saw a red dot on the plane. I didn’t know it was a Japanese fighter until later. I turned on the radio and they were announcing that entire island was under attack.” Many of the construction workers were taken to Pearl Harbor the next morning to help clean up. They had to retrieve bodies of dead U.S. Navy men from the water. “I still remember the terrible sight of the bodies bobbing in the water. I saw the USS Arizona burning in flames for days after the bombing,” Bartlett said.

  Bartlett returned to the mainland, secured a job in a naval shipyard, and completed his degree at UCLA, graduating with a psychology degree before being drafted into the army in 1944. Bartlett became an army first sergeant for an all–African American unit. He served in Europe and later was sent to the Philippines and the Pacific theater. After the stint with the army Bartlett joined the U.S. Army Reserve Corps and served in Korea and during the Berlin Wall crisis. He retired as a chief warrant officer in 1979.

  When Robinson returned, he took the field for the last game of the season for the Los Angeles Bulldogs, who were playing the Hollywood Bears, the team of Washington and Strode. Robinson helped the Bulldogs to a 10–7 lead, but Washington rallied the Bears to a 17–10 victory. If the war had not intervened, the course of history might have changed if Robinson had continued to play football as a career.

  Robinson took a job with Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, a hiring that is noteworthy because the aircraft industry hired few blacks. To meet the military’s need for equipment, Lockheed relented and put blacks to work. Robinson drove a truck, earning $100 a month. Looming over him was the possibility that he could be drafted into the service. He sought an exemption based on being his mother’s sole support. He doubted whether his bad ankle would make him fit for the service, and, moreover, he questioned his patriotism after learning how African Americans were treated in the military.

  Robinson’s bid for an exemption was turned down, and he received his induction notice on March 23, 1942, just about the time that Jimmy Dykes of the Chicago White Sox, who had seen Robinson play several years earlier, was holding tryouts. Dykes was supportive of blacks playing in the big leagues. “I would welcome Negro players on the Sox, and I believe one of the other fifteen big league managers would do likewise. As for the players, they’d all get along too.” But it was too late for Robinson to try out. He was dispatched to Fort Riley, Kansas, for basic training.

  During the football offseason Strode took a crack at professional wrestling, the exhibition kind where the bad guys seemed to always win. Fans hated the villains and would turn out in droves in the hopes they would lose. A promoter at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles agreed to give Strode a shot. He trained for eight months. He went on tour to San Bernardino, where, he said, “we paraded up and down the streets just like the circus had come to town. That would attract fans because television hadn’t hit yet.”

  Strode became the good guy, “the baby face.” He couldn’t be the bad guy because there would be a “race riot” if he pummeled the white wrestler. Strode dressed all in white. “I was the clean colored boy,” he said. Once when he was wrestling, the bad guy was “doing all this nasty stuff to me, gouging and punching.” Strode’s father was in the audience and couldn’t take it anymore. He jumped into the ring and told the bad guy to “get the hell off him.” Strode said he got up off the mat and told his father, “It’s only a show Daddy.”

  Then football season resumed. At halftime in one game they learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Strode was drafted and wound up playing football for the March Field Fliers team near Riverside, California. The football team was organized to raise money for the Army Emergency Relief fund, which helped the families of killed or wounded soldiers.

  Segregation was in force in the military during World War II. On the base whites and blacks lived in separate barracks. The blacks would work in the mess hall and clean latrines and officers’ quarters. “What a slap in the face that was,” Strode said. “For twenty-seven years I thought I was equal. Now we had the goddamnedest war going and I find out how bad things really are.”

  But being an athlete brought him privileges that other blacks were denied. An officer who supported the football team talked the commanding officer into letting Strode stay with the other football players in the base gym. None of the athletes had played with an African American before. “Some of them white boys from the South didn’t know we could talk except for ‘Yassuh!’ But before the year was out, we were good friends and teammates,” Strode recalled. “We started to have a good time, and they saw I didn’t have any scars on my back.” One player told him, “I had no idea you guys were like this.”

  The army football team played other service teams, semi-pro teams, and colleges up and down the Pacific Coast and as far east as Colorado, holding its own with most of them. “We were all grown men; a lot of the team was from the NFL,” Strode noted. Once a general who had placed a bet on the March Field team went into the locker room at halftime when the team was losing 6–0 and told them if they didn’t win the game, they would be shipped overseas. That did it. They won 32–6. “That was pressure football,” Strode said. “We played for our lives.”

  Strode played for three more years before a stepped-up war effort called for an end to football. This time Strode was going overseas for sure. “They were going to ship me off with the rest of the black soldiers to Europe, and boy, that was the butcher shop,” Strode remarked. But the officer who had landed him on the football team stepped in. He asked that Strode be kept with the athletes going overseas. “They do everything together,” he told the commanding off
icer. “I sure would hate to get Woody killed with some other outfit.”

  Strode was sent to Guam, where he wound up guarding B-29s on an airfield for the duration of the war. When the war was over and he arrived in San Francisco, he discovered the Hollywood Bears playing the San Francisco Clippers. Washington had been playing for the Clippers the year before, leading them to a 7-3 record. Strode called the Bears owner, who told him Kenny Washington was once again playing for the Bears and that a uniform was waiting for Strode. The owner asked him, “Are you in shape?” Strode told him he was. “I suited up and played forty minutes.” The Bears went on to win the Pacific Coast Professional Football League championship with an 8-2 record. Washington led the league in scoring, was second in rushing, fourth in passing, and second in total offense. He may have been the most dominant pro football player outside the NFL.

  17

  Moving Up in the Ranks

  “When I followed [Bradley’s] career it was obvious to me that he was the most qualified black officer on the force and one of the most outstanding of any color.”

  —Attorney and friend Charles Lloyd

  Not long after Pearl Harbor Tom Bradley sought to enlist in the Coast Guard. He was rejected “on the grounds I was too tall”; he was 6 feet 4 inches. “They said I’d just be bumping my head on things.” It was a clear signal to him that it was because he was black. Then he inquired about joining the Army Air Corps, but “they just laughed.” Soon thereafter he received his draft notice from the army, and it came during the week that his wife, Ethel, learned she was pregnant. Bradley now had second thoughts about joining the military.

  At the time Los Angeles was experiencing an increase in violence and vandalism, as well as the Zoot Suit Riots, so called because U.S. sailors and Marines attacked Mexican youths, who were wearing wide-cut zoot suits, for their being “unpatriotic.” Coincidentally Bradley’s status came before the draft board, where he found a friendly face. He was a Watts real estate broker who was familiar with Bradley’s work with juveniles. The man was influential in getting the draft board to waive him from military duty because of his pending fatherhood and his need to work with youngsters.

  Bradley knew it would be difficult to advance in the police department because of his race, but he was confident that he could overcome that hurdle. Of the 72 police recruits in the academy only 4 were black. When Bradley started out, there were about 100 African Americans on the forceout of about 4,000 officers. Twenty-one years later Bradley noted that only about 150 officers were African Americans, a ratio that was far below the 14 percent of the black population of Los Angeles in 1960.

  Bradley’s first assignment was to work traffic, “and that was the worst of the assignments I was to have in twenty-one years,” he said. But to his relief, three days later he was assigned to work patrol in the Newton Street Division, which today encompasses nine square miles and 150,000 residents in the South Central area of Los Angeles. Newton was where all the African American officers were sent. The watch commander was Lieutenant Roscoe “Rocky” Washington, Kenny Washington’s uncle. “Blacks had been excluded from the normal activities of the department, and it was literally a department of double standards,” Bradley commented, one standard for whites and one for blacks.

  That assignment lasted three months before Bradley was enlisted to work in the juvenile delinquent program. Department officials saw his youth and college background as perfect qualifications to work with youngsters. Bradley agreed: “I think my age and background really helped provide me with the needed insight to make a difference with these kids. I often knew only too well the answers to come of the very questions I would be asking them.” Moreover, Bradley’s abilities as a track star came in handy. Troublemakers often took off running when they created mischief. “Well, I guess my record in track paid off,” he observed, “because I would always catch them. They would be out of breath and just gaze up at me in disbelief.”

  Bradley organized sports programs in cooperation with local colleges to get the youngsters involved in football, basketball, baseball, and track. He remembered how important those activities had been when he was growing up. “It really marked the first time that some of these kids were not in the ever-present company of drop-outs and more hardened criminal elements,” Bradley said. “Having some of the college coaches and stars involved—successful people whom these kids saw pictures of in the papers or heard about over the radio—really help the kids to develop a ‘can-do’ attitude.”

  After five years with that program Bradley was promoted to sergeant and assigned as a detective for five more years. There were few black sergeants at that time. He went to work in the vice squad, where he helped clean up prostitution, bookmaking, and other illegal activities in the South Central and Wilshire areas of Los Angeles. About this time Bradley also was taking an interest in the Democratic Party. Bradley worked on future governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown’s unsuccessful attempt to become attorney general in 1946. He also helped Ed Roybal become the first Hispanic member of Congress from California in 1962.

  Bradley became a mentor for many of the black officers, encouraging them to seek higher ranks. His leadership was characterized by his quiet style and reserved nature. “He just had that leadership ability without appearing to be an obvious leader,” fellow officer Maria Thomas said. After four years in vice Bradley needed a new challenge. He proposed the position of community information officer, a post that he said no other department in the country had. The job led to a base of support for him later when he entered politics.

  While Bradley was moving through the ranks, Jackie Robinson was having problems with the law—military law. It was Jim Crow raising his head once again. Although Robinson had been subjected to racism all his life, he had never seen what came with being in the U.S. Army.

  After basic training Robinson received his first lesson on being a black man in the military. He applied to Officer Candidate School. He and other blacks in his unit had passed tests for the school, but nothing happened for three months. “We could get no answers to our questions about the delay,” he said. “It seemed to be a case of buck passing all along the line.” Finally in January 1943 Robinson became a second lieutenant.

  Robinson was put in charge of an all-black transportation battalion at Fort Riley, Kansas. Some of the men complained about being allowed to sit in only seven seats in the post theater even when other seats went empty. Robinson telephoned a major who told him there was nothing he could do. The major thought he was talking to a white man, so he said, “Lieutenant, let me put it to you this way. How would you like to have your wife sitting next to a nigger?” When Robinson went into a rage, the major hung up on him. The seating arrangement soon was changed by a colonel to allow for more seats, even though they remained in the rear of the theater.

  Robinson also was playing for the post football team. Its first scheduled game was against the University of Missouri, which refused to play if a black player—that is, Robinson—took the field for Fort Riley. The army solved the problem by giving Robinson leave to go home so that the game could be played. After that Robinson never played in a game for the post. He told the colonel in charge of the football program that he would not play. The colonel said he could order him to. Robinson said, “You wouldn’t want me playing on your team, knowing that my heart wasn’t in it.” The colonel let it go, but Robinson concluded, “I would never win a popularity contest with the ranking hierarchy of that post.”

  The army barred Robinson from the base’s all-white baseball team, on which a future Brooklyn Dodger, Pete Reiser, was playing . “One day we were out at the field practicing,” Reiser recalled, “when a Negro lieutenant came out for the team, [and] an officer told him, ‘You have to play with the colored team.’ That was a joke. There was no colored team.” The lieutenant walked away. “That was the first time I saw Jackie Robinson,” Reiser said. “I can still see him slowly walking away.”

  Robinson was soon transferred to Fort
Hood in Texas. He hopped on an army bus to go to a nearby hospital for a checkup on his ankle to see whether he was fit for overseas duty. While on the bus, he talked with the wife of a fellow lieutenant. “We sat down together in the bus, neither of us conscious of the fact that it made any difference where we were sitting,” Robinson said. The bus driver glanced in his rearview mirror and thought he saw a black man talking with a white woman. He stopped the bus and ordered Robinson to move to the rear of the bus. “I didn’t even stop talking, didn’t even look at him,” Robinson recalled. He knew that the army had put out a regulation prohibiting racial discrimination on post vehicles. “Knowing about these regulations, I had no intention of being intimidated into moving to the back of the bus,” Robinson said. Robinson and the driver got into a verbal squabble. The driver drove on, and when Robinson was getting off at the next stop, the driver went to get a dispatcher. “There’s the nigger that’s been causing me trouble,” the driver said, pointing at Robinson. Robinson told the driver to get off his back. Seconds later two military policemen arrived and asked whether Robinson would talk to their captain. Robinson agreed, but “I was naïve about the elaborate lengths to which racists in the armed forces would go to put a vocal black man in his place.”

  The upshot was that the army brought court martial charges against Robinson, charges of which he was eventually acquitted. The accusations came about because of his “insolent, impertinent and rude manner” when addressing a superior officer about the incident on the bus. Robinson was fed up with the army, and he had a plan: he would violate military procedure by going over the head of his superiors and send a letter to the Adjutant General’s Office in Washington DC. The letter asked that he be retired from the army because there were no openings for black officers. “I feel I can be of more service to the government doing defense work rather than being on limited duty with an outfit that is already better than 100% over strength in officers.” Robinson was hoping the top brass would see him as a potential troublemaker. “I guess someone was really anxious to get rid of me fast,” he said, because not long afterward, on November 28, 1944, the army gave him an honorable discharge.