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

by James W. Johnson

  Although Strode played a few minutes in some games, he thought he could have helped the team more. But he quietly accepted the situation. “Well, I had to sit and suffer those lashes because I opened the door,” he said. “Kenny and I opened the door. Soon, every black with the ability was running up and down the field.” Looking back on those days, Strode remarked, “If I have to integrate heaven, I don’t want to go.”

  Traveling with the Rams made a big impact on him and Washington, Strode said. “We discovered how popular we were across the country. The black kids outside of California used to tell Kenny and me how much they enjoyed listening to our games on the radio while we were still playing at UCLA. Until that time, we didn’t realize what a unique thing we had done.”

  On one trip to Chicago Washington and Strode tried to stay at a white hotel. The hotel offered Washington and Strode $100 each to find someplace else to stay. “Well, what the hell, let’s be segregated,” Strode replied. “It was great,” Strode said. “I discovered my own people.” They got to listen to Count Basie’s jazz band in the hotel to which they moved. But the black press heard about the incident and criticized Washington and Strode. “Look,” he said, “do me a favor and mind your own business. We get $200, we don’t have to stand curfew. I hear the white guys on the club are about to mutiny to get the kind of a deal we got. Now, you’re going to louse it all up.”

  Strode wrote in his memoirs that he could not recall many racial incidents on the field. “You’re out there trying to beat each other up; how do you know when a guy’s trying to hurt you because you’re black?” He acceded that occasionally some players would take a cheap shot at them. At times white players hit Washington after the whistle had blown to stop play, and no penalty was called. It did little to help his aching knees.

  In a game against the Chicago Cardinals, Washington hurt his knee again. The Pittsburgh Courier wondered how long Washington could keep taking the punishment. His knee, it said, “will only hold together for so long. . . . One hard tackle at a certain spot . . . and the former Bruin is generally through for the day.” Bob Snyder noted that when Washington first began to play, “They’d tee off on him. They’d drop knees on him.”

  Snyder recalled that Washington and Strode were well accepted by their teammates but not so much by other teams. He remembered when a big Green Bay tackle hit Washington in the jaw with an elbow. Apparently the player also called Washington a “black bastard.” Washington started to go after him but regained his composure. Then he said, “Listen, that was a pretty good shot. I want to tell you something you white trash. If you want to wait till the game is over, meet me under the stadium and I’ll knock your goddamn block off.” Snyder said, “Well, our other players heard about that, and I think if we had an election, he would have been elected captain.”

  Strode played little that year, catching just four passes. Strode said he was put in as a 200-pound defensive end “in the butcher shop. . . . It was a joke.” Teammate Tom Harmon called Strode “one of the greatest defensive ends I ever saw, but he never got a chance to prove it because of that fool coaching staff. In practice you could never get near him. You never saw a man in better shape.”

  The next season, after an exhibition game in which he got in for only one play, the Rams released Strode. Line coach George Trafton told him, “Woody, it’s not because of your ability that you’re getting fired. They’re trying to say you’re too old [thirty-two] and that they’re trying to rebuild. I tried to tell them Negroes don’t age like white people.” Later, when Strode was talking with Washington, Kenny told him, “It’s not your ability; it’s your lifestyle. Dan Reeves does not approve of your marriage to Luana and your Hawaiian lifestyle.” It wasn’t the first time Strode’s mixed marriage had been an issue. When they were married, Strode remarked, “You’d have thought I was marrying [actress] Lana Turner.”

  On the field Washington was the target of slurs and cheap shots in pileups unseen by officials, who often overlooked them. Washington found himself “turning the other cheek” more often than he would have liked. “I think he endured it but there were times like anything else where he would have to get in somebody’s face to challenge somebody,” his grandson Kirk Washington said. “It got to him at times. It was hard to be a Negro during that time trying to play football. He endured a lot.”

  In limited action in 1946 Washington ran for 114 yards, caught 6 passes, and scored a touchdown. The following year he ran for for 144 yards for a league-leading average of 7.4 yards a carry. His final year, when he put in some time as a defensive back, Washington gained 301 yards on the ground. He then decided to call it quits. He was no longer the healthy player who had thrilled UCLA crowds ten years earlier. He was thirty years old. Time had passed him by. For his career he had carried the ball 140 times for 851 yards, or 6.1 yards a carry, and 8 touchdowns. He had caught 15 passes for 227 yards and a touchdown.

  But Strode’s and Washington’s mark in pro football was greater than their performance on the field. They had broken the barrier, and eventually every NFL team became integrated. Washington recalled in 1971 that it “was just as important for a colored player to break into pro football as it was in baseball.” The next year the Rams signed African American Tank Younger to the team and went on to win three straight champions beginning in 1949.

  Washington left football with the same grace that he had maintained throughout his life. During halftime of his final game at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Washington was honored for his career. He was given a number of lavish gifts, including a new Ford sedan, a combination radio-television set, and a $500 savings account for his seven-year-old son Kenny Jr. His teammates presented him with a watch. While thanking the crowd, he remarked, “The cheers you fans have given me went to my heart, not to my head.” The crowd roared.

  Strode’s football career was far from over. Not long after he was cut, a former Rams teammate who was a player-coach for the Calgary Stampeders in Canada asked him to join his team. He offered him $5,000 for the eighteen-game season and $100 a week in expense money. Strode likened playing in Canada to the Old West because Canadian football was so far behind U.S. football. But nowhere did he find the Jim Crow discrimination he found in the states. The Canadians loved Strode.

  The former teammate and now coach installed plays that the Rams used, a system far advanced for Canadian football. The Stampeders went undefeated, with Strode scoring the winning touchdown in the championship game when he returned a fumble 45 yards. The next season the Stampeders made it to the championship game again but lost. Strode suffered a separated shoulder and sat out most of the second half. In his third and final season in Canada he suffered two cracked ribs over his heart and called it quits. “I loved football, and I probably played longer than I should have,” Strode said. “When you start getting injured like I did towards the end, that’s a sign to hang ’em up.” It was 1949, and he was heading back home for good.

  19

  The Negro League Years

  “The plate is the same width. The bases are the same—ninety feet apart. I’ve got to make good.”

  —Jackie Robinson

  Jackie Robinson was fed up with playing in the Negro Leagues. The travel was fatiguing, and the meals were lousy. “You were lucky if [restaurants] magnanimously permitted you to carry out some greasy hamburgers in a paper bag with a container of coffee,” he recalled. “You were really living when you were able to get a plate of cold cuts. You ate on board the team bus or on the road.” The players often slept on the rickety old buses on the way to the next town because hotels wouldn’t take them. If there were hotels that took blacks, they had no eating facilities. Robinson was ready to return to California. He saw no future in black baseball. He wanted to marry his college sweetheart, Rachel, and still sought to land a job as a high school coach.

  On August 24, 1945, Robinson was at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox and also where the black teams played when the White Sox were on the road. Clyd
e Sukeforth, a Brooklyn Dodger scout, walked onto the field to talk with Robinson. He told Robinson that Branch Rickey had heard of Robinson’s talents and wanted to talk with him. Sukeforth asked to meet with him that night. Then he asked Robinson to travel to Brooklyn to meet with Rickey on the pretense that the Dodger boss wanted him to play for the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers in a new league being formed for black players. It took some talking, but Robinson finally said he would come. “I was thinking that this might be a gag, a cruel gag,” Robinson said. “I didn’t dare think of becoming a Dodger. Hundreds of things entered my mind, and I was still thinking when we got off the train in New York.”

  Who was this Branch Rickey he was going to meet? As the great sportswriter Red Smith described him, he was “a player, manager, executive, lawyer, preacher, horse-trader, spellbinder, innovator, husband and father and grandfather, farmer, logician, obscurantist, reformer, financier, sociologist, crusader, father confessor, checker shark, friend and fighter, Judas Priest, what a character.” The sixty-four-year-old Rickey wore a hat most of the time under which bushy eyebrows wiggled up and down. A gruff voice came out over his bowtie, while his pudgy body strained the buttons on his natty suit. He often held a cigar in his hand, from which he took an occasional puff. He neither drank nor cussed. He amassed a fortune during his baseball years.

  What transpired was an intense three-hour meeting in which Rickey was going to get his way. Rickey “just stared and stared,” Sukeforth recalled. “That’s what he did with Robinson—stared at him as if he were going to get inside the man. And Jack stared right back at him. Oh, they were a pair, those two. I tell you, the air in that office was electric.” Rickey told Robinson that he wanted him to play for the National League club, not a black team. Mentioning a black team as a reason was just a ruse to get him to meet with Rickey. “My reactions seemed like some kind of weird mixture churning in a blender,” Robinson said. “I was thrilled, scared, and excited. I was incredulous. Most of all, I was speechless.”

  Rickey told Robinson he had considered several players who could become the man to break the color barrier, but they didn’t match up to Robinson. But, he warned, “We can fight through this, Robinson. We can win only if we can convince the world that I’d doing this because you’re a great ballplayer and a fine gentleman.” He told Robinson he would face terrible problems on and off the field and asked him how he would handle them. “They’ll taunt and goad you,” Rickey said. “They’ll do anything to make you react. They’ll try to provoke a race riot in the ballpark. This is the way to prove to the public that a Negro should not be allowed in the major leagues. This is the way to frighten the fans and make them afraid to attend the games.”

  “Mr. Rickey,” Robinson asked, “are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?” Rickey flew out of his seat and replied, “Robinson, I’m looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back. . . . We’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, very few newspaper men. And I’m afraid that many fans will be hostile. We’ll be in a tough position.”

  Rickey told Robinson he would have to play hard to win people over. “You’ve got to do this job with base hits and stolen bases and fielding ground balls, Jackie.” Rickey drew on the New Testament passage to stress that Robinson had to turn the other cheek. Robinson had never backed away before, and to do so at this point in life would be foreign to his nature. But he agreed to embark on the new path for two years until Rickey released him from his restraints.

  Robinson withheld from Rickey that he wondered whether he could restrain himself, but he knew that he had to. He said he had to do it for black players who might follow him, for his mother, for his girlfriend, for himself—and “for this spellbinder I had just met.” He agreed to a contract that included a $3,500 bonus and $600 a month in salary to play for the Montreal Royals, a team one step from the Brooklyn Dodgers. But he was to tell no once except Rachel and his mother.

  Rickey recalled, “Surely God was with me when I picked Jackie. . . . He really did understand the responsibility he carried. . . . He had the intelligence of knowing how to handle himself under adversity. Above all he had what the boys call guts, real guts.” A childhood friend, Gloria May, recalled that she was surprised when Robinson signed with the Dodgers. “And amazed, just like the rest of the public was,” she said. “But I think a lot of people were behind him, and they appreciated the fact that he gave of himself, which must have been a very traumatic experience. And nobody can realize it unless you have been through it. We felt it, but, you know, he had to live it.”

  On October 23, 1945, Robinson was introduced as a new player for Montreal at a news conference attended by more than two dozen members of the press. The room “exploded” as flash bulbs popped and reporters headed to tell their newspapers the story. When order was restored after several minutes, the club’s president, Hector Racine, expressed confidence that Montreal fans were not racially biased and that they would judge Robinson on his playing ability. “We made this step for two reasons,” he told reporters. “First, we are signing this boy because we think of him primarily as a ball player. Secondly, we think it is a point of fairness.”

  Branch Rickey Jr., who was then in charge of the Dodgers’ farm teams, said he expected some reaction from areas in the United States that had not accepted blacks into their culture. “My father and Mr. Racine are not inviting trouble,” he said, “but they won’t avoid it if it comes. Jack Robinson is a fine type of young man, intelligent and college bred, and I think he can make it, too.” He predicted that some players from the team would “steer away from a club with Negro players on its roster. Some of them who are with us now may even quit, but they’ll be back in baseball after they work a year or two in a cotton mill.”

  When Robinson spoke before the reporters, he told them he knew he was a “guinea pig” and that he was delighted to have been picked to break the color barrier. “Maybe I’m doing something for my race,” he said. Rickey also defended his position. “I have never meant to be a crusader,” he said. “I hope I won’t be regarded as one. My purpose is to be fair to all people and my selfish objective is to win baseball games.”

  The announcement met with an avalanche of news coverage, from critics to backers. Most coverage contained negative comments ranging from sportswriters’ opinions to ballplayers’ distaste for the idea. “Ball players on the road live close together,” Texas-bred Rogers Hornsby, a Hall of Famer, commented. “It won’t work.” Dixie Walker, a popular Dodger who was born in Georgia, said, “As long as he isn’t with the Dodgers, I’m not worried.” The editor of a black New York weekly wrote that Robinson “would be haunted by the expectations of his race. . . . White America will judge the Negro race by everything he does. And Lord help him with his fellow Negroes if he should fail them.”

  Future Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller doubted that Robinson would succeed in the Major Leagues because he had “football shoulders.” He said Robinson “couldn’t hit an inside pitch to save his neck. If he were a white man, I doubt if they would even consider him as big league material.” Robinson replied that he wished Feller hadn’t mentioned his shoulders. “What are football shoulders?” Robinson asked. “I don’t think anybody knows. If it means muscle-bound I don’t have them. . . . It was a shot in the dark, because football players don’t set big league baseball afire. Maybe I won’t but I’ll make a good living by trying. Anybody who says I can’t make it doesn’t know what I’ve gone through, and what I’m prepared to go through to stay up.”

  Sportswriters Dan Parker of the New York Mirror and Red Smith of the New York Herald-Tribune were supportive, but not so Jimmy Powers, sports editor of the New York Daily News, who wrote that Robinson wouldn’t succeed “next year or the next. . . . He is a 1000-to-1 shot to make the grade.” An editorial in the Bible of baseball, The Sporting News, deemed Robinson a player of Class C ability and predicted, “The waters of competition in the International League [Montreal’
s league] will flood far over his head.” Atlanta Journal sports editor Ed Danforth wrote, “I don’t see why a top flight Negro ballplayer would be anxious to play in the white leagues when he is doing so well in his own organization.” George White of the Dallas News said that signing Robinson was unfair to him as well as to the South. Bud Seifert of the Spartanburg Journal in South Carolina wrote, “Segregation in the South will continue. We live happier with segregation in athletics as well as all other activities.”

  Some supporters saw Ricky’s and Robinson’s efforts as an affirmation of the World War II fight for freedom. Lee Dunbar of the Oakland Tribune said it was “fitting that the end of baseball’s Jim Crow law should follow the conclusion of a great war to preserve liberty, equality and decency.” Elmer Ferguson of the Montreal Herald wrote, “Those who were good enough to fight and die by the side of whites are plenty good to play by the side of whites.” The black press, of course, was ecstatic, but Ludwig Werner of The Sporting News wrote that he felt sorry for Robinson. “He will be haunted by the expectations of his race.” Another sportswriter, Will Connolly of the San Francisco Chronicle, wondered whether Rickey had picked the wrong man to break the color barrier. It should have been Kenny Washington, he wrote. “Kenny is a ‘white man,’ a nice guy. Robinson, he’s a troublemaker.”

  It is interesting that black players were surprised, and some, like pitcher Satchel Paige, thought Rickey had picked the wrong man. “I’d been the one the white boys wanted to barnstorm against,” Paige said. “I’d been the one everybody said should be in the majors. . . . It was still me that ought to have been first.” Even so, Paige was uncertain whether integration was a good idea for the black ballplayer. He criticized black reporters who were advocating integration “without thinking about our end of it . . . without thinking how tough it’s going to be for a colored ballplayer to come out of the clubhouse and have all the white guys calling him nigger and black so-and-so. . . . What I want to know is what the hell’s gonna happen to good will when one of those colored players, goaded out of his senses by repeated insults, takes a bat and busts fellowship in his damned head?”