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

by James W. Johnson

  Major League officials were less than forthcoming with what they thought of Robinson’s signing. They voted fifteen to one against Rickey’s effort to integrate baseball. Commissioner Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler, National League president Ford Frick, and American League president Will Harridge were “unavailable for comment.” The venerable owner of the Philadelphia Athletics, Connie Mack, replied, “I’m not familiar with the move and don’t know Robinson. I wouldn’t care to comment.” Others went so far as to deny a color barrier existed.

  Rickey traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, to persuade Chandler, a former U.S. senator and two-time governor of the Blue Grass State, to allow Robinson to play. Much to Rickey’s surprise, Chandler disagreed with the owners’ vote. “Mr. Rickey, I’m going to have to meet my maker some day,” he said. “If He asked me why I didn’t let this boy play, and I answered, ‘Because he’s a Negro,’ that might not be a sufficient answer. I will approve the transfer of Robinson’s contract from Montreal to Brooklyn, and we’ll make a fight with you. So you bring him on in.”

  Before spring training began, Robinson and Rachel were married in California. A few weeks later they headed to Daytona Beach, Florida, to begin his stint with Montreal. It wasn’t going to be easy, and they knew it. She worried that her husband’s temper would get the best of him. “I could not be sure what was going to happen,” Rachel said. “I worried that something might happen, some incident, and we would be harmed, or killed.” As the Robinsons tried to travel to Daytona Beach, airlines bumped them from their seats twice in favor of white passengers. They had trouble finding a place to eat and to sleep. Time and time again they ran into Jim Crow. Robinson thought he might lose his temper, but he remembered that he and Rachel had agreed “that I had no right to lose my temper and jeopardize the chances of all the blacks who would follow me if I could help break down the barriers.”

  At Daytona Beach they were given “special accommodations” with a local black political leader while white players lived in a hotel. After several days in Daytona the club moved to Sanford, Florida, where there were two hundred players, most of them Southerners. Robinson was reticent when he was in their presence, but they seemed to go about their jobs. “But there was a mutual wariness between us, a current of tension that I hoped would lessen in time,” Robinson recalled.

  The Robinsons faced discrimination at virtually every turn. They hated it but were not discouraged. They gritted their teeth and carried on. “What it did for us was not only enlighten us and open our eyes to what things were going to be like, but it also mobilized a lot of fight in us,” Rachel said. “We were not willing to think about going back. It gave us the kind of anger and the rage to move ahead with real determination.”

  Robinson’s manager at Montreal was Clay Hopper, a forty-four year-old cotton broker from Greenwood, Mississippi. Hopper reportedly told Branch Rickey that he didn’t want to manage Robinson. “Please don’t do this to me,” he pleaded with Rickey. “I’m white and I’ve lived in Mississippi all my life,” Hopper said. “If you’re going to do this, you’re going to force me to move my family and home out of Mississippi.” Some questions have arisen whether that quote was accurate. Hopper, however, was open-minded. Rickey had hired Hopper as Montreal’s manager after Robinson signed with the Dodgers. Rickey had hoped that hiring Hopper might show that a white Southerner was willing to manage a black on his team. Hopper’s actions after he became manager show tolerance and then acceptance.

  Rickey had placed Hopper in this difficult situation because he had great faith in Hopper’s leadership and his ability to develop young players. Hopper had been with Rickey in the St. Louis and Brooklyn franchises for seventeen years and had produced eight championship teams. “I didn’t need an introduction when [Robinson] came through that door,” Hopper said. “I said to myself, ‘Well, when Mr. Rickey picked one he sure picked a black one.’” Hopper greeted Robinson and shook his hand. Robinson was surprised by the handshake, “for even in those days a great number of Southerners would under no circumstances shake hands with a Negro.”

  After Robinson’s talents began to show, Hopper seemed to agree that Rickey had made a positive decision. Robinson’s teammates weren’t hostile toward him, nor were they friendly. “Tolerant” might be a better description. “They seemed to have little reaction . . . one way or the other,” Robinson said. One white player was an exception. Lou Rochelli and Robinson were competing for the same position, second base, and Rochelli had no animosity toward Robinson. He even helped him to learn a position that was new to Robinson.

  Although Robinson’s hitting was weak, he fielded and ran the bases well. The continual tension Robinson lived with no doubt sapped his strength as a hitter. “Jackie couldn’t perform well that spring,” Rachel recalled, “because the pressure was unbearable. . . . He was trying too hard; he was overswinging; he couldn’t sleep at night; he had great difficulty concentrating.” She said they were afraid Jackie wouldn’t make the team, “that he would be cut in spring training. Every day without a hit made Rickey’s experiment seem more risky.”

  During spring training Robinson heard good news about a friend: Kenny Washington had signed with the Rams. “That’s great,” he told the press. “He’s a great football player and Los Angeles will make a lot of money with him in the lineup.”

  Toward the end of the training camp, the nervousness had calmed down, and Robinson’s hitting began to improve. There was little doubt he would be in the starting lineup on opening day. His turnaround may have been because Robinson had found some acceptance among his fellow players. “Those who had no prejudices acted toward me the same as they acted toward other fellows they were meeting for the first time,” Robinson wrote in a newspaper column several months later. “And those who, because of Southern descendancy, had certain feelings about race quickly set those feelings aside. There were some recalcitrants, of course, but they were in such a minority that they were inconsequential.”

  Along the way, Robinson’s morale was stoked by two “glorious” events. One was during a spring training game between the Dodgers and the Royals. He had steeled himself for jeers, taunts, and insulting behavior. Instead he was greeted with only a few weak and scattered boos. He made decent plays and smacked his first base hit of the spring. The second event was in the opening game of the International League season in Jersey City, New Jersey, when he homered with two men on in the third inning on the way to a Royals’ 14–1 win. “This was the day the dam burst between me and my teammates,” Robinson said. He ended the game with 4 hits, the home run, and 3 singles, and he had stolen two bases. His bluff dashes from third caused pitchers to balk twice, allowing him to score. “He was amazingly fast and agile,” teammate Al Campanis said. “If he were caught in a rundown, the odds were in Jackie’s favor to get out of it.” Robinson began to believe in Rickey’s prediction. “Color didn’t matter to fans if the black man was a winner,” Robinson said.

  “He did everything but help the ushers seat the crowd,” said sportswriter Joe Bostic, writing for the black periodical the Amsterdam News of New York, in summing up that first game of the regular season. Bostic called Robinson’s performance that day “the most significant sports story of the century.” He said baseball had taken up “the cudgel for democracy and an unassuming but superlative Negro boy ascended to heights of excellence to prove the rightness of the experiment. And prove it in the only correct crucible for such an experiment—the crucible of white-hot competition.”

  Montreal’s early schedule seemed to be designed almost to test Robinson’s courage. After the series with Jersey City, the Royals played in Newark, New Jersey; Baltimore (the southernmost city in the league); and Syracuse, New York. League officials were concerned that Robinson’s appearance in Baltimore would create “rioting and bloodshed,” but Rickey thought they were overreacting. Besides, he told the league president, “We solve nothing by backing away. In fact, we’ll encourage every agitator in Maryland if we show fea
r.” Robinson was greeted with “the worst kind of name-calling and attacks on Jackie that I had to sit through,” Rachel Robinson recalled. But he got through it.

  The Royals returned to Montreal, where Robinson found a welcoming environment. He was encouraged to find an “atmosphere of complete acceptance and something approaching adulation.” Said a Montreal sportswriter, “For Jackie Robinson and the city of Montreal, it was love at first sight.” Another sportswriter wrote, “The absence here of an anti-Negro sentiment among sports fans . . . was what Mr. Rickey doubtless had in mind when he chose Montreal as the locale of his history-making experiment.”

  Although his manager tolerated Robinson on his roster, he had difficulty accepting him. Prejudice was ingrained in him from his Southern upbringing. Once Robinson made a terrific play at second base as Rickey and Hopper watched together. Rickey called the play “superhuman.” Hopper turned to Rickey and said, “Do you really think a nigger’s a human being?” As noted, however, Hopper eventually came around to accepting Robinson, at least on the surface.

  The warm atmosphere Robinson felt in Montreal didn’t extend to games in the United States. In Syracuse, New York, a player for the opposing team threw a black cat out on the field and yelled, “Hey, Jackie, there’s your cousin.” After Robinson doubled and then scored, he ran by the Syracuse dugout and replied, “I guess my cousin’s pretty happy now.” Nevertheless, similar incidents were taking a toll on Robinson, who was having trouble sleeping and eating. But by season’s end he was leading the league in hitting and received a standing ovation in Baltimore after he stole home in one of the games. A Montreal sportswriter even gave him a nickname–“the Colored Comet.”

  The season was not without incidents on the field. When a fight or a dispute broke out, Robinson was told to stay out of it. “I’ve reminded him several times,” Hopper told the press. “‘Jackie, you stay out of the arguments no matter what they are.’” Pitchers threw at his head, runners aimed their spikes at his legs and arms, and players baited him unmercifully from the opposing dugout. At season’s end one Montreal sportswriter wrote, “Because of his dark pigmentation Robbie could never protest. If there was a rhubarb on the field . . . he had to stay out of it. Otherwise there might have been a riot.” Robinson was consistently the target of bean balls. “You never saw anything like it,” said Dixie Howell, Montreal’s catcher. “Every time he came up, he’d go down.”

  The Royals won the International League championship by 18 1/2 games and appeared before eight hundred thousand fans at home. Up next was the Little World Series against Louisville, champions of the American Association. Three games were played in the Kentucky city, and Robinson said the visit “turned out to be the most critical test of my ability to handle abuse.” The tension was terrible, and Robinson was greeted with some of the worst vituperation he had experienced. He managed only one hit in eleven trips to the plate, a performance that only raised the loudness of the taunts and insults from the crowd.

  The Royals lost two of the first three games; if they were to capture the best-of-seven-game series, they had to win three games in Montreal. Canadians were livid over the treatment Robinson had received in Louisville. During the games the Montreal fans loudly booed the Louisville players. The support they showed Robinson and his teammates boosted them to three straight victories and the championship. Robinson wound up hitting .400 despite his poor start in Louisville, and he had two hits and started two double plays that helped to give the Royals a 2–0 victory in the final game.

  Robinson and his teammates were mobbed after the game. In the locker room Hopper held out his hand to Robinson and said, “You’re a great ballplayer and a fine gentleman. It’s been wonderful having you on the team.” After he showered, Robinson had a plane to catch for a barnstorming tour and had to tear through the crowd to get to the airport. One sportswriter wrote, “It was probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind.”

  Robinson finished the season with a league-leading .349 batting average and 111 runs scored; he stole 40 bases (second in the league) and drove in 66 runs. Sportswriter Dick Young of the New York Daily News wrote, “Jackie Robinson led the league in everything except hotel reservations.” Next stop: Brooklyn.

  20

  End of the Line at LAPD

  “The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you.”

  —Tom Bradley

  If Tom Bradley encountered racial discrimination in the LAPD, he faced it as a citizen trying to make his way in a hostile environment in Los Angeles. He was refused credit at a downtown clothing store even though he was a police officer, restaurants and hotels turned him away because he was black, and he and his wife had to use a white intermediary to buy their first house in virtually all-white Leimert Park. When the Bradleys and their two children moved in, neighborhood children looked on and chanted, “The niggers are coming, the niggers are coming.” Bradley never forgot the names of Los Angeles restaurants that had turned him away in the 1940s and 1950s, and he boycotted them all. “I have a long, long list.”

  He refused to let such setbacks wear him down. “For one thing, I have never let an experience with discrimination or prejudice embitter me,” he said in 1984. “I have always tried to rise above that kind of situation. . . . It was hard. My attitude was, ‘That’s the other guy’s problem, and I’m just going to keep pushing on. . . .’ Like a Sherman tank, I just kept rolling over the opposition and the obstacles.” On another occasion he remarked, “I can tell you in all candor, I don’t see people, individually or in crowds, in terms of their color.”

  When he was appointed as a lieutenant, one of the first issues he took on was to allow blacks to work together with whites in patrol cars. That got him labeled as a troublemaker. “Anyone who had the courage and the guts to speak out against the status quo and against the injustice in the department was looked upon as a troublemaker,” Bradley said.

  Until then blacks had been assigned to street duties. Once Bradley set out to desegregate the patrol cars, it didn’t go well. In 1960 he persuaded the chief to allow an experiment that would put a white officer into a patrol car when one of the black officers was on vacation. Several officers volunteered, knowing that the plan would be soundly rejected. When white and black officers were in a car, they began getting calls that were a “very sick kind of treatment and abuse” from their fellow officers from all over the city, Bradley said. “It became such a nasty situation that the white officer who was involved in this particular unit came to me and asked if he could be relieved of that assignment.” Bradley had predicted the experiment would fail and that it would become a reality only if the police chief ordered it. After Bradley retired, it became official department policy, but it still didn’t happen until 1963 or 1964, Bradley said, and not before the police chief told white officers to turn in their badges if they refused to cooperate.

  Off duty Bradley suffered the humiliation of discrimination on road trips across the country when he was turned away from motels with blinking vacancy signs and restaurants that were half full. One Texas motel let him stay if he promised to leave by daybreak before other customers saw him and his family. Once when they were turned away, he became angry, a rare show of emotion. “And it was more a matter of frustration. But I didn’t even let on to my children or my wife.”

  In the 1950s Bradley wrote a letter to the Gillette Corporation protesting that it was failing to show black athletes, like his friend Jackie Robinson, in advertising. “I thought that was wrong, so I wrote and told them so.” He never received a reply. He never bought a Gillette product after that.

  The rank of lieutenant was the end of the line for Bradley. His superiors told him that he “had gone as far as an African American could go.” In 1974 Bradley revealed his approach in a racially hostile environment in the city and within the police force: “If you treated everybody, no matter what the circumstances, as you would like to be t
reated, . . . one could do his job with dignity and honor and receive respect from the citizenry he serves. . . . It was that kind of philosophy which carried me twenty-one years in the department without ever having to draw my gun, without having to engage in physical abuse or parading of the persons with whom I came in contact.”

  Knowing that he could not move up any higher in the police department and that he had never been satisfied with police work, Bradley sought a career change. He was greatly discouraged by his lack of success in bringing changes within the department. “I knew the obstacles were so great that I did not see it was worth the investment of time with so little promise of success,” Bradley concluded.

  While still on the force, Bradley began attending law school at night. He first attended Loyola University and finished up his degree at non-accredited Southwestern University in 1956. He passed the California bar examination a year later. In 1961 he retired from the police force and began practicing law full time. Bradley commented that he had no resentment toward the police department. “If they hadn’t had such racist policies I’d probably still be there,” he said, “so it was actually a blessing in disguise.”