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

by James W. Johnson

  In March 1996 Bradley was stricken with a heart attack. Doctors performed triple bypass surgery, but less than a day after the surgery he suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak clearly for the rest of his life. Two years later he died of a heart attack at the age of eighty.

  In a tribute to Bradley Richard Riordan, who was elected to replace Bradley when he retired, called him “a regal leader in appearance, word and deed. . . . [He was] the right leader at the right time for our city—a unifying force in bringing together diverse elements from throughout Los Angeles. Tom Bradley earned the confidence of leaders everywhere. His impact was felt throughout our city, our nation and the world.” In a eulogy at Bradley’s funeral Vice President Al Gore called him the Jackie Robinson “of public service—making history through his quiet dignity, his iron determination, and his ability to walk through doors that opened to his insistent knock.”

  Unemployed fifty-one year-old Leon Cheatham left his house at 7:00 a.m. and walked more than two miles to attend Bradley’s funeral, but when he arrived at the church, it was already packed with people who had lined up starting at 6 a.m. to attend the 10:00 o’clock services. He and scores of others heard the services over loudspeakers outside. “I don’t have the money to spare to catch buses and stuff,” Cheatham said. “So, I walked. I just had to come to pay my respects. Mayor Bradley didn’t have no color barrier or nothing. He just loved people and brought them together.” Melvin Hill, who was just a boy when Bradley was elected mayor in 1973, also wanted to pay his respects but to make a few dollars too. Hill, thirty-four, sold T-shirts with a series of photographs depicting stages of Bradley’s life, from his days as a UCLA track star through his years as mayor. “A lot of older black people are buying the shirt,” Hill said. “They can relate best to his struggle from sharecropper to mayor of L.A. But if you think about it, what he did was incredible.” The fronts of the shirts read, “Mr. Mayor, thanks for the memories.”

  26

  The Civil Rights Years

  “He did us proud but at a cost beyond paying.”

  —Author Roger Angell

  Robinson wasn’t about to fade into oblivion now that his baseball career was over. Far from it. He had a sense of social responsibility that led him to undertake an effort to change the world, which he knew discriminated against all persons, not just African Americans.

  Robinson joined the popular chain of Chock Full O’Nuts restaurants in New York City as a vice president. It seemed an unlikely job for a former ballplayer, but he was intrigued that he would be directing personnel matters for more than a thousand employees. He was recruited by owner William H. Black, who was white. “From what I’ve read about Jackie he was just about the best man for the job,” White said.

  Robinson was amused to learn that Black was considered guilty of discrimination against whites because most of the employees were black. Racists called the company “Chock Full O’Niggers.” Apparently white people shunned restaurant counter jobs and blacks needed jobs. Black didn’t care what color a person’s skin was as long as he or she did the job.

  A clincher was that Black gave full support to Robinson’s request to become chairman of the Freedom Fund Drive of the NAACP. Robinson noted that Black “told me that if he were in my place there wouldn’t be enough he could do for the cause of freedom for black people.” He told Robinson he could use company time to travel, work, and speak for the NAACP as long as it didn’t interfere with his job. To sweeten the job offer, Black donated $10,000 to the NAACP. Robinson helped raise more than $1 million in the first year of his tour.

  Robinson was true to his word. He worked tirelessly for Chock Full O’Nuts right from the start. He was anything but a figurehead in a job that used his name to gain publicity for the company. Robinson jumped right in by studying wage scales, benefits, training, and mobility patterns. He would travel to restaurants throughout the city to gather information from employees in person. By 1961 Robinson was elected to the company’s board of directors. During his years at Chock Full O’Nuts and long after, Robinson took any means necessary to seek equality, from writing letters to key political figures and prominent people to debating civil rights with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

  Not long after Robinson retired from baseball, June 7, 1957, Howard University in Washington DC awarded an honorary Doctor of Law degree to him and Reverend King, whom Robinson would join in civil rights protests in the years to come. The degree was the first of dozens of awards Robinson would receive while alive and posthumously. Six years later, on August 28, 1963, Robinson stood close by, looking on with his children when King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

  In 1957 Robinson was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease with which his brothers Edgar and Mack also were afflicted. He told a friend that his doctor said that for an athlete who abstained from smoking and drinking (as Jackie did), he had never seen a body in such bad shape. The Robinsons were shocked by the discovery, but as Rachel put it, “It was premature for us to be concerned with mortality—too premature and too frightening.”

  Robinson may have been the first insulin-dependent diabetic to play Major League Baseball, despite his claim that the illness hadn’t been diagnosed while he was an active player. But former tennis great Bill Talbert, a close friend of Robinson’s and the first famous athlete known to perform with diabetes, believed that Jackie became insulin dependent in midcareer. “I think Jackie felt it was a weakness. With all the publicity about blacks in baseball, he didn’t want another thing to talk about,” Talbert said after Robinson’s death.

  In 1959 Robinson signed on with the New York Post, which was considered a liberal newspaper, to write a column three times a week “on any subject that he [felt] strongly about.” He had a ghostwriter, black playwright William Branch, to help him fashion his words. “As a Negro, I could hardly ignore this rare opportunity for one of us to speak to so wide an audience concerning just what we feel and think,” Robinson wrote. “That this person happens to be me isn’t important. The fact that it is happening is the thing.” His columns covered the gamut from family to race relations, from politics to sports. Michael G. Long, who edited a book of Robinson’s columns, commented, “Robinson wrote to prod and provoke, inflame and infuriate, and sway and persuade, as he sought to build his readership. Indeed, as Robinson played to win, he also strove to win the arguments of his day. . . . The whole story, as revealed by his commentary, is that Jackie Robinson had a heart full of passion and comparison.”

  The columns lasted until November 1960, when Robinson was fired, probably for supporting Richard Nixon for president over John Kennedy, although the editor denied that was so. One reason given for his dismissal was that his use of a ghostwriter failed to reflect Robinson’s personality.

  “No one will ever convince me that the Post acted in an honest manner,” Robinson wrote in 1962 for his new newspaper, the weekly Amsterdam News, a black newspaper. “I believe the simple truth is that they became somewhat alarmed when they realized that I really meant to write what I believed.” That column was written with a new ghostwriter, Alfred Duckett, a public relations expert who in 1972 would ghostwrite Robinson’s autobiography I Never Had It Made. Each of Robinson’s ghostwriters worked closely with Robinson to make sure they reflected his views. Nothing went out under Robinson’s name without his approval. This time the column was on the editorial page and rarely covered sports. The column ran through 1968.

  Robinson wholeheartedly kept up his work with the NAACP despite his illness. He traveled thousands of miles across the country giving speeches and raising money to boost the organization’s treasury. In 1967, however, he had a falling out with Executive Director Roy Wilkins and resigned. He accused Wilkins of a dictatorial administration that had become reactionary and undemocratic. Robinson apparently was upset by Wilkins’s old guard crushing the young turks in national board electio
ns. Robinson later regretted his resignation, saying he should have tried to bring about change within the organization.

  In the 1960s Robinson also found time to help establish the Freedom National Bank, for which he served as board chairman. It was a black-owned institution based in Harlem to provide loans and banking services for minority members who were largely being ignored by establishment banks in New York City. The bank operated until 1990, when it failed. He also wrote several autobiographical works.

  Robinson continued to use his newspaper column to sound off on a myriad of subjects, with a great many focusing on his views of racial discrimination and politics. One column may have had a strong influence in combating racial discrimination in golf, his second favorite sport. In 1960 he took on the Professional Golf Association (PGA) for banning African Americans from membership—in particular Charlie Sifford. He pointed out that players [read: white players] worse than Sifford had been admitted as members and that crooner Bing Crosby and President Dwight Eisenhower were members of white-only golf clubs. In late March Robinson received a telephone call from an excited Sifford, who told him, “We did it!” Sifford said PGA officials had been influenced by Robinson’s recent columns. “Robinson hit us pretty hard, didn’t he?” an official told Sifford.

  (For his contributions to golf, Sifford was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014 and an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, golf’s birthplace. Pro golfer Lee Trevino said of Sifford, “You have to put him in the Jackie Robinson category.” Tiger Woods referred to Sifford as “the Grandpa I never had” and that without Sifford, “I probably wouldn’t be here. My dad would never have picked up the game. Who knows if the [white] clause would still exist or not? But he broke it down.”)

  Although Robinson was active in politics, he rejected reports that he planned to run for public office. He preferred to be free from the bounds of the politically correct positions of the time to speak his mind about any and all issues that stirred him. Robinson may have called himself a political independent and voted for Republicans and Democrats alike, but he tended to lean toward conservative issues except when it came to civil rights. He believed that through economic progress African Americans would improve their position in society.

  Robinson supported several conservative issues, including the Vietnam War. (He once wrote to Martin Luther King Jr. to defend the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policy.) He noted that the Republicans were the party of Lincoln. He let his views on the candidates be known and even surprised some by endorsing Richard Nixon over John Kennedy in 1960 because he felt Kennedy had not made it “his business to know colored people.” Robinson later regretted his lack of support for Kennedy. “I do not consider my decision to back Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy for the Presidency in 1960 one of my finer ones. It was a sincere one, however, at the time,” Robinson wrote in his autobiography.

  The turning point in Robinson’s support of Nixon may have been Robinson’s long-standing anger over the former vice president’s refusal to show support for Reverend King when he was unjustly sentenced to four months in jail for taking part in a sit-in demonstration. Kennedy, however, intervened to persuade a local judge to release King. After Kennedy’s assassination and Lyndon Johnson’s ascent to the presidency, Robinson supported Johnson’s efforts to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was angered by the opposition of some Republicans to the legislation.

  Robinson was more in line with the policies of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, becoming one of six national directors for his presidential run in 1964. Robinson was dead set against Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, arguing that Goldwater reeked of prejudice and bigotry. In Robinson’s autobiography he recalled the following of the 1964 GOP convention: “As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of what it must have felt [like] to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” In a column titled “I Would Love to Be a Republican but Barry Goldwater Is a Bigot,” Robinson wrote that he shuddered “at the thought of the Goldwater–Bill Buckley conservatism being allowed to capture the Republican Party. The far-out, right-wing kooks, goons, and bigots who constitute a frightening segment of the pro-Goldwater offensive would sign the death warrant [of the party of Lincoln]. . . . I admit freely that I think, live, and breathe black first and foremost.” He explained that was one of the reasons he was so committed to Rockefeller. When Goldwater won the Republican nomination for president, Robinson warned that the GOP was becoming a “white man’s party” and supported Lyndon Johnson. In 1966 he became a special assistant for community affairs to Governor Rockefeller.

  In the 1968 election Robinson called Nixon’s nomination “signs of the sick and troubled times. [The nominating convention] was a white folks’ affair and the once Grand Old Party’s new caretakers, under Richard Nixon, leaned over backwards to give Dixie some Southern Comfort.” He warned that if Nixon was elected, “we as Negroes are in serious trouble; we would, in my opinion, be going backward.” He supported Hubert H. Humphrey for president.

  Robinson couldn’t have been happy when President Nixon’s counsel in 1969 asked FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to look into Robinson’s activities. Hoover responded that Robinson had associated with Communist fronts and had addressed a meeting of the Black Panthers. Nothing came of the investigation. History has proven that Hoover’s political investigations often were tainted. It’s probable that Robinson didn’t even know about the investigation; Nixon’s directive wasn’t declassified until twelve years after his death.

  In 1972 Robinson swung back to Nixon because of shortcomings he saw in his Democratic opponent for president, Senator George McGovern—basically that McGovern was weak in foreign policy. Robinson also tended to let bygones be bygones in his hopes of seeing improvement in African American chances of achieving the American Dream during a Nixon administration.

  Five years after he retired, Robinson became eligible for selection to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Speculation ran high about whether he would be elected on the first ballot because, as he put it, his “fiery temper” made him a “much hated player.” Robinson said he would be thrilled if he were selected, but “I’d like to make it perfectly clear that I do not think I deserve rejection either, simply because I directed my ‘fiery temper’ against violations of my personal dignity and civil rights and the civil rights of the people for whom I have such deep concern.”

  Sportswriters vote on Hall of Fame candidates, and Robinson needed 75 percent of those voting to get into the Hall. Robinson told sportswriters that when considering his candidacy, they should consider only his ability on the playing field. When the ballots were counted, he was four votes over the required minimum, the first player to be selected in the first year of eligibility since the inaugural players at the beginning of the Hall of Fame in 1936. It had been six years since the last player had been inducted. “I am so grateful,” Robinson told the press. “I have had a lot of wonderful things happen to me in my life. . . . But to make the Hall of Fame on the first go-around, where do you put that on the list?” Among the crowd attending the induction was the five-member family of George Brown, a retired mail carrier. Brown had driven the family 240 miles from Boston. They slept in their car the night before the induction. “I was at Braves Field when Jackie played his first game there in 1947,” Brown said. “Wheelchair and crutches couldn’t have stopped this old mailman from being here today.”

  Robinson was selected along with former Cleveland pitching great Bob Feller, who had once predicted that Jackie’s “football shoulders” would keep him from hitting big league pitching. But Robinson held no grudges. He told Feller that he was pleased they were going into the Hall together.

  At the induction Robinson set aside his bad memories and focused on the good ones. In his speech he said about his baseball career that “everything is complete.” He went on to say that he would not be at Cooperstown wit
hout the help of his wife Rachel, his mother Mallie, and Branch Rickey, calling them “three of the most wonderful people that I know.” Not long after the induction Robinson wrote to Rickey, telling him how inadequate he had felt expressing his feelings toward him. “I owe much to you, not because you brought me into baseball as the first—but because your life has been such an inspiration to me. I am a better man for having had the rich years of association with you.”

  Robinson’s Hall of Fame plaque granted his wish that he be recognized only for his efforts on the field. It contained only his playing statistics. That plaque remained until 2008, when it was updated with the following to reflect his efforts to integrate baseball: “Displayed Tremendous Courage and Poise in 1947 When He Integrated the Modern Major Leagues in the Face of Intense Adversity.” Jane Forbes Clark, board chairman of the Hall of Fame, remarked, “There’s no person more central and more important to the history of baseball, for his pioneering ways, than Jackie Robinson. Today, his impact is not fully defined without mention of his extreme courage in crossing baseball’s color line. We are proud of the changes we have made.”

  The next year Robinson and heavyweight boxer Floyd Patterson traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to support demonstrators led by Reverend King seeking desegregation and an end to the brutality of Police Chief Bull Connor’s forces. Robinson was shocked by what he saw and reflected that just a few short months ago he had been honored in Cooperstown, but in Birmingham he was “that negrah who pokes his nose into other peoples’ pudding.’”