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

by James W. Johnson

  Between 1965 and 1972 Robinson dabbled in the sports world. He became an analyst for ABC’s Major League Game of the Week, a first for an African American; he was hired as general manager of the soon-to-fail Brooklyn Dodgers of the Continental Football League; and he was a commentator on Montreal Expos telecasts. He also found time to start up a construction company to build housing for low-income families. “Jack finally found the business opportunity he had been searching for since leaving baseball a decade earlier,” said his wife Rachel. After he died, Rachel took over as president of the corporation, which eventually saw the construction of more than sixteen hundred housing units.

  Toward the end of his life, Robinson was heavily burdened by his troubled son, Jackie Robinson Jr., who had emotional problems as a youngster and was put in special education classes. He left high school without graduating to join the army and while in Vietnam was wounded on November 19, 1965. He came home with a deep drug addiction that led him to a treatment program that he successfully completed. He became a drug counselor after being clean for three years. On June 17, 1971, after working a long shift Jackie Jr. was killed in an auto accident on his way home. He was twenty-four years old. The tragic death was a setback for Robinson, who was in declining health. He had aged beyond his years, was almost blind, and was barely able to walk. He slowly began slipping away.

  Robinson turned down requests to appear in old-timers’ games or other ceremonies over the years, but he agreed to visit Dodger Stadium on June 4, 1972, the day his number was retired. It was difficult physically for Robinson to attend. He had suffered a recent heart attack, his diabetes was worsening, he was blind in one eye, and he was almost obese. He walked with a slow shuffle, like a man close to his nineties. But his mind and his passions were still strong.

  The Dodgers could honor him by retiring his number, but if they expected him to return the favor, they were sadly mistaken, wrote sportswriter Ron Rapoport, who interviewed him that day. “Baseball and Jackie Robinson haven’t had much to say to each other,” Robinson told him. “I told Peter [O’Malley, Dodgers president and Walter O’Malley’s son] I was disturbed at the way baseball treats its black players after their playing days are through. It’s hard to look at a sport which black athletes have virtually saved and when a managerial job opens they give it to a guy who’s failed in other areas because he’s white.” As for the retirement of his number Robinson remarked,

  [I] couldn’t care less if someone is out there wearing 42 It is an honor, but I get more of a thrill knowing there are people in baseball who believe in advancement based on ability. I’m more concerned about what I think about myself than what other people think. I think if you look back at why people think of me the way they do it’s because white America doesn’t like a black guy who stands up for what he believes. I don’t feel baseball owes me a thing and I don’t owe baseball a thing. I am glad I haven’t had to go to baseball on my knees.

  Robinson made one final public appearance, on October 15, 1972. He threw out the first pitch before Game 2 of the World Series. He was presented with a plaque honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of his integrating baseball. Nine days later, on October 24, Robinson was preparing to travel to Washington DC to lobby for a housing bill. He was going to tell Congress that integrated schools were fine, but if housing was bad, little was gained. Children were going to hang out on the streets and get in trouble, he believed. Just as he was ready to leave, Robinson suffered a fatal heart attack at his Stamford, Connecticut, home. He was fifty-three years old. Irving Rudd, one-time publicist for the Brooklyn Dodgers, said, “I am certain that Jackie’s forced cool during those first seasons in Brooklyn cost him a couple of decades of his life.”

  More than twenty-five hundred people jammed into Riverside Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for the funeral, and thousands more lined the streets to watch the passage of his mile-long funeral procession through Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, predominantly black neighborhoods. Pallbearers were Boston Celtics star Bill Russell and Dodgers teammates Don Newcombe, Joe Black, Junior Gilliam, Pee Wee Reese, and Ralph Branca. Thirty-one-year-old Jesse Jackson gave the eulogy. In part he said, “When Jackie took the field, something within us reminded us of our birthright to be free. . . . In his last dash Jackie stole home and Jackie is safe.” Robinson was buried in Cyprus Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn. His wife Rachel, son David, and daughter Sharon survived him.

  Shortly after his death Robinson’s ordeals and accomplishments were the subject of a Broadway musical, The First. In 1987, on the fortieth anniversary of his breaking of the color barrier, the Rookie of the Year Award was redesignated as the Jackie Robinson Award. On the fiftieth anniversary of his debut, his number 42 was permanently retired by all Major League teams, although current Major Leaguers already wearing the number were allowed to keep it for the remainder of their careers. The last player with that number, Mariano Rivera, retired after the 2013 season.

  In a tribute to Robinson, Sports Illustrated writer Ralph Wiley wrote the following:

  Jackie Robinson’s life was built around service to an idea, an ideal or a cause. He was always at the service of someone or something: UCLA, the U.S. Army, the Dodgers, the Republican Party, Branch Rickey, the NAACP. He was a champion that way to all people, not just blacks. He was a combination of the times he lived in and the fire that burned inside him. There has never been anyone quite like him. He burned with such intensity and needed a cause to direct it into. He was perfect for a cause. He needed to impact society through his efforts. He was addicted to competition and service, and I think it cost him his health. He was so driven to perform at a certain level to be a champion for his people. The lesson is that the brightest star often has the shortest life.

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  Their Legacy

  “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

  —Carved on Jackie Robinson’s gravestone

  The common legacy of the five superb athletes and their remarkable lives is that they broke color barriers or improved racial relations or both. They accomplished these feats in the same way, with a “go along to get along” philosophy. Jackie Robinson was no exception, even though his turn-the-other-cheek approach lasted only two years. If he had disregarded Rickey’s advice for the first two years in the Major Leagues, it seems unlikely he would have succeeded. As the Los Angeles Times put it in Tom Bradley’s obituary, Bradley subscribed to his “membership in the generation of American blacks who cracked the color line and, in doing so, were counseled to hide their hurts and resentments from a hostile white world.” Their black skin had to be thick.

  To recap: Robinson integrated baseball; Washington took down barriers in football; Strode did likewise in football, wrestling, and film; and Bradley and Bartlett opened doors in politics and civic affairs. Dr. Martin Luther King once remarked that “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” All five of these gentlemen surely lent their hands in bending that arc.

  Jim Murray, the Pulitzer Prize–winning sportswriter of the Los Angeles Times, called Robinson, Washington, and Strode pioneers, “individuals who fought for African American rights in a day when it was a fight in the dark, when the support system was not forthcoming. They ministered to group esteem on the field and battled for it off the field. They made their country a better place. For everybody.” The same held true for Bradley and Bartlett.

  What would Robinson say about his legacy today if he were alive? He told Los Angeles Times sportswriter Ron Rapoport the following just before he died in 1972: “I honestly believe that baseball did set the stage for many things that are happening today and I’m proud to have played a part in it. But I’m not subservient to it.”

  Robinson’s efforts on and off the field brought racial equality with changes broader than in just the political arena. Dr. King believed that Robinson was “a legend and a symbol in his own time” and that he had “challenged the dark skies of intolerance and frustration.” Accordin
g to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robinson’s “efforts were a monumental step in the civil-rights revolution in America. . . . Jackie’s accomplishments allowed black and white Americans to be more respectful and open to one another and more appreciative of everyone’s abilities.” Lester Rodney, the longtime sportswriter for the Daily Worker, wrote that Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier “has to be the single most heroic act ever performed in the history of sports in this country. I think I can say that. He made a real difference in America.”

  Robinson stressed that baseball was just part of his life and that he had other challenges to meet for a life fully lived. “If I had a room jammed with trophies, awards, and citations, and a child of mine came to me into that room and asked what I had done in defense of black people and decent whites fighting for freedom—and I had to tell that child I had kept quiet, that I had been timid, I would have to mark myself a total failure in the whole business of living.” Close friends like Dodgers teammate Don Newcombe and civil rights activist Dr. King believed that Robinson helped start the civil rights movement. “In those days, there was no Civil Rights Movement. People like Martin Luther King were too young then,” Newcombe said. King said Robinson forced people to confront the possibility of change: “Back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, [Robinson] underwent the trauma and humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of freedom.”

  Robinson changed issues, but he also changed lives. Dr. King told Newcombe, “Jackie Robinson made it possible for me in the first place. Without him, I would never have been able to do what I did.” Red Barber, the sports broadcaster when Robinson debuted with the Dodgers, didn’t grasp the idea of desegregation of baseball right away. A Southerner, Barber admitted the idea “tortured me. I set out to do self-examination. I attempted to find out who I was. I know that if have achieved any understanding and tolerance in my life . . . it all stems from this. I thank Jackie Robinson. He did far more for me than I did for him.”

  Perhaps a not so flattering legacy is that Robinson has been called the most hated man in baseball. Bleacher Report’s Brandon McClintock in 2011 named him one of the fifty most hated players, but if Robinson were alive today, he no doubt would not have cared. He wanted respect and didn’t care whether he was liked. He was so hated because he integrated baseball and was outspoken on such issues as the failure of some teams to use black players or hire African Americans to manage teams and operate in executive offices. It goes without saying that he certainly wasn’t hated by fans of his race but by the whites who rejected his place in baseball lore. Branch Rickey was right; too many white people thought he was an “uppity nigger.”

  After Robinson’s death, his widow, Rachel, established the Jackie Robinson Foundation, of which she remains an officer as of 2015 at age ninety-three. Since it began in 1973, the foundation has granted $65 million in college scholarships to 1,450 minorities; their graduation rate has been 98 percent. Nearly four thousand high school seniors apply annually for the scholarships, which can be as much as $24,000 for four years. In addition, the foundation has in place a forty-two-point strategy to help students succeed, a job and internment placement program, and a requirement of mandatory community service. The class of 2016 had fifty-seven scholars.

  The foundation also has been working to build a museum devoted to Robinson in New York City. The foundation’s goal was to raise $42 million to cover construction, opening costs, and an operating endowment. Fund raising, however, was slowed by recession, and the opening has been delayed several times. Plans call for the museum to occupy 18,500 square feet on two floors of One Hudson Square in Lower Manhattan, just blocks from the Freedom Tower and the 9/11 Memorial. The space will also house the foundation. Two galleries, a seventy-five-seat theater, and interactive stations for visitors are in the plans.

  Robinson accumulated dozens of honors before and after his death. The following are just a few of the most significant honors. In 1999 he was named by Time magazine on its list of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century. He also ranked number forty-four on The Sporting News list of baseball’s one hundred greatest players. Robinson reaped dozens of honors outside of baseball as well. In 1956 he was the first athlete to receive the NAACP’s Springarn Medal “in recognition of his superb sportsmanship, his pioneer role in opening up a new field of endeavor for young Negroes, and his civic consciousness.” Posthumously Robinson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan on March 26, 1984, and the Congressional Gold Medal by President George W. Bush on March 2, 2005; the Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian award bestowed by Congress.

  Several buildings have been named in Robinson’s honor. The UCLA Bruins’ baseball team plays in Jackie Robinson Stadium, which features a memorial statue of Robinson. City Island Ballpark in Daytona Beach, Florida, was renamed Jackie Robinson Ballpark in 1990, and a statue of Robinson with two children stands in front of the ballpark. The New York public school system has named a middle school after Robinson. A ten-mile stretch of Georgia Highway 83 outside Robinson’s hometown of Cairo has been renamed the Jackie Robinson Memorial Highway.

  A tribute to Robinson plays a prominent role in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in the fall of 2016. The museum will feature a 5,500-square-foot sports exhibition with a baseball gallery. The gallery devotes space to Jackie Robinson and the importance of the integration of the game. Another section highlights game changers—people, places, and institutions that have transformed sports or the larger society or both. One of the seventeen game changers is Jackie Robinson. Within his display there are three story lines: his role in the integration of baseball, his civil rights activism, and an examination of how he may have been the most hated man in baseball by the time he retired. The exhibition has six life-sized statues, one of which will be of Robinson.

  Often described as a man of quiet determination, Tom Bradley “spent a lifetime bridging racial barriers and used his skills to forge extraordinary coalitions, most notably between blacks and Jews and between labor and business,” his legacy foundation at UCLA has written. “He presided over a period of enormous growth in Los Angeles, leaving the gleaming downtown skyline of Bunker Hill and the start of a subway and light-rail system as the most tangible of his legacies.” California state historian emeritus Kevin Starr called Bradley “a very great public figure. I know of no one with a greater gift for reconciliation and healing. He was a prism through which we can see both the rise of Los Angeles as an international city and the reemergence of a vibrant black community that reaches back to the very beginnings of the Pueblo. . . . His mayoralty was a time in which Los Angeles reconfigured itself, redefined itself.”

  Although Bradley lost two races for governor when victories would have built even more onto his legacy, he will always be known for “the Bradley Effect,” the theory of discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes when a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other.

  Bradley’s legacy helped set the pace for Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008. Lyn Goldfarb, who co-wrote (with Alison Sotomayor) the documentary Bridging the Divide, noted that Bradley’s career led to Obama’s victory: “Tom Bradley laid the foundation for the kind of coalition politics that allowed President Obama to be elected. When he won [the mayoral election] in 1973, his victory enabled other candidates or potential candidates from around the country to see that, yes, it can be done.” In 2005 Antonio Villaraigosa, the first Hispanic mayor in modern times, said during his victory celebration, “I am standing here on the shoulders of Tom Bradley.”

  In 1993 Bradley participated in the formation of the Tom Bradley Legacy Foundation, headquartered in a hall bearing his name on the UCLA campus. The foundation sponsors, encourages, and facilitates scholarships for disadvantaged youths, particularly those in the inner city. According t
o its website, “[The foundation] continues [Bradley’s] vision to bring together individuals from all of the fragmented communities to work as one in continuing his vision for Los Angeles. The foundation focuses on the youth of today to help build the leadership for the future.”

  Woody Strode’s legacy is locked solidly in the sports and entertainment worlds. While his impact may not have been as great as Robinson’s or Bradley’s, it is spread across a visible part of America’s culture. Although his career in the NFL was an afterthought to Kenny Washington’s and was short-lived, he left his mark on the league with his integration of it.

  Here’s how Strode saw his career: “See, I was always opening doors never knowing what I’d find on the other side. One hundred years from today they’ll look at all this and say, ‘Shit man, this guy did all this stuff before anybody did anything.’ I never thought of it like that. I was just trying to make a living, just trying to survive in my generation.”

  Sports historians have overlooked the fact that Strode was one of the first popular African Americans to climb into the pro wrestling ring with the likes of Gorgeous George, who was considered to be the No. 1 villain in the golden age of the sport. Strode played the good guy, right down to his white trunks, who gets roughed up by the bad dude in this immensely popular event. Moreover, Strode’s film roles were groundbreaking at a time when blacks played subservient roles like butlers or lackies whose main lines were “Okay boss” or “Yessuh.” He was a good actor who brought more to the screen than his chiseled good looks and statuesque physique.

  Author Terence Towles Canote described it best about Strode’s acting:

  While Woody Strode spent much of his career playing bit parts and he never played a lead role in a Hollywood film, he was still a pioneer among African American actors. In the Fifties, when many African American actors were still playing somewhat stereotypical house servants, Woody Strode was playing the King of Ethiopia, a gladiator in the Roman Republic, and a private in the United States Army. Very few of the roles played by Woody Strode could be considered stereotypes. In fact, more often than not Mr. Strode played intelligent, strong willed, independent characters. And while many of his appearances in films could be measured only in minutes, he was obviously a talented actor. Even when his character was only on screen briefly, Woody Strode could deliver a strong performance. In playing roles that were not stereotypes and giving good performances while doing so, Woody Strode helped break down barriers in Hollywood. Quite simply, it was Woody Strode who paved the way for such African American action heroes as Wesley Snipes, Ving Rhames, and Samuel L. Jackson.