As George Beavers Jr. put it in 1902 after migrating from Atlanta, Georgia, “When people were ready to move from the South to come out West, we were getting the best of the lot, because it took a certain amount of income and vision to be able to do that, to be able to move so far West and start over again.”
Whether those views were realistic is questionable. Certainly by the 1930s and the Great Depression, such expectations fell short. While African Americans improved their lot in life by migrating to Southern California, their standards of living never matched those of the white population. “The boomtown atmosphere of Los Angeles provided important economic opportunities for the early Black community,” historian Raphael J. Sonenshein wrote. “But the puritanical conservatism of the city’s leadership severely constrained the long-term prospects for all minorities.”
In 1900 the black population made up 2.1 percent of Los Angeles’s 102,489 residents. By 1910 the black share of the population rose to 2.4 percent; by 1920, to 2.7 percent; and by 1940, to 4.2 percent of the 1.5 million residents.
Of the fifty thousand African Americans in Los Angeles in the late 1930s, thirty thousand lived in a long narrow strip of a community extending from Seventh Street to Slauson Avenue, a few blocks each side of Central Avenue. They also found a culture with a strong Mexican influence, attributed to the more than ninety-seven thousand residents of Mexican heritage. They were joined by more than twenty-one thousand Japanese, three thousand Chinese, and three thousand Filipinos. Los Angeles had the largest African American population in the West and all other cities in the country with the exception of Chicago and New York. And the African American population was growing at a rate faster than that of the white race. The largest numbers came from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
As a writer for the Works Progress Administration put it about Los Angeles in the 1930s, “To many a newcomer, it is a modern Promised Land. It amazes and delights him, and thaws him out physically and spiritually. There is a heady fragrance in the air, and a spaciousness of sky and land and sea that give him a new sense of freedom and tempt him to taste new pleasures, new habits of living, new religions.”
White Southerners also were moving to Los Angeles, and they brought Jim Crow with them, especially in the 1930s. As historian Douglas Flamming has pointed out, the white Southerners “complained that blacks were too free in Los Angeles, that the city should adopt the South’s model of segregation.” If attaining a good job in the early 1900s was not hard enough, by 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, 50 percent of African Americans were out of work. If black men found jobs, these were mostly as waiters, porters, or janitors who earned about fifty dollars a month. Their wives often had to work as domestic servants to supplement their incomes. Eighty-seven percent of black women and 40 percent of black men worked as domestic servants. One bright spot was that Los Angeles hired more African Americans as police officers and firefighters than most other American cities.
African Americans did find better schools that were not segregated, better housing that was affordable and had no covenants prohibiting blacks, and better jobs that freed them from a lowly sharecropper existence in the South. Many, though, lived at poverty levels or just above. As noted, they also found an abundance of racial discrimination, despite their perceptions before they arrived that Jim Crow would be left behind.
The growing African American population was a perceived threat to the white population. Southern whites in the West were hostile toward African Americans, and white Protestants wanted to keep the small-town feeling. As the black population grew, covenants prohibiting the sale of houses to African Americans began cropping up. Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel, who met her husband while they were attending UCLA, noted that her “anxiety had a lot to do with knowing about the Northern-style bigotry so common in Los Angeles; unlike the South, incidents of discrimination were often unexpected and inexplicable—you never knew when they would happen.”
Jobs went to whites first, and the rule of “last hired, first fired” prevailed. Beaches were segregated. African Americans’ use of public facilities like swimming pools was restricted to times when whites weren’t using them. The Pasadena pool was open just one day a week for them. During hot spells black kids stood outside the picket fence and watched the white kids splashing in the pool. “I honestly thought the officials didn’t think Negroes got as warm and uncomfortable as white people during the Pasadena heat,” Jackie Robinson said. Although forbidden to do so by state law, many hotels and restaurants refused service to African Americans. They found ways around the law by telling African Americans who were trying to go to the movies that the theater was sold out or that they might be ejected from a restaurant on trumped-up allegations of disorderly conduct.
Woody Strode called the racism “very subtle.” “We knew where we weren’t wanted, and we didn’t go to those places. Why would I want to go somewhere and have the door slammed in my face?” If African Americans did try to go to a restricted club, the owners set entrance prices so high that they couldn’t afford a ticket. Strode recalled that the Communists were trying to spread their influence by seeking support from minorities in the early 1930s. “That’s when our life was most vulnerable,” he said. He noted that the Communists would hold mixed dances for blacks with white girls. Strode said they would say, “‘See what we’ve done for you; you’re free.’ I saw through that even as a teenager.”
The white population in Los Angeles began putting up resistance to minorities moving into white neighborhoods. They used restrictive covenants and block agreements to keep them out. The covenants prohibit homeowners from selling to minorities. Block agreements were just what they sounded like: agreements by blocks of white owners to restrict blacks from moving in. With such restrictions, African Americans were forced into fast-growing ghettos like the community that eventually became Watts.
Communities like Inglewood posted signs forbidding Jews and “coloreds.” Strode remembered the signs saying that these groups weren’t welcome in Inglewood. Pasadena, home to the wealthy, also was highly prejudiced toward African Americans. “Housing discrimination was a devastating blow to Black economic prospects in Los Angeles,” historian Sonenshein wrote. And the Ku Klux Klan operated in the mid-1920s, although certainly not with the political or violent force that it exhibited in the deep South. Strode remembers when Mayor Frank Shaw was running for reelection. “He used to walk through [Strode’s neighborhood], knock on doors and say, ‘Don’t vote for so-and-so because he belongs to the Ku Klux Klan.’ They tried to scare us, but we didn’t believe it,” Strode said. “We had just left that in the South.” Strode called the Klan passive. “They read books, talked and all that but they never put on the hoods or got involved with any terrorism. They did no parading because we weren’t afraid of them.”
Such was the world in which the five future UCLA athletes found themselves growing up. The families of Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, and Ray Bartlett were longtime residents of Los Angeles. Jackie Robinson and Tom Bradley moved from the South to Southern California with their families in search of the elusive Promised Land.
1
No Bed of Roses in Pasadena
“If you poor Georgians want to get a little closer to heaven, come on out to California.”
—Burton Thomas, Jackie Robinson’s uncle
Mallie Robinson had had enough. Her husband, Jerry, had left her for another woman and she was strapped with five children, the youngest of whom, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, was just over a year old. (He was known as Jack until sportswriters began calling him Jackie when he played football at UCLA.) Years later Robinson said that when he became of aware of how much his mother had to endure, “I could only think of [my father] in bitterness. He, too, may have been a victim of oppression, but he had no right to desert my mother and five children.” When Robinson became famous, his father tried to pay a visit, but Jackie turned his back on him.
The Robinsons were living as sharecroppers on
a plantation in Cairo (pronounced KAYrow), Georgia, in the heart of the Black Belt, the fertile land in the middle of the state where the densest population of African Americans in the United States lived. Cairo was just “a day’s hike” from the Florida state line. Robinson would later call living as a sharecropper in Cairo “a newer, more sophisticated form of slavery.” Mallie and her husband were making a decent living by sharecropping but only after she had stood up to the tough plantation owner for a greater share of the profits earned from their labor. They were what were called “half-croppers” because they had to give half of their crops to the white landowner. But when Jerry left, the owner would not allow Mallie’s brother to help her bring in the crops. “You might as well go,” he told Mallie. “I ain’t gonna give you nothing.” He kicked her out of their house, which he owned, one that was barely inhabitable. She saw only a bleak future, one of poverty and living under the humiliation of Jim Crow laws.
Then Mallie’s half-brother Burton Thomas, well-dressed and exuding prosperity, paid a visit to Cairo and the Robinson family. He espoused the wonders of where he was living—Southern California. Mallie, her sister, and brother agreed to pack up their meager belongings and head to the Promised Land. The family entourage of thirteen (including children) boarded a midnight train from Cairo on May 21, 1921. Mallie remarked, “I hear that freedom train awhistling ’round that bend out yonder!”
A family friend, a young Charles Copeland, remembered the commotion at the train station. “I had never seen anything like it,” he said. “It was a big thing for us, everyone was so excited.”
When Mallie and the others passed through the San Gabriel Mountains, she was stunned by the beauty of Los Angeles. She called it “the most beautiful sight of my whole life.” The train stopped at Pasadena, where the entourage got off. They were going to live in what was called the “the richest city per capita in America.” “What my mother didn’t know when she brought us here, what none of us knew, was that Pasadena was as prejudiced as any town in the South,” said Jack’s brother Mack years later. “They let us in all right, but they wouldn’t let us live.”
Mallie and her children—Edgar (ten), Frank (nine), Mack (six), Willa Mae (four), and Jack (sixteen months)—found a tiny three-room apartment near the train station. Thirteen people lived in that apartment, which had no hot water and no kitchen sink, and dishes were washed in a tub that also served as a bathtub. Mallie then set out to look for a job as she had but three dollars in her purse. A white Pasadena family agreed to hire her as a maid, a job she held for twenty years. After two years in Pasadena, Mallie and her sister’s family bought a house at 121 Pepper Street in a white working-class section of Pasadena. Two more years passed before her sister and husband bought a house of their own, leaving Mallie the sole owner of the property where Jack would live until he left home seventeen years later.
The Robinsons were among eleven hundred African Americans who lived in Pasadena. They quickly learned that Jim Crow also resided in their new home. Blacks could find only menial jobs, and they were barred from many public places, such as the Brookside Plunge, which they were allowed to use only one day a week, after which the pool was drained. “Pasadena regarded us as intruders,” Robinson would say. “My brothers and I were in many a fight that started with a racial slur on the very street we lived on. We saw movies from segregated balconies, swam in the municipal pool only on Tuesdays, and were permitted in the YMCA only one night a week.”
Pasadena residents also were concerned that African Americans living in their neighborhoods were driving down property values, and they wanted to emulate such nearby cities as Glendale, Eagle Rock, and San Marino, which refused to hire African Americans and had nary any within their limits. By 1940 Pasadena had hired no blacks as police officers, firefighters, or teachers. Some worked as laborers in the streets, parks, and refuse departments. The African American newspaper, the California Eagle, noted, “The condition of affairs surrounding the racial issues in Pasadena is nothing less that nauseating.”
Even though the Robinsons lived in a comfortable two-story house with two bathrooms, a garden, and fruit trees in the backyard, they still were poor and often went without a meal. “Sometimes there were only two meals a day, and some days we wouldn’t have eaten at all if it hadn’t been for the leftovers my mother was able to bring home from her job,” Robinson remembered. Sometimes they ate just bread and a concoction of sugar and water Robinson called “sweet water.” Years later his wife Rachel had to remind him to eat his vegetables. “I never developed a taste for them because I never ate them as a youngster,” he said. His sister Willa Mae denied that the family went without meals, but Robinson remembered differently. He recalled that he could “never get my belt tight enough to keep that hurt in my stomach away.” He added that if they went hungry, “you can bet money that my mother was twice as hungry.” As noted, at times the people Mallie worked for let her fill her apron with leftover food to bring home. “We’d wait up, hoping she’d come home with a cake or pie,” Robinson said.
Mallie found time in her busy work schedule to teach her children to respect themselves and to demand respect from others. “That’s why I refused to back down in later life,” Robinson wrote years later, “and won’t back down now.” Brother Mack said Jackie got his strength from his mother. “She instilled pride in him,” he said. “She wouldn’t take anything from anybody. She was a real strong woman. It took a lot of guts to come out to California with five small kids. . . . Jackie inherited a lot from her; we all did.”
There was little doubt of racism in their neighborhood and beyond. “We went through a sort of slavery with the whites slowly, very slowly, getting used to us,” Willa Mae said. Neighbors tried unsuccessfully to buy the Robinsons out of their home. A cross was burned on the front lawn. Police often were called to keep the black children off the streets. When Jack was about eight years old, he was sweeping the sidewalk in front of his house when a little white girl began chanting, “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Jack responded by calling her “a cracker,” a slur that his brother Mack told him was the worst thing you could call a white person. The girl’s father ran out of the house after Jack. They began throwing rocks at each other until the man’s wife coaxed him back into the house.
Once Jack’s brother Edgar rode his skates to the grocery store to buy bread. A neighbor complained to police about the noise. “I’m sorry they’re so touchy that the noise of skates disturbs them,” Mallie told police. “But there’s no law against skating on the sidewalk, is there?” The policeman replied, “No, but the man who called us told us that his wife is afraid of colored people.” Mallie told the officer she would tell Edgar to go around the block and avoid the neighbor’s house.
While Mallie was working, Willa Mae cared for Jack, bathing, dressing, and feeding him. She even took him to school with her when Jack wasn’t old enough to attend. He would play in the sandbox on the school grounds while he waited for her. When it rained, Willa Mae’s teacher brought him inside.
When it was time for Jack to attend school, he was enrolled in Cleveland Elementary School for two years before transferring to Washington Elementary. “In those days he would come home from school, gulp down a glass of milk, put his books on that old dresser, and be out the door playing ball with the kids,” Willa Mae said. All he was interested in was playing sports. “He wasn’t a great student,” Willa Mae said, “but that was only because somewhere along the line he decided sports would be his life.” He was a C student in high school. When one of his grades would slip, he would work harder on another subject to keep the average necessary to play sports. “To do more would have meant giving up at least one sport, and I couldn’t,” he recalled.
When he was eight, Jack discovered that at least in sports he was allowed to compete with whites. “Sports were the big breach in the wall of segregation about me,” Robinson said. “In primary and high school white boys treated me as an equal.” Robinson’s classmates would share
their lunches with him if he played on their team. “He was a special little boy, and ever since I can remember he always had a ball in his hand,” Willa Mae said.
At twelve Jack moved on to Washington Junior High, where he earned C’s and B’s. His school transcript carried a remark from a school official stating that he probably would wind up as a gardener. In his free time Robinson delivered newspapers, ran errands, sold hot dogs at the nearby Rose Bowl, and cut grass to help out the family. During those years several more black families moved into the neighborhood, as did Mexicans, Asians, and poor whites. Their commonality was that they were poor. The boys formed the Pepper Street Gang, where they all—blacks, Latinos, Asians, and even a few whites—hung out together, at times getting into minor mischief. Robinson’s widow said the gang was more like the “Little Rascals” than the gangs of today. They threw dirt clods at cars, found lost golf balls on the golf course and sold them back to golfers, and stole items from stores, mostly food. “People used to ask me how Jack got so good throwing a baseball and a football,” Willa Mae remarked, “and I said it was from throwing rocks at the other kids who threw rocks at him.”
The Black Bruins Page 2