The Black Bruins

by James W. Johnson

  Good fortune was about to come Robinson’s way. While waiting for his discharge, he met a black soldier who had played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League, one of the top teams in professional black baseball. The soldier, Ted Alexander, told him the Monarchs were looking for top players. The pay was good and so was the baseball life, he told Robinson. Robinson wrote a letter seeking a job with the Monarchs. They agreed to pay him $400 a month if he made the team during spring training in April 1945.

  During the winter Robinson’s Pasadena mentor, Karl Downs, sent Robinson a telegram asking him to teach physical education at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas. Downs had been hired as president of the black college a year earlier, and he was reputed at the age of thirty-two to be the youngest college president in the United States. Robinson wanted to repay Downs for all the help he had been given and eagerly accepted the job—although only until spring training began.

  The college had virtually no athletic program, so Robinson put out a call for students to try out for a basketball squad. Seven students showed up, most of whom knew little about the game. Robinson set up a schedule against teams in the Southwestern Conference, including Grambling, Southern University, Bishop, Wiley, Prairie View, and Arkansas A&M. Huston didn’t fare well.

  Southern humiliated outmanned Huston in a tournament. On hand to watch the game was a Langston University player whose team would play Southern in the next tournament round. That player, Marques Haynes, was repulsed by Southern’s treatment of Huston and vowed to pay it back. With two minutes to go in the Langston-Southern game and Langston leading, Haynes went into one of his dribbling routines to run out the clock and keep the ball away from Southern. Haynes later became famous for his dribbling prowess with the Harlem Globetrotters and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1998. Robinson’s team won one game that season, a stunning defeat of defending league champion Bishop 61–59

  In March Robinson headed off to Houston for spring training with the Kansas City Monarchs. He discovered spring training consisted of playing games rather than preparing for the season. At the same time as Robinson was with the Monarchs, the Red Sox were under pressure from a Boston city councilman who was fighting Jim Crow in baseball. After a month of “spring training” Robinson was surprised by the Boston Red Sox, who offered him a tryout. He joined two other African Americans on April 16, 1944, at Fenway Park.

  The Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker; the black press; and to a much lesser degree the white press were joining in an effort to bring racial equality to the big leagues. Pressure from an angry white Boston city councilman, whose district encompassed a large black population, persuaded the Red Sox to hold the tryout. Neither the manager nor any players attended. Robinson banged pitch after pitch off and over the Green Monster, the famous left-field fence. “What a ballplayer,” scout Hugh Duffy said. “Too bad he’s the wrong color.” The two other black players, Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams, also fared well, but none of the three heard anything from the Red Sox ever again. Robinson headed back to the Monarchs. It wasn’t until twelve years later that Pumpsie Green was hired to play for the Red Sox, the last team to include an African American on its roster.

  Perhaps the most influential sportswriter to put pressure on big league baseball was Lester Rodney, a white man who relentlessly led the drive. “Nobody was making any fuss about the fact that the great black players—we called them Negroes at that time—were not allowed to play in the big leagues,” Rodney said in 1996.

  Rodney, a popular young reporter for the Daily Worker, chided his readers eleven years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. “You pay the prices,” he told his readers. “Demand better ball. Demand Americanism in baseball.” In those days communism was not the feared enemy that it became during the 1950s and the Cold War. Thousands of people read the newspaper. (Rodney later denounced communism.) Rodney once told the famed sportswriter Roger Kahn of an encounter he had with New York Giants manager Leo Durocher. “For a fucking Communist, you know your baseball,” Durocher said.

  Rodney’s “work, with an audience, encouraged black writers,” said University of Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck. “The two big impacts were with black writers and in mobilizing people.” Rodney and the Daily Worker led petition drives that Ruck said generated more than a million signatures urging baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to integrate the game. “Rodney made it seem that this was the ‘American Way,’” says Mark Naison, Fordham University professor of African American studies.

  As early as 1934 Rodney (then aged only twenty-three) and the Daily Worker had begun pushing for the integration of baseball. On August 13, 1936, Rodney wrote, in the promotion of an upcoming series of articles about Jim Crow in baseball, that he was going to “rip the veil from the ‘Crime of the Big Leagues’—mentioning names, giving faces, sparing none of the most sacred figures in baseball officialdom.” He wrote that mainstream newspapers had carefully hushed up the Majors’ bigoted stand against blacks in baseball and called it “one of the most sordid stories in American sports. . . . Read the truth about this carefully laid conspiracy.” Rodney’s articles received wide attention but no action from the “officialdom” of baseball.

  Outside of the black press, few white newspapers except the Daily Worker were covering the issue of a boycott on African American ballplayers. J. G. Taylor Spink, editor of The Sporting News, once wrote that there “was no good” to come from raising the racial issue. “The conscience of American journalism on baseball apartheid, sorry to say, was not in the hands of America’s big daily newspapers,” Rodney retorted. Rodney and the Daily Worker never quit trying to end baseball segregation.

  Robinson always was appreciative of Rodney’s efforts. He testified before Congress two years after he broke the color barrier that “The fact that it is a Communist who denounced injustice in the courts, police brutality, and a lynching when it happens doesn’t change the truth of his charges. Negroes were stirred up before there was a Communist Party, and they’ll stay stirred up long after the Party disappeared—unless Jim Crow has disappeared as well.”

  Sports historian Larry Lester told ESPN in 2010 that he believed Rodney’s efforts had a significant effect on Brooklyn Dodgers president and general manager Branch Rickey’s move to sign Robinson. “It made his job easier to sell the signing of Jackie Robinson to the American public, because Lester Rodney had already planted the seeds for this historic event to happen.” Rodney said in 1996 that the Daily Worker didn’t do it for credit, and “I don’t know how much we speeded up the inevitable.” As for Rickey, Rodney said, “He was going to be the big hero and baseball legend in history—he is, and rightfully so, because he did it . . . and once he did it, he fought for it.”

  In his biography Rodney recounted the scene in a jammed-packed Ebbets Field press box on April 10, 1947. Brooklyn announced its historic call-up of Robinson to the Dodgers as he batted against them for their Montreal farm club in an exhibition game. Three writers, Rodney said, approached him and said something like, “Well, you guys can take a lot of credit for this.”

  Life was not easy in the Negro leagues. The teams were poorly financed, the schedules created chaos, and black players had trouble finding places to eat and sleep on the road. Robinson missed the structure he found in college athletics and was appalled by gambling interests in the league. “[Playing in the Negro leagues] turns out to be a pretty miserable way to make a buck,” Robinson said. “When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.”

  Robinson questioned what his future held. He saw that a white ballplayer could achieve fame and fortune, but a black player could not. “I began to wonder why I should dedicate my life to a career where the boundaries for progress were set by racial discrimination,” Robinson noted. He also worried that he would lose Rachel, the love of hi
s life, who was growing impatient that he was not returning to California to settle down.

  Robinson played in sixty-three games for the Monarchs—the most any member on the team played that year was eighty—and batted .414. He was twenty-six years old. At the end of the season Robinson was so fed up with black baseball that he was ready to return to Los Angeles, look for a job coaching baseball in high school, and marry Rachel. But his fortunes were soon to dramatically change.

  18

  Making NFL History

  “From 1933 to 1946, major league professional football was as lily-white as a Klansman’s dancing partner.”

  —A. S. “Doc” Young, writer for Ebony magazine

  The year 1946 was Kenny Washington’s and Woody Strode’s time to make sports history. They would be the first blacks to end the thirteen-year unwritten boycott by the NFL that banned African Americans from playing in professional football. Up until 1933 seventeen African Americans had played in the NFL. The last was Joe Lillard of the Chicago Cardinals. He was a shifty runner, an excellent passer, and a skilled defensive back and kicker. He had been involved in at least four fights during the 1932 season, none of which he started. Yet there is little doubt those skirmishes had a major impact on the NFL owners who started the boycott. When the Chicago Bears’ founder and coach George Halas was once asked why there were no black players, he remarked that the game “didn’t have the appeal to black players at the time.” That doesn’t explain why Halas tried to sign Washington and then changed his mind after talking with other owners; perhaps it was in a show of solidarity. NFL owners never acknowledged publicly that there was a ban, but it was apparent to all, particularly the black race. Sometime after the boycott was lifted, an NFL executive, Tex Schramm, recalled, “You just didn’t do it [hire blacks]. It wasn’t the thing that was done.”

  Two owners of football teams—one a racist and the other not—signed Washington, Strode, and two other blacks to contracts. The Los Angeles Rams (originally the Cleveland Rams) were the first to break the NFL boycott, not necessarily because their owner, Dan Reeves, wanted to but because he was forced to. The Cleveland Browns of the new All-American Football Conference (AAFC) signed two black players, Marion Motley and Bill Willis, to contracts because they were among the best players available. The conference was new, and it had no boycott, so Motley’s and Willis’s contributions to breaking the color barrier are less strong than those of Washington and Strode. Nonetheless, the new teams in the AAFC were in no hurry to hire blacks. Cleveland Browns coach Paul Brown read about the Rams’ signing of Washington and Strode and months later took the first courageous step toward integrating the AAFC by signing Motley and Willis.

  When the fledgling AAFC opened the franchise in Cleveland under Brown, who was to become pro football’s Branch Rickey, the Rams decided to move from Cleveland to Los Angeles and its burgeoning population. The Rams, despite being NFL champions, were drawing fewer than twenty thousand fans to home games. Two major factors made the Rams pick Washington to be the first player to end the boycott: they were concerned that the new competition would sign black players, Washington among them, and that Los Angeles city officials would prohibit them from using the Coliseum if they didn’t let blacks play. They also were feeling heat from three prominent African American sportswriters: Halley Harding of the Los Angeles Tribune, Edward Robinson of the Los Angeles Sentinel, and Herman Hill of the Pittsburgh Courier. These journalists took up the challenge of persuading the Rams to sign Washington despite his age and injury-prone body. They wanted Coliseum officials to know that if they didn’t sign Washington, “there will be no pro football in the L.A. Coliseum.”

  African American leaders in Los Angeles put pressure on Coliseum officials by pointing out that under the Supreme Court’s 1896 “separate but equal” ruling the Coliseum could not have a segregated sports team playing in a stadium supported by public funds. It left Coliseum officials no choice but to prohibit the Rams from playing in the stadium unless they had black players. The Rams “didn’t take Kenny because of his ability,” Strode said. “They didn’t take me on my ability. It was shoved down their throats.”

  Reeves reluctantly agreed to sign blacks, particularly when he recognized that Kenny Washington, although age twenty-seven and often injured, could be a big draw at the box office. “The people out there loved Kenny, and they wanted him to play for the Rams,” Strode said. On March 21, 1946, Washington signed a contract with the Rams. No terms were announced, but a Rams’ source said, “Kenny asked for plenty and got it.”

  Reeves also knew that the rest of the league couldn’t stand in his way if he signed black players because he was opening new territory for the NFL. “Reeves had the league over a barrel,” Washington said later. “The Coliseum people warned the Rams if they practiced discrimination, they couldn’t use the stadium. When those NFL people began thinking about all those seats and the money they could make filling them up, they decided my kind wasn’t so bad after all.”

  Head coach Bob Snyder also admitted that the Rams would have been denied a Coliseum lease if they hadn’t signed Washington. “I doubt we would have been interested in Washington, if we had stayed in Cleveland,” Snyder said.

  It took two more years for another NFL team to sign a black player. The Detroit Lions signed end Bob Mann and halfback Mel Groomes, and the New York Giants signed defensive back Emlen Tunnell, whose career led him to the Hall of Fame.

  Ironically while the Rams were forced to sign the first two black players and break the boycott, the same procedures were used sixteen years later to integrate the last NFL team—the “lily-white” Washington Redskins. Their bigoted owner, George Preston Marshall, wanted to lease federal land for a new football stadium. But Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall said that would happen only if Marshall would agree to a non-discrimination policy. Jackie Robinson applauded Udall’s stand, calling it “inspirational and encouraging.” Marshall fired back at Robinson: “Jackie Robinson is in the business of exploiting a race and making a living doing it. I’m not. He doesn’t qualify as a critic.” But Marshall reluctantly agreed.

  Washington’s uncle, Rocky, acted as his agent, assuring that Washington would get a full year’s pay under a no-cut clause if he was used by the Rams only to generate ticket sales. When Jackie Robinson signed with Brooklyn, the Dodgers took steps to see him succeed. The Rams didn’t give Washington the same chance.

  The Rams decided it would be best if Washington’s roommate on the road was a black player. When asked whom he would like, Washington without hesitation picked Woody Strode. Ram officials questioned Strode’s interracial marriage in an effort to keep him off the team, but Washington would not relent. “I want my buddy,” he said. That was enough. The NFL then signed its second African American.

  “My signing with the Rams wasn’t a package deal per se,” Strode said, “but they realized that Kenny would be a loner on the road. They didn’t want Kenny to face it by himself. . . . Sometimes the team would stay at the Hilton and Kenny and I would have to go find somewhere else to stay. If we were lucky, we’d stay with a friend or relative.”

  Strode said he had the ability to play in the NFL, “but the Rams weren’t concerned with that. They spoke badly of my marriage to a Hawaiian, and I think if they had their choice they would have selected someone else.” Strode spent most of his playing career sitting on the bench and “collecting my $350 a week.” He would remark when his career was over, “Integrating the NFL was the low point of my life. There was nothing nice about it.”

  Strode said he didn’t realize what he and Washington had accomplished. “We discovered that very few blacks received the opportunity Kenny and I received,” he said. “I never became bitter over it, maybe at a few individuals, but never at the total picture.”

  Dick Hyland, a sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, called Washington the greatest football player he had ever seen, better than Red Grange, Tom Harmon, and Ernie Nevers, but he questioned whe
ther Washington’s “break” had come five or six years too late. “Washington has become a beaten-up ballplayer who is neither so strong nor so quick in his reactions as he was before the war.” He noted that because of Washington’s trick leg he had lost “just enough of his speed to enable tacklers . . . to nail him with punishing tackles—which in turn cut down his speed, strength and effectiveness.” Hyland saw Washington as no more than a “spot” player. “Kenny Washington will work his head off to prove this predication wrong, and I hope he does,” Hyland wrote.

  Washington made the team, and his first appearance in the NFL in 1946 was in Los Angeles in an exhibition game against the Washington Redskins; it was a replay of the championship game won by the Rams the previous year. A crowd of one hundred thousand was expected to attend the game. Such a number was more than the Rams had attracted during their entire season. Surely Kenny Washington had a lot to do with the size of the crowd, and Angelinos were eager to see top-flight professional football.

  The crowd fell below expectations at slightly more than 68,000, but fans saw a great game with the Rams winning 16–14. If Washington played, he had little impact on the outcome as he wasn’t mentioned in press accounts in the Los Angeles Times. According to Strode, Washington got in for one play in the first half plus a few minutes toward the end of the game. Strode said he never got into the game. The Rams wound up the year drawing almost 215,000 spectators in five games, a huge boost over crowds in Cleveland.

  Gordon Macker of the Los Angeles Daily News wondered why the duo didn’t play. “The scam of advertising names to hustle the chumps and then letting the names be only numbers in the program (25 cents please) seems to be an accepted practice with the pro promoters. Well, this town won’t go for it.” It didn’t bother Strode much. He was making more money than he had in semi-pro football, and he wasn’t getting beat up. “I was in the NFL and that was like a prize,” he said.