Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  By this time, Mallie knew that her husband was romantically involved with one of the married daughters of a respected black family, the Powells, who owned a large tract of land across the road from the Sasser place. (“It’s true,” Olin Faulk said some seventy-five years later; “my grandmother Fannie Powell’s sister was having an affair with him. The family often talked about it.”) Deeply hurt by the knowledge, Mallie turned increasingly to God, who warned her in a dream that Jerry and his lover were about to run off together. When Jerry announced too casually that he was going to visit one of his brothers in Texas and would take little Willa Mae along, Mallie replied just as casually that Willa Mae could not go. On July 28, 1919, Jerry said goodbye to his wife and children and went down to the railroad station in Cairo. Someone saw him skulking around one end of the station; then he climbed aboard a local train heading north—a curious way to go to Texas. Next, Mallie heard that he was working at a sawmill and that the woman was with him.

  When Jerry’s money and luck ran out, he was back on her doorstep. But she was moving now in a different direction. Jerry’s departure had put her on a collision course with Jim Sasser, who once told her to her face: “You’re about the sassiest nigger woman ever on this place.” Powerfully built, “a tall, rawboned man, who scared a lot of people,” according to one person, Sasser ran his farm with a mailed fist. A county commissioner, he was widely respected as perhaps the most enterprising farmer in the region, but he was also rightly feared as one of the toughest. When he found out that Mallie had actually helped Jerry, perhaps his best worker, to leave, he was livid. But Mallie stood up to him. When Sasser sought to bring the sheriff into the matter, to compel Jerry back into the marriage and onto the plantation, she refused to go along. When he tried to hire her as cook for his household, she declined the honor. Sasser struck back after one of Jerry’s brothers offered to bring in the crops for her. “You might as well go,” Sasser advised her. “I ain’t gonna give you nothing.”

  To accommodate new tenant farmers, he evicted her and the children out of her house into another one, less spacious, then into yet another, which she found barely habitable. Still, when Mallie tried to take a job elsewhere, Sasser blocked the way. Finally she found work with another white family, who treated her kindly. But Georgia and the South itself had become a dead end. As Mallie tried to gauge the likely future for herself and her five children, she saw mainly poverty, humiliation, and possibly worse. In the preceding five years, race relations had become bleak. On Thanksgiving night, 1915, at the behest of the same Tom Watson who had tried to lead blacks and whites under the Populist banner, the Klan was reborn in a ceremony atop Stone Mountain, Georgia. In 1919, when whites lynched seventy-six blacks in the United States, Georgia preserved its record as the most violently antiblack state in the Union. In April, three months after Jack’s birth, an incident in a church in Millen, eastern Georgia, led to the death of two white policemen; whites then killed five blacks and burned seven black churches and lodge halls. On May 10, a race riot broke out in Charleston in neighboring South Carolina. Early in September, in incidents across Georgia, a number of black churches and schools were burned down. Between the Charleston riot and the epidemic of arson had come the “Red Summer,” which witnessed at least two dozen race riots across the country, most notably in Chicago, brought on by bitter postwar competition between whites and blacks seeking jobs and housing.

  A way out for Mallie came with a visit to Grady County by Burton Thomas, her half-brother, who had emigrated to southern California. (He was Edna McGriff’s son by a previous marriage, to Monroe Thomas.) Elegantly garbed and exuding an air of settled prosperity, Burton expounded to one and all on the wonders of the West. “If you want to get closer to heaven,” he liked to brag, “visit California.” Slowly and secretly, and apparently with the aid of some whites among Mallie’s employers, a circle of relatives began to plan an exit. Mallie would take her five children with her. Her sister Cora Wade, two years younger, would also move, with her husband, Samuel, and their sons, Ralph, who was three, and Van, an infant. Mallie’s brother Paul McGriff also planned to go. Eventually, about thirteen family members formed the party migrating to Los Angeles.

  On May 21, 1920, Mallie commandeered a buggy, loaded her children and possessions on it, and headed for Cairo. There, preparing to leave, she and the children stayed briefly at the home on Adams Street (later called Seventh Street) of her half-sister Mary Lou Thomas Maxwell, forty-two years old and the full sister of Burton Thomas. Unhappy with her husband’s ways, Mary Lou intended to follow Mallie and Cora to California.

  Summoned by an indignant Jerry Robinson, as Mallie herself recalled, the police caught up with her at the small train station near the middle of town. To many white Southerners, migrating blacks were an insult and a threat: an insult to the myth that the South was perfection itself, especially in the harmony of its races; and a threat in that it meant the loss of some of the South’s cheapest labor. Local Georgia police routinely saw it as part of their responsibility to curb black migration. In 1916, in Macon, Savannah, and elsewhere in Georgia, officers mounted specific actions, including the vigorous policing of the black section of Jim Crow train stations, to prevent blacks from leaving. Typically, they tore up train tickets or intimidated blacks into turning back. In Macon, the city council approved the purchase of forty rifles by the police to deal with a perceived threat from blacks angry over this issue. About fifty thousand blacks abandoned Georgia that year.

  At the Cairo train station, some white policemen truculently checked train tickets, churlishly kicked at suitcases and boxes. But they did nothing to stop Mallie’s party from leaving.

  “In those days,” Charles Copeland, a family friend, later recalled, “six trains passed through Cairo every twenty-four hours. I was young, but I remember the day the sisters left with their children, the commotion at the train station. I had never seen anything like it. It was a big thing for us, everyone was so excited.” Around midnight, the number 58 train pulled into the station. The band of travelers wept, said their goodbyes, and climbed aboard. Almost certainly, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, only one year and four months old, was in his mother’s arms as the train pulled slowly out of Cairo to start the long journey across the continent.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Pasadena Boyhood

  1920–1937

  I might have become a full-fledged delinquent.

  —Jackie Robinson (1972)

  ON A WARM JUNE night in 1920, Mallie Robinson and her band of migrants from Georgia at last reached Los Angeles, California. After a sometimes dreary, more often absorbing ride across the continent, the first vista of the city dazzled her; it was, she wrote home, “the most beautiful sight of my whole life.” The next day, passing through orange groves and winding upward toward the land under the San Gabriel Mountains, the train bearing the party reached its final destination, the city of Pasadena, about a dozen miles from Los Angeles.

  The California weather and scenery were spectacular, the city of Pasadena impressive—but the Georgia migrants started their new life in a shabby cold-water apartment of three small rooms, with a tin tub serving as a kitchen sink, near the railroad station. The next morning, Mallie resolutely began her search for work; except for three dollars sewn into the lining of her petticoat, she was broke. Soon, however, she had landed a job as a maid with a white Pasadena family, on terms she liked: eight dollars a week, and her working day ended in the late afternoon, not into the night as in Georgia. When her employers moved away suddenly, she lost this job; but she soon found another, also with a white family, the Dodges, whose trust and respect she quickly earned. Twenty years later she was still working for them.

  After a few weeks in the cramped apartment, the Robinsons and the Wades moved with Burton Thomas into a roomy house with an ample backyard at 45 Glorieta Street, in the tree-lined northwestern section of the city. Like all of Pasadena, this area was mainly white; but it also formed the center of Pasadena’s sm
all black population.

  Late in the summer, Edgar and Frank Robinson, ten and nine years old respectively, started school at Grover Cleveland Elementary School nearby; Cora Wade, who was too frail to take a regular job, was in charge of Mack, Willa Mae, and Jack as well as her own children while her husband and Mallie worked. This arrangement worked well for the Robinsons and the Wades, less happily for Burton. Uncle Burton was “really very much a loner,” Willa Mae later recalled, “and he definitely wasn’t used to children.” In 1922, after about two years in Pasadena, Mallie and Sam pooled their money and bought a house at 121 Pepper Street, on an all-white block just to the north of Glorieta. The 1921–22 Pasadena City Directory listed Sam Wade as owner and “Mattie” Robinson as a fellow resident there, but they were co-owners. According to family legend, a black real estate agent employed his light-skinned niece to buy the house, then sold it to Mallie and Sam. However, the county tax assessor’s records indicate only that the property was bought in 1905 by two men, Charles R. Ellis and William H. Harrison, who then sold it in 1922 to Mallie Robinson and Sam Wade.

  Two years later, in 1924, the Wades moved into their own home a few blocks away, at 972 Cypress Street. Mallie then became the sole owner of 121 Pepper Street, where Jack would live until he left home in 1941. In 1939, Mallie would also buy the property next door, 133 Pepper Street, at what was then the corner of Pepper Street and Navarro Avenue (years later, Navarro Avenue would be filled in at that point). In 1946, she acquired a third adjoining lot, at 1302 Navarro Avenue.

  PEPPER STREET IN 1922 was a working-class district, but the black migrants from rural Georgia now lived in the wealthiest city in the United States, judged according to the size of its population. Twenty years later, despite the ravages of the Great Depression, Pasadena still ranked as “the richest city per capita in America.” Its main thoroughfare, Orange Grove Avenue, adorned by impressive mansions and effulgent gardens, was commonly called “Millionaires’ Row”; and signs of affluence and taste were everywhere to be seen. An educated black visitor passing through the city shortly before the arrival of the Robinsons in 1920 wrote admiringly of “a civic pride running through all the town,” as well as other features that made Pasadena unmistakably “a city of beauty and harmony.”

  In some ways, its story is a familiar American tale; in other respects, it is more or less original. Familiar enough is the conquest by whites of the Gabrielino Indians, whose unusually pale skin led some people to believe in a race of white Indians but did not save that race from extinction. Their lands, dominated to the north by the stone-faced San Gabriel Mountains and embracing the fertile San Gabriel Valley, then passed from the hands of the Church to a succession of secular owners, who presided over great ranches once a part of Mexico. Where the Gabrielinos, feeding on acorns and squash, used to roam freely, profitable grape vineyards and orange groves, often the property of eastern financial interests, began to flourish in the balmy climate. Then, in 1873, a group of Indiana citizens, sick of midwestern winters, took steps to acquire a California home in the region. By the end of the year, a model community was in the making. Wanting a quaint Indian name for their settlement, in 1875 the founders came up with “Pasadena,” which in a Chippewa dialect is said to mean “the valley,” or “of the valley.” The new community formally adopted this name.

  The founders set lofty civic goals for themselves. They divided the land in a spirit of harmony, built roads with a respect for the natural features of the land, and planted thousands of fruit trees, which led to the area being celebrated as a kind of Eden. The warm, dry climate encouraged sanitariums and hotels and a steady flow of tourists, many of whom returned to stay. Spurning heavy industry, Pasadena wooed the rich and the educated. The city, making the most of its mountains and clean air, factors conducive to geology and astronomy, established what became the major science school in the west, the California Technical Institute, or Caltech. “Sophisticated and wealthy patrons fostered the arts,” one historian has noted, “and Pasadena became an important center for distinctive architecture, painting and sculpture, music, literature and science.”

  For a while, Pasadena was a liberal community, proud of its Indiana abolitionist roots and its civic ideals. The city openly welcomed, first as visitors, then as settlers, Jason and Owen Brown, sons of John Brown, the martyr of the action at Harpers Ferry, in which Owen had fought. But the main test of its liberalism came from its servants and their descendants, of whom there were many. Pasadena was famous for its profusion of private gardens, the most famous of which was that of the beer magnate Adolphus Busch, formerly of St. Louis, Missouri. With its shimmering pools and fountains, winding paths, mossy stone walls, verdant lawns, and quaint little cottages out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Busch Gardens became a magnet for visitors to the town. Built by the rich, such gardens depended on cheap labor. As with the faux plantations of southwestern Georgia, the fantasies of the white rich became a boon to the colored poor.

  At first, the Chinese dominated, until the Exclusion Act of 1882 did its work; then the Japanese, less objectionable to whites, filled the vacancies. By 1920, when the Robinsons and the Wades arrived, blacks comprised the largest single minority group in Pasadena, although they numbered only about eleven hundred. The black presence dated back to 1883, when a Negro teamster, after driving a herd of cattle out from Nebraska, bought a vineyard and settled down with his family. Other blacks quickly followed in search of work in the homes and gardens of whites. Churches were founded and families took root, in relative peace. This period before the end of World War I came to be seen as their golden age by Pasadena blacks, who during the war found jobs for the first time in factories, mills, lumberyards, and other light industries. But with the end of the war came bitter clashes between them and returning white soldiers. If the war marked “the beginning of the transition in the economic livelihood of the colored people,” as one scholar noted, it also marked “the start of more intolerance, prejudice, and persecution” than had ever been known in Pasadena.

  In fact, Jim Crow had been a feature of Pasadena almost from the start. In 1900, the growing presence of blacks, Japanese, Chinese, and Hispanics led officials to zone the city according to race, a practice stopped only when the United States Supreme Court ruled against it in 1917. When blacks built a new African Methodist Episcopal church in 1909, whites attempted to burn it down. On July 4, 1914, came the issue that would symbolize more vividly than any other the mean and divisive spirit of Jim Crow in Pasadena. On that day, when city officials opened the sole municipal swimming pool, the Brookside Plunge in Brookside Park, they also restricted its use to whites only. After a storm of protest, the city instituted “International Day” at the pool—one day each week when anyone could use it. At the end of this day, they promised, the plunge would be drained and refilled with clean water.

  Justice was not unknown for blacks in Pasadena. In 1918, after two black women filed a lawsuit against a local theater that charged them more than whites for admission, a superior court judge awarded them one hundred dollars in damages. But similar acts of race prejudice persisted, as whites sought to turn the screws on blacks and other minority groups, to keep them out of all but menial jobs and bar them from as many public places as possible. In 1919, appalled by local conditions, some blacks founded a chapter of the then-militant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That year, the local correspondent for the main black-owned newspaper in the region, the California Eagle, challenged African-Americans “to come together and agitate for the things necessary for their betterment, and circulate propaganda for the guidance of the race in this, the greatest crisis of the Nation’s progress and reconstruction.”

  Meanwhile, white Pasadena leaders glowed understandably with a sense of accomplishment. In 1922, the city constructed the Rose Bowl, which served annually on New Year’s Day as the venue of a nationally renowned battle between college football teams, as well as the terminus of the famed Pasadena Parade of Roses. Bet
ween 1927 and 1932, the city completed an ambitious Civic Center, including a new city hall and an imposing main library. Pasadena saw the construction of the first freeway in the nation, the imaginatively landscaped Arroyo Seco highway, free of billboards, which linked the city to Los Angeles. About this time, Henry L. Huntington also committed himself to endowing the world-famous library and art gallery that would bear his name into posterity. The Pasadena Community Playhouse gained national fame, especially after its world premiere in 1928 of Dynamo by Eugene O’Neill.

  If Pasadena could now claim to be the Athens of southern California, its white citizens increasingly saw only one flaw in all this perfection: the presence of blacks. Crime was not an issue; black crime was insignificant. But Negro residents on any street drove down property values, as Pasadena whites looked with envy on nearby communities such as Eagle Rock, South Pasadena, and San Marino—but especially on Glendale, which had had the foresight not to employ blacks as domestics and now boasted that not a single Negro lived within the city limits. As one of Jack’s friends remembered about Pasadena in the 1930s, the boundaries for most nonwhites were strictly drawn, although there were also scattered exceptions: “You couldn’t live east of Fair Oaks. You couldn’t live north of Washington Boulevard. And you couldn’t live west of Lincoln Avenue.”