Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  On January 22, with the Bulldogs in their barn against Long Beach Junior College, where black students were not welcome, tempers flared. An explosion was expected, apparently; Jack’s brother Frank arrived at the barn with a concealed tire iron. Jack found himself locked in an ongoing struggle with Sam Babich, a substitute guard and “the stormy petrel” of Long Beach; according to the Chronicle, Babich “started a one-man campaign against Robinson as soon as he was inserted in the game.” With the final whistle, Babich walked over to Robinson and punched him. “The next moment,” according to a Post reporter, “Babich was lying on the floor of the gym, with Robinson on top of him.” At that point, “nearly all the people in the gym began swinging at the nearest person, friend or foe.” This “riot” involved “about 50 players, subs, coaches and spectators.” Later, the Long Beach student body president apologized to Jack and the Bulldogs, who had won both the fight and the game.

  The rest of the season saw the team record decline, although Jack remained a feared player. PJC finished third in the conference. He ended in second place, by one point, in the race for individual scoring honors in the Western Division of the Southern California Junior College Athletic Association. By this time, he was also in deep trouble.

  Within a few days of the Long Beach game riot on January 22, Jack spent a night in the Pasadena city jail. His arrest had nothing to do with the riot. He and a friend named Jonathan Nolan were coming home from seeing a movie when Nolan began to sing a wildly popular song of the day called “Flat Foot Floogie.” They passed a policeman, who felt insulted by the song and decided to challenge Nolan and Robinson. One thing led to another, and Jack ended up in jail. He spent the night in custody; no one at the station bothered to call his mother.

  On January 25, at a hearing, Robinson was sentenced to ten days in jail. However, bowing no doubt to the fact that this was Jack’s first arrest, and that he was a football star, the judge suspended the sentence on condition that Robinson not be arrested for two years.

  Although the incident apparently did not make the newspapers, it probably became common knowledge in Pasadena. The myth began to take shape of a Jack Robinson in frequent conflict with the police, young Jack Robinson as jailbird. In 1987, fifteen years after his death, a Star-News reporter would write: “There is a story that during his junior college career, Robinson frequently was tossed into jail on a Friday night only to be released for Saturday’s game.” Jack’s brother Mack, openly bitter at Pasadena, either wanted to lend credence to the story or was made to appear so: “All that left a lot of scars,” Mack said in response to this “story.” “This town gave Jack nothing.”

  The “story” is almost certainly false, and part of the myth of an antisocial, violent Jackie Robinson that arose, ironically, even as he struggled to assert himself against racism in the major leagues. The myth would often involve tales of Robinson punching white men in the mouth, especially smashing their teeth, as the would-be mythmaker pressed into service the embodiment of black male heroism, Jackie Robinson, against centuries of slavery, segregation, and racism. Even Mack endorsed the myth, as in avowing elsewhere that Jack “had busted many a white boy in the mouth if he was out of line with him,” or in boasting that he and Jack and their brothers had “kicked some white ass” in their youth. “Kids aren’t so tough when you can knock them down with a punch.”

  Undoubtedly there were fistfights now and then between Jack and young whites, but probably nothing like the legend of Jack’s brutal aggressiveness. Ray Bartlett remembered Jackie as having a far worse temper than Bartlett himself but being much less willing to fight on the football field. “We didn’t have face masks in those days—your bare face hung out,” Bartlett said. “Jack would see a little blood, and I would see it, and it would make me angry, but Jack wouldn’t react that way. Jack really didn’t fight back like I thought he should have. I didn’t see him as being a real fighter. I’ve always said that what made him such a good runner was that he didn’t want to get hit. You couldn’t get away with anything against him, but he was not dirty and he was not one to start a fight.”

  Robinson’s eagerness to talk back to the police became mixed up in legend with the fact of his raw physical power and then became conflated into a habit of brutality when in fact he drew a line early between protest and violence. Hank Shatford of the PJC Chronicle in Jack’s time, later a lawyer and superior court judge in Pasadena, found out what the police thought of Jack. “They didn’t regard Jack as a rabble-rouser,” Shatford related. “Not at all. It’s just that Jack would not take any stuff from them, and they knew it. Frankly, some of them were bigots then. Jack never wanted to be regarded as a second-class citizen. He rebelled at any thought of anybody putting him down, or putting any of his people down. He wanted equality. And he had a temper. Boy, he could heat up pretty fast when he wanted to! When he felt he was right and the other guy was wrong, he didn’t hesitate. He was in there. But he also had an extremely warm side to him that I saw all the time.”

  In any event, on January 25, 1938, Jack acquired a police record, as well as a jail term hanging over his head. Before his probationary period was over, he would come before a Pasadena judge again as a defendant.

  At almost precisely this time, in a stroke of rare good fortune, Karl Everette Downs entered Jack’s life. Earlier that month, Downs had arrived in Pasadena to assume the pastorship of Scott United Methodist Church on Mary Street, where Mallie worshiped. He was then only twenty-five years old. Robinson and some friends were loitering at a popular street intersection when a tall, razor-thin black man, stylishly dressed in a tailored suit, white shirt, and a tie sharply knotted, stopped his car and called out: “Is Jack Robinson here?” When no one answered, he left a message: “Tell him I want to see him at the junior church.” In their small community, no one had to ask what he meant or guess for long who he was. Sometime later, Jack delivered himself to the church and began a relationship that lasted only a few years but changed the course of his life.

  Born in 1912 in Abilene, Texas, the son of a Methodist district superintendent, Downs had attended public schools in Waco, Texas, then earned degrees at black Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, and Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia, before going on to Boston University. Downs arrived in Pasadena determined to transform Scott United Methodist. In a short time he put in place an amazing number of services and facilities, including a day nursery, a social service department, a toy and book lending library, a skating rink and a basketball court, folk dancing, a young married couples’ fellowship, a Sunday-afternoon radio program, a program of interracial teas, and a celebrity night that brought a variety of speakers to Scott Methodist, from the Harlem activist Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Linus Pauling. Above all, he emphasized the importance of young people and the need for change.

  According to Robinson later, “elder members objected to Reverend Downs’s program. They felt tradition should be maintained.” But while the elders objected and debated, Downs quickly won over the youth. “He looked half his age,” Eleanor Heard recalled (he officiated at her marriage), “and yet he was a serious man that you had to respect and admire.” Downs was cosmopolitan but also race proud; he was mature and yet challenged the old ways. Two years before coming to Pasadena, he had published a fighting article, “Timid Negro Students!,” in Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. Calling on black and white students alike to fight social injustice, he demanded “fearless, rational, comprehensive and cooperative ventures of both the Negro and white students.” He warned that injustices like the Scottsboro case and lynchings in the South would continue “until the Negro student substitutes courage for his timidity and sacrifice for his comforts.”

  To Downs, Robinson evidently was someone special who had to be rescued from himself and the traps of Jim Crow; to Robinson, Downs was a revelation. “He really was a sort of psychiatrist,” Ray Bartlett thought. “I’m not sure what would have happened to Jack if he had
never met Reverend Downs.” Downs led Jack back to Christ. Under the minister’s influence, Jack not only returned to church but also saw its true significance for the first time; he started to teach Sunday school. After a punishing football game on Saturday, Jack admitted, he yearned to sleep late; “but no matter how terrible I felt, I had to get up. It was impossible to shirk duty when Karl Downs was involved.” The young minister, with his love of athletics and his easy manner, was also a pleasure to be around. “Karl Downs had the ability to communicate with you spiritually,” Jack declared, “and at the same time he was fun to be with. He participated with us in our sports. Most important he knew how to listen. Often when I was deeply concerned about personal crises, I went to him.”

  In his last autobiography, I Never Had It Made, Robinson then mentions only one problem or crisis that he brought to Downs: his relationship to his mother, her long hours of menial work, and his own inability to help her end this cycle of toil. “When I talked with Karl about this and other problems,” he wrote, “he helped ease some of my tensions. It wasn’t so much what he did to help as the fact that he was interested and concerned enough to offer the best advice he could.” The relationship between his minister, his mother, and Jack himself was crucial. As a young man, vibrant, educated, articulate, and brave, Downs became a conduit through which Mallie’s message of religion and hope finally flowed into Jack’s consciousness and was fully accepted there, if on revised terms, as he himself reached manhood. Faith in God then began to register in him as both a mysterious force, beyond his comprehension, and a pragmatic way to negotiate the world. A measure of emotional and spiritual poise such as he had never known at last entered his life.

  Looking back in 1949 on his youth, Jack would point out as a major turning point in his life his relatively late understanding of the crucial role his mother played in it—that “there was somebody else in this world beside little me.” The turning point had come “all of a sudden in junior college.… It made me realize there was somebody battling and pushing us along. With a mother like that a fellow just had to make good.” Acknowledging at last the moral victory Mallie had made of her life despite her dreary job and country ways, Jack came to see the strength from knowing “that I had a lot of faith in God.… There’s nothing like faith in God to help a fellow who gets booted around once in a while.”

  Downs also gave Robinson his first inspired sense of a reliable future vocation. From about this point in his life, Jack knew that when the cheering stopped, as he understood it would, he would seek to become a coach, or to serve in some other intimate capacity with young people, especially young black people, to try to shape their lives as his life had been shaped by his mother and by Karl Downs.

  WHEN THE BASEBALL SEASON STARTED, Jack was now an established star of the Bulldogs. His hitting was assured; his fielding was brilliant; his base running set him apart from all other players. In one play that astonished a sportswriter, Robinson found himself apparently trapped by fielders between second and third base; but when he saw the shortstop drop the ball, “instead of stopping at third, the dusky flash, noting that home was uncovered, went all the way to score.” Early in April, riding a thirteen-game winning streak, PJC climbed atop their division. In the process, Jack had made his mark. On May 1, when he was named to the All-Southland Junior College team, he was also selected as the Most Valuable Player in the region. The next day, he celebrated by going five-for-six and stealing two bases against Los Angeles Junior College.

  On May 7, the sporting legend of young Jackie Robinson grew even more imposing. Arriving late for a vital division game against Glendale Junior College in Glendale, Robinson had one hit and stole a base in a PJC victory. But he had a good reason to be tardy. Earlier that day, in Pomona, about forty miles away, Jack jumped 25 feet 6½ inches on the last of his three allotted tries at the Southern California Junior College track meet to set a national junior college record. In the process, he erased his brother’s mark, which Mack had set one year before at the Drake Relays in Iowa.

  The legend grew some more on May 17 in a game against Pomona, when Coach Mallory tossed the ball to Jack in the third inning for his debut as a pitcher. Hurling the remaining innings, Robinson gave up five hits, walked five batters, hit one, and uncorked one wild pitch. Nevertheless, the Bulldogs won, 12–1, and he gained official credit for the win. Two days later, the Bulldogs demolished Compton to take the divisional title. Playing in twenty-four games, Jack had batted .417 and scored forty-three runs; scoring in all but three of the games, he struck out only three times and stole twenty-five bases. The PJC Chronicle pronounced him “the greatest base runner ever to play on a junior college team,” as well as “one of the most sensational fielders in the business.”

  This was surely the moment for a major-league club to sign Robinson and begin grooming him. In March, in a game that pitted a Pasadena youth nine against the Chicago White Sox (in town for spring training), Jack’s brilliance had been clear. After his second hit of the game, he stole second base almost impudently against the White Sox catcher Mike Tresh. In the next inning, after his superb stop of a smash by Luke Appling, the American League batting champion, he started a brilliant double play to snuff out a White Sox threat. A reporter heard Jimmy Dykes, the White Sox manager, declare: “Geez, if that kid was white I’d sign him right now.”

  Signed by a major-league organization, Jack would have joined a group of young and still developing baseball players—such as Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Kiner, Bob Lemon, and Bob Feller—he would meet later either in the majors or in the Hall of Fame. But in 1938, the prohibition against blacks in major-league baseball was like iron. The years from about this point in 1938 until 1946, when he took the field for the Montreal Royals of the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, would be in effect the lost baseball youth, never to be recovered, of Jackie Robinson.

  IN 1937, JACK HAD ENTERED PJC a wiry fellow, with a sinewy yet undernourished body; one sportswriter in 1941 would recall him as having been in 1937 “a rather skinny kid.” Another writer, much later, remembered that “what struck me then was how thin and fragile he looked and how suddenly he could be the man who wasn’t there when tacklers attempted to down him.” By the time Jack played his last football game for the Bulldogs, however, his body had changed; benefiting from football team “training tables,” his weight had jumped from around 135 pounds to nearly 175. By the fall of 1938 Jack’s shoulders were visibly broader and denser with muscle, his thighs were thick for a person with his relatively modest frame, and he had achieved his top height, just under six feet. Now in his twentieth year, he stood at the peak of his physical perfection.

  With his broad-jump record as well as his amazing football, baseball, and basketball exploits, he had emerged completely from his brother Mack’s dominance. Neither brother seemed entirely comfortable with the change. “I couldn’t get over it, breaking Mack’s record,” Jack recalled. “Mack had always been my idol, making the Olympics and all that, and here I’d broken his record.” Again using his college or university mainly as an outlet for athletics, Mack finally enrolled in the spring at the University of Oregon. In June, on a visit home, he let the press know how pleased he was by Jack’s record jump. But the Pasadena press now needed no prompting to sing Jack’s praises or to see him as a greater athlete than Mack. When the PJC Chronicle named Jack its athlete of the year, Hank Shatford saluted him as “the greatest all-around athlete ever to attend P.J.C.” And that month, to help raise funds to send Jack to the National Amateur Athletic Union’s big track-and-field meeting in Buffalo, New York, Rube Samuelsen of the Post paid tribute: “It is doubtful if Pasadena ever has had a greater all-around athlete and that is saying a lot in a city where champions are produced as regularly as the years roll by.”

  The Buffalo meet, on July 3, promised a dramatic clash of the Robinson brothers in the broad jump. But Mack, who won the 200-meter race after being eliminated in the 100, decided late to withdraw from the event. Jack himsel
f placed third. At the end of the summer Mack did not return to Oregon. Instead, he stayed in Pasadena to work for the city, sweeping streets. Some people wondered how he, a college man, could work at such a job. “I never did understand those people,” Mack remarked later. “I had to take whatever I could get.”

  The late spring and summer of 1938 found Jack once again playing some tennis and golf at Brookside Park, but challenged mainly by the nighttime softball Owl League. Again he played on a team made up of young black men from northwestern Pasadena, including his cousin Van Wade in center field and Ray Bartlett in left. Their sponsor this year was Pepsi-Cola, which provided uniforms and some equipment.

  Typical of his brilliance was a game against Jones Barber Shop, which ended in a tie “mainly because the barbers were unable to stop Jackie Robinson.” Playing shortstop, Jack “made two singles for his team’s only hits, stole five bases and scored his club’s two runs. Jack also sparkled in the field by engineering a brilliant double play.” Again and again, Jack was the difference between victory and defeat. He and his team began to attract crowds never before seen at softball games at night in Brookside Park; in early August, five thousand fans turned out for a league game involving the Pepsi-Cola team. On August 17, when Pepsi-Cola played its last regular game of the season, with Ray Bartlett the star that night, the team accorded Jack the honor of pitching the last inning. He retired the side in order. Pepsi-Cola then rolled through the playoffs to take the title.

  The fall brought a return to PJC and to football, and a magnificent season for the Bulldog team and Robinson in particular. Santa Ana arrived boasting a twenty-two-game winning streak; it left town with its streak snapped in a game that saw Robinson “directly responsible for each and every Pasadena touchdown.” Against Ventura, Jack gave “another scintillating exhibition of broken field running” when he took a lateral at the 40-yard line, “streaked down the north sidelines until he was trapped on the 10, where he suddenly cut diagonally across the field to score.” After five games, the Bulldogs were undefeated. Although Jack had missed one game with an injury, his 61 points scored was thought to be the second highest by any player in the country that fall. In the Rose Bowl, an assembly of some thirty-eight thousand saw Pasadena smother Los Angeles. One run by Robinson was unforgettable; “after squirming out of the arms of four would-be tacklers, the Negro sensation went down the south sidelines to a touchdown.”