Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Rachel, more winsome now than shy, knew who Jack Robinson was; in high school, she had seen him play football. She had thought him conceited then, because he stood in the backfield with his hands on his hips, all too nonchalant in awaiting the violence at hand; then she found out that this was only a style and had little to do with his character. She never forgot their first meeting, and Ray Bartlett introducing her to Jack. “I remember the awkwardness of the moment. What I liked about Jack was his smile, and a kind of confident air he had about him, without being cocky in person.” She also noticed then that Robinson wore white shirts almost exclusively. A snow-white shirt against a sable skin: “I thought to myself, Now why would he do that? Why would anybody that dark wear a white shirt? It’s terrible!” But Jack seemed not to care. “He wore his color with such dignity and pride and confidence that after a little while I didn’t even think about it. He wouldn’t let me. He was never, ever, ashamed of his color.”

  Soon Jack and Rachel were seeing each other every day. “I was the aggressor, no doubt about it,” Rachel confessed. “I would sit in my car and wait for him to drive into the parking lot. He was always running late, but I would wait. I would find a dozen excuses for walking through Kerckhoff Hall to see if he was pushing his mop.” Then they would sit and talk and learn about one another. The differences were clear. “Intense” about her studies and accustomed to excellence, Rachel would have tried for medical school (following a cousin in Texas, who was herself a doctor) if Zellee had not counseled a career in nursing, the easier for Rachel to marry and start a family. Now she was enrolled in the five-year Bachelor of Science degree course in nursing at the university. Jack confided to her that he wanted to be a coach, which seemed reasonable enough. To Rachel, he seemed to have no interest in his studies: “I even thought he was being coached by faculty to get through his courses. His mind was very much on athletics. I could see he was intelligent, but I never thought of him as a student at all.”

  Rachel brought Jack home to the house on 36th Place, where he found a detached frame bungalow that her father had bought years before. A devoted gardener, he had planted so many roses, camellias, dahlias, and hydrangea bushes that the house stood out in the neighborhood. Jack immediately won Zellee over; she saw him from the start as a gentle person, a gentleman, serious and religious, as well as handsome. “He was Zellee’s dream guy from the start,” according to Rachel. “She was far more sure about him than I was.” But her father was not smitten with Jack. As with all of Rachel’s boyfriends, “my father was jealous of Jack, tremendously jealous. What was this big star athlete doing with his little daughter, just a freshman? He sulked and rumbled. He took it hard. But my mother never budged, and my mother had the last word in our household.” Jack’s sister, Willa Mae, declared: “Rachel’s father didn’t like Jack because he was too black—and Jack understood that very well.” But Willa Mae never met Rachel’s father, who was known in the community for his race pride. “Jack’s color would not have been an issue for him,” Rachel insisted. In any event, her father’s hostility had little or no effect on the way Jack felt about Rachel.

  In turn, Jack took Rachel home to Pepper Street. She would remember a rocking chair on the porch, crochet doilies on the upholstered furniture, and lots of family photographs on the walls. The house was simply furnished but clean and neat. The Robinsons were all friendly. Edgar was sweet, but he was also strange, with his averted glances and halting speech. Mack’s infant son, Phillip, was sadly retarded. What was wrong here? On the other hand, she liked Mack and Willa Mae, who seemed perfectly fine. Most important of all, Jack’s mother, Mallie, was a woman one had to respect and like. “Mallie was very gracious and kind to me,” Rachel would say, “and right from the beginning I could tell that there was no competition or conflict with her. She thought of me the way my mother thought of Jack: Here’s a girl in the church, she doesn’t drink or smoke, a good student, going into nursing, no other boyfriends. Everything that she would have wanted for Jack—that was me. And I could relate to her very well, in her own struggle, what she had gone through just to be there.”

  For their first date, Jack sealed his romance with Rachel in October when he invited her, not Bessie Renfro, to the homecoming dance on November 2 at the premier hotel in Los Angeles, the Biltmore. Nervous and excited, Rachel bought a stunning black dress and a chic matching black hat with fox trim; escorted by Jack in his one suit, she set out for the Biltmore wrapped in the black broadtail fur coat that was her grandmother’s pride. Both because they were black and because of Jack’s fame, they found themselves the focus of some attention; but they also felt a tension that had everything to do with their awareness of each other’s bodies, still unknown. “The evening was fun but never completely comfortable,” Rachel said. “It was stilted. Jack was a little awkward, I was confused.” She was a very good dancer; less adept, he was unwilling to venture beyond a two-step even for a waltz. Still, they tried to relax to the orchestral strains of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Star Dust” and Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and all the other haunting tunes that young people danced to in the peaceful autumn of 1940 in America.

  When Jack and Rachel returned to her home, he said goodbye quickly. “I was excited and happy and full of anticipation, wondering on the ride home whether he would kiss me,” she remembered. “I wanted him to; I really wanted him to kiss me. He pecked me on the cheek. That was all. I was disappointed.” Their deepening feeling for one another was shot through with a bracing sense of propriety. For both, a sexual relationship at this point was out of the question. Scrupulous and shrewd, Rachel would never have consented; the almost equally self-disciplined Jack had no desire to press hard, if he pressed at all. Undoubtedly he was already thinking of her as possibly his future wife, and accordingly had placed her on a pedestal, the better to worship her. So much was uncertain about their lives, even as they grew more certain of their love for one another. Jack and Rachel would know one another, and be committed to one another, for more than five years before they finally consummated their romance, and they would do so only within a week or so of their wedding day.

  AT UCLA, THE 1940 football season opened on a note of high expectation, with Robinson at its center. His “colossalness,” the Bruin enthused, “is almost universal knowledge among football fans all over the country”; he was “beyond doubt the Coast’s No. 1 candidate for all-American honors.” His sensational running behind the new UCLA line would make the Bruins “the greatest drawing card in the nation.”

  Nevertheless, the season turned out to be a disaster for the Bruins even as Jack shone as an individual. In the opener against Southern Methodist University, UCLA suffered a narrow loss; its sole touchdown came when Robinson gathered in a punt on his own 13-yard line, raced straight ahead, swerved dramatically left, “and went all the way by himself as the Mustangs stood petrified.” The only Bruin win (against nine losses) came in mid-November against Washington State in “a wild and woolly, free-scoring orgy” in which Robinson turned in “one of the most amazing performances ever witnessed in the Coliseum.” Passing for one touchdown, he ran 60 dazzling yards for another, then sealed the victory with a 75-yard ramble to score in the final minutes.

  For the season, Jack finished second in the conference in total offense. His running average dropped from the heights of the previous year to only 3.64 yards per carry, but he averaged 21 yards on his punt returns, when he was most free to improvise, to set a national record. He was also the third leading passer in California football. However, with the Associated Press calling UCLA the biggest disappointment of the season, he earned only honorable mention as an all-American.

  At this point, with his football eligibility used up, Robinson was surely tempted to walk away from UCLA. As a student, he was now in sharp decline. He would earn an A, a C, and a D in three courses in physical education. He would earn a C in geology but end with a D in history and an E in military science. He was starting to fall behind.

  One
reason for him to stay was Rachel’s presence, although they had gone on no dates after the event at the Biltmore. They saw each other on campus, where they were now recognized as a pair, or Jack visited Rachel at her home. Jack’s reluctance to arrange dates bothered Rachel a little, but she adjusted to his quirks of personality, his mixture of nice manners and mannish roughness, his silences, his passionate but also self-disciplined way of being. “A lot of it,” she said, “had to do with his sense of himself as an athlete, the idea that he couldn’t abuse his body. One thing he was always harping on: he had to be home and asleep by midnight. His body demanded it, his training as an athlete demanded it. He would never lose that sense of himself as in training, or having to be in training even if he also didn’t like to exercise. That idea definitely got in the way of a lot of fun!”

  He decided to sign on for another basketball season with Coach Wilbur Johns, who believed that were it not for his devotion to football, Robinson might have become “the greatest of all basketball players. His timing was perfect. His rhythm was unmatched. He had the valuable faculty of being able to relax at the proper time.” Above all, Jack “always placed the welfare of his team above his chance for greater stardom.” His right hand injured, Jack for a while shot the ball with his left but still managed to be a scoring threat. Nevertheless, the Bruins struggled in almost every game. Jack also had to contend with constant rough play. Once again vying for the individual scoring title, he was an obvious target; in one game at Berkeley, the Bruin complained, he was “viciously treated.” At home, however, he was a hero. Early in March, when Coach Johns took him out of the last game of the “long, weary basketball season,” Robinson received a thunderous ovation that acknowledged his heroic efforts on behalf of the Bruins over the preceding two years.

  Once again, with 133 points, Robinson won the individual league scoring title. Once again, however, top honors eluded him. “Robinson Fails to Make All-League Cage Team,” the Bruin protested; “Prejudice ‘Rumored’ to Have Played Major Role in Selection.” Placing every Stanford starter on the all-conference first team, most of the coaches relegated Robinson to the second. (But Nibs Price of California, who had lauded him the previous year, now failed to vote for Jack on the first, second, or third team. In vain, Bruin sports editor Hank Shatford railed against this “flagrant bit of prejudice” that “makes our blood boil.… It’s more than a miscarriage of justice.”)

  Now, although he was still eligible to compete in baseball and the broad jump, Jack was ready to leave UCLA. Where he would find work was a good question. His almost matchless sports record counted little. On February 28, as the basketball season drew to a close, Shatford had reported that Robinson had received job offers from the semipro Broadway Clowns, a basketball team, and from a Mexican baseball club. Unfortunately, the offers were poor; professional sports seemed to be out of the question. No blacks, not even all-American Kenny Washington, played now in the National Football League. (Woody Strode had just made his debut as a professional wrestler.) Also all-white were the National Basketball League and other forerunners of the NBA. Major-league baseball and its farm systems were forbidden.

  But despite arguments against leaving UCLA by most of his coaches and by Rachel, Mallie, and Karl Downs, Jack was determined to go. “I was aghast,” Rachel recalled. “I tried to talk him out of it. He was so close to finishing. He put it all on Mallie, that he wanted to help her financially, because she was still working very hard. But I think he would have left in any case. He had had enough.”

  Near noon on March 3, Jack strolled into the registrar’s office. There, he made arrangements that would allow him to leave the university with an “honorable dismissal,” instead of dropping out casually, without an official blessing. By the end of the day, he was gone.

  In the spring, at the annual Bruin football banquet, he was absent, working in a small town up the California coast, when the UCLA Alumni Association gave him its coveted yearly award for outstanding service to the university. Jack sent what an official called a “very fine letter” of thanks, which elicited “a great burst of applause” when it was read to the assembled guests. “I was indeed serious about the friends and other things I mentioned in the letter,” Jack later assured the official in another letter. “It really is something to know you have friends like the ones I made while attending UCLA. I certainly hope that Friendship continues on and on.”

  Jack’s words were stiff and artless, but sincere. So was his hope that some lasting link could be preserved between himself and his two brilliant UCLA years, when roaring crowds shouted his name and he strode the campus in glory. But even as he wrote these letters, his future had begun to seem dim, even dingy, and the memory of his sporting triumphs at the university in Westwood was fading away.

  CHAPTER 5

  Jack in the World at War

  1941–1944

  I am a negro, but not a nigger.

  —Jackie Robinson (1944)

  IN APRIL, ROBINSON REPORTED to the job that had helped him decide, against all advice to the contrary, to leave UCLA. “I had offers to join professional football teams,” he later recalled, but had quickly turned them down. This job paid little and lacked glamour, but it offered to train him for what he was now sure would be his life’s work. “I could see no future in staying at college,” he would write, “no real future in [professional] athletics, and I wanted to do the next best thing—become an athletic director. The thought of working with youngsters in the field of sports excited me.”

  Despite his failure to graduate, Robinson was now a far more mature and polished young man than he had been when he entered UCLA in 1939. The adulation showered on him for his amazing athletic feats had not left him vain and self-indulgent; his core moral values, learned from his mother and reinforced by Karl Downs, among others, remained firmly in place. Despite his quick temper in the face of injustice, especially racial discrimination, he lived on the whole a life of discipline, restraint, and self-denial; he thought of himself and his future in terms of moral and social obligations rather than privilege and entitlement. Jack had hardly taken full advantage of UCLA as a center of learning, but he was much more comfortable now than in the past with the world of ideas and books. Welcomed by his coaches and professors as well as by the student body as a whole, he now had an even more inclusive sense of his country and a brighter confidence in his future as a black citizen—although the maddening contradictions of American democracy were everywhere around him, clouding his sense of possibility.

  On the campus of the California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo, some six hours north of Los Angeles, Robinson signed on as an employee of the National Youth Administration to work at its training camp a few miles away, at Atascadero. Founded by Presidential order as a Depression measure in 1935, the NYA sought to provide jobs, job training, and relief for young people between sixteen and twenty-five years of age. The Atascadero facility took students up to the age of eighteen, and trained about one hundred at a time. Jack was hired as an assistant athletic director, at $150 per month, to help organize sports activities for these trainees; his job was to help make sure, as he put it the following year, “that their free time was well spent.”

  Because he was black, his appointment was news. An NYA official offered solemnly that the agency was “fortunate, indeed, to secure the services of this outstanding athlete.” This was mainly a preemptive response to people who would question the wisdom and propriety of putting a black man in a position over whites, even white teenagers.

  Buckling down to the job, and drawing on his rich experience as an athlete, he quickly set up a number of regular events and programs, including calisthenics, for the youngsters; he also played shortstop on the camp’s baseball team. But learning to supervise and interact with the youths, who came from various ethnic groups and creeds but were almost all poor and from broken homes, was the real challenge. At first, he was not very happy; he could say of his job only that it was “something that I
have wanted to do but it is not quite what I would like.” The sometime delinquent was now a figure of authority, and had to learn to face youngsters from that unaccustomed position. In their young lives, he wrote with sympathy, many of the youths had had it “pretty tough,” and some “don’t know anything about anything”; but while “most of them are really swell guys,” he also faced the fact that “there is that few that you always find in a large group that is bound to cause trouble.”

  His concern for young people and his passion for sports saw him through; “the biggest kid of all come recreation time was yours truly, Jackie Robinson.” The star athlete put on no airs: “I realized that I had been no different than many of these kids, who would make good if given half a chance.” The color of his skin didn’t seem to matter to the white kids, who made up most of the number. Jim Crow reared its head only once. Trying to attend a camp dance at the urging of a friendly fellow employee named Lippman Duckat, who played second base on the camp team, Robinson was politely but firmly turned away by a doorkeeper. Duckat and Robinson left quietly.

  Apart from this incident, Jack “loved and appreciated” his NYA job. Then, around July, the camp began to disband. In the wake of the Nazi conquest of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, and following the Battle of Britain, American entry into the conflict seemed more and more a certainty. The previous September, 1940, the President had signed into law the Selective Service and Training Act, which called for the registration of all men between twenty-one and thirty-five, and the drafting of eight hundred thousand recruits. The NYA was now superfluous. Nominally Jack remained an employee at the work camp until September, but by the end of July he was finished at Atascadero as the Army moved in and took over the NYA buildings.