Early in August, with no new job in sight, Jack arrived in Chicago for three weeks of football practice before playing in the nationally renowned annual charity game sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. The contest pitted an all-star college team against the Chicago Bears, the reigning champions of the National Football League. Although Jack had received more than seven hundred thousand votes in a Tribune poll to secure one of the sixty-six places on the college squad, some people undoubtedly questioned his right to be on a team with stars such as Tom Harmon of the University of Michigan, who had won the Heisman, Maxwell, and Walter Camp trophies to capture the finest collegiate honors. However, as one reporter noted, “it took one scrimmage to establish the Negro boy’s rightful place among the All-Stars.” Pictured as “a soft-spoken, dark-skinned kid with a flash of illuminating white teeth,” the versatile Jackie Robinson was “the Jim Thorpe of his race.” Jack enjoyed both the three-week camp, with all expenses paid, and the game itself, which took place on the night of August 28 before a crowd of more than ninety-eight thousand fans at venerable Soldier Field. For three quarters, the collegians gallantly battled the Bears, before three touchdowns in the last quarter sealed Chicago’s victory. From Jack’s point of view, the highlight undoubtedly came when he caught a 36-yard pass from Charley O’Rourke of Boston College for a touchdown. “The only time we worried,” a Chicago defensive end said, “was when that guy Robinson was on the field.”
From Chicago, Tom Harmon and other stars moved to begin their lucrative NFL careers; Robinson headed home. The following month, September, when he made his professional football debut, it was a one-shot deal in a setting far inferior to the NFL. Before a crowd of about ten thousand at Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles, Jack started for the racially mixed but mainly white Los Angeles Bulldogs against a similar team, the Hollywood Bears, which included his old Bruins teammate Kenny Washington. Jack’s debut was not a success. In the second quarter, he pulled up lame; not for the last time, the right ankle he had injured in his first PJC football season in 1937 let him down. He watched the rest of the game from the sidelines. A week later, however, he accepted an offer to join the Honolulu Bears (formerly the Honolulu Polar Bears) in the semiprofessional Hawaii Senior Football League. Along with Ray Bartlett, Jack was hired by F. J. “Brick” Brickner, the Bears’ team director and a former California college player himself. Brickner offered Robinson tough terms: $150 as an advance payment against his salary, a payment of $100 for each game he played, and the promise of a bonus if the Bears won the league championship (as they had done the previous year). The deal also included a construction job near Pearl Harbor. “The construction job was a very important part of the package,” Bartlett recalled. “We could use the extra money, because we were both trying to help our mothers. But because the construction job involved defense, it also meant we wouldn’t be drafted—at least, not yet.”
Sailing on the Matsonia with Bartlett, Jack arrived in Hawaii a celebrity. His full-length picture adorned a page of the Honolulu Advertiser, where a banner heralded the arrival of the “Century Express,” Jackie Robinson. An advertisement urged football fans to come and “See the Sensational All-American Half-Back Jackie Robinson.” Soon Jack was installed with Ray Bartlett in a duplex apartment in the Kaimukai district, near St. Louis College. They reported to their construction job by day and then to the practice field at night, when the regular games would be played because of the Hawaiian heat. According to Bartlett, Jack did not make a good laborer. Their jobs were with an outfit called Hawaiian Constructors, under a foreman who had attended college in Berkeley. “When he found out that Jack and I were from UCLA,” Bartlett recalled, “we were pretty much in. But Jack didn’t like to work. I’ll never forget the scene. He’d pick up one board, maybe eight or ten feet long, about six inches wide—not heavy—and put it on his shoulder, and carry it over to the carpenter. Finally the foreman said, ‘Jack, in the future, I want you to pick up two boards at a time, okay?’ Jack didn’t last long on the job. Either he quit or was fired.”
He was more of a hit playing football. Immediately he boosted his local reputation, and the sale of tickets, with a brilliant performance in an exhibition-game victory over a seasoned team from the 35th Infantry of the U.S. Army. But his success had one adverse effect on the Bears: their top running back of the previous year, Charles “Babe” Webb, formerly of New Mexico State University, allegedly stormed off the club after being passed over. Webb’s rebellion proved to be only a token of the club’s lack of discipline, which showed at once when the six-game league season started. A record crowd of twenty thousand paid to see the first game, but the Bears lost badly to the veteran Healani Maroons. “Robinson, almost entirely on his own, reeled off some brilliant runs,” one newspaper reported, “but faltered in his passing, many of his attempts being intercepted.” In other games, Jack was electrifying at times, then injured his right ankle once again. Playing hurt, he performed poorly. By early December, the luster was gone from the league. On December 3, fewer than six hundred persons paid to see the Bears lose.
Unhappy with his season and homesick, Jack hurried to leave Hawaii. On December 5, bidding goodbye to Ray Bartlett and Brick Brickner, he boarded the Lurline for passage back to California. On December 7, he and some other men were playing poker when they noticed the ship’s crew painting the windows black. Soon the captain ordered everyone on deck and broke the news that Japanese airplanes had attacked Pearl Harbor, north of Honolulu, with massive destruction of American lives and ships. The United States and Japan were now at war. To thwart any lurking Japanese submarines, the Lurline would travel home stealthily, with lights out at night, slipping in and out of regular sea lanes. Jack watched and waited anxiously until the California coast came into sight.
Back in Los Angeles, he quickly found a job with Lockheed Aircraft in nearby Burbank. Normally the aircraft industry was hostile to blacks, but the suddenly vital need for military equipment and supplies following Pearl Harbor had cracked the racial walls. The previous June, responding to pressure from black leaders such as the labor organizer A. Philip Randolph and Walter White of the NAACP, as well as to the threat of a massive civil rights march on Washington, D.C., President Roosevelt had reluctantly signed Executive Order 8802, which sought, through the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), to end “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” Most white employers still evaded the order, especially if it meant putting blacks and whites together in intimate working conditions. But after Pearl Harbor, more blacks were hired than ever before. Jack found work as a truck driver, for which he earned $100 a month.
Once again he was living on Pepper Street, but able now to contribute to his share of the expenses, which was important to him. Too many people, he believed, still depended on Mallie Robinson. Willa Mae had just married, but she and her husband, Lewis Walker, a laborer; her brother Edgar; Frank’s widow, Maxine, and their children; and Mack and his wife and children lived in one or another of the two houses Mallie owned on Pepper Street and looked to her for help. “If Jack and his mother had any consistent conflict,” according to Rachel Robinson, “it was about the number of people she took in out of the kindness of her heart, including those he thought were simply exploiting her.” Jack hated to see how some of her grandchildren conducted themselves at Mallie’s house on Pepper Street, which he believed should have been her sanctuary. Instead, they were “running in and out and raiding her refrigerator and taking her spare change and things like that, and Jack was furious.” Being able to give his mother money instead of taking from her was a most important milestone in his life.
He continued to see much of Rachel, who was now a sophomore at UCLA. From Atascadero and Hawaii, Jack had sent her a shallow but persistent stream of brief letters, mainly to let her know that she was often on his mind. Without the prospect of a good job, he could hardly do more. Besides, Rachel had her own plans, which
centered on staying in school until 1945, when she expected to earn her B.Sc. in nursing from the University of California and qualify as a registered nurse. She would not give up college for love. “I wasn’t thinking necessarily about a career or graduate school or anything like that,” she would say. “It was just that I had a sense of boundaries and goals, of tasks that had to be finished. I had seen too many women, good students, fall into marriages after a year or two. I couldn’t be like that.” A dropout himself, Jack fully supported her desire to graduate; he liked the fact that she excelled at school. He was also content that their relationship remained chaste. While he was at Atascadero, she had made no attempt to visit him. “That was out,” she recalled. “I never went anywhere to see Jack, although he would come to see me. Visiting him just wasn’t done. I wouldn’t have thought it proper, and he wouldn’t have thought it proper, either. We had no conflict there. In those days, Jack was at least as much into propriety as I was.”
Bringing them closer that year, if tragically, was the death on March 6, 1941, of Charles Raymond Isum. Although her father had come close to dying several times, his passing devastated Rachel; the intensity of her mourning amazed Jack. “Rae’s deep grief had a profound effect on me,” he wrote later. “In this time of sorrow we found each other and I knew then that our relationship was to be one of the most important things in my life no matter what happened to me.” Ray Isum’s death gave Jack an opportunity he might not have had otherwise. “My father’s death,” Rachel saw eventually, “gave Jack an opening where he could at last be the man, the main man, in a family of his own. On Pepper Street, he had been fatherless, the last child, loved from a distance, almost on the periphery. With the Isums, it was different. My mother adored him. My younger brother was crazy about him. I loved him. Jack could step right into the center of us all and take possession of his own family—at least in his mind. I think it had a profound appeal for him.”
At some point, more than a little awkwardly, Jack sent her a gift to signify his commitment to her, short of a formal engagement. Into an envelope, without much of an explanatory note, he stuffed a heavy charm bracelet made up of miniature pieces of sports equipment—footballs, basketballs, and the like—that he and other varsity athletes received at the end of the season, and sent it through the regular mail. “It’s a wonder it ever reached me,” Rachel said; “when I got the envelope, the charms had broken through the corners. It could easily have been lost, or stolen. Still, I was thrilled to receive it—it was just the sign of commitment and love I wanted at the time. I wore it proudly.” She was wearing it when Jack returned home in December 1941.
Hovering now over their relationship, and Jack’s life, was the military draft. Before Pearl Harbor, Jack had not been eager to enlist. Registering at Longfellow Elementary School in Pasadena, he had struggled with the local board over his hope for an exemption. Throughout the South, ironically, draft boards worked hard to keep blacks out of the services, in the name of segregation; in Pasadena, the draft board often seemed too eager to take blacks and spare whites. “Like all men in those days I was willing to do my part,” Jack later declared; but before Pearl Harbor he had at least three reasons for wanting to stay out of the Army. First, eager to have his mother stop working, he had put himself down as her sole means of support. Second, he doubted that his bad ankle could withstand the rigors of infantry training, much less combat. Last of all, his patriotism was sorely tried by the humiliations facing blacks in the military.
Not surprisingly, after Pearl Harbor the draft board rejected his application for exemption out of hand. On March 23, 1942, his “Order to Report for Induction” was issued by the President of the United States. The order arrived almost on the day that Robinson, along with another black player, Nate Moreland, a pitcher, was teased and tantalized by an opportunity to work out in Brookside Park with the Chicago White Sox, in town once again for spring training. Pressed by a reporter, the White Sox manager, Jimmy Dykes, solidly endorsed the idea of racially integrated baseball. “Personally,” he declared, “I would welcome Negro players on the Sox, and I believe every one of the other fifteen big league managers would do likewise. As for the players, they’d all get along too.” Robinson, he said, was easily worth fifty thousand dollars to any major-league club. But on April 3, as ordered, Jack presented himself at the National Guard Armory in Pasadena with the specified three days’ worth of clothing. From there, he was taken to the induction station at Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, near Los Angeles. After a doctor declared him in excellent health, he was given his first set of vaccinations and dispatched for thirteen weeks of basic training at Fort Riley, Kansas.
Two or three years before, Fort Riley had been a relatively sleepy Army reservation of some thirty-five hundred souls, known mostly for its fabled role as a cavalry post defending the wagon trains of white adventurers and settlers heading west on the Santa Fe Trail; the monument to the Battle of Wounded Knee, in which many Indians were slaughtered, stood on its grounds. Fort Riley had also functioned as the only cavalry school maintained by the Army; it was home, too, to the only all-black cavalry regiment in the military. Now, in 1942, it had become a major staging area and training ground for U.S. infantry divisions heading overseas.
For black recruits entering the armed forces in 1942, the first enemy was probably Jim Crow. Increasingly, black Americans saw two wars taking place. One conflict was with the Axis powers; the other was being fought out at home and overseas with white American notions of racial supremacy. In 1939, fewer than four thousand blacks served in the Army, and most were in service occupations; only five blacks, including three chaplains, were regular officers. In the Army Reserve, Jim Crow rules called for white officers to lead black men in their segregated outfits, no matter how distasteful whites found the job or how bitterly some blacks resented them. In 1940 the secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, deriding the record of blacks in World War I, insisted on segregation as a permanent feature of Army life; an official memorandum argued that segregation “has been proven satisfactory over a long period of years and to make changes would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparations for national defense.” Another memorandum insisted: “There is a consensus that colored units are inferior to the performance of white troops, except for service duties.”
Outside the Army, the record was even worse. After World War I, when ten thousand blacks served in its ranks, the Navy first barred blacks altogether, then accepted them only as mess attendants, to wait on whites. In its grand history dating back to the American Revolution, the all-volunteer Marines had never accepted a black into its ranks. The Army Air Force barred blacks until 1939, when it herded them into segregated units for training. In a final humiliation, the Red Cross bowed to military pressure by refusing blood plasma prepared from the blood of blacks “on the score that white men in the service would refuse blood plasma if they knew it came from Negro veins.” The irony of the fact that the major scientist behind the development of blood banks, Dr. Charles Drew of Howard University Medical School, was himself an African-American was lost on the Red Cross.
And yet 1942, when Jack entered the Army, also marked a turning point in race relations in the military. The number of African-Americans in the Army soared. The Navy and Coast Guard began accepting blacks for general service, albeit hemmed in by often humiliating restrictions, and the Marine Corps ended its ban on African-Americans with the formation of segregated units. At Fort Riley, caught between Jim Crow ways and the first glimmerings of change, Jack, like countless other black men, accepted the evil of segregation and buckled down to basic training.
Quickly he separated himself from the pack. On the gunnery range, he scored 196 with an M-1 rifle and was designated an “expert” marksman. His character was also rated as “excellent.” With his basic training accomplished near mid-July, Jack’s crisp intelligence, his steely self-discipline despite his flaring temper, his excellent record in sports, and his four years of colleg
e should have made him a prime candidate for Officer Candidate School (OCS). But when he applied for OCS, he was summarily refused, without explanation. “The men in our unit had passed all the tests for OCS,” he recalled. “But we were not allowed to start school; we were kept sitting around waiting for at least three months, and we could get no answers to our questions about the delay.” Instead, while many whites with less aptitude and education moved toward their commissions, he was assigned to help take care of horses in the stables at Fort Riley. His most complex challenge was learning to keep the horses’ heads still during their vaccinations. Secretary of War Stimson himself had stated the Army’s core reason for denying almost all blacks a chance to be officers: “Leadership is not imbedded in the negro race yet and to try to make commissioned officers to lead men into battle—colored men—is only to work a disaster to both.”
Jim Crow was in charge even on the playing field. When Jack went out for the baseball team, he was stopped. Apologetically, a white player mumbled to him that the officer in charge had laid down the law: “I’ll break up the team before I’ll have a nigger on it.” Even games between all-black and all-white teams were discouraged. But Jack’s athletic fame could not be ignored completely; two years later, a book on racism in the armed forces would report that “Negro athletes such as Joe Louis, the prizefighter, and Jack Robinson … are today greatly admired in the army.” Fortunately for him, Robinson and Louis found themselves thrown together by fate that year, 1942, at Fort Riley, where Louis also went through basic training. Becoming firm friends, the two athletes played golf and went out riding together regularly; Robinson also joined Louis in some of his special training sessions as a boxer. Louis’s attentions flattered Robinson. Louis was then at the peak of his national fame, which had soared with his first-round victory in 1938 over Max Schmeling of Germany, in a match widely seen as a showdown between democracy and fascism. In the days after Pearl Harbor, Louis’s popularity reached new heights when he announced that proceeds of a coming title fight would go to the Navy Relief Society; then, the next month, he voluntarily joined the Army. “We gon do our part,” he assured an American public still shattered by the disaster of Pearl Harbor, “and we will win, because we are on God’s side.”
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