Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  Nevertheless, Jack delivered an ultimatum: leave the Nurse Cadet Corps or end their engagement. To his astonishment, Rachel chose the latter. At Fort Riley one day, he opened a tightly wrapped, carefully insured package from Rachel and found his ring and bracelet nestled inside. His shock hardened into pride; their relationship was over: “Stubbornly I vowed to forget her.” (Perhaps Jack operated with a double standard, or he felt himself freed by his breakup with Rachel to seek sex with other women, or he had a momentary lapse of loyalty. On February 29, he was treated at a Fort Riley dispensary for a case of “ ‘New’ Gonorrhoea, Acute.”)

  A few weeks later, on April 13, he and more than a dozen other black officers at Fort Riley received the news they had been waiting for: they were to proceed immediately to Camp Hood, Texas, and report there to the headquarters of the 761st Tank Battalion, which was scheduled to go overseas and into combat later in the year. Jack and his fellow officers reached Camp Hood with some foreboding. If Southern camps had a poor reputation among black soldiers, among the more notorious was Camp Hood, a massive new military installation carved out of about 160,000 acres of lonesome farmland in the Texas heartland in direct response to the war. The success of the German blitzkrieg, spearheaded by Panzer tank divisions, had spurred the development of U.S. antitank technology and antitank forces, which needed a vast area of land to explore the complex lessons of blitzkrieg. A month after Pearl Harbor, the Army announced that its new Tank Destroyer Technical and Firing Center would be located in central Texas. Nine months later, Camp Hood was activated; by 1944, when Robinson and his friends arrived, it was easily the largest military facility in the United States.

  To the military, Camp Hood was a triumph that helped dispel the myth of Panzer invincibility. The proud Tank Destroyer insignia featured a black panther crushing a tank between its jaws, encircled by the fighting motto “Seek, Strike, and Destroy.” To the sixty thousand servicemen stationed there in 1944, Camp Hood was often a horror. The hot land crawled with rattlesnakes, tarantulas, black widow spiders, and scorpions, and the humid air buzzed with mosquitoes and other sniping insects. In addition, black soldiers and civilians had to deal with raw aspects of Jim Crow (the Army had named the camp after a Confederate hero, General John Bell Hood, a West Pointer who had commanded a brigade of Texans against the Union). Black soldiers, quartered in the least desirable part of the camp, in makeshift housing, lived segregated lives at every turn, with a separate USO and a separate officers’ club; venturing off the base, they faced a hostile, narrow-minded local population backed by stringent Jim Crow state laws and customs. “Segregation there was so complete,” a black officer said, “I even saw outhouses marked White, Colored, and Mexican; this was on federal property.”

  Jack quickly found out that his lieutenant’s bars meant little to whites at Camp Hood. A soldier recalled: “One day Jackie was on his way to town when he realized he didn’t have enough money. He stopped at the white officers’ club to get a check cashed and they barred him at the door; he wasn’t allowed across the threshold. Jackie became very bitter about this.” Fortunately, the 761st Tank Battalion, Company B (to which he was not assigned but only attached), was an oasis in this desert of human relations, not least of all because of its leader. Activated in 1942 and now part of the armored forces in training at Camp Hood, the 761st was commanded by a white fellow Californian, Lieutenant Colonel Paul L. Bates, a thirty-four-year-old former star football player and graduate in economics at Western Maryland College. Among the black men under him, Bates had a reputation as a white man who appreciated their troubles but who was also determined to mold them into a powerful fighting force. He set high standards, from personal hygiene and dress to battlefield efficiency. “Our boots were shined like you couldn’t imagine,” Bates remembered; “our men would go out of their way to salute officers and to look them straight in the eye.” He also channeled the racial indignation of his men into a desire to succeed as no black U.S. outfit had succeeded before. Of the battalion’s later military success in Europe, which was substantial, he would say with satisfaction: “I believe they fought against Germans not as Germans so much as against the white man.”

  Jack and the other Fort Riley officers were each assigned to head a platoon. For Robinson, this spelled trouble. At Fort Riley, some officers had trained in mechanized cavalry, but he had been a genuine horse soldier and knew nothing about tanks and tank warfare. The M-4 medium tank (the General Sherman) used by the 761st was a mystery to him. Rather than pull rank and bluff his way through, he decided to confess his ignorance openly and rely on the goodwill of the men under him. He recalled his first meeting with his platoon. “Men,” he recalled saying, “I know nothing about tanks, nothing at all. I’m asking you to help me out in this unusual situation.” A “deep and impressive silence” followed. He turned to a veteran sergeant standing beside him and allowed that the sergeant, not Lieutenant Robinson, was in charge of the platoon. Evidently, Jack’s candor and humility had an energizing effect on the men: “It turned out to be one of the smartest things I ever did.”

  A white fellow lieutenant, David J. Williams, a Yale graduate who later wrote a book about the 761st, captured a graphic snapshot of Robinson as army officer: “He was kind of aloof, very straight, dressed really sharp, didn’t swear much, was religious. He was a really good person, but he was never close to anyone.” Although Robinson was a friend, Williams never really knew him: “He was a very private person.” No doubt, Jack’s toughness and asceticism offended a few men. One veteran would recall him as someone “who tended to pick on people who were smaller than he was or who he felt were less important than he was.” Under oath, however, Colonel Bates would testify that Robinson was held “in very high regard,” especially by the enlisted men but also by Bates himself: “I tried to have him assigned [not simply attached] to the battalion because of his excellent work.”

  Despite Jack’s bad ankle, Bates asked Robinson to consider going overseas with the battalion as morale officer. (On June 9, the War Department had alerted the 761st that it would soon be heading for Europe and combat. The advance party would leave on July 20; the rest of the men were to follow about three weeks later.) Not only had Jack done an outstanding job with his platoon; his leadership in the battalion in sports, especially in organizing baseball and softball teams, had boosted the morale of the men. Clearly Bates’s request pleased Jack. To go overseas, however, he would have to be examined again and sign a waiver releasing the Army from any financial claim or benefit in case of reinjury to his ankle. “I said I’d be willing to do that,” Jack later recalled. On May 25, a thorough hospital examination was requested by the adjutant of the 761st “to determine the physical qualification for overseas service of 2nd Lt. Jack R. Robinson.” But Jack’s status could not be changed without an appearance before an Army Retiring Board. Accordingly, on June 21 he reported to the Army’s McCloskey General Hospital in the nearby town of Temple for an examination to see the “type of duty, if any, that he may be physically qualified to perform.” To doctors there, Jack reported no improvement in his condition. After every baseball game, his ankle became swollen. Every day, at odd times, the ankle joint would lock up; a few kicking motions released it. Although this examination found no swelling or cramping of motion, X-rays revealed “a bony mass distal to the medial malleolus,” as well as “several smaller pieces of tissue of osseous origin anterior to the ankle joint”: in other words, bone chips.

  Five days later, on June 26, the Disposition Board at the hospital declared Robinson still unfit for general duty but “fit for limited military service.” It recommended “that this officer appear before an Army Retiring Board for consideration of reassignment to permanent limited military service.” The board concluded: “This officer is fit for overseas duty.”

  Robinson was now ready to acquiesce to Colonel Bates’s wishes and go overseas with the 761st Battalion. But on July 6, he became entangled in a dispute that threatened to end his military servic
e in disgrace. Around 5:30 p.m. that day, still a patient at McCloskey Hospital in Temple, Jack boarded a city bus that took him to Camp Hood, about an hour or so away. There, he took a camp bus to the colored officers’ club, located on 172nd Street in the camp. He reached the club around 7:30 p.m. About three and a half hours later, or around eleven in the evening, he boarded a Camp Hood bus to begin the return journey to the hospital in Temple. He started to move to the rear when he saw a young woman he knew, Virginia Jones, sitting in the middle of the bus. Virginia Jones, the wife of First Lieutenant Gordon H. Jones Jr. of the 761st Tank Battalion, lived in nearby Belton. Jack sat down beside Mrs. Jones. After going five or six blocks, the driver, a white man named Milton N. Renegar, turned around in his seat and ordered Robinson to move to the back of the bus. Robinson refused. The driver then threatened to make trouble for him when the bus reached the station. Robinson again refused. By this time it had probably occurred to him that the driver believed that Virginia Jones was white; she was not.

  On the ride from Temple to the camp, Robinson had obeyed Texas law requiring Jim Crow seating on the bus. But he also knew that the Army now forbade segregation on its military bases. The previous month, after the killing of a black soldier by a white bus driver in Durham, North Carolina (a civilian jury soon acquitted the driver), the Army had proclaimed its new policy. Robinson also knew about the widely publicized refusals by Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson to obey Jim Crow rules at a bus depot in Alabama.

  Exchanges between Robinson and Renegar grew more heated. When the bus reached the crowded central bus station at the camp, another passenger, Mrs. Elizabeth Poitevint, who worked in the camp kitchen, let Robinson know that she herself intended to press charges against him. Her intervention, as a white woman, brought the incident close to a flash point. According to Robinson’s statement, which was taken down by a white stenographer he considered hostile to him, “I said that’s all right, too, I don’t care if she prefers charges against me. The bus driver asked me for my identification card. I refused to give it to him. He then went to the Dispatcher and told him something. What he told him I don’t know. He then comes back and tells the people that this nigger is making trouble. I told the driver to stop fuckin with me, so he gets the rest of the men around there and starts blowing his top and someone calls the MP’s.”

  Renegar, the driver, had asked the dispatcher, a man named Bevlia “Pinky” Younger, to call the military police, and Younger had promptly done so. The first MP to arrive was Corporal George A. Elwood. The police escorted Robinson to the military police guard room, where Robinson encountered a sergeant and also a private, Ben W. Mucklerath, he would accuse of calling him a nigger. The police then summoned the officer of the day, Captain Peelor Wigginton, who was also the camp laundry officer. Turning first to Mucklerath, Wigginton set out to question him about the incident. When Robinson interrupted the private to dispute what he was saying, Wigginton ordered Robinson outside.

  Next to arrive on the scene was an assistant provost marshal, Captain Gerald M. Bear, who was also commander of the military police. According to Robinson, he was following Bear into the guard room when Bear rudely turned on him: “Nobody comes into the room until I tell him.” Since Robinson could see Mucklerath in the room, he protested at being kept out while the white private was allowed in. Bear repeated his order, and Robinson left the guard room.

  In his own statement, Bear declared that when he arrived, Robinson was inside the guard room. He then asked Robinson to step outside the guard room and into the receiving room while he, Bear, heard a report from Captain Wigginton. However, instead of obeying, “Lt. Robinson kept continually interrupting Captain Wigginton and myself and kept coming to the Guard Room door-gate. I cautioned and requested Lt. Robinson on several occasions to remain at ease and remain in the receiving room.” Furthermore, “in an effort to try to be facetious, Lt. Robinson bowed with several sloppy salutes, repeating several times, ‘OK, sir, OK, sir,’ on each occasion.” According to Bear, he ordered Robinson “to remain in the receiving room and be seated on a chair, on the far side of the receiving room. Later on I found Lt. Robinson on the outside of the building.… Lt. Robinson’s attitude in general was disrespectful and impertinent to his superior officers, and very unbecoming to an officer in the presence of enlisted men.”

  Robinson would soon vehemently dispute this version of the episode. To him, Bear on arriving seemed “not polite at all” and “very uncivil toward me.” The heart of the matter for Robinson was that Bear “did not seem to recognize me as an officer at all. But I did consider myself an officer and felt I should be addressed as one.”

  After taking statements from all the whites involved, Bear at last allowed Robinson to speak. Jack could not help noticing that he was made to stand while “they asked that private [Mucklerath] to sit down.” For the statement, Bear employed a stenographer, a white woman named Wilson. The presence of yet another white woman, as well as Robinson’s refusal to efface himself before her, added to the tension. Robinson remembered her asking him sharp and, to him, totally inappropriate questions as a civilian: “Don’t you know you have no right sitting up there in the white part of the bus?” Robinson would also testify that after he objected to a part of her transcript, she snapped, “ ‘If you had completed your statement it would have made sense’ and I told her that if she had put down Captain Bear’s question, it would have made sense; and she then picked up her purse and said, ‘I don’t have to make excuses to him’ and she went out, and Captain Bear went outside to her and talked awhile.” (Bear would deny under oath that there had been any friction whatsoever between Wilson and Robinson.)

  At some point, against Jack’s wishes, Bear arranged to have military police drive the black lieutenant back to the hospital in Temple. Robinson protested that he had a pass that was good until eight in the morning and should be free to go where he wanted. Repeatedly he asked if he was under arrest. Bear finally told Robinson that he was under “arrest in quarters,” which meant that he was not being taken into custody but that he would be considered under arrest at the hospital, although without a guard. Robinson was then taken to the hospital in a police pickup truck.

  At the hospital, a white doctor who knew Jack warned him that a report had come in about a drunken black lieutenant trying to start a riot; the doctor advised him to take a blood alcohol test at once. The test proved he had not been drinking. He also informed Colonel Bates about the episode. Bates quickly discovered that Captain Bear intended to bring Robinson up on a court-martial. When Bates refused to endorse the charges, Bear moved to have Robinson transferred to a battalion with a more compliant commander. By this time, his superiors at the camp understood that the Jackie Robinson case could bring trouble for all concerned. On July 17, in a telephone call to another colonel, Walter D. Buie, chief of staff of the XXIII Corps, Colonel E. A. Kimball, commander of the 5th Armored Group, advised: “This is a very serious case, and it is full of dynamite. It requires very delicate handling.… This bus situation here is not at all good, and I am afraid that any officer in charge of troops at this Post might be prejudiced.” Nevertheless, on July 24, Robinson was transferred to the 758th Tank Battalion, where the commander signed orders to prosecute him.

  Also on July 24, military police placed Robinson under arrest. On that day, he wrote to the NAACP in New York “seeking your help and advice. I feel I am being unfairly punished because I wouldn’t be pushed around by the driver of the bus.… I am looking for a civilian lawyer to handle my case because I know he will be able to force the truth with a little technique.” He had refused to move “because I recalled a letter from Washington” barring segregation on Army posts; the statements against him were “a pretty good bunch of lies.” (The NAACP did not reply until the day after the trial: “We will be unable to furnish you with an attorney in the event that you are court martialled.” However, if he was convicted, the association would write on his behalf to the Adjutant General in Washington.) Other
messages urged the NAACP to intervene; an anonymous writer warned that “this incident is only one of many which have seen Negro officers and enlisted men intimidated and mistreated in Camp Hood, and the surrounding towns.” Someone in Los Angeles contacted both U.S. senators from California, Sheridan Downey and Hiram W. Johnson, who then wrote to Secretary of War Stimson inquiring into the matter. Several black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier, also spread the story.