Although the coming trial worried Jack, it did not intimidate him. Even as his fate hung in the balance, he took up the challenge of supporting another black officer, who had been found guilty of buying tires on the black market. Sure that a white officer in a similar circumstance would have been treated differently, he wrote to Truman Gibson, now civilian aide to the secretary of war, asking him to help the man. Jack’s composure under fire had a great deal to do with his faith in God; he still said his prayers on his knees at night before going to bed, as he would for many years to come. To Rachel, brought up in the church but less devout, Jack was possessed by the deep sense, instilled by his mother, “that God would take care of you. You are a child of God, made in God’s image. Because God is there, nothing can go wrong with you. You can allow yourself to take risks because you just know that the Lord will not allow you to sink so far that you can’t swim. An ordeal like the court-martial was a sign to Jack that God was testing him. And Jack just knew that he would respond well, he would come through, because he was a child of God. His faith in God was not very articulate, but it was real, and it did not allow for much doubt.”
At 1:45 in the afternoon on August 2, the case of The United States v. 2nd Lieutenant Jack R. Robinson, 0-10315861, Cavalry, Company C, 758th Tank Battalion, began. Nine men would hear the case. One was black; another had been a UCLA student. Six votes were needed for conviction.
Robinson’s defense attorney—nominally, at least—was Lieutenant William A. Cline, a thirty-year-old native Texan who had served in North Africa before being assigned to Camp Hood. Listed as assistant defense counsel was First Lieutenant Joseph C. Hutcheson of the 635th Field Artillery Battalion. However, the trial record indicated yet another defense lawyer: “The accused stated he desired to be defended by regularly appointed defense counsel, assisted by 1st Lt. Robert H. Johnson, 679th Tank Destroyer Battalion, as his individual counsel.” Although his role may be lost to history, Lieutenant Johnson, not Cline or Hutcheson, was probably crucial to Robinson’s fate at the trial.
Jack had started out with deep reservations about his appointed counsel. Lieutenant Cline, from the small town of Wharton, Texas, was not comfortable defending a black in such a case, and candidly told Jack so. Robinson “told me the NAACP had offered to provide him with a lawyer,” according to Cline fifty years later. “I told him I thought that was a pretty good idea because I came from just about as far south as you could go.” In addition, Cline had little courtroom experience. “I was a general country lawyer,” he recalled. He and his father, also a lawyer, “had a title business. I didn’t engage in much adversary stuff.”
Not hearing from the NAACP, Robinson returned to Cline. According to Cline, “I never asked him why he changed,” but went on to defend the accused. However, in his autobiography I Never Had It Made, Robinson related that his first lawyer, a Southerner, pleaded prejudice, then yielded to “a young Michigan officer who did a great job on my behalf.” Robinson was probably referring to the work of Lieutenant Johnson; but the trial records do not indicate which part any individual played in his defense in the courtroom. For the record, Cline was his defense counsel. (Fifty years later, interviewed for an article in the National Law Journal, Cline gave no indication that anyone else had helped him defend Robinson.)
Jack faced two charges. The first, a violation of Article of War No. 63, accused him of “behaving with disrespect toward Capt. Gerald M. Bear, CMP, his superior officer.” Robinson had incurred the charge “by contemptuously bowing to him and giving him several sloppy salutes, repeating several times ‘OK Sir,’ ‘OK, Sir,’ or words to that effect, and by acting in an insolent, impertinent and rude manner toward the said Captain Gerald M. Bear.” The second charge was a violation of Article No. 64, in this case “willful disobedience of lawful command of Gerald M. Bear, CMP, his superior.” It alleged that Robinson, “having received a lawful command … to remain in a receiving room and be seated on a chair on the farside of the receiving room, did … willfully disobey the same.”
Three other charges had been prepared, then abandoned. The first accused Robinson of disrespect toward the officer of the day, Captain Wigginton, by saying to him: “Captain, any Private, you or any General calls me a nigger and I’ll break them in two, I don’t know the definition of the word”; and by speaking to Wigginton “in an insolent, impertinent and rude manner.” Why this charge was dropped is not clear. The other two charges involved civilians and perhaps were seen as manifestly ill advised. One charge accused Robinson of using “abusive and vulgar language” toward the bus driver “in the presence of ladies.” He had said, according to the charge, “ ‘I’m not going to move a God damn bit,’ or words to that effect, and ‘I don’t know what the Son-of-a-Bitch wanted to give me all this trouble,’ or words to that effect.” The third charge, also dropped, accused Robinson of telling Elizabeth Poitevint, the white woman who entered the dispute: “ ‘You better quit fuckin with me’ or words to that effect.”
Dropping those charges actually hurt Jack’s defense, to some extent; the defense could no longer link what had happened on the bus to what had gone on with the white soldiers, although a common thread was an utter disrespect for him as an officer and a human being. The defense then decided to try to show that Robinson had not been insubordinate to Captain Bear but rather that Bear had managed the entire matter poorly. The defense could not dwell on the subjective area of Bear’s racism, but it could hammer away at any weakness in his execution of his authority. “The provost marshal [Bear] didn’t know how to handle it,” Cline would recall. “It had developed into a kind of personal matter.”
The cross-examination of Bear (by Cline, Hutcheson, or Johnson) sought to exploit the likelihood that Bear, rudely brushing aside Robinson on arriving at the guard room, had not given him specific instructions about where to wait; that Bear probably had become incensed when Robinson insisted on correcting the transcript of his statement as typed by Bear’s stenographer; that Bear had declined to answer when Robinson had asked repeatedly if he was under arrest; and that Bear’s decision to send Robinson back to the hospital in a police vehicle under guard was unwarranted. Skillful questioning of Bear and other prosecution witnesses brought out inconsistencies about his handling of Robinson that night, and especially about what he told Robinson to do in sending him out of the guard room—except that Robinson was supposed to be “at ease,” which gave Jack’s lawyers latitude in defending his behavior.
Clearly, almost all of the whites involved were genuinely mystified that Robinson disliked being badly treated. The white private, Ben Mucklerath, denied that he had called Robinson a nigger, as Robinson charged; but Corporal Elwood, the first MP on the scene, testified that Mucklerath “came over to the pick-up and asked me if I got that nigger Lieutenant. Right then the Lieutenant said, ‘Look here, you son-of-a-bitch, don’t you call me no nigger.’ ” The bus dispatcher, “Pinky” Younger, who had summoned the military police, asserted that when Corporal Elwood asked him what was going on, “I told him that the trouble was with a nigger Lt. The nigger Lt., hearing the remark, resented being called so.” The bus driver, Milton Renegar, swore that Elizabeth Poitevint had explained aloud: “I don’t mind waiting on them all day, but when I get on the bus at night to go home, I’m not about to ride all mixed up with them.”
One white witness only, Mrs. Ruby Johnson, gave an account of events on the bus almost exactly as Robinson related them. Ironically, she was a friend of Mrs. Poitevint and had been sitting with her on the bus. According to her statement, when the bus became crowded, the driver asked Robinson to move to the back. “The Lt. said, ‘No, I’m going to sit here, I’m not going to move to the back of the bus,’ he said that in a very forceful voice, and [t]hen he told the driver, ‘You had better sit down and drive the bus wherever you are going.’ He told the bus driver that twice, and the bus driver told the Lt. that he would wish he had gone to the back of the bus when they got to the Central Bus Station.” Mrs. Johnson
reported no obscenities spoken by Robinson to anyone, including her friend Mrs. Poitevint. (Mrs. Poitevint herself swore that he had told her, “ ‘You better quit fuckin’ with me.’ He said that three or four times, after we got off the bus, and all that profane and obscene language he used could have been heard by anyone around there, and there was a big crowd there too.”)
At last Robinson himself took the stand, although he was not obliged to do so. Full of suppressed passion and eager to be heard, he had to be cautioned more than once to speak more slowly for the stenographer’s sake. (Ironically, this same swiftness of speech had irritated Bear and Wilson during his sworn statement.) He allowed that, yes, he had used obscene language once after being provoked, but not to Mrs. Poitevint. He denied behaving in a mocking and contemptuous fashion to any officer. The most poignant moment was perhaps when he explained his angry reaction to being called a nigger. In an inspired gesture, he then movingly invoked his memory of Mallie’s mother, Edna Sims McGriff, who had died in Pasadena in 1933, and who had often talked to Jack and the other children about being born a slave in Georgia in 1858, before the Civil War. To the question “Do you know what a nigger is?” Robinson replied: “I looked it up once, but my grandmother gave me a good definition, she was a slave, and she said the definition of the word was a low, uncouth person, and pertains to no one in particular; but I don’t consider that I am low and uncouth. I looked it up in the dictionary afterwards and it says the word nigger pertains to the negroid or negro, but it is also a machine used in a saw mill for pushing logs into the saws. I objected to being called a nigger by this private or by anybody else. When I made this statement that I did not like to be called nigger, I told the Captain, I said, ‘If you call me a nigger, I might have to say the same thing to you.… I do not consider myself a nigger at all, I am a negro, but not a nigger.’ ”
The defense also called a series of character witnesses. Captain James R. Lawson and Second Lieutenant Harold Kingsley of the 761st Battalion testified, as well as Colonel Bates himself. Bates was evidently so eager to support Robinson that more than once the prosecution tried to rein him in. He testified about Robinson that “particularly with the enlisted men, he is held in high regard”; that his general reputation was “excellent”; that his ability as a soldier was “excellent”; that he, Colonel Bates, had tried to have Robinson assigned, rather than merely attached, to the battalion “because of his excellent work”; and that, yes, he would be satisfied to go into combat with Robinson under him.
In summing up, the defense insisted to the panel, as Robinson later wrote, that the case involved no violations of the Articles of War, as charged, “but simply a situation in which a few individuals sought to vent their bigotry on a Negro they considered ‘uppity’ because he had the audacity to seek to exercise rights that belonged to him as an American and as a soldier.”
The trial lasted more than four hours. Robinson secured at least the four votes (secret and written) needed for his acquittal. He was found “not guilty of all specifications and charges.”
Although it ended in his exoneration, Robinson’s court-martial would add further to the legend of his brutality and his suffering. His white fellow officer David Williams would write of seeing Robinson restrained in a manner Jack never mentioned anywhere: “He was handcuffed, and there were shackles on his legs. Robinson’s face was angry, the muscles on his face tight, his eyes half closed.” According to Williams, Jack had rebelled after the driver decided to dump his black passengers short of their destination. “It was alleged that Robinson, who possessed a quick temper and much pride, had roughed up the driver.” And Truman K. Gibson, who told Joe Louis’s biographer Chris Mead the unlikely story of Jack beating up an officer at Fort Riley, also placed a violent Robinson at “Camp Swift” in Texas. Here, a white bus driver pulled a pistol and ordered Jack to move to the back. “Jackie said, ‘That’s a fatal mistake.… You’re gonna eat that son of a bitch.’ So Jackie took it and broke every tooth in the guy’s mouth, and they discharged Jackie for the good of the service. That’s the Jackie Robinson story.” This false story, published innocently in Mead’s authoritative Joe Louis, was quoted from Mead’s work in another important book on Joe Louis—by his son, Joe Louis Barrow Jr.—and then again by Woody Strode in his memoir, Goal Dust. Contrary to fact, the legend of Robinson as a violent man continued to grow.
ACQUITTED, JACK RETURNED to the 758th Battalion at North Camp Hood. Later that month, on August 24, he was formally reattached to the 761st. But by that time the battalion had already left Camp Hood and was on its way to Europe. The day before his trial, an advance detachment had left Texas on its way to Britain. On August 9, the main body (36 regular officers, 2 warrant officers, and 676 men) had departed for Camp Shanks, New Jersey, to embark for England.
On October 10, the 761st would land at Omaha Beach in Normandy as part of General Patton’s Third Army and as the first black armored unit ever sent into combat. On November 7, led by Colonel Bates, with five other white officers and thirty black officers, the 761st went into action. Fighting for 183 consecutive days, the battalion captured some thirty towns in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Germany, and Austria. More than three hundred of its soldiers would receive the Purple Heart; the first person wounded was Bates himself, shot by an enemy patrol on the first day of combat. In November, twenty-two of its men were killed and eighty-one wounded on the field of battle. The 761st Tank Battalion would also help to liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Later, Robinson never stated any regret about staying at home while the 761st Battalion went overseas into battle. His court-martial had probably killed his desire to continue in the Army. But that desire was documented. On July 21, after his arrest but just before his court-martial, he had appeared before the Army Retiring Board meeting at McCloskey Hospital in Temple and expressed a desire to remain on active duty, but on a limited service status. Asked if he wished to retire from the service, he answered, “No.” Asked if he considered his disability “permanent,” he also replied, “No.”
On August 21, he was reassigned to the 659th Tank Destroyer Battalion at North Camp Hood. What the Army intended by this move is not clear, but he wanted no part of it. Four days later, Jack broke regulations, bypassed the regular chain of command, and sent a sharp letter, air mail special delivery, to the Adjutant General in Washington, D.C. He had sought a position, he wrote, with the Special Service Division (in the area of recreation), but “I was told there were no openings for Colored Officers in that field. I request to be retired from the services and be placed on reserve as I feel I can be of more service to the government doing defense work rather than being on limited duty with an outfit that is already better than 100% over strength in officers.”
Jack was still uncertain of the outcome of his appeal when orders came on September 19 for Robinson (along with nineteen other “colored” second lieutenants) to leave Camp Hood and report to Camp Breckinridge, to be assigned to the 372nd Infantry Regiment. Given his physical problems, this transfer made little sense. On September 29, writing again to the Adjutant General, Jack pointed out that infantry service “would only further aggravate my injury.… Being an Infantry Officer requires a man that is physically fit and since I have been informed that I would be responsible for any further injury, I feel I would not give the government the services that are required of an officer.” Again he pressed his request for “inactive status.”
The end was now in sight. In late September, the Adjutant General’s office in Washington had informed the Eighth Service Command in Dallas, Texas, that “inasmuch as Lieutenant Robinson does not desire to be retained on active duty in a limited service capacity, it is desired that orders be issued relieving him from active duty.… It is desired that the relief orders include the phrase ‘by reason of physical disqualification.’ ” On October 17, he was ordered to transfer to Camp Wheeler, Georgia. However, he was also given leave of one month and three days, effective October 21, before
reporting to Camp Wheeler. Precisely at the end of his leave, he would “revert to an inactive status,” as the Special Order put it. In other words, for all practical purposes his service was now over.
Back in Pasadena, he made no move to call Rachel in San Francisco, but could hardly stop thinking about her. Finally, after his mother begged him to do so, he placed a call to Rachel and found her eager to patch up their quarrel. Racing to San Francisco by car, he offered her the engagement ring once again. The charm bracelet, alas, was gone; he had impulsively given it to a young woman at Fort Riley. In 1949, Jack would tell a ghostwriter that he had been on the verge of marrying this unnamed woman; “I had almost made up my mind to marry the other girl.” But seeing Rachel again, he realized “really that she had more kindness, understanding and was more womanly than anybody I had ever known.… We became engaged again.”
Rachel herself was in a happier mood: her brother Chuck was alive. Shot down over Yugoslavia, he had found shelter with a civilian family, then was arrested and jailed in a German prison camp. According to the Red Cross, he was badly wounded in one leg but otherwise was in good health. In fact, he was on his way back to the United States.
On November 28, 1944, Robinson was “honorably relieved from active duty” in the U.S. Army “by reason of physical disqualification.” Almost certainly, he was at home in California when the end came.
His stint of almost three years as a soldier was over. So was his ordeal as a black officer in the mainly Jim Crow army of the United States. The war was a time of sacrifice for countless Americans, but for Robinson it had been deeply frustrating. With the potential to become an excellent soldier and a leader of soldiers, he had been barred from making something substantial of his talents; the Army had come close to destroying him. In the process, however, he had learned more about life. As 1944 drew to a close, he was a more seasoned and mature individual than when he had entered as a raw recruit in April 1942. He was far more deeply invested now in a personal commitment to the ideal of social justice, especially for blacks. But he had paid a stiff price in the process.
Jackie Robinson Page 16