Authors: Arnold Rampersad
Consciously or not, Jack was acting as his mother Mallie had done in winning over Pepper Street, when she saw that some whites were mainly prisoners of their ignorance and had to be treated accordingly, with a measure of understanding. Drawing both on religion and on her practical sense of the world, Mallie had responded calmly to them, as one might treat children, and she had won out, in her own way, over racial prejudice. Now Jack, younger and impetuous, and in a milieu about which she knew nothing, and which seemed to breed rage and violence, was striving to do the same.
The football season had barely ended before Jack showed up for practice with the Bulldog basketball team under Coach Carl Metten. Like Mallory, Metten was an alumnus of Pasadena High School; at Oregon State he had lettered in football and basketball. The PJC basketball team labored under two handicaps. The first had to do with its arena, which was little more than a shed, with one side exposed to the elements, so that fans shivered on chilly nights, or fled the rain. The other handicap was the team itself; its average height was only about six feet.
With Robinson and Bill Busik at forward and Ray Bartlett (also about six feet) at center, the Bulldogs started the season with two victories, but soon fell to earth. In a virtually all-white league, with all white officials, the Bulldogs believed they were being mistreated. At an early tournament, Jack’s spirited play and team-high scoring were offset by questionable calls, as PJC saw them, including a technical foul against Jack. A string of losses followed, including one in Sacramento when Jack left the court with bruised ribs; Busik, too, was hurt. These injuries were no accident. By this point,
the league-leading scorer Jack Robinson was a prime target of blows. In turn, Jack was hardly bashful about hitting back, if he could do so surreptitiously. Gordon remembered a game in which an opponent hacked at Jack repeatedly without a foul being called. Robinson waited patiently for his chance. “
Jack had the ball,” according to Gordon, “and he had his head sort of down. All of a sudden he comes up with the ball. He just ripped the guy, right up the front. Blood went everywhere. But no foul. After that, he had no problems in that game.”
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.
W
HEN 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.