Jackie Robinson (12 page)

On February 4, against Glendale, Jack played the last game of his two-year career as a Bulldog. Just before he left the campus, he gained one more significant honor: induction into the junior college’s most respected
honor society. On January 27, before the assembled student body, Jack and nine other students received a gold pin to mark their acceptance into the Order of Mast and Dagger; each semester, Mast and Dagger tapped a few students who had performed “
outstanding service to the school and whose scholastic and citizenship record is worthy of recognition.” A group picture of the chosen students, including Jack, made the front page of the Pasadena
Post.
While Jack’s sporting exploits had won him this honor, his induction also showed an appreciation by his peers at PJC of his strength of character. On the campus, to the mass of students, Robinson was a respected figure, acclaimed and yet modest, as the journalist Shav Glick (also tapped that day) recalled almost forty years later: “
To them he was a quiet, capable student who became a superstar on the athletic field.”

Away from the campus, however, life was another matter. The cheering crowds and his honors and awards could never make up completely for the humiliations that came with being a young black man in a city hostile to people like him. On January 2, Jack had further painful proof of where blacks stood in Pasadena when his oldest brother, Edgar, was beaten by two policemen, then charged with resisting arrest and violating a city ordinance. The ordinance barred individuals from placing chairs along the annual Tournament of Roses Parade without a license (the chairs were then rented out for four or five dollars each).

According to Edgar, two policemen accosted him about the rental of certain seats. When he reached into his pocket to retrieve a license (for which he said he had paid four dollars on December 30), one officer knocked him down. Next followed, according to a newspaper report based on Edgar’s statement, “
a free-for-all scuffle, in which his eye was blackened, his arms twisted and bruised.” Denied medical treatment or a chance to call home, Edgar pleaded guilty to the charges and paid a ten-dollar fine. At the city hospital, the staff refused to treat him. Edgar then went to the office of the chief of police to lodge a complaint. “Before he had an opportunity to say anything,” according to the newspaper, “he said he was ordered out, ‘before you are clubbed on the head,’ these words reputedly said by the chief himself.”

Apparently, the police also robbed him. He was carrying $60 when arrested, but at the station only $36.55 was counted out as belonging to him. The two policemen vanished from the record; they might have come from Los Angeles, Edgar thought, because he had to direct them to the local police station and because (so he said) they told him at one point that “
we don’t allow Negroes in Los Angeles to make this kind of money.” Protests against the police proved a waste of time. The Pasadena branch of the NAACP passed a resolution of protest to the city police department
and offered it documents detailing other accusations “
of flagrant discrimination and brutal treatment of colored citizens in Pasadena by the police.” The NAACP was ignored. Apparently, the only newspaper to mention its move, or Edgar’s arrest, was the black-owned
California Eagle.

This incident, and other episodes like it, eventually made Jack loathe Pasadena. Some of his childhood friends, including Sid and Eleanor Heard, who never left the city, became reconciled to its faults. But Jack’s final response was different. “
If my mother, brothers and sister weren’t living there,” he declared, “I’d never go back.” His resentment went deep. “I’ve always felt like an intruder, even in school. People in Pasadena were less understanding, in some ways, than Southerners. And they were more openly hostile.”

Early in February, just past his twentieth birthday, Robinson took his first bold steps away from home when he began to commute daily between Pasadena and Los Angeles to attend classes at UCLA. In the next two years, he would grow in maturity in many ways, but he would also be forced to endure even more embittering incidents that led him to resent the city of his youth. As always, however, he looked with hope to the future; and in the winter of 1939, the future for Jack Robinson was UCLA and its promise of national glory.

O
N
F
EBRUARY
15, 1939, ending “
the wild rumors that have been running rife regarding his future plans,” Jack Robinson drove his 1931 Plymouth from Pepper Street in Pasadena to Vernon Avenue in downtown Los Angeles to begin his formal association with UCLA by enrolling at the Extension Division of the university. There, he would complete the requirements for full entry to the university in Westwood in the fall.

At UCLA, where its new football coach, Babe Horrell, saluted Robinson as “
one of the greatest open-field runners I have ever seen,” the student newspaper added its endorsement. Quoting the PJC track coach to the effect that Robinson was the state’s “outstanding all-around athlete,” the
California Daily Bruin
also foresaw no academic problems for the recruit, although his transcript showed deficiencies in algebra, French, and geometry. “Judging by his previous scholarship record,” the
Bruin
declared, “Robinson should have little difficulty in making good in Extension Division.” But Jack himself then shook up reporters—and, no doubt, at least two coaches at UCLA—by announcing that he would no longer strive to be a “four-star” athlete. Instead, he would compete in football and the broad jump only, because the strain of competition in four sports was too great. “And besides,” he added, “I think I should study. That is why I chose UCLA. I don’t intend to coast so that I can play ball.”

Jack’s decision meant only one thing, really: he had set himself the goal of following in Mack’s footsteps and making the U.S. Olympic team in
1940. Already some experts were hailing him as the finest broad jumper in the United States. With time now to train for the event, he was expected to earn a spot on the team easily.

For Robinson, the next few months were a respite from the intense athletic activity of the previous two years. In the spring, he stuck to his promise and emphasized his studies. Taking courses in English, French, physiology, and physical education, he also finished work in algebra and geometry started at Muir Tech. If he attended spring football training in Westwood in March, he did so as a spectator. He also played no basketball for UCLA. However, suiting up for an Alpha Phi Alpha team in a statewide league of Negro fraternities, “
the Black Panther,” as the
California Eagle
dubbed him, scored 25 points in leading the Alphas to a victory.

The spring passed quietly, if with one major change on Pepper Street. His mother completed the purchase of the house and land at 133 Pepper Street, next door to 121 Pepper Street. With this purchase, Mallie moved into 133 accompanied by her niece Jessie Maxwell; she left 121, the larger house, to an assortment of family, including Jack, Willa Mae, Edgar, and Frank and Maxine and their children. The summer began well, with yet another sports triumph for Jack when, over the Fourth of July weekend, on the tennis courts at La Pintoresca Park near his home, he won the men’s singles and doubles titles in the tenth annual championship tournament of the black Western Federation of Tennis Clubs. Opponents crumbled before what one observer called “
his wickedly unorthodox style, characterized by lightning speed and uncanny judgment.” In the men’s singles final, faced with his “devilish placements, speed, and a merciless little cut, used in net play,” his veteran opponent “quietly folded up.” Teaming with a friend, Jack then took the doubles title. In the entire tournament, neither he nor his doubles team came close to dropping a set. “The amazing thing about Robinson’s performance,” the observer marveled, was that although he “only plays tennis in the summer vacation months … [he] nevertheless ran rough shod over players who are devoted to the sport year round and for years on end.”

But within days of these victories came the worst blow of Jack’s life to that point. At about 6:25 p.m. on July 10, his brother Frank was riding his motorcycle along Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena when a woman driving a car in the opposite direction turned across his path to enter a service station. Frank braked hard and swerved to avoid the car, but its left front fender snagged his machine. Frank, along with a passenger behind him, went flying. They struck a parked car so hard that the impact left a huge dent in its body. With only bruises, his passenger walked away; Frank was knocked unconscious. An ambulance sped him to Huntington Memorial Hospital, where doctors found that he had fractured his skull and broken
several ribs as well as a leg and a thigh. The accident had also ruptured his liver, spleen, and kidney and punctured his left lung.

Jack was playing cards at the home of a friend when he heard the news. Rushing to the hospital, he heard to his horror that Frank was near death. In tears he called home and broke the news to his sister, Willa Mae. “
Mama was living next door then on the corner,” she recalled, “and I hollered out the window. I didn’t think what I was doing, so the whole neighborhood heard and everybody came running.” Fleeing the hospital, Jack went home and fell sobbing into bed. Frank, who had regained consciousness, lingered for several hours. Jack Gordon remembered him cursing in his pain, and Mallie recalled his deep groaning as he begged her to turn him over so he could die in peace. A few minutes after midnight, he was gone. On July 14, he was buried in Mountain View Cemetery. “
I was very shaken up by his death,” Jack wrote later. “It was hard to believe he was gone, hard to believe I would no longer have his support.”

Jack sought relief from sorrow in sports—mainly tennis, golf, and baseball. Playing for the Pasadena Sox, a racially mixed team made up of past and present PJC players and sponsored by the Chicago White Sox, he helped to lead his team to victory in the California State Amateur Baseball championship. Near the end of August, in the championship game in Brookside Park, Jack scored his team’s first two runs, stole four bases, started one double play, and had five assists. On this team Jack was one of three black starters, and probably the outstanding player on the field—a fact hardly lost on the major-league scouts who attended the game. At one point, the
California Eagle
called the play of the three, and their easy acceptance by the many white spectators, “
the biggest argument for the participation of the Negro in major league baseball.”

But even as this mixed team advanced smoothly, a harsher spirit prevailed elsewhere. In a fight that would last nine years, NAACP lawyers finally took on the city over segregation at the swimming pool in Brookside Park. That year, a superior court judge, setting aside arguments by the city that “
swimming offered the opportunity of certain intimacies like marriage and that the races should be separated,” placed the NAACP petition on the court calendar. The legal battle was joined. (Later that year, a court ruled against the plaintiffs, but on the basis of a legal technicality. When the plaintiffs appealed and, years later, won their case, the city closed the pools to everyone.) This legal battle was of more than passing interest to Jack. Either at this point, or after some other protest about the city pool, Mack and all other recently hired black workers were fired in revenge by the city manager. The summer of 1939 also saw the founding of the Pasadena Improvement Association. On July 1, the association, endorsed by every important
business and real-estate organization in Pasadena, was incorporated. Its explicit goal was to restrict the “
use and occupancy of property” in the city of Pasadena “to members of the White or Caucasian Race only.”

As racial discrimination in Pasadena took this nasty turn, Jack himself became caught up in yet another dangerous episode involving the city police. On September 5, he was in his aging Plymouth, coming home from a softball game in Brookside Park, with Ray Bartlett and other friends riding playfully on the running boards, when he pulled up at the corner of Mountain Street and Fair Oaks Avenue. Although Jack would tell the story somewhat differently, Bartlett remembered clearly that a car driven by a white man came up alongside, “
and the man said something about ‘niggers’ to us, and I popped him with my glove, slapped him in his face.” When the man shot his car forward and pulled over, Jack pulled up behind him. “I thought me and this guy were going to have a fight,” Bartlett recalled. “But Jack got right in the middle of it, as usual.” Out of nowhere, according to Jack, a crowd of young blacks quickly gathered. When the white man saw the youths, “
he turned pale and backed away, saying that he didn’t want to fight or even start anything in this neighborhood.”

Just then, a motorcycle policeman, John C. Hall, pulled up. By this time the crowd had grown, according to a police report, to “
between 40 and 50 members of the Negro race.” Scared not so much of the police but of his strict mother, Bartlett decided to slip away. “
So I withdrew,” he recalled. “But not Jack. He just wouldn’t back down. He was just stubborn.” When Officer Hall tried to make arrests, his “suspects” kept melting away into the crowd. Suddenly he drew his gun on Robinson, who alone refused to run or hide. “
I found myself up against the side of my car,” he said later, “with a gun-barrel pressed unsteadily into the pit of my stomach. I was scared to death.”