Authors: Arnold Rampersad
Jack also liked the fact that Louis was humble. Passing through Los Angeles that November, Louis telephoned Rachel. “
I got this telephone call from a Joe Barrow,” she remembered, “who said he was an Army buddy of Jack and he was going to come by and ‘honk at’ me.” Rachel, who did not care to be honked at, was in the bathtub when her caller arrived. “My mother came flying through the door,” she remembered. “ ‘You won’t believe who’s on the front porch. Joe Barrow is
Joe Louis!
’ I was stunned, embarrassed, but most of all thrilled.… It was the modesty and simplicity of it which impressed me.” Robinson liked the way Louis enjoyed his fame and money, and the adulation of both white and black America, while remaining true to himself. Within four years, Jack himself, and Rachel also, would be caught up as principals in an even more complex drama involving the sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting needs and desires of black and white America. As different as the men were, Louis’s lessons of modesty and humility would not be lost on Robinson.
“
I’m sure if it wasn’t for Joe Louis,” Jack would insist, “the color line in baseball would not have been broken for another ten years.” At Fort Riley in 1942, Louis used his prestige to try to help the young black men, including Robinson, who wanted to be officers, although exactly what he accomplished is open to question. According to Louis’s old friend Truman K. Gibson, an attorney who was then an assistant to William Hastie, the black civilian aide to the secretary of war, Louis telephoned him about Robinson’s plight. Gibson then flew to Fort Riley to investigate conditions there. At
a meeting organized by Louis, he met with Robinson, Louis, and other blacks to hear their grievances. On another occasion, Gibson pointed out that the wheels were already in motion to take those men toward OCS. What is certain is that after waiting in limbo for about three months, Jack and a small group of other blacks at Fort Riley were accepted into OCS. Around November 1, and after Jack had served for some time as a squad leader, they began their thirteen weeks of training in a class of just over eighty candidates.
The candidates were from all over the United States; more remarkably, they included both whites and blacks. For the first time in Army history, OCS was integrated. Suddenly, whites and blacks studied, worked, ate, trained, and were billeted together, in the middle of an otherwise viciously segregated world. Integration did not free black officers altogether; for some time, Army rules would continue to forbid any black officer from outranking a white officer in the same unit. The integration of OCS at Fort Riley was bound to cause trouble, and gave rise to a story with Jack Robinson at its explosive center. According to Truman Gibson again, Jack was on a drill field when a white officer denounced a black soldier as a “
stupid nigger son of a bitch.” Robinson intervened: “You shouldn’t address a soldier in those terms.” The white officer turned on him: “Oh, fuck you; that goes for you too!” Jack, who had “an explosive, terrible temper,” erupted in a rage: “He almost killed the guy.” Summoned by Joe Louis, Gibson went with him to see “the commanding general” about the incident. After Louis presented the general with “some very expensive gifts,” Robinson was “permitted to finish officer candidate school.”
Almost certainly, this episode never took place. (But it would be accepted as truth in an important biography, Chris Mead’s
Joe Louis,
and transmitted even deeper into history by other writers quoting from that biography.) In another telling, Gibson identified the gifts: “
Joe gave the general some bottles of Roederer Champagne and a gold watch. That took care of that.” It represents an aspect of Robinson’s eventual reputation, after his bold integration of white baseball; he would emerge as an icon of raging black manhood, and be refashioned by some people, black and white, into a figure not only of racial triumph but also of racial revenge. Conditions
at Fort Riley were no doubt trying, but Jack was capable of holding himself in check to avoid such a gross violation of the military code. In contrast, a white writer, Ruth Danenhower Wilson, gathering material for her study of blacks in the wartime military,
Jim Crow Joins Up
(1944), would report that “at Fort Riley the faculty of the Officer Candidate School felt that the Negro all-American Football Player—Jack Robinson—had been better liked than any other Candidate in the school.”
In any event, on January 28, 1943, following Army custom, a fellow graduate ceremonially pinned the gold bars signifying the rank of second lieutenant on Jack Robinson, and he signed the oath of office that marked his commission as an officer in the cavalry of the U.S. Army. For Jack, who had graduated from neither Pasadena Junior College nor UCLA, his Army commission was probably the most significant public accomplishment of his life to that moment outside of sports.
In March, on leave and decked out in his dashing cavalry officer’s uniform, Jack headed for California. His old friend Jack Gordon, now himself in the Army, was in Blythe, California, when Robinson arrived without notice. “
I was at headquarters,” Gordon recalled, “in a room where all the black officers used to hang out, when the door opened and who should walk in but Jack Robinson. He was an absolute sight, just beautiful to see! He had on his cavalry outfit with the riding breeches and the dark jacket and the wide-brimmed hat with the chin strap and the high polished boots and everything. Folks just stopped talking and looked at him.” But Jack’s final destination was San Francisco, where Rachel now lived in the nurses’ dormitory of the University of California Hospital on hilly Parnassus Avenue. Because UCLA had neither a medical nor a nursing school, she had moved north for the last three years of her program, which involved both academic and clinical work at the hospital.
When they were at last alone together, Jack presented her with an engagement ring, complete with a tiny diamond. She accepted the ring, and they were formally engaged. Rachel was happy to be engaged, but she was still in no hurry to be married. Jack had only a limited sense of the reasons for her reluctance; and Rachel, too, was in something of an emotional fog. “
I had come to realize,” she would say, “how dominated I had been by my family all my life, how they had shaped my thoughts, my goals, my very being. Now I was in nursing school, which was terribly demanding and regimented. I could see that marriage was going to be another force, maybe even more powerful, keeping me in place, with me trying, striving hard, as usual, to be the best wife I could be, just as I had tried to be the best child, the best young lady, the best student I could be. I could see marriage suffocating me, and I really was not eager to rush into it.”
Rachel knew that Jack and her mother were quite different people; but she also sensed that he would want her to be the woman her mother had groomed her to become, and the thought sometimes oppressed her. This was all a little too complicated for Jack, who could not imagine why Rachel would not want to be that woman. “
Jack began to get just a little edgy about my hesitating. Still, I held onto him, because I loved him. And he had my mother totally on his side, and my mother pretty much had me.” (Once,
Zellee had consulted a psychic about her daughter. “Tell her,” the medium advised, “to either marry a certain man or stop riding around in his Buick.” Zellee’s mouth dropped open; Jack was then driving a Buick.)
Rachel knew exactly what she wanted as a wedding present from Jack: a sable fur coat. Jack, who probably still owned only one suit, agreed to the purchase but with some reluctance. Although he had no interest in buying fine things for himself, he expected his wife to know and want them; still, a fur coat seemed a bit much. A little reluctantly, he went with Rachel to one of the fanciest fur shops in the city. “
Do you have a sable coat to show me?” Rachel asked, with as much confidence as she could muster. “The poor salesman was stunned. ‘Oh yes, lady, I can show you one. But I want you to know that only Bing Crosby’s wife owns one, as far as I know.’ ” Standing behind Rachel, Jack snickered; she heard him distinctly. However, “I was not about to acknowledge the defeat. I drew myself up and asked the man, ‘Well, if not sable, is there something else you can suggest?’ He told me: ‘I have a very nice dyed ermine.’ He brought this little piece of fur out. I looked at it. It wasn’t what I had in mind, but I knew by this point that I was in over my head.” Jack, chuckling, put a down payment on the ermine. The fur coat caper was something they would both laugh about in the coming years.
R
ETURNING TO
F
ORT
R
ILEY
, he found himself assigned to a provisional truck battalion. In addition, he was appointed morale officer of his company. The men respected his sports knowledge and skills and also understood that he could and would speak up for them, in his fluting, high voice that showed hardly a trace of his mother’s Southern drawl. Certainly he knew their racial troubles at Fort Riley from personal experience. Once again, for example, whites barred him from the baseball team. At least one witness to the episode, ironically, would later play with him on the Brooklyn Dodgers. “
One day we were out at the field practicing,” Pete Reiser would recall, “when a Negro lieutenant came out for the team. An officer told him, ‘You have to play with the colored team.’ That was a joke. There was no colored team. The black lieutenant didn’t speak. He stood there for a while, watched us work out, and then he turned and walked away.… That was the first time I saw Jackie Robinson. I can still see him slowly walking away.”
Jack was barred from the baseball team, but it appears that either this year, 1943, or the next, he competed in and won a table tennis competition that made him the champion player in the U.S. Army, in a sport he had played only sporadically over the years. (In October 1944 a USO director in the Fort Riley area tried to match Robinson against Miss Jini Boyd
O’Connor, said to be the current Middle Atlantic champion, “
because we know of his ability as a ping-pong artist.”)
But sports provided only respites from the boredom of life at Fort Riley, as Jack and the other black officers and men watched and waited for something significant to happen. The overwhelming question was whether blacks would be allowed a chance at combat. Summer brought news of massive shipments of black soldiers overseas, but the Army was shunting most of them into service units, where most whites contemptuously thought blacks belonged. Early in 1944, the black 2nd Cavalry Division, after two years of zealous training, would be turned into a service unit and denied the chance of battlefield glory. Morale also suffered with the multiplying acts of violence against black soldiers by whites, to whom the sight of a black man in uniform, and especially an officer, was often an affront. In Little Rock, Arkansas, a white policeman killed a black sergeant on a city street. In Centerville, Mississippi, a sheriff nonchalantly ended a dispute between a white MP and a black soldier by shooting the soldier dead. Incidents such as these, emblazoned on the pages of newspapers such as the Chicago
Defender,
the Pittsburgh
Courier,
and the New York
Amsterdam News,
scarred the image of the military in the eyes of blacks. About this time, the only African-American general in the U.S. Army, Benjamin O. Davis, testified to the mournful truth that black Americans “
had lost confidence in the fairness of the Army to Negro troops.”
Frustrated in his role as morale officer, Jack himself refused to give in to cynicism or despair. This refusal often meant friction between himself and whites, or worse. His most dangerous episode came after some soldiers complained bitterly to him about conditions for blacks at the post exchange, where they often waited and waited for the few seats assigned to blacks while “white” seats went unused. Determined to intervene, Jack telephoned the provost marshal of the base to complain; at the very least, he wanted more spaces assigned to blacks. With the provost marshal, a Major Haffner, unaware that Robinson was black, the conversation became more and more heated as Robinson developed his points. Finally, Major Haffner came to the point: “
Lieutenant, let me put it to you this way. How would you like to have your wife sitting next to a nigger?” Jack was livid. “Pure rage took over,” he admitted. “I was so angry that I asked him if he knew how close his wife had ever been to a nigger. I was shouting at the top of my voice. Every typewriter in headquarters stopped. The clerks were frozen in disbelief.” On the advice of a warrant officer who had overheard Jack’s words, he made a full report of the conversation to the battalion commander. The incident ended fruitfully. Additional seats became available for blacks, and Major Haffner himself, in later encounters
with Robinson, was polite and even helpful. One thing remained constant, however: segregation.
Jim Crow at Fort Riley was only a token of racism in America, and the sweltering summer brought bizarre news of major civil disturbances across the country even as the United States fought abroad in order to uphold and restore democracy. Early in June, rioting started in Los Angeles when Mexican-American youths living under dismal conditions clashed with white sailors and soldiers who had flooded the city in search of the usual wartime pleasures. On June 16, two blacks were killed when a white mob fomented a mass disturbance in Beaumont, Texas, sparked by the rumor, later disproved, that a black man had raped the wife of a white serviceman. In Detroit on June 20, far more destructively, marauding mobs clashed in various parts of the city and left twenty-five blacks and nine whites dead. On August 1, Harlem exploded in a riot that took six lives, injured some three hundred persons, and cost millions of dollars in property damage. Appropriately enough, the spark was a report, erroneous, that a white policeman had shot and killed a black soldier.
News of the civil disturbances made life at Fort Riley even more difficult for blacks there. Thus Jack was in no mood to comply when, in August, he was asked to join the football team at the fort. Finally, he decided to practice with the team. However, the season was to start with a game against the University of Missouri when he suddenly found himself given two weeks’ leave to go home, although he had not applied for leave. Before long he recognized the reason: Missouri had “
made it quite clear to the Army that they would not play a team with a black player on it. Instead of telling me the truth, the Army gave me leave to go home.” Angry at the deception, Jack left Fort Riley on September 4. When he returned to duty on September 17, he reported to the team not to resume practice but to resign his place: “I said that I had no intention of playing football for a team which, because I was black, would not allow me to play in all the games.” The colonel in charge of the team reminded Robinson that he could order him to play. “You wouldn’t want me playing on your team,” Jack replied, “knowing that my heart wasn’t in it.” Although no one ordered him to play, “I had no illusions. I would never win a popularity contest with the ranking hierarchy of that post.”