Jackie Robinson (21 page)

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.

A
CQUITTED
, J
ACK 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.

As he approached his twenty-sixth birthday, he was a man still moving largely in the dark. Prodigiously gifted as an athlete, with a fierce will to succeed, he was yet without a vocation or a profession or a skill that could be marketed easily in a nation deeply divided by race and indifferent or hostile to its black citizens and their dreams. Robinson was still drifting, drifting, still largely at the mercy of fate and the whims and wishes of whites, even as he also continued to nurture the faith that he yet might be destined by God for something great.

N
OVEMBER 1944 FOUND
Robinson fresh out of the Army and with only the prospect of a job. The prospect had come casually enough. One day, passing by a baseball field at Camp Breckinridge in Kentucky, Jack noticed a black man snapping off some impressive curves. The player turned out to be Ted Alexander, now a soldier, but previously a member of the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro National League. Suddenly it occurred to Jack that this might be an avenue worth pursuing. The war had left the Negro leagues short of talent; at the same time, they were attracting some of the largest crowds in their history. On Alexander’s advice, Robinson sent a letter of inquiry to Thomas Y. Baird, who owned the Monarchs along with their founder, J. L. Wilkinson. Answering promptly, Baird offered Jack $300 a month—if he made the team. Robinson countered by asking for $400. Conceding, Baird ordered Robinson to join the team for spring training the following April in Houston, Texas.

By Christmas, however, Jack was already living in Texas. Early that month, perhaps in response to news from Robinson himself about his offer from the Negro leagues, Reverend Karl Downs, now the president of Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas, sent a telegram to Jack inviting
him to teach physical education there. Eager to work, and even more eager to repay his debt to Reverend Downs, Jack promptly accepted his offer.

The year before, when Downs left Pasadena to go to Samuel Huston, he became reputedly the youngest college president in the United States. From Camp Hood, Jack had gone to Austin at least once to visit Downs, who had counseled him during his court-martial ordeal. “
I believe that my father had even gone up to Camp Hood and tried to help Jackie,” Downs’s daughter, Karleen, later offered. “He and my mother had such great respect and affection for him.” When the athletic director of the college suddenly quit his job in the fall, Downs had turned to Robinson and begged him to come as a replacement.

Jack certainly did not go for the money. In 1945, Samuel Huston College, a black United Methodist Church school founded in 1876, was an institution in deep financial distress, its meager resources reduced further by the war, its student rolls shrinking. Enrollment teetered now at just over three hundred students, of whom only about three dozen were men. “
The college was a ghost,” a newspaper recalled some years later, “and it was Downs’s duty to give this dead institution life and meaning in the community and the state.” Downs had responded vigorously; aided by his local congressman, a onetime schoolteacher named Lyndon Baines Johnson, who believed—in part as a segregationist—in the importance of historically black colleges, Downs had launched a building program that soon added five new buildings to the campus. “
Bringing Jackie Robinson to the campus was vintage Karl Downs,” a friend of Downs’s would recall. “It was the same spirit that led him to put in a visiting artists program that brought in all sorts of celebrated musicians, and that in turn made some very influential local whites take note of our little college. Nothing like that had ever happened before Karl came.”