His athletic skills allowed him to star in football, basketball, track, and baseball in high school, earning him recognition from the local paper as the high school’s “outstanding athlete” in his junior and senior years. In 1937, the five-foot-eleven-inch, 135-pound Robinson enrolled in Pasadena Junior College, where his mastery of all those sports continued. “It is doubtful,” said the
Pasadena Post
at one point, “if Pasadena ever has had a greater all-around athlete, and that is saying a lot in a city where champions are produced as regularly as the years roll by.”
Robinson’s athletic accomplishments enabled him to enroll at UCLA in 1939 with an athletic scholarship. Now weighing about 175 pounds, Jackie excelled in football, basketball, baseball, and track, becoming UCLA’s first four-letter man. He was hailed by one local newspaper as “the greatest ball-carrier in the nation,” won the Pacific Coast Conference basketball scoring title in 1941, and set a conference track record for the long jump (twenty-five feet). Ironically, baseball proved to be his worst sport (where he played shortstop and finished his first season with a batting average of only .097). But his shortcomings in that one sport were of little moment. Jackie Robinson had made his mark. He had not only the adulation of other students but also the attention of college coeds, both black and white.
However much he must have enjoyed that attention, only one woman captured his emotions—a freshman he had met in the UCLA student lounge. He was, he later said, attracted by her “looks and charm.” For her part, seventeen-year-old Rachel Isum, a slim African-American woman with keen intelligence, was immediately drawn to UCLA’s premier athlete. He was, she remembered, “very impressive—a handsome, proud and serious man with a warm smile and a pigeon-toed walk.” But the quality that most impressed Rachel was Jackie’s humility. “He was a big man on campus when he met me,” she later remembered, “and I was a lowly freshman. But he related to me as a person and not as being a big star on campus.”
They began to date, and, as Rachel later confessed, she was “the aggressor,” waiting for Jackie after games or work and otherwise doing whatever she could to increase the frequency of their contact. In November, Jackie invited Rachel to the school’s homecoming dance, and from that point on Robinson was committed to a relationship with this young woman from Los Angeles.
By the early winter of 1941, Jackie had exhausted his eligibility to play football for UCLA, and at that point—being a C student with no interest in academics—he decided to leave school without waiting for graduation. In March 1941 he accepted a position with the National Youth Administration, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, to help troubled youths in San Luis Obispo. The outbreak of war in Europe made that assignment a short-lived one, because the army decided to utilize NYA’s facilities.
Left to fend for himself, Jackie accepted an offer to play semipro football with the Honolulu Bears for the 1941 season. Although he enjoyed some memorable moments, the team was not very good, and he sustained a serious injury to his right ankle, which had already been damaged in earlier football exploits. He was glad to return home in December and was on a ship coming back to California when he learned of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.
Robinson received his draft notice in March 1942 and filed an application with the army for Officer Candidate School. His application was summarily dismissed at first, but Jackie knew all about racial discrimination and the importance of perseverance. And so, before long, his OCS application was accepted, and in time it was Second Lieutenant Jackie Roosevelt Robinson who occupied the army barracks at Fort Riley in Kansas.
Despite his success in overcoming the obstacles to become an officer, Robinson soon learned that army life was rife with racism. The most enduring experience occurred in July 1944. One evening Jackie took a bus to nearby Camp Hood, spent a few hours at the colored officers’ club and then caught an army bus to return to the hospital. As he was walking toward the rear, he spotted the wife of a fellow black officer seated in the middle of the bus, and he sat down next to her for the ride back. As more passengers boarded the bus, the driver left his seat to tell Robinson that he had to move to the rear. Jackie knew his rights and refused to move. The bus driver called the military police and, when they arrived, the driver pointed to Robinson, saying, “There’s the nigger that’s causing me trouble.”
The MPs took Robinson off the bus, held him in a room on a suspicion that he was drunk and trying to cause a riot (even though Robinson had never had a drink in his life), and ultimately had him arrested for “behaving with disrespect” toward the MP commanding officer (who had shown up at the scene) and for failing to obey the commanding officer’s order that he remain seated on a chair in the room to which he had been taken.
Always the fighter, Robinson wrote to the NAACP about the trumped-up charges, and the matter received considerable publicity in the press. By the time the court-martial proceedings convened in August 1944, the army was no doubt aware of the adverse publicity that would ensue if Robinson were convicted, and so, after four hours of testimony, Robinson was acquitted.
Although he may have won the legal battle, Robinson was not a welcome presence in the armed services. They took note of his ankle injuries and had him honorably discharged. Robinson immediately returned to his home in Los Angeles with one principal goal in mind: to marry Rachel Isum.
That was no small challenge. He had remained in touch with Rachel in the years after he had left UCLA, and, despite several separations, the relationship remained strong. But Rachel had another agenda that did not entirely coincide with Jackie’s. “I could see marriage suffocating me,” she later said, “and I really was not eager to rush into it.” And so she made it clear that there would be no wedding until she completed her studies at UCLA in the spring of 1945 and he got a job to support them.
Ironically, before he had left the service, another GI had talked to Robinson about opportunities that might be available with the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the Negro leagues’ top teams. Jackie tried out in the spring of 1945 and received an offer to play for $400 a month. Anxious to succeed in his new job, Robinson made his mark in the Negro leagues that summer. He played shortstop, posted an impressive .345 batting average, and won wide recognition for his superlative talents. But he was not happy. Playing with the Monarchs meant constant travel in old buses and cars, dingy rooms in dilapidated hotels, and greasy food from segregated restaurants. It was, Robinson later said, “a pretty miserable way to make a buck.”
Fate then intervened in the guise of Branch Rickey, the sixty-four-year-old general manager and part owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey was a lawyer who had devoted his life to baseball, and he had a dream: to integrate the major leagues. It was a dream that had evolved from his days as a coach for the Ohio Wesleyan University baseball team in the early 1900s. Rickey had taken the team to South Bend, Indiana, for a game against Notre Dame, but the hotel resisted when he tried to register the black player on the team. In a compromise, Rickey agreed to share his room with the young player and sent him up the stairs while Rickey completed the arrangements. When he entered the room, Rickey saw the black student sitting on the bed in a state of despair and pulling at the skin on his hand. “Damned skin,” the student cried. “If I could only rub it off.” Then and there Rickey decided that he would do something about segregation in baseball.
It would not be easy. Segregation was an accepted part of baseball life at that juncture, and Rickey had to bide his time. In the meantime, he enjoyed considerable success as a field manager and general manager for the St. Louis Browns in the American League and then the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League, introducing many innovations (like a minor-league farm system where young players could be nurtured) and fielding Cardinal teams that won nine pennants and six World Championships in twenty-five years. But Cardinal owner Sam Breadon decided not to renew Rickey’s contract after the 1942 season, and the rotund sextagenerian found a new home with the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had won the pennant in 1941 and were beginning to look like perennial contenders.
As he aged, Rickey no doubt sensed that time was running out on his dream of integrating baseball, but there remained one unyielding obstacle: Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He had been appointed as baseball commissioner in 1920 in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal (when eight players on the Chicago White Sox were accused of fixing the 1919 World Series). Landis ruled the game with the proverbial iron fist, and he had an unwavering view about blacks in baseball—it would never happen under his watch. But Landis died in November 1944, and former United States senator Albert B. Chandler was chosen to replace him.
Rickey could not have been more pleased. When asked about the growing pressures to allow blacks to play in the major leagues, Chandler responded, “If a black boy can make it in Okinawa and Guadal canal, hell, he can make it in baseball.” Upon reading that quotation, Rickey began to move forward with his plans to integrate baseball.
There was no shortage of talented black players from whom to choose, but the first player had to be special. However much Chandler supported equality in baseball, there remained a stronghold of opposition to having black players in the major leagues. There would be resistance, there would be pressure, and there would be no assurance of success. The first black player would therefore need not only the skills to excel on the field but also the fortitude to handle the inevitable abuse that would follow him wherever he went. Rickey intended to find that special player and dispatched Brooklyn scouts throughout the country to investigate Negro players who might be available.
Clyde Sukeforth was the scout designated to check out the Monarchs’ star shortstop at a game in Chicago and to bring him back if Robinson had the skills to play in the major leagues. Rickey did not want to advertise his true intentions, and he had circulated the notion among his scouts that the Dodgers were going to form a new Negro team—the Brooklyn Browns—to play in a new Negro league. But that subterfuge did not sit well with Robinson, and he kept pressing Sukeforth, “Why does Mr. Rickey want to see me?” Sukeforth tried to explain the situation as he understood it, and the young athlete finally agreed to take the train back to Brooklyn with the Dodger scout.
The meeting occurred on August 28, 1945, in Rickey’s office at 215 Montague Street in Brooklyn. Robinson was led into the office and saw a large man with bushy eyebrows and a cigar sitting behind a oversized desk. Rickey was given to long sermons (a quality that led sportswriters to refer to his office as the “Cave of Winds”), and Robinson soon learned that there was no topic more deserving of a sermon than integration in baseball.
Rickey no doubt startled Robinson with the opening question: “You got a girl?” It was not an idle question. A devout Methodist, Rickey was, according to one sportswriter, offended “by alcoholism, extramarital sex, and the word shit.” Robinson explained that he was indeed engaged. Rickey was pleased. “When we get through today,” he replied, “you may want to call her up, because there are times when a man needs a woman by his side.” Rickey then proceeded to reveal his true intentions. There was not going to be any Brooklyn Browns team. Rickey wanted to bring Robinson into the Dodger organization so that he could eventually play in the major leagues. “I know you’re a good player,” Rickey continued. “What I don’t know is whether you have the guts.” The Brooklyn GM explained that there would be many people in and out of baseball who would oppose Robinson’s presence on the field and who would do whatever they could to prevent the experiment or, failing that, try to make it an embarrassing disaster. “We can’t fight our way through this, Robinson,” Rickey intoned. “We’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side.” Robinson, always ready, if not eager, to fight discrimination wherever it appeared, did not understand. “Mr. Rickey,” he asked, “are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?” Rickey’s response made a deep impression on the young player sitting before him. “Robinson,” he said, “I’m looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.” And so Rickey made Robinson promise that, no matter how vile the taunts or actions of other players, he would simply turn the other cheek and focus on his performance on the field.
Robinson left the meeting “thrilled, scared and excited.” He had an offer to play for the Montreal Royals, a Dodger farm team, which included a $3,500 bonus and a salary of $600 a month. He not only had a new future. He now had the means to marry Rachel.
The wedding was held at Independent Church in Los Angeles on February 10, 1946. Two weeks later, the young couple traveled to Daytona Beach, Florida, for spring training (where they learned that they could not stay with the rest of the team at the hotel—which did not allow blacks—but had to share a nearby private home owned by blacks).
As Rickey had predicted, spring training was filled with tension. Some of it was hard to ignore—threats from anonymous sources of what would happen if Robinson showed up on the field, games that had to be canceled because the particular town did not allow blacks to play on the same field as whites, and epithets thrown at Robinson from the stands.
Rickey realized that the best way to overcome opposition was to show the Dodgers how valuable Robinson could be to the team, and he urged the former Monarch star to be as daring as he could be on the field. “Give it all you’ve got when you run,” said Rickey. “Gamble. Take a bigger lead.” Robinson was conscious of the need to succeed and did what he could—but the pressures were taking their toll. “I couldn’t sleep,” Robinson later recalled, “and often I couldn’t eat.” He and Rachel consulted a doctor, who thought that the young player might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.