BY THE SUMMER OF 1920, THE GREAT WAR WAS A BAD MEMORY. Johnny had come marching home victorious. America was settling in to a joyous peace, gleefully entering the prosperous, anything goes Roaring Twenties—the age of short-skirted flappers, jazz, prohibition, bootleg whiskey, speakeasies, automobiles, and barnstorming pilots.
At seventeen, John Charles Robinson carried himself confidently with a warmth about him that made him immediately likeable. In 1974, looking back some fifty years, different contemporaries, including Miomi Godine, Osborne Barabino, and Teddy Collins, described him in these terms:
“Kind, good at sports. He played on our baseball team.”
“Johnny was the best at everything he did.”
“I wanted to be just like hm.”
“He was dependable, always there to help others, an all-around guy.”
“Johnny was serious sometimes, but when he laughed, there was honest joy in it shared by all around him.”
“He never started trouble, got along with everybody. He was a leader.”
Most Sundays, Johnny attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small building at the corner of Thirty-Second Avenue and Twenty-First Street. The minister of the AME church, Pastor Lanoa, was also John’s school principal. He recognized Johnny as an exceptional student and encouraged him to follow his parents’ desire for him to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
On a Sunday afternoon in late August of 1921, Johnny walked aimlessly down Thirty-First Avenue all the way to the beach road. The Gulf waters sparkled under a blue sky laced with fair weather clouds. The breeze filled his lungs with the clean, salty scent of the sea. Thoughts about leaving home for the first time weighed heavy. I’m gonna miss that water and the fishin’ and swimmin’ out there. Ain’t nothin’ like it up in north Alabama.
Johnny turned east toward town, paying attention to the surroundings as if seeing them for the first time . . . or the last. Leavin’ a place you know and love is harder than I reckoned now that it’s almost time to go. He passed the electric power plant at the foot of Thirtieth Avenue. Heavy black smoke billowed from the towering chimney. Behind the plant was the car barn where the town’s streetcars were maintained. To the south he could see the harbor filled with steamships and tall-masted sailing ships, most taking on loads of lumber, some loading cotton bales. Since the Great War, steamships were beginning to outnumber the graceful, tall-masted barks, brigantines, and schooners that called at the port. Streetcars were running back and forth out to the grand pavilion at the end of the East Pier. Sunday strollers dressed in their best moved along the boardwalk parallel to the streetcar and railroad tracks. Men wore hats and ladies carried parasols for protection from the sun. John passed the ice plant where blocks of ice were being loaded into insulated boxcars that would transport vegetables and oranges, gathered from the outlying farms, all the way to Chicago. Johnny picked up a chip of ice and chewed it as he walked east across the front lawn of the Great Southern Hotel that faced the Gulf.
At Twenty-Fifth Avenue, he turned north to the center of town. On Sunday afternoons he had always liked to go downtown to watch the increasing number of automobiles. They were beginning to replace horse-drawn buggies and wagons just as steamships were replacing those powered by sail. Miller Tire and Gasoline Store stood not far from Alexander Livery, Harness and Vehicle Company. There were even two motorcycles in town.
Johnny turned off Twenty-Fifth Avenue at the Parlor Drugstore and walked west on Fourteenth Street past a restaurant. Black people were not allowed in the dining room, but they could buy a meal if they went down the alley to the back door. He walked on past the Hewes Brothers Building, turned on Twenty-Seventh Avenue at the Inn Hotel and crossed over to Union Station where signs lettered “White Only” and “Colored Only” marked separate waiting rooms. The station was always a center of activity—locomotives moving through, wagons and trucks loading or unloading, people coming and going, some being picked up or let out by the station taxi that ran between the station and the Great Southern Hotel as well as to businesses downtown. Between the G&SI and the L&N railroads, some twenty-two trains a day now stopped at Gulfport, passenger trains at the station and freight trains that rumbled onto sidings alongside loading docks. The air was heavy with the mingled odors of steam, burning coal, and heavily oiled machinery.
Soon it’s gonna be my turn to get on one of those trains and leave this town. It’s a good town with mostly good folks. Ain’t been no trouble like I hear there’s been in the Delta.
Johnny knew that he would have to leave the comfort of the familiar behind, and the thought troubled him. He had never been further out of Gulfport than Biloxi to the east and Pass Christian to the west. He was tall, black, leaving home, and a little afraid.
The September day he left for Tuskegee, Celeste Cobb packed Johnny’s freshly washed and pressed clothes into a small worn trunk, the same one she had used when she traveled from Carrabelle, Florida, to Gulfport so many years ago. Just before closing the trunk, she tucked in a small Bible and a little extra house money she had been saving. Then she went to the kitchen and put sandwiches, cookies, a polished red apple, and a Mason jar, filled with iced sweet tea and wrapped in newspaper for insulation, into a brown paper bag.
“Charles,” she called. “We better go. He can’t miss his train.”
Celeste and Charles Cobb, Pastor Lanoa, and many of Johnny’s friends walked to Union Station with him. For all of them, this was a big occasion. He was one of only two young black men in town leaving for college.
Celeste hugged him. “I’m gonna miss you, baby. You be good and write to us, you hear?”
His father shook his hand. “Do the best you can, son. I know we’ll be proud of you.”
John, dressed in a new suit, shirt, and tie, pushed his trunk up onto the landing and climbed the iron steps of the coach, the one marked reserved for colored only. He waved from an open window as the train pulled out of the station.
“You can cry now, Momma,” Charles Cobb said as he wiped the corners of his eyes. He offered his arm to Celeste. The two of them turned to walk home.
“Our boy is leaving, but I’m so proud we’re sending him to college. You a good man, Charles Cobb.”
They crossed the tracks silently, arm and arm, Charles limping on his bad leg, Celeste in her best go-to-meeting dress.
John Robinson watched the countryside slide by as he gazed out the open train window. The Colored Only coach was at the front of the train just behind the baggage and mail cars. A little more soot and smoke from the engine filtered through the open windows into the front car set aside for blacks, but John didn’t think much about the dirt and grime collecting on the window sill. He liked being up front where he could hear a great, rumbling symphony—the rhythmic puffing of steam driving the piston rods, the great steel driving wheels click-clacking over rail joints, the whistle sounding at crossings. It was fire and steam, steel and motion, and it took his mind off leaving home and the anxiety of what lay ahead.
John had read about Tuskegee. He knew the school was founded by a man born a slave in Virginia, a man who at age sixteen walked almost five hundred miles to get an education at Hampton Institute in 1872. The man was Booker Taliaferro Washington. In 1881 he opened a school with thirty pupils in a church. Because of him, Johnny was on his way to that school that had grown into Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Booker T. Washington died in 1915, but an equally famous man was a resident professor there. His name was George Washington Carver whose research in agricultural chemistry resulted in his election as a fellow in the Royal Society of Arts in London, an honor only a handful of Americans had earned at the time.
Watching the scenery slide past his open window, John saw an automobile turn off a rutted farm road onto the clay-gravel highway running parallel to the railroad tracks. It was a cut-down Model T. The auto had no top and the windscreen was folded down flat. The goggled driver, bent low over the steering wheel, tore off down the road to race the highballing locomotive. He was giving it all he had, kicking up a swirling trail of dust and scattering chickens along the way. Ever so slowly the train pulled away.
Won’t be long before automobiles be outrunning this train. Robinson leaned out the window and waved.
Johnny’s daddy had told him that now that the war was over, the automobile was the coming thing. John believed him. And though he did not mention it, he believed something else was coming too. Airplanes! Yes! He had seen more than a few flying down the coast the last two or three years. At Tuskegee, John paid his entrance fee of two hundred dollars plus eighteen dollars for the first month’s fee for room and board due the first of every month during the school year.
At the time, these fees represented about thirty percent of the yearly average income (twelve hundred dollars) for a steadily employed, skilled male worker.
John’s dormitory roommate was Joseph Flowers. In an interview in 1974, Mr. Flowers stated that John was a top student. “We had fun at the occasional social activities at the college.” When asked if John partied at school, Mr. Flowers said, “John was a dancer, liked the girls, but I never saw him drink or smoke.” He also said there was a very short Christmas break at Tuskegee and that most students remained on campus. “We didn’t have the money to pay for travel home. We hardly had money to give each other presents. I think I spent a dollar and ninety-five cents on a book to give Johnny. When either of us got a package from home, cookies and things, we shared them. Money was tight but Tuskegee was a wonderful place. Everyone was friendly, and there was never any trouble. I think everyone loved it.”
John chose to study a new technology: automotive mechanical science. After the Great War, automobiles were all the rage. Only the wealthy were able to afford the expensive, powerful, handmade brands, but Henry Ford, with his revolutionary assembly line and Model T, made the automobile available to the average working middle class. In a relatively short time, the automobile industry had become the largest in the United States. By 1921 there were well over seven million automobiles registered in the United States with the largest concentration in the big cities.
John traveled to his college by steam engine and, for the last several miles, by a mule-drawn wagon. By the time he graduated, three years later, he and his classmates had studied mechanical theory, internal combustion engines, automotive electrics, mechanical drawing, and they had assembled a real automobile, rebuilding the engine, chassis, transmission, drive-train, suspension, and electrics. In addition to their chosen trade, all students studied mathematics, English literature, composition, and history.
An average student in English, Robinson had a natural mechanical ability that distinguished him from most of the other students. Although he finished near the top of his class in mechanical science, he was so quiet and serious at school that years later some of his classmates had a hard time remembering John C. Robinson until they saw his picture in the newspapers. It can be said that young ladies didn’t have as hard a time remembering John. Most took note of the tall, quiet student from Gulfport. His shy but self-confident manner and winning smile would not only serve him well in business, but would also charm the ladies, young and old alike.
During the summers, John worked for Mr. Simpson at the ship chandlery and saved his pay to help his parents with his next year’s school expenses. Still, he wasn’t all work. There were social activities and dances where the young people got together. One girl in particular caught Johnny’s eye. Her name was Janette Sullivan. She was a pretty Creole young lady from Pass Christian. Janette played jazz piano so well she became a member of the Tuxedo Band, which performed along the coast and even in New Orleans. She and John would remain friends throughout his life. On his occasional trips home, she always brought him a chocolate cake, his favorite.
On a wonderful day in 1924, a proud Celeste and Charles Cobb sat in the audience to watch their boy graduate from Tuskegee. They had worked hard for this day and John knew it. His mother cried happy tears. His daddy felt a little taller and limped a little less when he walked up to John, put his arm around him, and said, “Son, no man has ever been more proud of his boy than I am of you today.” His parents had every reason to be proud. What they didn’t know was that there were very few men, young or old, white or black, who knew more about the workings and intricacies of automobiles and internal combustion engines than their son.
They all returned to Gulfport that summer of 1924. John was glad to be home. His mother’s gumbo, pies, collard greens, and ham tasted even better than he remembered. It was good to see his friends, including Janette, but the longer he stayed, the more restless he became. He would leave the house in the morning, come home for lunch, and leave again in the afternoon. Charles Cobb could see that something was troubling him; John talked less and less.
One day Charles asked his son to sit with him out on the porch. Celeste brought out two big glasses of sweet iced tea and then returned to her kitchen. Charles took a sip of tea and opened the conversation.“You did so fine at school and now you’re sitting in the right seat. The streets are beginning to fill up with automobiles, especially those Model T Fords. There’s gonna be plenty of work for an automobile mechanic.”
“That’s right, Daddy, but not for me, not here in Mississippi.”
Charles glanced up quickly. “Why, son, there’s more than three garages here in town.”
“And I’ve talked to every one of ’em and to the ones in Biloxi, too. That’s what I’ve been doing all day every day: going up and down the whole coast looking for a job. They’ll give me a job sweeping, filling gas tanks, changing tires, or washing, but I’m an engine man. All the automobiles belong to white folks. When I talk to the garage owners about automotive science they smile, look at each other, and then look at me like I belong behind a mule with a plow. The last thing they want is a black man knowing more ’bout automobiles than they do. I just don’t think I’m gonna get the chance here at home to do what I know I can do.” He spoke quietly, telling the facts as he saw them, the truth as he understood it. “I could work full time for Mr. Simpson, but that’s not what I went to school for.”
“Son,” Charles replied, “me and you are colored, can’t change that, but there are some good white folks here that will give you a chance if you’ll just give ’em a little time to recognize what you know, what you can do. I don’t exactly sweep floors over at the railroad shop. You know that. And your Momma and I haven’t done too bad. We own this house, don’t owe but a little on it. We educated you and your sister.”
John’s sister was now a well-regarded teacher.
“I know, Daddy. I’m grateful to you, and more proud of you and Momma than you can ever know. But I want my own business one day, and I can’t do it down here. How many blacks here have cars? How long would it take for whites to take their business to a black man, leave a white business for a black man’s garage?” There was no answer from his father. “I’m going to Detroit, Daddy. That’s the center of automobile science. There’s a friend from school I can stay with till I get started.” John reached over and laid his hand on his father’s knee. “You gonna help me tell Momma?”
Charles Cobb stood up. “I been helping you tell your Momma things for a long time, son. I guess we better go on in and tell her together.”