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Fortunately for him, Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, into a strong family—at least on his maternal side. As the fifth of five children born to Mallie McGriff and Jerry Robinson, Jackie had older brothers Frank, Mack, and Edgar and sister Willa Mae to look out for him. Mallie’s father and mother—Jackie’s maternal grandparents—Washington McGriff and his wife Edna Sims, had been born slaves but did well after being freed. They lived on twelve acres they owned just south of Cairo in southwestern Georgia. Illiterate themselves but wise, the McGriffs emphasized education for their children. Mallie, the seventh of fourteen children, went to the local colored school through the sixth grade and, at age ten, taught her father how to read so he could study his Bible.
Cairo—pronounced “Cayro”—Georgia, founded in 1835 and later the county seat of Grady County, had a population in 1919 of about 1,900, 45 percent of whom were African Americans. (Historical Perspective 2.)
Jerry Robinson, Jackie’s father and the eldest of eleven children, worked in the fields on a cotton farm owned by James Madison Sasser. His father Tony—Jackie’s paternal grandfather—had crossed the border from the Florida panhandle in his youth and worked his entire life on the Sasser plantation. Neither Tony nor his wife could read or write.
Mallie McGriff and the handsome Jerry Robinson met at a Christmas dance in 1906 when she was only fourteen years old and he eighteen. They began to see each other, but the McGriffs disapproved of Jerry, not only for his age but also for what they considered his being a shabby prospect. They much preferred the son of a family who had come to Georgia from South Carolina and lived in the best tenant house on the Sasser farm. However, love trumped her parents’ wishes and three years later Mallie married Jerry on November 21, 1909.
Jerry and Mallie moved into one of Sasser’s tenant houses and went to work for the landowner at $12 a month. The couple was happy in the early months of their marriage as Jerry labored in the fields and Mallie tended a garden and took care of the house. Mallie, whose parents had taught her to plan and prepare for the future, was to understand that there was little future on $12 a month—especially since Sasser insisted that most of the income be spent at his company store.
Sasser differed little from Georgia landowners at the time, expecting the tenants’ low wages to be spent at his facility, and he discouraged any kind of public meetings where they might organize. As a result, just as it had been in slave days, the church was one of the few places blacks could gather, worship, and socialize. During the Red Summer of 1919 and other periods of racial unrest, even these places became targets for burning and destruction.
Swine killing time in the fall also revealed Sasser’s ideas on equality and further reinforced Mallie’s thought that they were “not living high on the hog.” The Robinsons and other black workers received only the scraps—feet, internal organs, and intestines for chitterlings.
Mallie believed that their present lives were not far removed from slavery and voiced her opinion to her husband and his employer. Both whites and blacks feared Sasser—a tall, powerful, rawboned man—but Mallie stood up to him and insisted that they become sharecroppers rather than working for wages. Sasser was not happy with the proposal but, because of the labor shortage, agreed to provide housing, land, seed, and fertilizer in return for one-half of the Robinson’s crop.
The Robinsons prospered as sharecroppers—raising cotton, peanuts, corn, sugar cane, and potatoes and owning their own hogs, turkeys, and chickens. Mallie later recalled that she was happy with her life and lived the way she wanted to live. Jerry, however, tired of farm life and had a “roving eye” for other women. Three times he left Mallie and the farm only to return, usually after his money ran out. The couple would reconcile, have another baby, and then repeat the cycle.
Surviving family members today have conflicting opinions as to whether Jackie was born in his parents’ home or that of his grandparents. All are in agreement that Dr. Arthur Brown Reynolds, a white physician, attended the birth. Of her five births, Jackie’s was the only one assisted by a medical doctor. Apparently, the community’s black midwives had either died or were ill from the Spanish flu, which was epidemic at the time. (Historical Perspective 3.)
The Robinsons chose Roosevelt as Jack’s middle name to honor Teddy Roosevelt, the U.S. president from 1901 to 1909 who had charged up San Juan and Kettle Hills in the Spanish-American War supported by—and some say saved by—a black regiment on his flank. Roosevelt had been a great supporter of equal rights for African Americans, particularly during his first term. Pressure from white racists during his second term made him more conservative but he did condemn lynchings as well as oppose the segregation policies of President Wilson. Roosevelt died on January 6, 1919, and, with the birth of Jackie three weeks later, the Robinsons thought Roosevelt to be an appropriate middle name.
For his first eighteen months, baby Jackie lived with his parents in their tenant home. It is likely that he had little contact with whites, and he was too young to be aware of the racism and poverty that surrounded him in Southern Georgia. Jackie’s arrival did little to help the deteriorating relationship between Jerry and Mallie with Jerry spending more and more time in Cairo, where it had become fairly common knowledge that he was having an affair with the married daughter of the respected Powell family who farmed land adjacent to that of Sasser.
On July 28, 1919, in the middle of cotton-growing season, Jerry told Mallie that he was going to Texas to visit a brother. Despite her suspicions, Mallie and the children bid him goodbye. They would never see him again. Rumors came to Mallie that Jerry had taken a northbound train rather than one to the west. Another rumor said he was working in a sawmill in Florida and the Powell daughter was with him. By the early 1930s when Mallie received a telegram from one of Jerry’s relatives saying that he was dead, his demise had little effect on the family. Jack’s older brother Mack, who was in high school when the telegram arrived, later recalled that it had been so long since they had seen or heard from their father that his passing “wasn’t traumatic for us; we had no recognition of him.”
Jackie was too young to have any memories of his father or even remember the telegram’s arrival. In a Personal History Statement that he completed during Basic Training at Fort Riley, Kansas, years later, Jackie erroneously wrote that his father had died sometime around 1922 of natural causes.
After Jerry’s departure from Georgia, Mallie had to determine how she was going to support her five children, especially because James Sasser was not happy to have lost one of his sharecroppers but still have his family living on his land and in his tenant house. He offered to have the county sheriff find Jerry and return him home, but Mallie refused. She also turned down a job as the Sasser family cook. Sasser told her, “You’re about the sassiest nigger woman ever on this place.” He then evicted her and the children from the tenant house to a much smaller, poorly maintained cabin.
With help from relatives, Mallie managed to gather their final crop and then found a job working for a nearby white family. By the end of the winter of 1920, Mallie realized how bleak life looked in Georgia. Race relations had worsened instead of improving after the Red Summer of 1919. The Ku Klux Klan became larger and more active. Poll taxes and literacy requirements, combined with intimidation, prevented most blacks from exercising their right to vote. Other Jim Crow laws limited almost every aspect of their lives. A black farmer in southern Georgia was more like a serf in medieval Europe than a free person in America. And a black woman with five mouths to feed was several notches lower yet.
Mallie’s opportunity to escape the prejudices and poverty came when her half-brother arrived from California in the spring of 1920. Burton Thomas, son of Edna McGriff from a marriage previous to Monroe Thomas, had moved to southern California after serving in World War I and was a great advocate of the region. He often said, “If you want to get closer to Heaven, visit California.”
Mallie decided not to visit California but rather to move there. Mallie gathered up what funds she could—a little money from the last crop, a few dollars saved from her domestic job with the white family, some relatives’ contributions, and perhaps a little extra from her white employer who sympathized with her situation. She also convinced relatives to join her who were willing to gamble on a better life in California—her sister Cora Wade, brother-in-law Samuel, and their two children; her brother Paul McGriff; and Mary Lou Thomas Maxwell, Mallie’s half-sister and full sister of Burton Thomas.
Mallie and her extended family were not the only blacks in Georgia seeking freedom from the Jim Crow south. In 1920 alone, approximately 50,000 African Americans had joined the Great Migration in search of better paying jobs and a greater degree of freedom in the industrialized Midwest, North, and West Coast. The threat of the loss of cheap labor so disturbed southern whites that Macon and other towns in Georgia organized special police units to prevent blacks from moving away, using intimidation, beatings, and physical removal from trains. Like their neighboring counterparts, the white citizens of Cairo did not like the exit of their cheap workforce but took no action to prevent their exodus. On May 21, 1920, Mallie took her children and a few pieces of luggage in a borrowed buggy to Cairo where she met up with the rest of the relocating family members. At the scheduled time on the departure date, around midnight, the Number 58 train arrived. Mallie, carrying 16-month-old Jackie, and her mobile children—Edgar, 11; Frank, 9; Mack, 7; and Willa Mae, 5—boarded the dirty, segregated colored coach. With her entire fortune of $3.00 sewn into her undergarments, Mallie was undaunted by the conditions of the Jim Crow railcar. For the rest of her life, she called the railroad journey her “Freedom Train.”
With virtually no money, the family ate what Mallie had packed at home for the trip and endured the hardships of the long train ride that took them across the Deep South and through the widest portion of Texas where rail stations had separate bathrooms and water fountains for whites and blacks. None of the Robinsons had any idea at the time, the role that Texas would play in baby Jackie’s future.
Happily, the Robinsons’ train took them on to Southern California—through Los Angeles and to Pasadena. Orange groves and the clean, prosperous towns so impressed Mallie that she wrote home that it was “the most beautiful sight of my whole life.”
Burton had done well by Georgia standards, but he nevertheless remained on the low end of poverty by California norms. The group from Cairo moved into his three-room, cold-water-only apartment near the railroad station. A tin tub served both as a kitchen sink and bath. Cora, who was not in good health, kept the children, while Mallie looked for work. She soon secured a job as a maid to a white family with wages of $8.00 per week. Unlike Georgia, she was not required to work into the evening but rather returned home to her family in the late afternoons.
Mallie’s new position did not last long because her employer lost his job and moved away. Within days, however, she found a similar domestic job with another white family named Dodges with whom she developed mutual respect and trust. Mallie remained in their employment for the next twenty years.
With increased money coming in, the Georgia group, as well as Burton Thomas, relocated out of the cramped apartment and into a separate house with a backyard. The house to which they moved was located at 45 Glorieta Street in northwest Pasadena. Mallie had managed to land her family in a place where the streets were lined with citrus and palm trees and where a significant portion of the area’s small black population lived peacefully with its primarily white citizens.
Although Pasadena was far from southern Georgia, prejudices and oppression were a part of life for blacks living in southern California. Still, in its early years, Pasadena remained tolerate of blacks—partly because of Indiana abolitionists who had founded the town but mostly simply because there were few African American residents. The more blacks who arrived, however, the more restrictions whites wanted to place on them. (Historical Perspective 4.)
The first black in Pasadena had been a teamster who drove a head of cattle from Nebraska to Southern California in 1883. He stayed, bought a vineyard, and sent for his family. When the Robinsons arrived in 1920, African Americans numbered about 1,100 of the city’s total population of 45,000. Blacks were not the only ones who suffered prejudices, for Chinese, Japanese, and Hispanic residents also encountered limitations. While there were no specific areas in which minorities were officially to reside, there were many parts of Pasadena where they were not allowed. Nearby towns of South Pasadena, Eagle Rock, and San Marino did not allow African Americans to be employed as domestics. By cutting off jobs usually filled by blacks, the cities naturally limited the number of African American residents. Glendale boasted that not a single Negro lived in their city limits.
Segregation increased rather than decreased with the passage of years. From the time of its founding in 1873 until Jackie Robinson departed for the army in the 1940s, Pasadena did not employ a single black policeman, fireman, schoolteacher, or city government official other than a few park and refuse workers.
The city also limited access to its public facilities with the best, or perhaps the worst, example being admittance to the city’s only public swimming pool. When blacks and some white residents protested that the city restricted use of the Brookside Plunge in Brookside Park to “whites only,” city officials initiated an “International Day” when the pool was open to everyone for one day of the week. This small gesture diminished with the city’s promise to its white citizens that the pool would be drained and filled with “clean water” at the end of each International Day.
Thus was the backdrop for Jackie’s formative years. Life was not easy during those first years in California for the Robinsons. In addition to living in the cramped apartment, the family often found food in short supply. Mallie received some welfare aid from the state, and her employer allowed her to take home the leftovers from meals. Still, the family frequently went hungry. The older children remember meals where the only food on the table was bread and sugar water.
There is no doubt that times were hard for the Robinsons, as they were for other blacks and many whites at the time. In later years, journalists and biographers emphasized Jackie’s impoverished childhood as harsh and as poor as possible to reinforce his rags to riches stories. While his early years were tough, there is no doubt that his life in Pasadena was far better than it would have been if his family had remained in Georgia.
Despite the prejudices and restrictions of Pasadena, Mallie and her extended family, through hard work and dedication, thrived in California. By 1922, Mallie had managed to put aside sufficient funds to join Sam and Cora Wade in the joint purchase of a home at 121 Pepper Street on a previously all-white block just north of Glorieta Street. Family lore claims that a black real estate agent used his light-skinned niece as a front to buy the home and then selling it to Mallie and the Wades. However, local tax records show that two men, Charles R. Ellis and William H. Harrison bought the home in 1905 and sold it to Mallie Robinson and Sam Wade in 1922.
Regardless of how they acquired the home, the Robinsons and Wades soon found that their white neighbors did not welcome their extended black family. Initially other residents on the street offered to buy out Mallie and Sam. Later someone burned a cross on their yard, and neighbors called the police when they thought the Robinson children made too much noise. Having come so far, Mallie was unwilling to be sidetracked by such diversions. She set out to win her neighbors’ favor—if not their trust and friendship. She had her son Edgar do chores at no cost for the wealthiest person on the block who lived next door. Mallie also shared the fruits of her garden with her neighbors and, with the passage of time, found the acceptance she sought for herself and her children. Eventually, additional minority families moved onto Pepper Street.
After a couple of years, the Wades bought another home, leaving what Mallie called “the castle” to the Robinsons alone. Its five bedrooms offered space for all, and its backyard provided plenty of room for apple, orange, peach, and fig trees as well as a vegetable garden and pens for chickens, ducks, and turkeys. Most of the grounds were used for food production, but Mallie also raised flowers to beautify their home.
Mallie maintained her ties to Georgia and assisted several family members and friends in making their way west. When her father died in 1927, she helped bring her mother to Pasadena to live with her and later with the Wades. Jackie was fourteen when Edna McGriff died on July 25, 1933. For the rest of his life, Edna represented his ties to the Old South and to slavery as he listened to her stories that included explanations of the differences between a Negro and a nigger that he would quote at his military court-martial many years later.
During his life, Jackie Robinson had many mentors and supporters, the most important of whom were those during his coming of age in Pasadena. Mallie instilled in her children the importance of family, education, and religion. She emphasized courtesy, self-discipline, and standing up for what is right.
Not all was perfect at home or in Pasadena, however. After being apprehended for a minor infraction, the local police took Jackie and several friends to the station where they questioned them while denying them water for four hours. Finally, they brought in watermelons so they could laughingly take stereotypical pictures as the boys devoured the fruit. Jackie later recalled the incident as the “most humiliating day of my life.”
Not happy in Pasadena, Jackie felt as if he did not belong there. Years later he said, “If my mother and brother and sister weren’t living in Pasadena, I would never go back. I’ve always felt like an intruder there—even in school. People in Pasadena were less understanding in some ways than Southerners, and they were more openly hostile.”
After the Wades moved out of the Pepper Street home, Mallie turned to Willa Mae to look after Jackie while she was at work. Although only three years older, Willa Mae saw to it that her baby brother had something to eat, and that he mostly stayed out of trouble. When Willa Mae started kindergarten at Grover Cleveland Elementary, Mallie had her take Jackie along with her. Willa Mae placed her brother in the school yard sandbox, instructed him not to wander off, and went to class. The school’s teachers were not happy with the arrangement until Mallie met with them and explained that, if Jackie had to stay home, she would have to quit her job to take care of him. She would then have to go on relief, and, she said, it would be cheaper for the city to just let him come to school and play. Mallie then taught Jackie to say “Good morning, teacher,” hoping that his charm and Willa Mae’s responsible oversight would convince the teachers to allow the arrangement to continue.
After a year in the sandbox, Jackie returned to the school as a student. Then in 1926, two years afterward, Pasadena rezoned its school districts, placing the Robinson children in the Washington School system, which was a closer walk from Pepper Street. Jackie attended that elementary program and then graduated from Washington Junior High where he excelled at all sports but did not take his studies very seriously. He made mostly B’s and C’s—with more C’s than B’s as the years passed. Instead of studying, he preferred to play any game or sport available. His fellow students recall his great athletic abilities but also remember him to be so competitive and dedicated to winning that, no matter what the game, he was not very likable. When not engaged in sports, he mostly remained a loner.
Although Pasadena schools were integrated, all of Jackie’s teachers were white. Two of them, Bernice Gilbert and Beryl Haney, especially liked what they saw in the young Jackie. Besides often providing him lunch, they developed an affection and friendship with him. Jackie and the two teachers maintained contact long after he became famous and no longer lived in Pasadena.
One of Jackie’s earliest bad memories of Pepper Street occurred when, at eight years old, he was sweeping the front sidewalk of his home, and a neighbor girl shouted from across the street, “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Too young to remember real discrimination when he left Georgia, Jackie was especially vulnerable to the prejudices and slights he received from the residents of Pasadena. Even small infraction made lasting impressions. Jackie and his friends, limited to one day in the public pool, often went swimming in the municipal reservoir. One day the police caught them and, with guns drawn, one of them shouted, “Looka there—niggers swimming in our drinking water!”
When not at school or playing sports, Jackie worked to supplement the family income as soon as he was old enough. He had a paper route, mowed lawns, and ran errands. In his free time, Jackie joined a group called the Pepper Street Gang. Composed of neighborhood blacks, Mexicans, and Japanese kids, the gang never committed vicious or violent crimes but got into more than their share of mischief, such as stealing fruit from street stands and orchards. The enterprising youths also stole golf balls from the local links hazards and then sold them back to the players.
In his biography, Jackie wrote that he “might have become a full-fledged juvenile delinquent if it had not been for the influence of two men who shared my mother’s thinking.” These two black men not only served as mentors, but also they were as close to father figures as Jackie had in his life. Carl Anderson, who worked as an automobile mechanic in a garage in the Pepper Street Gang’s neighborhood, did not scold Jackie but rather pointed out how his crimes hurt his mother as well as himself. He also suggested to Jackie that he would get nowhere by following the crowd and that he should have the courage and intelligence to be his own man. Jackie wrote, “I was too ashamed to tell Carl how right he was, but what he said got to me.”
The second man, Reverend Karl Downs, led the Scott United Methodist Church where Mallie had her children in the pews every Sunday morning. Jackie, who had not cared much for church until Downs arrived and initiated special programs for children, became so involved with the church and Reverend Downs that he quit hanging out with the Pepper Street Gang and even began teaching a Sunday School class. Jackie later wrote, “It wasn’t so much what he did to help as the fact that he was interested and concerned enough to offer the best advice he could.”
In addition to Anderson and Downs, Jackie’s three older brothers were the other primary male influences on him. His eldest brother, Edgar, had a strange relationship with Jackie—and with everyone else, for that matter. Edgar was somewhat mentally challenged, but he loved speed—on roller skates, bicycles, or motorcycles. Jackie later wrote about Edgar, “There was always something about him that was mysterious to me.” He added that the primary trait they shared was the way each, on occasion, would get angry and lose his temper.
Perhaps the greatest impact Edgar had on Jackie was not what he did but rather what was done to him. At the Rose Bowl Parade on January 2, 1939, Edgar set several chairs along the route to watch the festivities. Two policemen arrived to tell Edgar that he had to have a permit for the chairs. When he showed the officers that he had the required license, they muttered something about Negroes not having the kind of money necessary to buy a permit. They then beat him and arrested him for violating a city ordinance and for resisting arrest. Eyes blackened and arms bruised, Edgar received no medical treatment nor could he call home. The police did not release him until he pled guilty and paid a fine. Later efforts by Edgar and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to protest the incident were ignored. To Jackie the beating and arrest of his brother were just more examples of racism that exacerbated his bad feelings about Pasadena. There would be more cause for negative feelings as another brother reached adulthood.
Of his three male siblings, Frank showed the most concern for his little brother. Jack later recalled that Frank was mild and sweet-tempered but that “he was always there to protect me when I was in a scrap, even though I don’t think he could knock down a fly.”
Frank served as a good model for Jackie in showing him how to stay out of trouble by talking through conflicts rather than getting angry. He also demonstrated to Jackie that no matter how hard a black man worked, it was difficult for him to get ahead in Jim Crow Pasadena because the only employment Frank could find was lawn maintenance and tree trimming. He had so much difficulty making a living that he still lived at home with his mother even after he married and became a father.
It was Mack, his older brother by four and a half years, who had the greatest influence on Jackie. Mack excelled in track and field to set several Pasadena broad jump and the 200-meter-sprint high school records. Jackie attended all his brother’s meets and, for the first time, saw the adoration and attention given sports stars. Despite a heart murmur, Mack continued training after high school and earned a place on the 1936 U.S. Olympic Team. In that year’s games, held in Berlin, Adolf Hitler walked out of the stadium after African American Jesse Owens won the 100-meter dash, besting the Nazi leader’s Aryans. Hitler was not there later to see Mack come in a close second to Owens in the 200-meter dash, earning the Silver Medal.
Mack noted that the U.S. Olympic officials segregated white and black athletes in different hotels. He also said that the local Germans treated him better and with more respect than the whites back in Pasadena and that he received no reception or parade welcoming him home. A columnist in the Pasadena Post wrote in 1938 about Mack’s Olympic performance and the rising local fame of Jackie. The piece said, “In many places they would be given the key to the city. Here we take them in stride, for granted. Never have they received their just due, from their own home citizens.”
After the Olympics, Mack enrolled in the University of Oregon where he helped the school win national collegiate and Amateur Athletic Union track titles. He dropped out of the university in his senior year to return home to support his family. In addition to not receiving recognition in Pasadena for his Olympic silver medal, Mack also faced the city’s same Jim Crow restrictions in employment. When he applied for a job with the municipal services, officials gave him a broom and pushcart, assigning him duties of a night shift street sweeper. On cold nights he often wore his leather U.S.A. Olympic Team jacket. When a judge ordered Pasadena to integrate its public swimming pool, the city retaliated by firing all its black employees, including Mack. Pasadena eventually rehired Mack, but he continued in minimal maintenance positions.
When Mack’s wife gave birth in 1940 to their second son, who was mentally disabled and could not speak, the couple prepared to place the child in an institution. Mallie stepped forward and said she would care for the boy and took him into her home. With Mack, as well as Jackie and all her children, Mallie remained the family’s greatest protector, supporter, and influence. In the meantime, Jackie watched how the members of his family fared.