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Jackie Robison left the army with mixed feelings. He was proud that he had graduated from Officers Candidate School to be commissioned a second lieutenant and that he had been successful in improving the equality of black soldiers at Fort Riley. At Camp Hood, he had done what he thought was right in standing against Jim Crow rules about moving to the back of the bus, and he was satisfied that the army had done the right thing in finding him not guilty in the resulting court-martial. He did not, however, ever express regrets about not joining his fellow officers and soldiers of the 761st Tank Battalion in their deployment to the European Theater and their valiant fight across Germany.
During the post-war years and during his baseball career, Jackie occasionally mentioned his service as an officer and his honorable discharge, but it was not until his autobiography in 1972 that he made any mention of his court-martial—and even then covered it in only a few brief pages.
Despite his downplay of his military service and his court-martial, both made a significant impression and impacted Jackie’s thoughts and future. He had learned that he could stand up to Jim Crow laws and use the system to fight bigotry and prejudices. That was a lofty and noble purpose, but it was not a job—nor did it provide an income.
November 1944 found Jackie unemployed and back with his mother on Pepper Street in Pasadena with his job skills only as a soldier or an athlete. He quickly decided to make use of the latter. He reconnected with contacts he had made in the army and in Los Angeles to rejoin the work-force. One of those was a man he had met before his taking leave from Camp Breckinridge when he had walked by a ball field and observed a black soldier throwing impressive curve balls to a friend. Jackie had stopped and introduced himself to Ted Alexander, who had played in the Negro Leagues for the Kansas City Monarchs before the war. Alexander had explained that, with many ballplayers called to active military duty, the Negro Leagues were looking for talent.
Jackie knew little about the Negro Leagues, it being doubtful that he had ever seen one of their games. Still, it sounded like a good job opportunity to him as well as the chance to play ball. With Alexander’s assistance, Jackie sent a letter to Thomas Y. Baird, who co-owned the Monarchs with founder J. L. Wilkinson. Baird expressed interest in Jackie and offered him $300 per month if he made the team. Jackie successfully countered for $400 and agreed to join the team in Houston for spring training in April.
The possibility of playing for the Monarchs held both positives and negatives for Jackie. On the good side, he had a job, and that job was playing baseball. On the bad, he would be on the road and away from California. Rachel remained in nursing school in San Francisco and was not happy with Jackie leaving again for a job halfway across the country. In her biography, she wrote, “The war forced us to endure long, painful separations. . . . I was in the last three years of my nursing program in San Francisco determined to graduate. . . . It was a strained engagement, at times putting our relationship to the most severe tests of loyalty and faith. But we remained steadfast despite temptations and the turmoil around us. In fact, I believe that having to struggle through those years helped us mature and prepare for our life together.”
Jackie’s and Rachel’s life as man and wife was not yet to begin, however. With time to fill between his discharge and spring training, Jackie sought out his former mentor from Los Angeles, Karl Downs, who was now the president of Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas. The two had visited while Jackie was at Camp Hood, and Jackie later credited Downs’s religious guidance for getting him through the ordeal of the court-martial. Now Downs offered Jackie a job as physical education instructor, and Jackie accepted, returning to Texas yet again.
Along with his religious and academic passions, Downs also was an activist for equal rights. His zeal influenced Jackie as well as his students. In an article in The Crisis, Downs criticized blacks for being “too timid” when confronting racial problems. He wrote, “The contemporary Negro students cannot hope to make any contributions to this cause unless they shake from their shoulders the shackles of timidity which have grown into their lives as a result of slavery’s influence.”
Samuel Huston College struggled with finances and a dwindling number of male students because of the war. However, assistance from the Methodist Church and Texas Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, a segregationist who supported black colleges in order to keep the institutions segregated, kept the school’s doors open.
Robinson organized physical education classes for all students and, despite the limited number of male students, fielded a basketball team in the all-black Southwestern Athletic Conference. In an Austin American Statesman article in 2014, former player Roland Harden recalled, “We were one of the few teams that ran all the time. He got out there with us and actually showed us what to do and was a better player than anybody on our team. Or anybody we played, really. And he was a gentleman. He required us to wear suits and ties when we got off the bus.”
Jackie stood up for his team the same way he had stood up for his rights all his life. Harden remembered, “I saw him go after officials when we were playing. He didn’t get ejected, but he would go to the breaking point.”
Despite his previous athletic accomplishments, Jackie remained modest. When he announced to the team after the season ended that he was leaving to join the Monarchs, his trainer Harold Adanandus, according to a 1997 interview, recalled saying, “Well, Jackie, I didn’t even know you played any baseball.” Robinson had responded, “Yeah, I play a little.”
Robinson got his chance to “play a little” immediately after joining the Monarchs in Houston. To his dismay, he found spring training not to be working on fundamentals but rather actually playing practice games. Three days after reporting to the team, Jackie was on a bus with the team for a game in San Antonio. On May 6, 1945, just as the war in Europe was coming to an end, the Monarchs opened their season in Kansas City.
The best part of playing with the Monarchs for Jackie was that he got to observe and learn from some of the finest players in the Negro Leagues. Jackie considered his monthly salary of $400 to be a “financial bonanza,” but he wrote in his autobiography that his time with the Monarchs had “turned out to be a pretty miserable way to make a buck.” There were also other aspects of being a Monarch that bothered Jackie. For one, a large part of the job was the travel that involved not only long bus rides but also Jim Crow laws that prevented the team’s staying in white hotels and eating in white restaurants. Most of their meals were delivered in paper bags out the back door of eating establishments and consumed on the bus. Robinson also did not like the personal habits of many of his fellow players who stayed out late at night drinking and chasing women.
Jackie played well enough to earn a spot in the 1945 East-West All-Star Game, but he was becoming more and more dissatisfied with playing in the Negro Leagues. There were stories in the press about the possibility of ending the Jim Crow barriers in baseball, but, as Jackie later wrote, “I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.” He added, “I began to wonder why I should dedicate my life to a career where the boundaries for progress were set by racial discrimination. Even more serious was my growing fear that I might lose Rae again. I began to sense in her letters that her patience was thinning. She had been hoping I’d settle down in California to work out our future. The way I was traveling we saw each other rarely. I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel?”
Robinson concluded, “The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.”