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Authors: Arnold Rampersad
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remembered Morgan coming to the house often, but not only to scold Jack; Mallie recalled going downto his office “often” to bawl him out, as she put it, when she thought he was too hard on the boys. “I think he did a good job at really keeping things in hand,” Ray Bartlett judged (he would become Pasadena’s second black police officer), “and actually pointed kids in the right direction.” Despite a bad habit of quietly urging members of each ethnic group to avoid members of the other ethnic groups as being beneath them, he carefully avoided showing racial prejudice. In 1939, as protests grew over Jim Crow at the Brookside Plunge and segregation in housing, he publicly defended young blacks in Pasadena against the charge that they posed any special problem as delinquents.
Morgan was one of several male figures of authority, especially his coaches, to whom Jack responded well, as a good son might to his father, even as he muddled through his adolescence. Another such person was a black man named Carl Anderson, who challenged Jack to move beyond the inanities of the Pepper Street Gang. “He made me see,” Robinson later wrote, “that if I continued with the gang it would hurt my mother as well as myself.… He said it didn’t take guts to follow the crowd, that courage and intelligence lay in being willing to be different. I was too ashamed to tell Carl how right he was, but what he said got to me.” Only seven years older than Jack, Anderson worked as a car mechanic near the intersection of Mountain and Morton, where members of the Pepper Street Gang often loitered. As one of the unofficial leaders of the local black community, he tried hard to undo the psychological damage done to black youngsters by Jim Crow. When the local Boy Scouts refused to integrate their units, Anderson founded the first black troop in northwest Pasadena. “He also organized a special group for us kids, that he called the Friendly Indians,” Sid Heard remembered. “We’d go over to his house every Friday night and listen to him tell stories and the like. He really liked young people.”
With each passing year, the cheering Jack heard at football and baseball games contrasted poorly with the pain of knowing what it meant to be black in Pasadena. At first, as a boy, he took Jim Crow in his stride; then he began to see and feel more intensely. “I always thought Pasadena was a great place,” he recalled, “until I got more experience of life.” One episode involved the YMCA, which had fine sports facilities but refused blacks as members, and stalled and frustrated Jack when he applied for membership. Another was the Brookside Plunge: “During hot spells, you waited outside the picket fence and watched the white kids splash around. I honestly think the officials didn’t think the Negroes got as warm and uncomfortable as white people during the Pasadena heat.” Jim Crow dogged him in the movie houses, where blacks were forced to sit in one section only. At the Pasadena Playhouse, empty seats, if available, quarantined black patrons from whites. “At the Kress soda fountain, you could sit at the counter and wait and wait and no one would serve you,” one friend would recall. “The same thing at Schrafft’s. You could work in the kitchen, but you couldn’t eat there, at least not without a hassle.”
The veteran Los Angeles
Times
sports journalist Shav Glick, who as a fellow Pasadena Junior College student would cover Jack’s exploits for the Pasadena
Post
for some years in the 1930s, wrote in 1977: “The Robinson the world came to know, competitive and combative, aggressive and abrasive, impatient and irascible, was tempered on the streets, the schoolgrounds and theplaying fields of Pasadena.” But Glick stressed that this process of tempering went on inside, and was kept inside, by Robinson. The face Jack presented to the world, especially after high school, was on the whole calm. And then, as well as later, he almost
Morgan was one of several male figures of authority, especially his coaches, to whom Jack responded well, as a good son might to his father, even as he muddled through his adolescence. Another such person was a black man named Carl Anderson, who challenged Jack to move beyond the inanities of the Pepper Street Gang. “He made me see,” Robinson later wrote, “that if I continued with the gang it would hurt my mother as well as myself.… He said it didn’t take guts to follow the crowd, that courage and intelligence lay in being willing to be different. I was too ashamed to tell Carl how right he was, but what he said got to me.” Only seven years older than Jack, Anderson worked as a car mechanic near the intersection of Mountain and Morton, where members of the Pepper Street Gang often loitered. As one of the unofficial leaders of the local black community, he tried hard to undo the psychological damage done to black youngsters by Jim Crow. When the local Boy Scouts refused to integrate their units, Anderson founded the first black troop in northwest Pasadena. “He also organized a special group for us kids, that he called the Friendly Indians,” Sid Heard remembered. “We’d go over to his house every Friday night and listen to him tell stories and the like. He really liked young people.”
With each passing year, the cheering Jack heard at football and baseball games contrasted poorly with the pain of knowing what it meant to be black in Pasadena. At first, as a boy, he took Jim Crow in his stride; then he began to see and feel more intensely. “I always thought Pasadena was a great place,” he recalled, “until I got more experience of life.” One episode involved the YMCA, which had fine sports facilities but refused blacks as members, and stalled and frustrated Jack when he applied for membership. Another was the Brookside Plunge: “During hot spells, you waited outside the picket fence and watched the white kids splash around. I honestly think the officials didn’t think the Negroes got as warm and uncomfortable as white people during the Pasadena heat.” Jim Crow dogged him in the movie houses, where blacks were forced to sit in one section only. At the Pasadena Playhouse, empty seats, if available, quarantined black patrons from whites. “At the Kress soda fountain, you could sit at the counter and wait and wait and no one would serve you,” one friend would recall. “The same thing at Schrafft’s. You could work in the kitchen, but you couldn’t eat there, at least not without a hassle.”
The veteran Los Angeles
Times
sports journalist Shav Glick, who as a fellow Pasadena Junior College student would cover Jack’s exploits for the Pasadena
Post
for some years in the 1930s, wrote in 1977: “The Robinson the world came to know, competitive and combative, aggressive and abrasive, impatient and irascible, was tempered on the streets, the schoolgrounds and theplaying fields of Pasadena.” But Glick stressed that this process of tempering went on inside, and was kept inside, by Robinson. The face Jack presented to the world, especially after high school, was on the whole calm. And then, as well as later, he almost
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