These five men could have been called the original Fabulous Five. And that designation was no exaggeration, because they went on to change the cultures of professional athletics, entertainment, the civil rights movement, and politics.

The athletes who played together in the 1939 school year were:

• Jackie Robinson, who would break the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947 and become a prominent advocate of racial equality after his baseball years.

• Kenny Washington, who took down the color barrier of the National Football League when he played for the Los Angeles Rams in 1946.

• Woody Strode, who would join Washington with the Rams and later become an accomplished actor in movies such as Spartacus, Sergeant Rutledge, and The Professionals.

• Ray Bartlett, who would go on to serve on the Pasadena police department (at that time, only the second African American) and as a prominent Los Angeles area civic leader.

• And then there was the fifth, Tom Bradley, who would transform Los Angeles into a global city during his 20 years as mayor. He also would make history as L.A.’s first black mayor, and the first in a major city that had a white majority.

At UCLA, these athletes came to know each other, creating a bond of fellowship that lasted for their entire lives.

The decision to recruit a roster of African-American football players came after UCLA had experienced a 20-year drought on the gridiron. At the time, this recruiting decision represented a bid for competitive advantage, since most schools, including rival USC, were uninterested in recruiting black players in that era. Washington and Strode came first to UCLA in 1936, and were followed by Robinson, Bradley, and Bartlett, who would team up in 1939.

Their recruitment helped create an accepting atmosphere at UCLA for African Americans. That was a challenge. African Americans numbered only 50 of the university’s 9,600 students that year. At the time, the campus was predominantly a commuter school. All five athletes lived at home, as no blacks were allowed to reside in Westwood, the neighborhood surrounding the campus where some students lived. For social activities, they would attend a club for African Americans called the Sphinx.

Nonetheless, the school was an oasis in a more hostile environment. “UCLA was the first school to really give the Negro athlete a break,” Bartlett said. Strode later said: “Whatever racial pressure was coming down in the City of Los Angeles, the pressure was not on me in Westwood. We had the whole melting pot, and it was an education for all of us. […] I was just like any other athlete. And I worked hard because there was always the overriding feeling [that] UCLA really wanted me.”

Bradley was convinced that UCLA played a vital role in setting a standard of acceptance for black athletes, and ultimately for African Americans as students and leaders. “Some of the schools with which UCLA had an affiliation did not permit blacks to compete on the same teams,” he said. “And UCLA administration made the decision that no school that would discriminate against its athletes could any longer compete in athletics with us.”

But Jackie Robinson wasn’t so sure that all was as cozy as Bartlett, Strode, and Bradley saw it. He remarked during his UCLA years that he was treated like a hero when playing in front of a huge crowd on the football field but as soon as the game was over he was simply Jackie Robinson, the Negro.

Jackie Robinson during his track-star days at UCLA. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

What is clear is that that recruitment of the athletes was news off campus as well. Nationally, by the late 1930s, no more than 38 African Americans suited up for major college football across the country—none in the South. “Three African-American players out of eleven in the starting lineup was highly unusual for the time,” says Kent Stephens, curator and historian for the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana.

UCLA’s roster of black players on the football team made it the most racially integrated squad in college football history. “We have yet to find another single coach in the history of football that has had the guts to play three of our race at one time and have [four] on the squad,” a reporter for the Chicago Defender, a newspaper for black readers, wrote later in the year.

In contrast to the four football players, Tom Bradley, who had been an all-city football player at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, received an academic scholarship. He eventually decided against playing for the football team, preferring to focus on competing in the 440-yard run, the 880 races, and the 1,600 relay in track. That race fit perfectly his tendency to be something of a loner. He later said: “The whole business of competition—in track, particularly, because you’re kind of one-on-one in track—involves a kind of discipline you have to develop for yourself …. I think it really became part of my lifestyle.”

But Bradley did have teammates on the track-and-field team, including the four star football players, who competed in track during the spring. There were three other black runners on the team—Tom Berkley, Bill Lacefield, and James LuValle, who ran at the so-called Nazi Olympics in 1936 and became a scientist and an administrator at Stanford. These athletes formed lifelong fellowships that included several reunions.

The best athlete of the group, Jackie Robinson, lettered in four sports at UCLA, the only Bruin to accomplish the feat. Robinson won the NCAA championship in the long jump (then called the broad jump) while also leading the Pacific Coast Conference in scoring one year for the basketball team. His worst sport was his future professional avocation: baseball, in which he batted .097 and committed 10 errors in his single season.

Many of the other athletes excelled in multiple sports. Bartlett also played four sports but didn’t earn a letter in all like Robinson. Washington threw the shot put, and Strode the discus and shot put. Washington played baseball as well. Rod Dedeaux, who coached USC baseball for 45 years and scouted for the Dodgers, said he thought Washington had a better arm, more power, and more agility than Robinson. (Washington got a tryout with baseball’s New York Giants in 1950, but by then he was past his prime.)

Each of the athletes had his own life, shaped by the fact that they lived at home and held down part-time jobs along with other personal responsibilities. Robinson tended to avoid social activities on the UCLA campus. Bradley and Strode joined different black fraternities, while Bartlett and Washington concentrated on academics, as did Bradley. None of the athletes graduated in four years. What held them together was their dedication to sports.

Of the five, Robinson was the one who most vigorously battled racial discrimination throughout his entire life. The other four, while acutely aware of the racial climate in their lives, adopted a more passive approach of “going along to get along,” which was the safest mode of operation in those days.

Robinson devoted a great deal of his life after he broke the color barrier in baseball to working for civil rights. Strode had little to do with the civil rights movement. He believed that what he accomplished on the field and life was the best way to break down prejudice. Bradley fought discrimination in the Los Angeles Police Department and as mayor, while Washington and Bartlett worked within the political system to seek racial equality.

Some relationships among the five were closer than others. Robinson and Bartlett, who grew up together in Pasadena, were lifelong friends. (Bartlett represented Robinson, who died in 1972, as grand marshal of the 1999 Rose Parade.) Strode and Washington were like brothers; Washington was emphatic that the Rams sign Strode if they wanted him to play. And Bradley and Bartlett were in frequent touch as they became policemen and civic leaders in Los Angeles.

Their legacies remain strong today.

The post How UCLA Helped Break the Color Barrier in College Athletics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The story of Robinson’s breakthrough often comes in the language and rhythms of baseball—the stuff of hits and runs, stolen bases and brushback pitches. He wrought havoc on the basepaths, demolished a racial barrier, and opened up our society.

The popular tale emphasizes Robinson’s moral courage, and rightly so. It has shaped him into a folk hero who belongs to the ages. But Robinson’s story becomes most instructive when we bring it down from the realm of the timeless epic, and connect it to the time and place in which it occurred.

The larger history—of racial struggle in Brooklyn and America after World War II—is often ugly and painful. When Robinson’s saga is placed in this context, it does not represent just a feel-good triumph for racial equality. It also reveals how the quest for freedom and democracy has coexisted with our country’s commitment to segregation and racism.

To be American is to know that we strive for freedom and at the same time we practice its opposite. We are capable of great leaps forward in terms of racial progress, including the election and re-election of the nation’s first black president. Yet our streets are not yet safe enough for unarmed black men to walk in peace. This remains our unresolved conflict: high-achieving African-Americans have been welcomed into specific realms of American life, yet such individual accomplishments have done nothing to alter the deeper patterns of black poverty, police brutality, and spatial segregation. The conflict between racial progress and racial inequality was as clear in Jackie Robinson’s day as in our own.

For many Brooklynites, an afternoon at Ebbets Field was the definition of bliss.

The aroma hit them first. The smell of bread rising from the Taystee factory, and cakes baking at the Ebingers plant, greeted the fans when they stepped out of the train station. As the throng pressed closer to the stadium, that scent mixed with roasted peanuts and hot dogs, sweat, and grass. Then came the sounds: the excited yells of children, the vendors hawking scorecards or newspapers. Many Brooklyn natives, like Joel Berger, recalled Ebbets Field as “a total sensory experience.” Nighttime made the stadium a palace, transfixing the eyes. Joe Flaherty remembered the decadent feel “of walking through Prospect Park to see a rare night game.” On a balmy evening in mid-summer, “all of a sudden the sky would be lit up,” transforming Flatbush into “the Emerald City, and as you got closer, you’d pick up your pace, and you’d give your tickets and go charging inside.” A Dodger game was the quintessential Brooklyn experience. In the age of Jackie Robinson, it became more than that. Ebbets Field was not only the borough’s cultural heart but the very seat of American democracy.

Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, almost nine years before anyone had heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks. His achievement armed postwar Brooklynites with a distinctive claim to progress. Dodger fans had long detected something special in their baseball team and their borough; Robinson deepened that sense. He “added another dimension to being a Dodger fan,” reflected journalist and Brooklyn native Pete Hamill. “It was about right and wrong … we became the most American place in the country.” A moral element at once mingled with the magnificent smells and sounds and sights.

If white fans looked further down the street, they would have come to entirely different conclusions about the extent of racial progress. On the same Bedford Avenue that housed Ebbets Field, they would have witnessed the grim reality of housing segregation. Discriminatory federal policies had combined with block-busting realtors and fearful white homeowners to create racially homogeneous neighborhoods. Brooklyn’s African-Americans were corralled into a few select areas. Poor blacks had little choice but to pay high rents for dilapidated apartments. In neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Brownsville, and particularly Bedford-Stuyvesant, residents found basic services sorely lacking. Their garbage was collected only sporadically in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in such areas, the city built few recreation centers, parks, or pools. In the very same years when Robinson played for the Dodgers—1947 to 1957—black ghettoes solidified.

This is what the rhetoric about Robinson and interracial democracy so brazenly missed. Even if Robinson’s heroics in the stadium pushed baseball fans to rethink their racial attitudes, even if Ebbets Field became a crucible of integration, very little of that feeling spilled over into the city—or country—at large.

Robinson’s own family experienced the inequities first-hand. Jackie Robinson learned that it was one thing to integrate the national pastime, and quite another to desegregate white towns and neighborhoods. The Robinsons ended up enjoying polyglot Brooklyn. But white homeowners had tried to prevent African-Americans from buying property in Flatbush. The Robinsons’ black landlord had endured such discrimination. Moreover, after the Dodgers integrated, some white fans had renounced their allegiance to the team. The borough was no interracial oasis, and even for the Robinsons it was not always welcoming.

In 1953, Jackie and Rachel Robinson began to search for a house in the suburbs of Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York. It was a humiliating experience.

The Robinsons attempted to buy land in New Canaan but were rebuffed. Rachel called about one house in Greenwich and, after giving her name, the owners refused to show it. The couple settled for a property just across the state line in New York. Jackie recalled that in autumn 1953, “we finally found a piece of land in New York’s Westchester County that was just what we wanted.” The Robinsons offered the asking price, waited for weeks, and were told that the price would be raised by $5,000. This was standard practice in housing discrimination, a sure-fire way for whites in exclusive towns to claim that they had nothing against African Americans—it was just that blacks could not meet the asking price. This was purely the market at work, they would say, not racism. So the Robinsons promptly kicked in the extra $5,000. “There was another period of confused silence,” Jackie recalled. “At last, we were told that the land had been sold to somebody else. It was this way everywhere we went.” Suburban whites did not want an African-American for a neighbor, even if it was Jackie Robinson.

After the Bridgeport Herald printed an article about the Robinsons’ experience, the citizens of North Stamford, Connecticut, were moved to action. Ministers circulated non-discrimination petitions. The Robinsons finally bought a home on Cascade Road. Rachel Robinson recalled that moment: “I don’t know that I ever have felt closer to being a real American, closer to having lifted from my shoulders the nagging doubts and insecurities that are the heritage of the American Negro.” For her, the ability to buy a home was the true test of American freedom.

Their story serves as a sobering reminder about the meaning of racial progress in America. That progress isn’t really about whether we embrace famous black athletes or cultural icons, or even whether we elect an African-American as president. The true test of our progress is whether we can enact policies that combat racial inequality—to stop the rising tide of mass incarceration and police brutality—and whether we can eradicate racial inequality from our private realms, much closer to home, as well. Only then can we begin to build a country in which African-Americans are truly welcome in every neighborhood, every school, and on every street.

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