ONETAKING THE FREEDOM TRAIN
It was hog-butchering day, and Mallie Robinson was excited. Perhaps Jerry would bring home a slab of bacon, some juicy ham, or a tender rack of ribs. Even part of a shoulder, along with a few feet and knuckles, would be mouthwatering additions to the menu.
With squealing and gunshots in the distance, she probably thought of her husband slicing the hog fat, carving the meat, and trimming the choice cuts. Jerry was a skilled butcher and one of the best workers on the plantation.
At the end of the day, Jerry handed Mallie the rewards of his labor. Unwrapping the butcher paper, she couldn’t believe what she saw—a putrid pile of hog livers and lungs.
She felt as if someone had kicked her in the stomach. “Where’s the backbones?” she demanded. “Where’s the neckbones?” It was one thing not to have ham or tenderloin, but no backbone to scrape a bit of meat from? No neckbone for broth? That was unacceptable.
But there was no easy solution. The Robinsons lived on a plantation owned by a cruel white man, and Black workers had few options when they didn’t receive their fair share.
Mallie was livid. Directing her ire toward Jerry, she said what they both knew all too well—“Slavery’s over!”
* * *
Mallie McGriff and Jerry Robinson first caught each other’s attention at a Christmas-tree-trimming party in 1903. The festivity was held on James Sasser’s plantation just outside Cairo, Georgia, where Jerry’s family lived and labored. “I sure like you,” Jerry said as they walked to her house after the party.
Mallie’s father, Washington McGriff, a former enslaved person and now a farm owner, was far from pleased when he learned that his fourteen-year-old daughter had made plans to go to church with the nineteen-year-old Jerry. Mallie’s mother, Edna Sims McGriff, wasn’t supportive, either. She and Washington hoped that their daughter would marry the eligible bachelor who lived in the plantation’s biggest house.
But Mallie was strong-willed, independent, and determined. Despite her parents’ best efforts to break them apart, she and Jerry dated for six years before marrying on November 21, 1909, less than one month before that disappointing butchering day.
* * *
When the young couple moved into a log cabin on Sasser’s land, Mallie turned to her husband and said, “Let’s prove to the world what we can do.” But that was easier said than done. As a laborer, Jerry earned just twelve dollars a month, barely enough to feed and clothe the two of them, let alone the babies who would no doubt arrive.
Mallie soon pitched to Jerry a bold plan. “Let’s try and farm for ourselves,” she said. Jerry was hesitant, but sometime after the couple’s first Christmas together, he approached Sasser and threatened to leave unless he could “half-crop”—farm the land and keep half the crops that he and Mallie raised.
Sasser realized that losing an excellent worker would deliver a financial blow, so he reluctantly allowed the Robinsons to start their own farming venture. Within a few years, the hardworking couple had a yard full of hogs, chickens, and turkeys, and fields with cotton, corn, peanuts, peas, beans, and potatoes.
The remains of Jack’s birthplace in Grady County, Georgia
* * *
Still, not everything was good at the Robinson home. Jerry was attracted to other women, and he often left Mallie to fend for herself. By the eighth year of their marriage, the couple had separated and reconciled more than a few times. “And every time we got back together, I got another child,” Mallie recalled.
She became pregnant again in the spring of 1919. The Robinsons already had four rambunctious children—Edgar, Frank, Mack, and Willa Mae—and Mallie hoped for a girl to add some balance to the brood.
She went into labor on January 31, 1919. The visiting doctor wanted to administer a painkiller, but Mallie feared that it would kill her, so she just gritted her teeth and pushed hard until he arrived—Jack Roosevelt Robinson. She named her newborn son after former president Theodore Roosevelt, who had died earlier that month.
PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
In 1901, President Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington for dinner at the White House. Washington was the founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. The all-Black school reflected Washington’s belief that Black people could best advance their rights by becoming educated, working hard, and strengthening their moral character within the system of racial segregation.
A 1903 lithograph of Booker T. Washington and President Roosevelt at the White House
The dinner marked the first time that a Black man dined at the White House with a sitting US president. An uproar followed. Washington became the target of death threats, and Roosevelt endured vicious criticism from racist politicians. But Black people across the country, including Mallie Robinson, admired Roosevelt, and many considered him a supporter of Black interests. Roosevelt continued to consult with Washington, but he never again invited a Black leader to the White House.
In 1906, Roosevelt shared his secret feelings about Black people in a letter to a friend. “As a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites,” he wrote. In 1916, he also claimed that “the great majority of Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for the suffrage,” the right to vote. Mallie would not have known of Roosevelt’s racist thoughts when she named Jack after him.
* * *
Six months later, Jerry traveled to nearby Cairo, hopped aboard train number 230, and left for Florida with another woman. Mallie wondered whether she could manage to take care of the children, feed the animals, clean the pens, and harvest the crops.
Plantation owner James Sasser was unsympathetic. He had never liked Mallie and had even called her “about the sassiest nigger ever on this place.” It wasn’t long before he evicted the Robinsons from their home, forcing them to move to a dilapidated property. He soon kicked them out of that one, too, saying they had to move to a house full of men.
This was just one of numerous assaults against Black people across the South during “the Red Summer of 1919,” a frightening period of race riots and bloodshed. (Los Angeles Evening Express, August 29, 1919)
Mallie was so upset that she gathered her children and walked off the plantation forever, leaving behind fifteen hogs, four barrels of syrup, four bales of cotton, and basketfuls of potatoes and vegetables.
The future looked bleak. Mallie found work as a maid, but the job failed to provide her with a stable economic life.
The future also looked deadly. The Ku Klux Klan was riding through Georgia once again, and in the summer of 1919, the white terrorists had burned Black churches, lodges, schools, and homes in the state.
* * *
Mallie looked for a way to escape, but there was no clear path forward—until her brother, Burton Thomas, encouraged her to move to California, the state he had migrated to years earlier.
Feeling inspired, Mallie quickly made plans with her sister Cora and her brother Paul and their families to leave Georgia for good.
THE KU KLUX KLAN (KKK)
Klan members in Valdosta, Georgia, 1922
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Tennessee in 1866, just after the conclusion of the Civil War. Its goals were to promote white supremacy, the belief that white people are superior to people of color, and to resist Radical Reconstruction, the federal government’s plan to increase the political and economic power of former enslaved people. The Klan sought to accomplish these goals by terrorizing, torturing, and lynching Black people. The original Klan disbanded in the 1870s, though remnants remained, and a new one was founded at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915, shortly after the release of The Birth of a Nation, a blockbuster film that glorified the first Klan.
On May 21, 1920, Mallie, sixteen-month-old Jack, and his four siblings waited for the steam engine and its passenger cars to pull into the station. Mallie called it the “Freedom Train.”
After everyone was safely aboard, she could finally take a deep breath. Mallie and her children were free at last. Free from the plantation. Free from Sasser. Free from white terror. And free to create a better life. Or so she thought.
The Cairo train station from which the Robinsons left for California in May 1920
Jack, probably in 1925, about age six
TWOTHROWING STONES
The train car rocked back and forth as Mallie struggled to hold Jack still. He was a strong toddler, and it was a challenge to change his diaper in the best of circumstances. As soon as he wriggled free, Jack waddled off to join his siblings.
Whenever she could, Mallie looked out the window and enjoyed the roaring rivers, the majestic mountains, and the desert valleys. The best part of the trip was seeing the bright lights of Los Angeles in early June 1920. It was “the most beautiful sight of my whole life,” she remembered.
The thirteen members of the Georgia family disembarked in Pasadena, about a dozen miles outside of Los Angeles, where Mallie’s brother Burton lived. With little money among them, the new arrivals moved into a dilapidated apartment near the train station. It had three small rooms, a bathroom without a tub, and old pipes with only cold water.
The Robinsons slept in one room. As the youngest, Jack shared the bed with his mother while his siblings spread themselves across the hard floor.
The day after arriving, Mallie found domestic work that paid eight dollars a week and ended every day around 4:00 P.M., giving her time to feed and care for her children. Although that job didn’t last long, she soon landed a similar one with the Dodges, a white family who employed her for the next two decades.
THE GREAT MIGRATION
Migrants arriving in Chicago in 1920
The Robinsons’ move from Georgia to California was part of the Great Migration. In 1920, there were twelve million Black Americans living in the United States, 75 percent of them in the South, where slavery had been most prominent. Between 1915 and 1970, more than six million Black people migrated from the South to major cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, including New York City, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns, a book about the migration, said, “They left on their own accord for as many reasons as there are people who left. They made a choice that they were not going to live under the system into which they were born anymore, and in some ways, it was the first step that the nation’s servant class ever took without asking.”
* * *
In 1922, when Jack was about three years old, Mallie and her brother-in-law Sam Wade bought a house at 121 Pepper Street. The two adults were still rather poor, but the seller agreed to “easy terms” of payment.
The house had eleven rooms, two bathrooms, a porch, fruit trees, and a yard big enough for planting vegetables, raising chickens, and playing sports. But there was a major problem. The Robinsons and Wades were the only Black people on their street, and most neighbors did not want them living there.
This advertisement for 121 Pepper Street appeared in the Pasadena Evening Post on March 21, 1921.
Some neighbors were so disturbed that they tried to buy the property back. When that effort failed, they burned a cross in the home’s front yard. Edgar spotted the blazing wood and extinguished the flames before they could spread to the house.
If Mallie was frightened, no one detected it. They saw a strong woman who was fiercely committed to her family’s right to live at 121 Pepper Street.
The Robinson kids, of course, did not stay inside their house and yard. They zipped up and down the streets, with Edgar speedily leading the way on his bike or roller skates. Legend has it that a police officer ticketed him for skating too fast.
Disapproving neighbors frequently called the police department. One man told an officer that his wife was so afraid that she had not come out of the house since the Robinsons had arrived. When the officer shared that news, Mallie remained defiant. “I’m afraid she’ll be in that house a lifetime,” she said.
* * *
Mallie faced another challenge. She worked during the day, and there was no one to care for young Jack when the older kids were at school. With few good options, Mallie asked Willa Mae to take her younger brother to school and leave him in the sandbox until it was time to return home.
Jack must have been surprised to find himself in the sandbox after all the other kids went inside Grover Cleveland Elementary School, but he dug in and stayed close to the windows, where his big sister could keep an eye on him. Willa Mae’s teacher allowed him to come inside on rainy days and to play with students during outside recess. Jack became quite skilled at shooting acorns at all the kids running around him.
Back at home, he loved playing with a ball that Mallie had made from socks and rags. Stick in hand, he whacked the ball all around the yard, and before long, he could hit, throw, and catch as well as the older kids. Despite his “pigeon toes”—his toes pointed inward, toward each other—he also ran fast.
When Jack became a student at Cleveland Elementary, his friends stood in awe as they watched him tear up the baseball diamond, the football field, and the dodgeball court. Envious of his athletic skills, they offered him half their lunches if he would play on their side.
* * *
But his athleticism did little to protect him from the racist neighbors, and at the age of eight, he had a nasty encounter while he was sweeping the sidewalk.
Across the street was a white girl who was also sweeping. Her father was one of those who had loudly demanded that the Robinsons leave the neighborhood. Jack paid her no mind at first, but then she shouted, “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!”
The words stung, and Jack fired back that she was “nothing but a cracker.”
Unfazed, the girl shot off a rhyme: “Soda cracker’s good to eat, nigger’s only good to beat.”
Hearing the commotion, her father burst through their front door, picked up a rock, and hurled it at Jack.
Jack found his own rock and threw a fastball right back.
The battle waged on until the man’s wife ran out of the house and scolded her husband for such immature behavior. As the man skulked back inside, Jack stood his ground, fully prepared to fight some more.
Copyright © 2022 by Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long
