Free Jackie Robinson by Arnold Rampersad Page A

place. Closer now to his full height, which was just shy of six feet, Robinson started at forward instead of guard; he also began the league season as acting captain. In the first game, against the elite Hoover High team, he led the Terriers to an upset victory that set the tone for the rest of the season. Not only was Robinson Muir’s most reliable and prolific scorer, but his precocious sense of the importance of team play and his fearless desire to win also made everyone around him a better player. In the last sixty seconds of a crucial game against South Pasadena, Jack led a furious charge that brought Muirfrom behind to win the game. Leading his team’s scoring, he tallied 20 of his team’s 49 points.
    On January 29, 1937, he played perhaps his most dominating basketball game ever for Muir Tech; he was like a man possessed in a league encounter with archrival Glendale. Much was on the line. His Terriers entered the game with a tenuous hold on first place; but it was also the last scheduled game of Jack’s high school career. Rising to the challenge, he went all out for victory. “Robinson was all over the floor,” the
Post
marveled, “and when he wasn’t scoring points he was making impossible ‘saves’ and interceptions, and was the best player on the floor.” His unselfishness stood out. “Many times,” according to the
Post,
“he fed the ball to teammates, giving them setups. And there were few times Glendale, even with a decided height advantage, could snatch the ball away from Robinson off the backboard.” The Terriers won, to tighten their grasp on first place.
    The day of the game against Glendale was Jack’s last at Muir High. Whatever his misgivings about Pasadena, he clearly loved his teammates and his high school and cared deeply about its fortunes and the nurturing role it had played in his life. As an athlete, he had given Muir Tech everything he had to offer, and knew how much he had profited from the giving. His efforts had been recognized even by those who took no pleasure in doing so. Even the powerful Pasadena
Star-News,
usually frigid to blacks and begrudging in its praise of his exploits, conceded finally that Jack Robinson “for two years has been the outstanding athlete at Muir, starring in football, basketball, track, baseball, and tennis.”
    Two days later, on January 31, 1937, he celebrated his eighteenth birthday. The next day, he enrolled as a student at Pasadena Junior College, across town. In the next two years, Jack would take his local fame to new heights. Through his amazing exploits in his four top sports, he would also bring himself, for the first time, to the attention of the wider world. But in these two years, he would also come close to disaster in his conflicts with himself and white authority, especially the police. He would come to the brink of killing the hopes his mother had nursed for him, and that he had been nurturing for himself during his boyhood in Pasadena.

CHAPTER 3

Pasadena Junior College
1937–1939
    It was there that I lost most of my shyness.
    —Jackie Robinson (1972)
    O N F EBRUARY 1, 1937, when Jack Robinson made his way out to Colorado Boulevard to register for classes at Pasadena Junior College, he found a campus in a state of serious disrepair. Instead of green lawns and ivy-covered walls, he saw raw dirt that turned to dust under the hot sun or to mud in the rain; the bare walls of three unfinished buildings dominated the bleak scene. Robinson had come to enroll near the end of the four-year “tent era” of campus history, a time of reconstruction and makeshift facilities in the wake of the destructive Long Beach earthquake of 1933, which had rocked Pasadena. However, even as Jack arrived, workmen were finishing the construction of three gleaming white buildings that would form the heart of the new PJC.
    For Robinson and other students of his time, attending the junior college after leaving high school was fully expected; the local public