Jackie Robinson (20 page)

Renegar, the driver, had asked the dispatcher, a man named Bevlia “Pinky” Younger, to call the military police, and Younger had promptly done so. The first MP to arrive was Corporal George A. Elwood. The police
escorted Robinson to the military police guard room, where Robinson encountered a sergeant and also a private, Ben W. Mucklerath, he would accuse of calling him a nigger. The police then summoned the officer of the day, Captain Peelor Wigginton, who was also the camp laundry officer. Turning first to Mucklerath, Wigginton set out to question him about the incident. When Robinson interrupted the private to dispute what he was saying, Wigginton ordered Robinson outside.

Next to arrive on the scene was an assistant provost marshal, Captain Gerald M. Bear, who was also commander of the military police. According to Robinson, he was following Bear into the guard room when Bear rudely turned on him: “Nobody comes into the room until I tell him.” Since Robinson could see Mucklerath in the room, he protested at being kept out while the white private was allowed in. Bear repeated his order, and Robinson left the guard room.

In his own statement, Bear declared that when he arrived, Robinson was inside the guard room. He then asked Robinson to step outside the guard room and into the receiving room while he, Bear, heard a report from Captain Wigginton. However, instead of obeying, “Lt. Robinson kept continually interrupting Captain Wigginton and myself and kept coming to the Guard Room door-gate. I cautioned and requested Lt. Robinson on several occasions to remain at ease and remain in the receiving room.” Furthermore, “in an effort to try to be facetious, Lt. Robinson bowed with several sloppy salutes, repeating several times, ‘OK, sir, OK, sir,’ on each occasion.” According to Bear, he ordered Robinson “to remain in the receiving room and be seated on a chair, on the far side of the receiving room. Later on I found Lt. Robinson on the outside of the building.… Lt. Robinson’s attitude in general was disrespectful and impertinent to his superior officers, and very unbecoming to an officer in the presence of enlisted men.”

Robinson would soon vehemently dispute this version of the episode. To him, Bear on arriving seemed “not polite at all” and “very uncivil toward me.” The heart of the matter for Robinson was that Bear “did not seem to recognize me as an officer at all. But I did consider myself an officer and felt I should be addressed as one.”

After taking statements from all the whites involved, Bear at last allowed Robinson to speak. Jack could not help noticing that he was made to stand while “they asked that private [Mucklerath] to sit down.” For the statement, Bear employed a stenographer, a white woman named Wilson. The presence of yet another white woman, as well as Robinson’s refusal to efface himself before her, added to the tension. Robinson remembered her asking him sharp and, to him, totally inappropriate questions as a civilian: “Don’t
you know you have no right sitting up there in the white part of the bus?” Robinson would also testify that after he objected to a part of her transcript, she snapped, “ ‘If you had completed your statement it would have made sense’ and I told her that if she had put down Captain Bear’s question, it would have made sense; and she then picked up her purse and said, ‘I don’t have to make excuses to him’ and she went out, and Captain Bear went outside to her and talked awhile.” (Bear would deny under oath that there had been any friction whatsoever between Wilson and Robinson.)

At some point, against Jack’s wishes, Bear arranged to have military police drive the black lieutenant back to the hospital in Temple. Robinson protested that he had a pass that was good until eight in the morning and should be free to go where he wanted. Repeatedly he asked if he was under arrest. Bear finally told Robinson that he was under “arrest in quarters,” which meant that he was not being taken into custody but that he would be considered under arrest at the hospital, although without a guard. Robinson was then taken to the hospital in a police pickup truck.

At the hospital, a white doctor who knew Jack warned him that a report had come in about a drunken black lieutenant trying to start a riot; the doctor advised him to take a blood alcohol test at once. The test proved he had not been drinking. He also informed Colonel Bates about the episode. Bates quickly discovered that Captain Bear intended to bring Robinson up on a court-martial. When Bates refused to endorse the charges, Bear moved to have Robinson transferred to a battalion with a more compliant commander. By this time, his superiors at the camp understood that the Jackie Robinson case could bring trouble for all concerned. On July 17, in a telephone call to another colonel, Walter D. Buie, chief of staff of the XXIII Corps, Colonel E. A. Kimball, commander of the 5th Armored Group, advised: “
This is a very serious case, and it is full of dynamite. It requires very delicate handling.… This bus situation here is not at all good, and I am afraid that any officer in charge of troops at this Post might be prejudiced.” Nevertheless, on July 24, Robinson was transferred to the 758th Tank Battalion, where the commander signed orders to prosecute him.

Also on July 24, military police placed Robinson under arrest. On that day, he wrote to the NAACP in New York “
seeking your help and advice. I feel I am being unfairly punished because I wouldn’t be pushed around by the driver of the bus.… I am looking for a civilian lawyer to handle my case because I know he will be able to force the truth with a little technique.” He had refused to move “because I recalled a letter from Washington” barring segregation on Army posts; the statements against him were “a pretty good bunch of lies.” (The NAACP did not reply until the day after the trial: “
We will be unable to furnish you with an attorney in the event
that you are court martialled.” However, if he was convicted, the association would write on his behalf to the Adjutant General in Washington.) Other messages urged the NAACP to intervene; an anonymous writer warned that “
this incident is only one of many which have seen Negro officers and enlisted men intimidated and mistreated in Camp Hood, and the surrounding towns.” Someone in Los Angeles contacted both U.S. senators from California, Sheridan Downey and Hiram W. Johnson, who then wrote to Secretary of War Stimson inquiring into the matter. Several black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh
Courier,
also spread the story.

Although the coming trial worried Jack, it did not intimidate him. Even as his fate hung in the balance, he took up the challenge of supporting another black officer, who had been found guilty of buying tires on the black market. Sure that a white officer in a similar circumstance would have been treated differently, he wrote to Truman Gibson, now civilian aide to the secretary of war, asking him to help the man. Jack’s composure under fire had a great deal to do with his faith in God; he still said his prayers on his knees at night before going to bed, as he would for many years to come. To Rachel, brought up in the church but less devout, Jack was possessed by the deep sense, instilled by his mother, “
that God would take care of you. You are a child of God, made in God’s image. Because God is there, nothing can go wrong with you. You can allow yourself to take risks because you just know that the Lord will not allow you to sink so far that you can’t swim. An ordeal like the court-martial was a sign to Jack that God was testing him. And Jack just knew that he would respond well, he would come through, because he was a child of God. His faith in God was not very articulate, but it was real, and it did not allow for much doubt.”

At 1:45 in the afternoon on August 2, the case of
The United States
v.
2nd Lieutenant Jack R. Robinson, 0-10315861, Cavalry, Company C,
758
th Tank Battalion,
began. Nine men would hear the case. One was black; another had been a UCLA student. Six votes were needed for conviction.

Robinson’s defense attorney—nominally, at least—was Lieutenant William A. Cline, a thirty-year-old native Texan who had served in North Africa before being assigned to Camp Hood. Listed as assistant defense counsel was First Lieutenant Joseph C. Hutcheson of the 635th Field Artillery Battalion. However, the trial record indicated yet another defense lawyer: “
The accused stated he desired to be defended by regularly appointed defense counsel, assisted by 1st Lt. Robert H. Johnson, 679th Tank Destroyer Battalion, as his individual counsel.” Although his role may be lost to history, Lieutenant Johnson, not Cline or Hutcheson, was probably crucial to Robinson’s fate at the trial.

Jack had started out with deep reservations about his appointed counsel. Lieutenant Cline, from the small town of Wharton, Texas, was not comfortable defending a black in such a case, and candidly told Jack so. Robinson “
told me the NAACP had offered to provide him with a lawyer,” according to Cline fifty years later. “I told him I thought that was a pretty good idea because I came from just about as far south as you could go.” In addition, Cline had little courtroom experience. “I was a general country lawyer,” he recalled. He and his father, also a lawyer, “had a title business. I didn’t engage in much adversary stuff.”

Not hearing from the NAACP, Robinson returned to Cline. According to Cline, “I never asked him why he changed,” but went on to defend the accused. However, in his autobiography
I Never Had It Made,
Robinson related that his first lawyer, a Southerner, pleaded prejudice, then yielded to “
a young Michigan officer who did a great job on my behalf.” Robinson was probably referring to the work of Lieutenant Johnson; but the trial records do not indicate which part any individual played in his defense in the courtroom. For the record, Cline was his defense counsel. (Fifty years later, interviewed for an article in the
National Law Journal,
Cline gave no indication that anyone else had helped him defend Robinson.)

Jack faced two charges. The first, a violation of Article of War No. 63, accused him of “
behaving with disrespect toward Capt. Gerald M. Bear, CMP, his superior officer.” Robinson had incurred the charge “by contemptuously bowing to him and giving him several sloppy salutes, repeating several times ‘OK Sir,’ ‘OK, Sir,’ or words to that effect, and by acting in an insolent, impertinent and rude manner toward the said Captain Gerald M. Bear.” The second charge was a violation of Article No. 64, in this case “willful disobedience of lawful command of Gerald M. Bear, CMP, his superior.” It alleged that Robinson, “having received a lawful command … to remain in a receiving room and be seated on a chair on the farside of the receiving room, did … willfully disobey the same.”

Three other charges had been prepared, then abandoned. The first accused Robinson of disrespect toward the officer of the day, Captain Wigginton, by saying to him: “Captain, any Private, you or any General calls me a nigger and I’ll break them in two, I don’t know the definition of the word”; and by speaking to Wigginton “in an insolent, impertinent and rude manner.” Why this charge was dropped is not clear. The other two charges involved civilians and perhaps were seen as manifestly ill advised. One charge accused Robinson of using “abusive and vulgar language” toward the bus driver “in the presence of ladies.” He had said, according to the charge, “ ‘I’m not going to move a God damn bit,’ or words to that
effect, and ‘I don’t know what the Son-of-a-Bitch wanted to give me all this trouble,’ or words to that effect.” The third charge, also dropped, accused Robinson of telling Elizabeth Poitevint, the white woman who entered the dispute: “ ‘You better quit fuckin with me’ or words to that effect.”

Dropping those charges actually hurt Jack’s defense, to some extent; the defense could no longer link what had happened on the bus to what had gone on with the white soldiers, although a common thread was an utter disrespect for him as an officer and a human being. The defense then decided to try to show that Robinson had not been insubordinate to Captain Bear but rather that Bear had managed the entire matter poorly. The defense could not dwell on the subjective area of Bear’s racism, but it could hammer away at any weakness in his execution of his authority. “
The provost marshal [Bear] didn’t know how to handle it,” Cline would recall. “It had developed into a kind of personal matter.”

The cross-examination of Bear (by Cline, Hutcheson, or Johnson) sought to exploit the likelihood that Bear, rudely brushing aside Robinson on arriving at the guard room, had not given him specific instructions about where to wait; that Bear probably had become incensed when Robinson insisted on correcting the transcript of his statement as typed by Bear’s stenographer; that Bear had declined to answer when Robinson had asked repeatedly if he was under arrest; and that Bear’s decision to send Robinson back to the hospital in a police vehicle under guard was unwarranted. Skillful questioning of Bear and other prosecution witnesses brought out inconsistencies about his handling of Robinson that night, and especially about what he told Robinson to do in sending him out of the guard room—except that Robinson was supposed to be “at ease,” which gave Jack’s lawyers latitude in defending his behavior.

Clearly, almost all of the whites involved were genuinely mystified that Robinson disliked being badly treated. The white private, Ben Mucklerath, denied that he had called Robinson a nigger, as Robinson charged; but Corporal Elwood, the first MP on the scene, testified that Mucklerath “came over to the pick-up and asked me if I got that nigger Lieutenant. Right then the Lieutenant said, ‘Look here, you son-of-a-bitch, don’t you call me no nigger.’ ” The bus dispatcher, “Pinky” Younger, who had summoned the military police, asserted that when Corporal Elwood asked him what was going on, “I told him that the trouble was with a nigger Lt. The nigger Lt., hearing the remark, resented being called so.” The bus driver, Milton Renegar, swore that Elizabeth Poitevint had explained aloud: “I don’t mind waiting on them all day, but when I get on the bus at night to go home, I’m not about to ride all mixed up with them.”

One white witness only, Mrs. Ruby Johnson, gave an account of events on the bus almost exactly as Robinson related them. Ironically, she was a friend of Mrs. Poitevint and had been sitting with her on the bus. According to her statement, when the bus became crowded, the driver asked Robinson to move to the back. “The Lt. said, ‘No, I’m going to sit here, I’m not going to move to the back of the bus,’ he said that in a very forceful voice, and [t]hen he told the driver, ‘You had better sit down and drive the bus wherever you are going.’ He told the bus driver that twice, and the bus driver told the Lt. that he would wish he had gone to the back of the bus when they got to the Central Bus Station.” Mrs. Johnson reported no obscenities spoken by Robinson to anyone, including her friend Mrs. Poitevint. (Mrs. Poitevint herself swore that he had told her, “ ‘You better quit fuckin’ with me.’ He said that three or four times, after we got off the bus, and all that profane and obscene language he used could have been heard by anyone around there, and there was a big crowd there too.”)