Jackie Robinson Read Online Free PDF Page A

OnThanksgiving night, 1915, at the behest of the same Tom Watson who had tried to lead blacks and whites under the Populist banner, the Klan was reborn in a ceremony atop Stone Mountain, Georgia. In 1919, when whites lynched seventy-six blacks in the United States, Georgia preserved its record as the most violently antiblack state in the Union. In April, three months after Jack’s birth, an incident in a church in Millen, eastern Georgia, led to the death of two white policemen; whites then killed five blacks and burned seven black churches and lodge halls. On May 10, a race riot broke out in Charleston in neighboring South Carolina. Early in September, in incidents across Georgia, a number of black churches and schools were burned down. Between the Charleston riot and the epidemic of arson had come the “Red Summer,” which witnessed at least two dozen race riots across the country, most notably in Chicago, brought on by bitter postwar competition between whites and blacks seeking jobs and housing.
    A way out for Mallie came with a visit to Grady County by Burton Thomas, her half-brother, who had emigrated to southern California. (He was Edna McGriff’s son by a previous marriage, to Monroe Thomas.) Elegantly garbed and exuding an air of settled prosperity, Burton expounded to one and all on the wonders of the West. “If you want to get closer to heaven,” he liked to brag, “visit California.” Slowly and secretly, and apparently with the aid of some whites among Mallie’s employers, a circle of relatives began to plan an exit. Mallie would take her five children with her. Her sister Cora Wade, two years younger, would also move, with her husband, Samuel, and their sons, Ralph, who was three, and Van, an infant. Mallie’s brother Paul McGriff also planned to go. Eventually, about thirteen family members formed the party migrating to Los Angeles.
    On May 21, 1920, Mallie commandeered a buggy, loaded her children and possessions on it, and headed for Cairo. There, preparing to leave, she and the children stayed briefly at the home on Adams Street (later called Seventh Street) of her half-sister Mary Lou Thomas Maxwell, forty-two years old and the full sister of Burton Thomas. Unhappy with her husband’s ways, Mary Lou intended to follow Mallie and Cora to California.
    Summoned by an indignant Jerry Robinson, as Mallie herself recalled, the police caught up with her at the small train station near the middle of town. To many white Southerners, migrating blacks were an insult and a threat: an insult to the myth that the South was perfection itself, especially in the harmony of its races; and a threat in that it meant the loss of some of the South’s cheapest labor. Local Georgia police routinely saw it as part of their responsibility to curb black migration. In 1916, in Macon, Savannah, and elsewhere in Georgia, officers mounted specific actions, including the vigorous policing of the black section of Jim Crow train stations, to preventblacks from leaving. Typically, they tore up train tickets or intimidated blacks into turning back. In Macon, the city council approved the purchase of forty rifles by the police to deal with a perceived threat from blacks angry over this issue. About fifty thousand blacks abandoned Georgia that year.
    At the Cairo train station, some white policemen truculently checked train tickets, churlishly kicked at suitcases and boxes. But they did nothing to stop Mallie’s party from leaving.
    “In those days,” Charles Copeland, a family friend, later recalled, “six trains passed through Cairo every twenty-four hours. I was young, but I remember the day the sisters left with their children, the commotion at the train station. I had never seen anything like it. It was a big thing for us, everyone was so excited.” Around midnight, the number 58 train pulled into the station. The band of travelers wept, said their goodbyes, and climbed aboard. Almost certainly, Jack Roosevelt Robinson,