gridiron. The coaches of Fort Riley’s highly competitive football team tried to persuade Robinson—at the time more renowned for his football prowess than for his baseball skills—to join the squad.

Robinson had other ideas. Earlier in his Army career he had wanted to try out for the camp baseball team. Pete Reiser, who was to be Robinson’s teammate on the Dodgers and who played on the Fort Riley squad, later recalled Robinson’s humiliating rejection: “One day a Negro Lieutenant came out for the ball team. An officer told him he couldn’t play. ‘You have to play for the colored team,’ the officer said. That was a joke. There was no colored team. The lieutenant stood there for a while watching us work out. Then he turned and walked away. I didn’t know who he was then, but that was the first time I saw Jackie Robinson. I can still remember him walking away by himself.”

Refused the baseball field, Robinson balked at representing Fort Riley as a running back. A colonel threatened to order him to participate, but Robinson remained adamant. To the dismay of the Fort Riley football fans, the best running back in camp refused to suit up.

In January 1943 Robinson was commissioned a second lieutenant and appointed acting morale officer for a black company at Fort Riley. As might be expected, the principal obstacles to high morale were the Jim Crow regulations governing the camp. Particularly upsetting were conditions at the post exchange, where only a few seats had been set aside for black soldiers. Robinson telephoned the base provost marshal, Major Hafner, to protest this situation; the major said that taking seats away from the white soldiers and giving them to blacks would cause a problem among the white troops. Furthermore, he could not believe that the lieutenant actually wanted the races seated together.

“Let me put it this way,” Robinson remembered the officer as saying: “How would you like to have your wife sitting next to a nigger?”

Robinson exploded. “Major, I happen to be a Negro,” he shouted, “and I don’t know that to have anyone’s wife sitting next to a Negro is any worse than to have her sitting next to some of these white soldiers I see around here.”

“I just want you to know,” said Hafner, “that I don’t want my wife sitting close to any colored guy.”

“How the hell do you know that your wife hasn’t already been close to one?” asked Robinson as he launched into a tirade against the major.

The provost marshal hung up on him, but Robinson’s protest was not fruitless: although separate areas in the post exchange remained the rule, blacks were allotted additional seats.

ROBINSON WAS NEVER punished or disciplined for being insolent to his superior officer, but he was soon transferred to the 761st Tank Battalion at Fort Hood, Texas. It was not an improvement. “The prejudice and discrimination at

Camp Hood made [other bases] seem ultraliberal in [their] attitude,” recalled Harry Duplessis, one of Robinson’s fellow black officers. “Camp Hood was frightening. … Segregation there was so complete that I even saw outhouses marked White, Colored, and Mexican.

Nevertheless, Robinson’s performance was so outstanding that even though he was on “limited service” because of an old ankle injury, his commanding officer requested that he go overseas with the battalion. In order to do so, Robinson was required to sign a waiver relieving the Army of all responsibility in the event of injury. Robinson agreed, but Army medical authorities insisted the ankle be examined before giving their approval.

The medical examination took place at a hospital thirty miles from Fort Hood. While waiting for the results, Robinson got a pass to visit with his company. He arrived at the base to find the battalion off on maneuvers, so he stopped at the officers’ club, where he met Mrs. Gordon H. Jones, the wife of another black lieutenant. Since she lived on the way to the hospital, they boarded the bus together.

For black soldiers in the South, the shortest bus trip could be a humiliating and even dangerous experience. According to the Pittsburgh Courier , which cited a “mountain of complaints from Negro soldiers,” “frustrations on buses in the South was one of the most fruitful sources of trouble for Negro soldiers.” In Durham, North Carolina, only weeks before, an altercation had ended with the driver shooting and killing a black soldier who had refused to move to the back of a bus. The driver was tried and found not guilty by a civilian jury. Unable to change the rules on civilian bus lines, the Army began to provide its own, nonsegregated buses on Southern bases. The action was given no publicity at first and was ignored at many bases. In June 1944, however, the story had been made public, and the resulting furor had brought the Army policy to the attention of many black soldiers.

When Robinson boarded the bus with Mrs. Jones on July 6, he was aware that military buses had been ordered desegregated. As he wrote to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People two weeks later, “I refused to move because I recalled a letter from Wash- ington which states that there is to be no segregation on army posts.” In his autobiography Robinson stated that the boxers Joe Louis and Ray Robinson had also influenced his actions by their recent refusals to obey Jim Crow regulations at a bus depot in Alabama. In any event, Lieutenant Robinson told the driver: “The Army recently issued orders that there is to be no more racial segregation on any Army post. This is an Army bus operating on an Army post.”

The

man backed down, but at the end of the line, as Robinson and Mrs. Jones waited for a second bus, he returned with his dispatcher and two other drivers. The dispatcher turned to the driver and asked, “Is this the nigger that’s been causing you trouble?” Leaving Mrs. Jones, Robinson shook a finger in the driver’s face and told him to “quit f——— with me.” As Robinson started walking away, two military policemen arrived on the scene and suggested that he explain the situation to the provost marshal.

Lieutenant Robinson was driven to military police headquarters by two MP’s. They were met there by Pvt. Ben W. Mucklerath, who asked CpI. George A. Elwood, one of ten MP’s, if he had a “nigger lieutenant” in the car. Robinson told the enlisted man that “if he ever called me a nigger again I would break him in two.” The first officer on the scene was Capt. Peelor Wigginton, the officer of the day. When Wigginton began to take Mucklerath’s story, Robinson interrupted. He was ordered out of the room until the assistant provost marshal, Capt. Gerald M. Bear, came to take over the investigation.

When the Southern-born Captain Bear arrived, Robinson started to follow him into the guard room, only to be told, “Nobody comes into the room until I tell him.” Why then, asked Robinson, was Private Mucklerath already in the room? When Captain Wigginton began briefing Captain Bear on Mucklerath’s testimony, Robinson, standing by the door, complained that the account was inaccurate.

The hostility grew with the arrival of a civilian woman named Wilson who was to record Robinson’s statement. Robinson later recalled that the stenographer continually interrupted his statement with her own questions and comments, such as, “Don’t you know you have no right sitting up there in the white part of the bus.” Robinson challenged the right of a Texas civilian to interrogate him and finally snapped at her to stop interrupting. Captain Bear growled something about his being “uppity,” and when Robinson insisted on making corrections in the written statement before signing it, the civilian stenographer jumped up and said, “I don’t have to take that sassy kind of talk from you.”

As a result of the evening’s events, camp officials were determined to court-martial Robinson. When his commanding officer, Col. R. L. Bates, refused to endorse the court-martial orders, the authorities transferred Robinson to the 758th Tank Battalion, whose commander promptly signed. Robinson was charged with insubordination, disturbing the peace, drunkenness, conduct unbecoming an officer, insulting a civilian woman, and refusing to obey the lawful orders of a superior officer.

FACED WITH SO MANY counts, Robinson feared that there was a conspiracy against him at Fort Hood and that he would be dishonorably discharged. He wrote to the NAACP for “advice or help on the matter.

“The people have a pretty good bunch of lies,” he reported. “When I read some of the statments of the

witnesses I was certain that these people had got together and was going to frame me.” While admitting that he had cursed after the bus dispatcher had called him a “nigger,” he denied “calling the people around all sorts of names.” “If I didn’t respect them,” he protested, “I certainly would have Mrs. Jones.”

Robinson was particularly upset because officials had not even asked Mrs. Jones to give a statement. He felt that he was “being unfairly punished because I wouldn’t be pushed around by the driver of the bus,” and was “looking for a civilian lawyer to handle my case because I know he will be able to free the truth with a little technique.”

His fear of a conspiracy was not groundless. During World War II, according to the historian Jack D. Foner, “many black soldiers were unjustly convicted by courts-martial, either because their officers assumed their guilt regardless of the evidence or because they wanted to ‘set an example’ for other black soldiers.” The demand on the NAACP for assistance for black soldiers was so great that they had to turn down most requests unless the case was deemed to be “of national importance to the Negro race.” In a letter actually dated one day after the trial, the NAACP informed Robinson that “we will be unable to furnish you with an attorney in the event that you are court-martialled.”

Meanwhile, among black soldiers in the Southwest, “Jackie Robinson s encounter with a cracker bus driver” had become, according to Lieutenant Duplessis, the “racial cause célèbre.” Robinson’s hasty transfer from the 761st Tank Battalion to the 758th led many black officers to believe that the Army was attempting to try him in secrecy. A group of them wrote letters to the NAACP and to two of the more influential black newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender . Lt. Ivan Harrison recalls the campaign as follows: “The NAACP, his fraternity, and the Negro press soon learned about Jackie and the messages began to pour in demanding to know what happened. They moved Jackie to another camp, then answered he was no longer a member of the 761st. Of course, the black underground soon notified them where he could be found. … It was beginning to be such a hot potato that they held what I am sure was the shortest court-martial in the history of the armed services.

Harrison was wrong about that; the court-martial proceedings lasted more than four hours. And although the black press made scant mention of the Robinson case, the officers’campaign did have some notable success. All charges stemming from the actual incident on the bus and Robinson’s argument with the civilian secretary were dropped. He had still to face a court-martial, but on the two lesser charges of insubordination arising from his confrontation in the guardhouse.

Although the dismissal of the more serious charges was to Robinson’s advantage, it also made his defense more difficult. He was being tried for insubordination, but no mention of the event which caused this rebellious behavior —the encounter on the bus—was to be allowed. Nor were the actions of the stenographer to be considered. Robinson was no longer on trial for refusing to move to the back of a bus, which was within his rights, or for responding to the racial slurs of a civilian, but for acting with “disrespect” toward Captain Bear and disobeying a lawful command given by that officer.

In the meantime, a problem had arisen regarding Robinson’s defense. Unable to get help from the NAACP, he had been assigned a young Southern lawyer to act as his counsel. Before Robinson could even protest, the lawyer withdrew from the case: having been raised in the South, he said, he had not “developed arguments against segregation” that were necessary to defend Robinson adequately. He did, however, arrange for Robinson to engage Lt. William Cline, a lawyer from Texas who was eager to handle the case.

The court-martial of 2d Lt. Jackie Robinson took place on August 2, 1944. The heart of the prosecution’s case was presented by Captains Bear and Wigginton, who told essentially the same story. As they had attempted to ascertain the facts of the events of July 6, Robinson continually interrupted them and acted disrespectfully. When ordered from the room, according to Bear, Robinson continued to stand by the half-gate door, “leaning on the half gate down in a slouching position with his elbows resting on the gate, and he kept interrupting.” Several times, said Bear, he told the black lieutenant to get away from the door, and in response, Robinson bowed and said, “O.K., sir. O.K., sir. O.K., sir.” Bear demonstrated the way in which Robinson bowed as he “kind of smirked or grimaced his face.”

CAPTAIN BEAR TESTIFIED that he gave Robinson a direct order to remain seated until called upon. Instead the lieutenant went outside and was “pitching rocks” and talking to the driver of a jeep. When ordered back inside, said Bear, Robinson complied “reluctantly … with his hands in his pockets, swaying, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.”

When Robinson was brought into the orderly room to make his statement, said Bear, “everything he said seemed facetious to him, and he seemed to be trying to make fun of it … he would raise and lower his words, and he would say, ‘Oh, yeah’ when I would ask him a question, and several times I asked him not to go so fast and to tone his language down.” He seemed “argumentative” and asked questions such as, “Well, do I have to answer that?” When asked to speak more slowly, according to Bear, Robinson began to “baby talk,” exaggerating the pause between each word.