Jack Roosevelt Robinson, later known as Jackie Robinson, was born near Cairo, in Grady County, southern Georgia, on January 31, 1919, a few miles north of the Florida state line. The exact location of his birth is subject to debate, yet two possibilities exist: a crumbling brick chimney marking a former dwelling or two brick chimneys standing above burnt-out ruins.
These sites were once part of a plantation owned by James Madison Sasser where Jack's parents, Jerry and Mallie Robinson, worked. Another possible location is on the edge of Hadley Ferry Road near Rocky Hill, also south of Cairo. The cottage on the Sasser plantation is considered the most probable site. Mallie later described giving birth in a farmhouse with about five big rooms, attended by a doctor, her husband, her brother, and a brother-in-law, during a raging flu epidemic with no women present.
The physician was a white man, Dr. Reynolds, likely a Georgia medical school graduate who began practicing in the area around 1910. Mallie had given birth to a healthy boy and chose his middle name to honor Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt had condemned lynching and attacked peonage, which had emerged as the new slavery in much of the rural South. He had worked with Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Roosevelt had appointed several blacks to high office.
Mallie had wanted a girl; now she had four sons, but only one daughter. She also knew that Jack's birth would not help her marriage, which was doomed. She and Jerry had been separated at least three times. Marrying for love, Mallie McGriff perhaps took a step down.
Jerry's father, Tony Robinson, had crossed over the state line from Florida to rent and farm land on the Sasser plantation. He had labored all his life for the Sassers; tied to the soil, he could neither read nor write. Mallie had known a different life. sixth grade-no small feat for a black girl in rural Georgia. Born slaves, Wash and Edna McGriff had pressed education on their children; when Mallie was ten, she repaid her father by teaching him to read his beloved Bible.
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They had brought up their children to fear God but also to plan for the future, and Mallie had learned those lessons well. For her, hope was essential. Slavery had defined, and continued to shape, the culture of the region. Before the Civil War, the fertile "Black Belt" across the middle of Georgia comprised the densest population of blacks anywhere in the United States.
Grady County was part of the Black Belt because it, too, was fertile and home to many blacks. Taking in Grady County and the adjoining Thomas County, this area rolled on as far south as Tallahassee, the hilly capital of Florida. the region was isolated, and home mainly to striving small farmers. Striving was part of its history. Needy white pioneers, many coming from the Carolinas, had helped to drive the native Seminole Indians from their ancestral grounds.
Part of the territory that in 1909 would become Grady County, with Cairo as its seat, was given away in the land lottery that followed, in 1820. Slaves had been essential to the growth of the region; slave labor had cleared its primeval forests, nurtured and harvested its crops. But, after the Civil War, blacks had looked forward to enjoying the fruits of their labor and freedom.
White hostility took even more violent forms. Between 1890 and 1902, when about 200 lynchings made Georgia the worst state in the Union in this respect, six took place in Thomas County. Between 1906 and 1918 saw more than 125 lynchings of blacks across the state, often for flimsy reasons and always unpunished. A race riot broke out in 1906, when four leading blacks were killed by whites, who also looted and burned black homes and businesses.
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The effect on blacks of so much repression was widespread poverty, disease, and crime, as well as cynicism and despair. For many, freedom had actually been a step down from slavery. Still, some blacks managed to rise. A chronic labor shortage made black people, no matter how poorly paid, necessary to white self-interest.
The area saw the coming in of farmers from the Central West" to buy cheap land in Georgia. This influx also spurred a culture that brought rich Northerners, including those with names such as Whitney, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, to acquire estates in the region. Amidst a wave of bankruptcies, the newcomers began to transform decrepit estates according to their fanciful notions about the Old South in its golden age, before the Civil War. With this came not only money, but new standards of civility as well.
Nevertheless, white supremacy was the first rule of life. In southern Georgia, as elsewhere, some blacks seized on almost every passing chance, every loophole in the logic of Jim Crow, to build as best they could. Family, the land, and the church became central to their lives. Mallie's family, were part of this group; clearly, too, they prospered. They were rooted in the community of landed black farmers who believed in family pride, education, the accumulation of property, and God. And now and then, even flourished.
Religion was important. Breaking away from white churches, where they were unwanted, blacks dipped into their meager resources to build and maintain more than thirty churches in the region by the turn of the cen- tury. For example, Beulah Baptist or Ochlocknee Baptist, important in Hadley family history. Mallie no doubt would have remained in Grady County, a devoted wife and mother, but for her husband's philandering.
Handsome and virile, Jerry Robinson had first flashed his teeth at her during a party at Christmas, 1906. She was sixteen years old, she only fourteen. Taking her home, he promised to call on her on Sunday and escort her to church. Incensed, Wash McGriff put a stop to that: Mallie was too young, he insisted. A tenant farmer, Jerry was a shabby prospect; instead, McGriff had in mind for Mallie an upstanding young man, originally from South Carolina, whose family lived in the best tenant house on the Sasser plantation. Carolinians, ignored him and encouraged Jerry.
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At first, Mallie was happy with Jerry in their cabin on Jim Sasser's plantation; but Sasser's terms and conditions soon disturbed her. From collard greens to turnips. Hog-killing time that Christmas brought a further shock; Mallie was stunned to hear that Sasser allowed his black workers only scraps-he reserved even the neckbones and backbones. When Sasser, deducting from his next year's salary of twelve dollars a month, gave Mallie five dollars to make the season merry, she found the sum inadequate; furthermore, Sasser expected her to spend it all at his plantation store.
Mallie saw these conditions as little more than slavery, and Mallie said so. A bold young woman, she set about changing their life. She made Jerry insist on sharecropping status with Jim Sasser rather than monthly wages. Sasser was not happy about the request, but agreed to it. Mallie then threw her energies into making sharecropping pay, and their life improved dramatically. They were even able to buy some of the staples of the Sasser plantation.
But prosperity worked poorly on Jerry; with money in his pocket, his eye began to rove. "only his love [was] drifting away." Dazzled by the lights of Cairo, Jerry wanted to move to town, but Mallie could not be swayed. Fed up, Jerry tried to put her out, but she refused to leave. She forgave him. He left again, and came back again; she forgave him once more.
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Mallie warned her in a dream that Jerry and his lover were about to run off together. But Willa Mae could not go. On July 28, 1919, Jerry said goodbye to his wife and children and went down to the railroad station in Cairo. He told his wife he was going to Texas, but he took a train north-a curious way to go to Texas.
When Jerry's money and luck ran out, he was back on her doorstep. But she was moving now in a different direction. Jim Sasser was respected as perhaps the most enterprising farmer in the region, but he was also rightly feared as one of the toughest. When he found out that Mallie had actually helped Jerry, perhaps his best worker, to leave, he was livid.
But Mallie stood up to him. When Sasser sought to bring the sheriff into the matter, to compel Jerry back into the marriage and onto the plantation, she refused to go along. Sasser struck back after one of Jerry's brothers offered to bring in the crops for her. "You might as well go," Sasser advised her. To accommodate new tenant farmers, he evicted her and the children out of her house into another one, less spacious, then into yet another, which she found barely habitable.
But Mallie worked her way. Finally she found work with another white family, who treated her kindly. But Georgia and the South itself had become a dead end. Mallie feared further humiliation, and possibly worse. In the preceding five years, race relations had become bleak.
Thanksgiving 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 the years following, Georgia preserved its record as the most violently antiblack state in the Union. In 1919, 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. And schools were burned down.
A way out for Mallie came with a visit to Grady County by Burton Thomas, her half-brother, who had emigrated to southern California. Radiating an air of settled prosperity, Burton expounded to one and all on the wonders of the West. With the approval of some whites among Mallie's employers, a circle of relatives began to plan an exit. Mallie would take her five children with her. These included Jackie, who was three, and Van, an infant. Mallie's brother Paul McGriff also planned to go.
On May 21, 1920, Mallie commandeered a buggy, loaded her children and possessions on it, and headed for Cairo. They were joined by Mallie's half-sister Mary Lou Thomas Maxwell, forty-two years old and the full sister of Burton Thomas. 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.
Black migration was seen as a 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. Efforts were made 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 prevent blacks from leaving.
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. At the Cairo train station, some white policemen truculently checked train tickets, churlishly kicked at suitcases and boxes.
"In those days," Charles Copeland, a family friend, later recalled, "six trains passed through Cairo every twenty-four hours. Everyone went down to see the trains come in. But that night, everyone went to the 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.
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