📍121 Pepper Street, Pasadena, CA 91103, USA
1922 – 1939“I was born in Cairo, Georgia, in January 1919, the youngest of five children of a sharecropper family. My father left when I was a baby, and in 1920 my mother, Mallie, took us west by train to Pasadena, California, to make a better life. She worked as a domestic for a white family, and within a couple of years she and her relatives had bought a house at 121 Pepper Street, in a white neighbourhood. We called it the Castle, because it protected us from the unfriendly world outside. The neighbours did not want us. They tried to buy us out, called the police on us, and once burned a cross on our lawn. My mother held her head high and won many of them over with her kindness, and she taught us pride, faith and self-respect. We were poor, and sometimes we ate only what she brought home from work. I ran with a group of local boys, the Pepper Street Gang, and got into small trouble until a mechanic named Carl Anderson and a young minister, Karl Downs, set me straight. My older brothers taught me sport, and my brother Mack won a silver medal in the 200 metres at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, behind Jesse Owens. At John Muir High School and Pasadena Junior College I starred in four sports, and at UCLA I lettered in football, basketball, baseball and track. In 1947 I broke Major League Baseball's colour line with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The house on Pepper Street is gone now, but a marker on the pavement shows where it stood.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today