CONTENTS
__________________________
A NOTE TO THE READER
BOOK ONE: THE RISE
CHAPTER ONE
THE PURE-BLOODED AMERICAN
CHAPTER TWO
THE GOOD MAN
CHAPTER THREE
THE SPORT
CHAPTER FOUR
THE MAN THEY ALL DODGE
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN SMILE
CHAPTER SIX
THE CHAMPION
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GREATEST COLORED MAN
THAT EVER LIVED
BOOK TWO: THE FALL
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BRUNETTE IN A BLOND TOWN
CHAPTER NINE
THE BLACK MAN GARBED IN BLACK
CHAPTER TEN
THE ACCUSED
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE FUGITIVE
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE STEPPER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PHOTOGRAPHS
COPYRIGHT
Acclaim for Geoffrey C. Ward’s
U N F O R G I V A B L E
B L A C K N E S S
“Deftly chronicled…. Unforgivable Blackness is engrossing and, at times, disturbing.”
—BusinessWeek
“[A] rousing, encyclopedic narrative.”
—The Nation
“Richly detailed…. The story unfolds in clear, simple prose, backed by exhaustive research. It is as much about America in the early 1900s as it is about boxing.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“It’s not only a biography of America’s first black heavyweight champion but also a case study in early-twentieth-century media hysteria. On both counts, racism KO’d fairness and tolerance every time.”
—Newsday
“A compelling portrait of a man determined to transcend his limits.”
—Bookmarks Magazine
“This remarkable book is at one and the same time a rousing story, a terrific biography, and first-rate history. With immense skill, Geoffrey Ward has not only brought Jack Johnson back to life but has provided a telling window onto what it was like to be a great black athlete in early-twentieth-century America.”
—Doris Kearns Goodwin
“Geoffrey Ward’s Unforgivable Blackness is a stunning exploration of the unbelievable bigotry of whites in early-twentieth-century America.”
—David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois
Geoffrey C. Ward
U N F O R G I V A B L E
B L A C K N E S S
Geoffrey C. Ward won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1989. With Ken Burns, he is coauthor of The Civil War and Jazz. He lives in New York City.
ALSO BY GEOFFREY C. WARD
Treasures of the Maharajahs
Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt 1882–1905
A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of FDR
The Civil War: An Illustrated History
(with Ric and Ken Burns)
American Originals:
The Private Worlds of Some Singular Men and Women
Baseball: An
Illustrated History (with Ken Burns)
Tiger-Wallahs:
Encounters with the Men Who
Tried to Save the Greatest of the Great Cats
(with Diane Raines Ward)
Closest Companion:
The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship
Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley
Not for Ourselves Alone:
The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
(with Ken Burns)
Jazz:
A History of America’s Music
(with Ken Burns)
Mark Twain
(with Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns)
FOR KELLY, GARRETT, NATHAN, AND KATIE
AND FOR WYNTON
Boxing has fallen into disfavor—into very great disfavor … The cause is clear: Jack Johnson … has out-sparred an Irishman. He did it with little brutality, the utmost fairness and great good nature. He did not “knock” his opponent senseless. Apparently he did not even try. Neither he nor his race invented prize fighting or particularly like it. Why then this thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is black. Of course some pretend to object to Mr. Johnson’s character. But we have yet to hear, in the case of White America, that marital troubles have disqualified prize fighters or ball players or even statesmen. It comes down, then, after all to this unforgivable blackness.
W. E. B. DU BOIS, The Crisis, August 1914
A NOTE TO THE READER
____________________________________________
In writing this book, I have made two editorial decisions of which the reader should be aware. There are no Jack Johnson “papers” upon which to draw—though I have included a good deal of autobiographical material in Johnson’s own hand that has never before been published—and therefore much of this book is necessarily based on contemporaneous newspaper accounts of events in his life, both public and private. No one who spends any time with the white newspapers of the early twentieth century can fail to be startled by the racist contempt with which black Americans in general and Jack Johnson in particular were routinely portrayed.
Johnson was the subject of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of newspaper cartoons during the course of his career. Those who drew them usually made some effort to produce recognizable caricatures of his white opponents, but Johnson himself looks the same in virtually all of them: an inky shape with popping eyes and rubbery lips, by turns threatening and ludicrous, that bears no resemblance to Johnson or anyone else; it is as if Krazy Kat or Mickey Mouse had somehow been dropped down among human beings. Even in ostensibly objective news stories Johnson is called the “dinge,” the “coon,” the “stove,” the “Texas Darky,” the “big smoke,” the “Ethiopian,” the “Senegambian,” and—more often than one can credit—simply “the nigger.” In the same derisive fashion, Johnson’s words were often rendered in a kind of minstrel dialect no one ever actually used offstage: “Deah’s one man dat Ah wahnts to fight. Dat’s Jeff. Ah don’e see no good reason why Ah’s not entitled to a whack at Jeff fo’ de champeenship.” There are at least four dim old recordings of Johnson’s actual voice: in three, he’s adopted the formalized declamatory style of the vaudevillian he was for thirty years; in the fourth, he’s trying to mimic a blackface comic. In none of them does he sound remotely like the buffoon the sports pages made him out to be. To help restore some sense of him as an individual, then, and to approximate the authentic sound of his speech, I have restored normal English spelling to whatever Johnson is quoted as having said. (I have not altered any of the words or made orthodox any of the grammar. Nor have I invented any of the conversations included here; every word was recalled by one or another participant or overheard by a reporter.)
And to recapture something of the atmosphere of the world in which he always insisted on remaining his own man, I decided not to use the anachronistic term “African American” in favor of the one that whites of Johnson’s generation most resisted using—and blacks of his day most hoped to see in print: “Negro.”
GEOFFREY C. WARD
BOOK ONE
___________________________
THE RISE
CHAPTER ONE
____________________________________________
THE PURE-BLOODED AMERICAN
IN THE SPRING OF 1910, Halley’s comet returned to the heavens after an absence of seventy-five years. Some believed it a sign from God that the world was about to end. Nearly everyone sa
w it as a momentous event, and during the week of May 18, when astronomers predicted the earth would pass through the comet’s tail, adults and sleepy children all over the country stumbled out of their homes at night to see if they could get a glimpse of it.
On the Lower East Side of New York, thousands of tenement dwellers, mostly immigrants and their families, filled the streets to peer up at the cloudy skies, while on the roof of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel uptown, Speaker of the House Joseph G. Cannon led two hundred tuxedoed guests attending the annual dinner of the National Association of Manufacturers in a champagne toast to the comet’s passing. In Memphis, Tennessee, separate all-night revivals were held for white and black believers awaiting Judgment Day. In Chicago, panicked householders blocked their doors and windows against deadly gases they believed the comet would release.
And early one morning, at the fashionable Seal Rock House on Ocean Beach at San Francisco’s western edge, guests and staff members alike gathered on the sand beneath the stars, listening to the rhythm of the surf and waiting to chart the comet’s brilliant course above the sea.
But the hotel’s most celebrated guest—the most celebrated black man on earth—remained in bed in his suite on the second floor. A member of his entourage had slipped up the stairs a few minutes earlier and tried to rouse him, but the heavyweight champion of the world had ordered him out of the room. He saw no need to get up. Over the coming centuries there would be hundreds of comets, he said. “But there ain’t gonna be but one Jack Johnson.”
Like a good many of his claims, this one was both outrageous and entirely accurate. He had, after all, battered his way from obscurity to the top of the heavyweight ranks and won the greatest prize in American sports—a prize that had always been the private preserve of white combatants. At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from no one and resolved to live always as if color did not exist. While most Negroes struggled merely to survive, he reveled in his riches and his fame. And at a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased. Most whites (and some Negroes as well) saw him as a perpetual threat—profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural order of things.
The real Jack Johnson was both more and less than those who loved or those who hated him ever knew. He embodied American individualism in its purest form; nothing—no law or custom, no person white or black, male or female—could keep him for long from whatever he wanted. He was in the great American tradition of self-invented men, too, and no one admired his handiwork more than he did. All his life, whites and blacks alike would ask him, “Just who do you think you are?” The answer, of course, was always “Jack Johnson”—and that would prove to be more than enough for turn-of-the-twentieth-century America to handle.
Johnson visited Paris for the first time in June of 1908, before sailing to Australia and his long-delayed battle with the heavyweight champion Tommy Burns. It may have been then that he and an unknown French journalist began laboring together over the manuscript that would become the first of his autobiographies.* The language of its opening passage seems stilted, especially in translation, but the thoughts are unmistakably Jack Johnson’s:
When a white man writes his memoirs … he anxiously begins with the history of his family from earliest times. It seems the higher one ascends the more interested one is in it. And I think that most authors embroider their genealogy. Basically, none of it interests anyone other than family members.
But I don’t want to exempt myself from this ancient custom and wish to say a few words about my genealogy.
Our [Negro] memories are handed down from father to son. Whites don’t think so, but we blacks are also proud of our ancestors and during long days and still longer nights, though we knew neither schools nor books, we still transmitted memories of past centuries. I don’t doubt that the stories have been modified over time, but the salient facts remain. If some parts are merely fables it doesn’t matter much. Who can tell among the white stories what is fact and what is fable?
Facts about Johnson’s ancestry are hard to come by, and he was himself a cheerful fabulist when it came to retelling his own life. But the first thing he wanted people to understand about him was that because his enslaved forebears had arrived in America long “before the United States was dreamed of,” he was himself a “pure-blooded American.” And because he knew that that was what he was, he saw no reason ever to accept any limitations on himself to which other Americans were not also subject.*
Why he insisted on acting that way at a time when most American Negroes were relegated to second-class citizenship remains the essential mystery of his life. No amount of sleuthing will ever fully solve it, but a few clues may lie half-hidden in what little we know of his boyhood.
He was born Arthur John Johnson in Galveston, Texas, on March 31, 1878, the year after the last Union troops were withdrawn from the former Confederacy, leaving freed blacks to fend for themselves.† His parents, Henry and Tina (known as Tiny) Johnson, both ex-slaves, did just that. She was from either North or South Carolina; government records and her son’s various accounts differ. Henry was born in Maryland or Virginia sometime during the 1830s; after serving as a civilian teamster attached to the U.S. Army’s 38th (Colored) Infantry, he settled in Galveston in 1867. His son loyally remembered him as “the most perfect physical specimen I have ever seen.” In fact, Henry stood just five foot five and was severely disabled by an atrophied right leg, the result of exposure to cold and rain and snow in the trenches at Petersburg, Virginia, that had caused the “disease of rheumatism” to distort his right knee—or so his attorneys would later claim in one of several unsuccessful bids he made for a veteran’s pension.
Despite his injury, despite the fact that he could not read and that neither he nor his wife could write, Henry Johnson never failed to find ways to support his family. He worked as a porter in a saloon, then as a school janitor, finally as supervising janitor for Galveston’s East School District. His wife took in washing. Both were faithful Methodists, and Henry sometimes helped with the preaching on Sundays; Jack Johnson’s glib tongue and enthusiasm for public speaking may have been an inheritance from him.
The Johnsons had nine children, five of whom lived to adulthood. They kept them all fed and clothed, saw to it that they attended at least five years of school, and somehow managed to put enough money aside to buy a plot of land at 808 Broadway at the island’s eastern end, and build their own singlestory home.
Jack was the Johnsons’ third child and first son, and from the beginning seems to have been the focus of his family’s attention. He was bright, talkative, and filled with energy, but, as he and his mother both remembered, he’d also been frail as a small boy and was still so thin at twelve that the family physician warned he might be tubercular. Like his sisters and brothers, he was expected from early childhood to help keep the family going. He swept out schoolrooms to ease his father’s burdens. “Those devilish brooms were taller than I was,” he remembered. “It was sure the joy of my early life to grow taller than the broomstick.” And he got an early morning job, riding along on a milk wagon to keep an eye on the horse when the milkman got down to make a delivery. Every Saturday night, he was paid ten cents and a brand-new pair of bright-red socks, of which his employer evidently had a limitless supply.
Otherwise, Jack remained at home with his older sisters, Lucy and Jennie, and his younger siblings, Henry and Fannie and an adopted brother named Charles. He was especially close to his mother, who told him again and again he was “the best boy in the world” and assured him he could do anything he wanted if he wanted it badly enough.
Jack Johnson seems to have needed little encouragement along those lines. He saw himself as someone special from the first—someone set apart, not subject to the limitations holding others back. His mother liked to recall what he told her one evening when he was still a small boy doing h
is homework by lamplight. As she told it,
Jack was reading in the Texas history book about great men, and he turns around to me and he allowed as how he was going to be a great man himself some one of these days. And I says, “Shucks, boy, what you talking about? What you think you’re going to be—president?” He said, no, he wasn’t figuring on being president, but he expects he’ll be something what’ll be just about as big. And that child sure was talking a parable that night.
Johnson would remain deeply devoted to Tiny Johnson until her death, lavishing her with gifts and telling reporters she had been responsible for all his success. After her death, he delivered a pulpit talk called “The Influence of My Christian Mother” before black congregations in several cities. In it, he urged his listeners to “keep your mother’s image before you all the time. Remember what she taught you when you was a youngster, and there is nothing you can’t accomplish.”
That message was reinforced by the city (and the neighborhood within that city) in which Johnson grew up. In 1929, long after his boxing life had ended, he cooperated in writing a series of syndicated articles about his career. In one, he argued that the outstanding black heavyweights of that era, Harry Wills and George Godfrey,* would never reach the heights he had reached, in part because they were from the Deep South and therefore “grew up with the thought implanted in their minds, through generations of tradition, that the COLORED man was not equal to the WHITE. The inferiority complex which was planted in their grandfather and his father has never been shaken off and never will be shaken off.”†
Johnson was a southerner, too, of course, and had also been raised in a city where, as he said, “the whites were in control.” But Galveston was different from most southern communities. It was a seaport and, like its rivals, Mobile and New Orleans, took a more relaxed view of racial separation than did the inland towns and cities of the South. All sorts of people came and went at the waterfront. “You had all walks of life, races, creeds, colors … in here,” a longtime resident remembered. “We were segregated but it wasn’t as bad as other places in the state of Texas…. That was a unique thing about Galveston. Negroes and Caucasian people were poor and lived in the same neighborhood, ate the same food, suffered the same problems.”
Unforgivable Blackness Page 1
