Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  “I done him up in about two minutes,” he remembered. That was how he liked things to go. “I go in to win from the very first second. Win I must and win I shall.” And win he did, at least forty-seven times officially and many more times than that off the record, against every blacksmith, tugboat captain, iron puddler, and gandy dancer brave or foolish enough to face him. Sullivan was, Charles Dana wrote, “the most phenomenal production of the prize ring that has been evoluted during the nineteenth century.”

  The Irish-American editor John Boyle O’Reilly may have captured Sullivan’s fighting style best:

  Sullivan is as fierce, relentless, tireless as a cataract. The fight is wholly to go in his way—not at all in the other man’s. His opponent wants to spar; he leaps on him with a straight blow. He wants to breathe; he dashes him into the corner with a drive in the stomach. He does not waste ten seconds of the three minutes of each round.

  His defensive skills were limited largely to a ferrous chin and the psychological impact of the relentless cheer with which he complimented any man who managed to reach it. “That’s a good one, Charlie!” he would shout, continuing to move inexorably forward. “I have never felt a man’s blow in my life,” he liked to say; there can be few more disheartening experiences in sports than to land your best punch and see its beefy target smile.

  Sullivan may not actually have been able to take bites out of horseshoes, as one story had it, but his power really was prodigious. “I thought a telegraph pole had been shoved against me endways,” said Paddy Ryan, from whom Sullivan took the heavyweight title in 1882; another victim, brought around by several buckets of water, wondered dreamily if he might have fallen off a barn.

  The champion once claimed in court that he had “never been angry in any of the engagements I have been in.” Between engagements, however, things were different: Sullivan was “a son-of-a-bitch of the first water,” one contemporary said, “if he drank any.” Despite his own claim that he had often been “full but never drunk,” heavy drinking fueled his sensitivity to any slight, real or fancied, and his favorite barroom-brawling technique was to butt his opponents into oblivion. His drinking would eventually cause him to balloon to more than three hundred pounds; it lost him his first wife, drove off at least one mistress, and almost cost him his life when, staggering out onto the platform between railroad cars to relieve himself, he tumbled off the speeding train into a farmer’s field near Springfield, Illinois.

  Sullivan had all the prejudices of his time and class. Black people were beneath his notice. “Any fighter who’d get into the same ring with a nigger loses my respect,” he told one reporter, and he did his best simply to ignore the existence of black challengers.* The hard-hitting Canadian George Godfrey might well have taken Sullivan’s title had the champion not continually ducked him, pretending he was willing to fight him one moment, then finding a way to get out of it the next.†

  Peter Jackson was even more formidable than Godfrey. Born in St. Croix,he began boxing in Australia. After winning the heavyweight championship of his adopted country in 1886 and punching his way past all the white challengers willing to fight him, he came to America in 1888, hoping to persuade Sullivan to give him a chance at his title. Superbly conditioned, skilled at both science and slugging, he was so impressive in his first American bout that one spectator was overheard saying “fear alone” would prevent Sullivan from ever facing him. Jackson forced George Godfrey to quit in the nineteenth round, then went on to beat every white contender who dared enter the ring with him. Negroes followed his exploits closely. After he knocked out Joe McCauliffe in San Francisco, hundreds marched up and down Market Street cheering his name. He was careful never to appear boastful: when black admirers staged a parade for him in Baltimore, he refused to take part unless a hand-painted banner proclaiming Sullivan a coward for avoiding him had been removed. Frederick Douglass kept a photograph of Jackson in his Washington office and would sometimes point to it when visitors came to call, saying, “Peter is doing a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question.”

  But there was only so much he could do so long as Sullivan refused even to consider facing him. Richard K. Fox, the influential editor of the Police Gazette, put up ten thousand dollars as a guarantee if Sullivan would give Jackson the chance Fox believed he deserved. The champion was unmoved. Many years later, his manager, William Muldoon, admitted that it had been he who vetoed the idea of fighting Jackson simply to save Sullivan from the “humiliation of being defeated by a Negro.” But by categorically barring all blacks, he and Sullivan also sought to turn a matter of personal convenience into what they hoped other whites would see as a matter of racial principle. Being the heavyweight champion of the world was, as the writer Gerald Early has said, something like being the “Emperor of Masculinity.” Lesser beings might be permitted to battle for lesser honors, but in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America it was unthinkable that a black man might wear that most exalted crown. And the best way to ensure that such a thing never happened was to keep all blacks from contending for it.

  Disappointed and already, at thirty, beginning to show signs of slowing down, Jackson agreed to meet the top white contender, James J. Corbett, in May of 1891, in San Francisco. Like Sullivan, Corbett was an Irish immigrant’s son, but he was a very different kind of public figure, handsome and well spoken, elegant rather than flamboyant, a former bank clerk, not a onetime ditchdigger. (It especially annoyed Sullivan that Corbett’s admirers called their hero “Gentleman” Jim.) And, like Jackson, Corbett was a master of defense. Their bout turned into a mind-numbing ring marathon, the two men handling each other with such exquisite caution that the fight stretched on for sixty-one rounds (four hours and five minutes)—so long, the sports-writer W. W. Naughton remembered, that most of the crowd was gone and many of those who remained had stretched out on the empty benches and gone to sleep by the time the referee called a halt and declared the fight “no contest.”

  Neither man could claim a victory, but just the fact that Corbett had endured so many rounds against Jackson built public enthusiasm for a Sullivan-Corbett contest at New Orleans in September of 1892. That fight—and the attention it drew—marked the real beginning of the modern boxing era. Instead of meeting in secret in a farmer’s field or aboard an anchored offshore barge, they would fight beneath the electrically illuminated roof of an enclosed stadium as the climax of a three-night “Triple Event” of boxing covered by sportswriters from all over the country.

  On the first evening, lightweight champion Jack McAuliffe knocked out challenger Billy Myer in the fifteenth round. The next night, George Dixon took on an Irish challenger, Jack Skelly. As a special concession to Dixon, a section of seats was set aside so that black fans could see their hero. He did not disappoint them, beating his outclassed opponent so badly before felling him that ringsiders never forgot the terrible sound his blood-soaked gloves made battering Skelly’s face. Black New Orleanians would celebrate for the next two days and nights, but white spectators were horrified. “It was a mistake to match a negro and a white man,” said the New Orleans Daily Picayune, “a mistake to bring the races together on any terms of equality, even in the prize ring.”*

  The contest between Sullivan and Corbett proved something of an anticlimax. The Great John L., badly overweight at thirty-three and breathing hard from the eighth round on, never caught up with his agile, well-conditioned challenger, who met Sullivan’s every puffing lunge with counterpunches until the champion collapsed in the twenty-first round, unable to rise again. Nothing in Sullivan’s ring career became him so much as his leaving of it. Shrugging off the restraining hands of his seconds, who thought he wanted to continue his hopeless battle, he leaned heavily on a ring post long enough to deliver a graceful curtain speech: “Gentlemen … All I have to say is that I came into the ring once too often—and if I had to get licked, I’m glad I was licked by an American. I remain your warm personal friend, John L. Sullivan.”

  Back in Ga
lveston, Jack Johnson, reading about the fight, must have been delighted. Jim Corbett was one of his earliest ring heroes, and when, during Johnson’s brief stay in Boston, he had unwisely expressed his enthusiasm for the new champion within earshot of a band of Sullivan’s young fans, he received a severe thrashing. Corbett was “the most beautiful boxer that ever lived,” Johnson once told a reporter; his rise had marked the moment when “skill began to have a greater place in the ring than mere brute force.” Fast, clever, and coolheaded, Corbett made many of his onrushing opponents look like fools. Johnson would one day relish doing that, too. Sullivan’s blanket dismissal of all black challengers must also have deepened Johnson’s attachment to the new champion, who was at least generous enough to say soon after winning the title that while he planned first to fight Charlie Mitchell—a British challenger Jackson had knocked out—because that international contest was bound to sell the most tickets, he “had no objection to fighting Peter Jackson because he is colored. I think he is a credit to his profession.”

  Jackson was not satisfied. Passed over yet again, he wrote an open letter to the newspapers. He was careful as always not to appear overly aggressive; he had never “challenged” anyone, he wrote, and had no “animosity” for the new titleholder, but fairness surely suggested that he should meet Corbett again in the ring before age crept up on him much further. The two did get together in Manhattan in 1894 to discuss a possible meeting, but the negotiations fell apart when each man set conditions the other refused to accept: Corbett would not fight in England, and Jackson would not fight in the American South.

  Peter Jackson would never get his chance at the championship. For a time he returned to England, where he began drinking so heavily his hands shook and his speech was slurred. He then came back to San Francisco, where Sailor Tom Sharkey refused to face him because of his color, and at thirty-seven he was badly beaten up by the up-and-coming young Californian James J. Jeffries. Jackson sailed back to Australia, where, in 1901, he died of tuberculosis at forty and was buried in Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery. When Charles “Parson” Davies, Jackson’s former manager, heard of his passing, he paid him what was then considered the highest possible compliment. “He was ‘Black Prince Peter,’” he said, “the whitest man who ever entered the ring.”

  Between 1895 and 1898, Jack Johnson remembered, he divided his time between Galveston, where he beat “all the big fellows who worked on the docks”—at least seven of them—and brief hoboing forays to other towns, where he hoped to do better.

  In October of 1896, he found himself in New York. There he applied for a job as sparring partner for the black welterweight “Scaldy Bill” Quinn, who was getting ready for a fight with Johnson’s old friend Joe Walcott. Quinn was a rough, gin-drinking customer; a jagged knife scar on his right cheek that looked like a burn gave him his nickname, and he was celebrated for an early melee during which he nearly bit off an opponent’s middle finger. “I was nothing but a poor Negro, without a cent and dying of hunger,” Johnson recalled. “Scaldy Bill and his trainer were leading a grand life; they threw five-dollar bills around as tips and drank to Bill’s next victory. But there were no five-dollar bills for Jack Johnson.” Quinn wouldn’t give him any work, and when Johnson asked for three cents to take the ferry to Long Island, where Walcott was training, “he gave me a furious look and told me not to annoy him further.”

  Johnson got there anyway, and Walcott’s manager put him up at a boardinghouse run by a woman named Taylor, whom he talked into serving him a whole leghorn chicken for lunch every day. Johnson later claimed to have run up a ninety-dollar tab. “For the love of God, Jack,” Walcott said when the bill was presented to him for payment, “I’ve never eaten like that in my life!” To Johnson’s intense satisfaction, Walcott knocked Quinn cold. He would be further pleased eight or nine years later when Quinn jumped aboard a Chicago streetcar Johnson happened to be riding and asked for a handout and he was able to tell him to get lost. During flush times, Johnson was famously generous to friends and hangers-on and sometimes even to total strangers, but he was always unforgiving toward those he felt had slighted him during his early days, when, as he said, “the world was less kind.”

  “There have been countless women in my life,” Johnson wrote in his 1927 autobiography.

  They have participated in my triumphs and suffered with me in my moments of disappointment. They have inspired me to attainment and they have balked me; they have caused me joy and they have heaped misery upon me; they have been faithful to the utmost and they have been faithless; they have praised and loved me and they have hated and denounced me. Always, a woman has swayed me—sometimes many have demanded my attention at the same moment.

  If anything, Johnson was minimizing the complexities of his private life. Newspapermen and federal agents would eventually ferret out its most intimate details and spread them on the public record; but before he won his title, we have only glimpses of that life, gleaned from his own sometimes unreliable writings and from brief newspaper items that hint at more than they explain. It is difficult even to know where Johnson was living during those years and often impossible to know with whom.

  Still, the simultaneous demands on Johnson’s attention made by women seem to have started early, if his American autobiography is to be believed. In 1898, when his parents wanted him to settle down with the daughter of friends, he wrote, he married another young Galveston woman instead, a childhood friend named Mary Austin. “My fortune in those days was somewhat lean,” Johnson remembered, “but we were devoted to each other and we were very happy.” Nothing else is known about Mary Austin. No record of any marriage seems to have survived, and the 1900 census would show Johnson still living at home with his parents and siblings and without his supposed wife. Like a good many prizefighters, Johnson would one day travel with women to whom he was not married but whom he introduced for decorum’s and convenience’s sake as his wife. Mary Austin may have been the first such “Mrs. Jack Johnson.” She would not be the last.

  Married or single, Johnson turned twenty-one in March of 1899 and began to spend more and more time away from home. “There was nothing more for me to do in Galveston,” he remembered.

  The purses offered me were truly minimal—10, 15 or 20 dollars at most. If I stayed there, all I’d have is debts for I had to pay one or two seconds and their wages absorbed the whole purse and sometimes more. So I decided to travel the world, to try to box from one coast to the other, and to attach myself to the training camp of a famous boxer.

  He resolved to try Chicago first.

  I waited until dark and then went down to the [Santa Fe] RR yards and climbed into a side door Pullman bound for Kansas City. Although I had several delays and made several changes in trains, nothing eventful happened until I was nearing K.C. Upon leaving Tulsa, Oklahoma, I had climbed into a box car which was about half full of baled straw, several of the bales were broken, which afforded an excellent bed for me. It was early in the morning and I had been sleeping soundly when I was awakened by a tattoo on the soles of my shoes. Upon waking up, I gazed into the face of a big brakeman. He held a lantern in one hand, and in the other he held a club in a most threatening way. He addressed me in a tough manner and said, “Well, boy, if you haven’t any money you will have to jump off.”

  Johnson rose to his feet. He had no money, he said. The train was moving too fast for him to jump, and he wasn’t interested in committing suicide. The brakeman swung his club.

  I side-stepped it and hit him in the jaw and followed with an uppercut to his nose which knocked him into the land of nod. He was just coming to when I noticed that the train had slowed down a great deal and looking out its door I saw many lights so, judging that we were in K.C., I jumped off … hustled something to eat and after waiting all day I boarded another freight train for Chicago.*

  Boxing was an unsentimental business. Hard-eyed white men ran it. To get anywhere, Johnson knew, even the ablest black fighter needed to find a well-con
nected white man willing to negotiate with other whites on his behalf. He called at one Chicago athletic club after another in search of someone willing to take him on, but victories over obscure opponents on the faraway Galveston docks carried little weight in the big city. “All the managers who I offered my services to seemed to think me too young and would not listen to me.”

  Hoping vaguely that prospects might be brighter in Memphis or St. Louis, he hopped another freight. When it pulled into Springfield, Illinois, he got down and went looking for something to eat. Somehow, the big black stranger carrying a suitcase caught the eye of Johnny Connor, an ex-bantamweight who ran the Senate Bar, a favorite hangout of Illinois legislators. Connor put on boxing shows above his saloon twice a month, and he was worried about his next card. Even the Chicago promoters who had set it up were afraid the main event wouldn’t be a crowd-pleaser: “Two very clever but very uninteresting boxers,” one of them recalled, “would, when brought together, be doubly uninteresting.”

  To liven things up, Connor planned to kick off the evening with what was called a battle royal, memorably defined by the sportswriter W. C. Heinz as “an enlightened form of entertainment” that came in “when bear baiting went out, in which half a dozen or more blacks were gloved, blindfolded and pushed into a ring where they were forced to flail at one another until only one remained standing.” Many whites found these spectacles hilarious.

  Connor already had four men willing to take part, but he wanted five, and the tall tramp from the railroad yards looked like an ideal addition to the cast. To make the offer more attractive, Connor said he would feed and house Johnson until the night of the fight and give him a purse of a dollar fifty if he won. Johnson accepted.*