Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Battles royal flourished in the South well into the 1940s. Several future champions, including Joe Gans and lightweight Beau Jack, are said to have got their start in them. Henry Armstrong, however, who became the first man to hold three titles simultaneously in different weight divisions, always refused to take part: “I wouldn’t go for that,” he said. “I was really too proud.” (Johnson’s Prison Memoir; Kaye, “Battle Blind.”)

  “In those days,” he remembered, most all Battle Royals were fought on a basis of winner take all, and often such fights were framed up, that is, sometimes 3 or 4 friends would be matched in the same Battle Royal and they would agree with each other to rush the stranger in the Battle and knock him out, and then they would [agree upon which one of them would win and] split the purse. [Johnson’s Springfield opponents] did not believe me much of a fighter or they would never have agreed to a winner take all basis…. They thought they had something easy.

  They didn’t. All four rushed Johnson at the opening bell, fists flying. He retreated to a corner and, with his back to the ropes, knocked out the first two with right hands to the jaw, then connected to the midsection of the third, dropping him to his knees—“like he was praying,” Johnson remembered. He chased the fourth man—“a big red-[haired] fellow”—until he could corner him and knock him out, too. When the man he’d felled with a body blow showed signs of struggling to his feet, Johnson hurried to his side, stood over him, and whispered, “If you get up I will kill you.”* He stayed down.

  I don’t know what the winner’s purse was as [the white man who acted as his manager] took all the money, but he showered me with praise. He said that everything was fine and dandy and that some day I would be a great fighter. He … bought me several glasses of beer. This part of my manager’s affection I appreciated. I grabbed my glass of beer and then edged up to the free lunch counter and began to eat…. Well, I guess I got away with about 30 sandwiches and a dozen beers.

  As soon as the headliners had finished their nonviolent encounter in Springfield that evening and the receipts had been counted and distributed, three boxing insiders from Chicago boarded the midnight train for home: the referee George Siler (known as “Honest” George in boxing circles to differentiate him from his more malleable peers), who doubled as boxing editor of the Chicago Tribune; P. J. “Paddy” Carroll, a former heavyweight who now promoted boxing matches for the Illinois Athletic Club; and Jack Curley, Carroll’s hulking young assistant.

  Curley would one day become one of America’s best-known showmen, a Barnumesque promoter and publicist whose clients would include Rudolph Valentino, William Jennings Bryan, the Vatican Choir, and a traveling flea circus, and whose most lasting contribution to American culture was to help transform professional wrestling from a legitimate if ponderous sport into a gaudy prearranged spectacle. Again and again over the years, Jack Curley would emerge from the wings just in time to further Johnson’s career.

  But in 1899 he was still just an eager twenty-three-year-old hustler. Born Jacques Armand Schuel to Alsatian parents in San Francisco on July 4, 1876, he derived his Americanized professional name from the ringlets that framed his moon face when he was a boy. His father enrolled him in business college, but Curley was soon lured away by what he called “the glamour of the streets.” At fifteen, he got a job as a police reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, only to be fired when his editor caught him spinning stories out of thin air. He drifted east in 1893 to see the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There he peddled papers, washed dishes, and slept in alleyways before landing a job with Paddy Carroll, working first as a cornerman, then as Carroll’s second-in-command.

  After he and his companions on the Chicago-bound train had wolfed down the sandwiches they’d bought on the Springfield station platform, Curley remembered, Carroll settled back into his seat and fell asleep, a dead cigar in his mouth, while Curley and Siler talked over the evening’s entertainment.

  “Did you see that battle royal they put on there tonight?” Siler asked as the train rocked along.

  “No. I was pretty busy about that time. Why?”

  “The big coon that won it looked pretty good to me.”

  “George, you’re just a natural booster. You know as well as I do that it was a rotten show. The semi-final was bad and the main event was worse. You don’t want to pan the show—so you picked the Negro.”

  “No, I’m serious. The big Negro had a great left hand and looked as though he knew his way around the ring.”

  One evening a few weeks later, Siler and Curley were standing at the bar in Stillson’s Café, a Chicago sportsman’s hangout at Madison and Dearborn. The excitable bartender, Frank Kennedy, was the official timekeeper for important boxing matches in the Windy City, and so enthusiastic about a black heavyweight prospect named John Haines (who fought under the nom de guerre of “Klondike”) that he kept him on his payroll as a porter between contests.

  Curley remembered that when Siler began talking up “the big coon with the great left hand” he’d seen in Springfield, some of the regulars began to tease Kennedy about what this out-of-town colossus might do to his man. Finally, Kennedy pulled a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet and slapped it on the bar. “That says Klondike will put this big shine of yours out inside of six rounds!” he shouted. “Put up or shut up!”

  Paddy Carroll wired Johnny Connor in Springfield, asking that Jack Johnson come to Chicago to face Klondike on the next week’s undercard. There was a thirty-five-dollar purse—twenty-five to the winner, ten to the loser. Johnson had had little to eat since he’d been allowed to stuff himself with sandwiches after the battle royal, but he signed on anyway.

  He made his big-city debut at the Howard Theater on May 5, 1899, on a card headed by two featherweights, Harry Forbes and “Turkey Point” Billy Smith.* Frank Kennedy, Klondike’s champion and employer, kept time. The referee was named Malachy Hogan.

  Johnson looked dangerously thin as he waited for the bell. He hadn’t a “thimbleful of victuals” in his stomach, George Siler recalled, but he soon landed a left hand that sent Klondike to the canvas. Curley described what happened next.

  Hogan bellowed, “One!”

  Klondike didn’t move.

  “What’s the matter?” Hogan shouted. “Ain’t you going to get up?”

  Klondike said nothing.

  “Two!”

  Klondike still hugged the canvas and Hogan prodded him with his foot.

  “Get up!” he commanded.

  Klondike merely shut his eyes.

  Hogan walked over to where Kennedy sat.

  “He’s a dog, Frank.”

  The count continued. The crowd roared with laughter.

  Hogan must have used up three minutes reaching a count of nine, when Klondike, feeling that further resistance to his pleadings and proddings was useless, finally got up.

  The Negroes mauled each other until the fifth round when Klondike’s left landed with a thud in Johnson’s body and Jack sank to the canvas.

  Again, Hogan began a burlesque count but Johnson was even more obdurate than Klondike had been. He rolled over, assumed a comfortable position with one elbow resting on the floor, his hand bracing his head, and settled himself to take the count if the process required the entire evening. When it had been completed, he dragged himself to his feet and shuffled out of the ring, paying not the slightest heed to the mingled hooting and laughter of the crowd.*

  Around one that morning, Jack Curley and Carroll’s other assistant, a ferret-faced onetime bantamweight named Sig Hart, finished counting the gate receipts in Paddy Carroll’s office above the theater and started downstairs.

  Jack Johnson was waiting in the lobby.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, according to Curley, “ain’t I goin’ to get nothin’ for fightin’ here tonight?” “What did Carroll say?”

  “He said if I didn’t get out, he’d skin my black hide off me.” “Then I’m afraid you won’t get anything.”

  “Bu
t Mr. Curley, I’m hungry. I ain’t had nothin’ to eat since seven o’clock this mornin’ in Springfield. If I could just get three dollars I could get something to eat and go back to Springfield.”

  “Wait here a minute,” Curley said.

  He climbed back up to Carroll’s office.

  “Not a dime,” the promoter said.

  “But Connor sent him up here and he’s a good friend of ours. We ought to give the poor fellow something.”

  “He quit didn’t he? I won’t give him a dime.” Curley returned to the lobby.

  Johnson turned to go. Curley took pity on him—or so he liked to remember many years later. (Neither empathy nor generosity was among his more conspicuous qualities.* ) “Sig, have you got a buck?”

  Hart came up with a dollar. Curley added two of his own. Johnson walked off into the night. “Had any one told me then that this lowly, hungry preliminary fighter would be the heavyweight champion of the world,” Curley wrote, “my first thought would have been to laugh and my second to call a policeman.”†

  Johnson stayed on in Chicago. He worked first as a sparring partner for veteran fighter Frank Childs. Billed as the “Crafty Texan” and nine years older than Johnson, Childs was one of the top black heavyweights in the country. “Frank… disliked me,” Johnson said, “for each time that [I] stepped into the ring with him he would give me an awful beating…. [Another fighter in the gym] often said, ‘What are you trying to do, Frank, kill that fellow?’ But this did not stop him. He would only try harder to knock me out.” But when Childs learned that his fellow Texan was so broke he was forced to sleep on the lakefront, he offered him the use of the floor in his own rented room. Johnson was curled up there one night when Childs, accompanied by either his wife or his cousin (Johnson’s several versions of the story differ), came home and told him he’d have to leave right away to make room for the newcomer. Johnson argued and was fired. It was cold and raining hard. He took refuge in a doorway until a policeman ordered him to move on, then found what shelter he could behind the equestrian statue of General John Logan in Lincoln Park. The rain blew in so hard off Lake Michigan that night, he remembered, “it seemed to me as if the bronze horse had turned his head away from the wind.”‡

  A Chicago promoter got him a fight in LaSalle, Indiana.* He won it, but lost his winnings that same evening in a dice game and had to borrow the money to get back to Chicago. Then, a would-be manager named Frank Lewis said he’d represent him and provide him with food and a place to stay as well. Johnson’s hardest times seemed over, but the arrangement lasted only seven days. “Oh, what a pleasant week,” he remembered.

  I ate ham & eggs, pie, hot biscuits and good sweet milk to my heart’s delight. I was just in the midst of one of these meals when I listened to the saddest piece of music which I had ever heard. The boss of the boarding house whispered in my ears that “Your manager Mr. Lewis is finished and you must get yourself another place to eat,” and that I would have to find a new boarding & eating house.

  That evening, his landlord demanded that Johnson pay the bill for his room and board. Johnson told him he’d have his money the next day, waited till everyone was asleep, lowered his trunk from the window, lugged it to the rail yards, and fled the city. He headed east this time, he remembered, and landed in Pittsburgh without enough money to buy a plate of beans. Near the stockyards someone stopped and asked him if he’d ever been in the ring. He said he had. Would he be interested in a fight? A brawny meat cutter who’d beaten up several local heroes was looking for an opponent. Johnson said he was just what they were looking for and proved it the next afternoon, knocking the butcher out in the first round. With his cap “brimming full of dollars,” he moved on to New York, where he acted as a second to Joe Walcott in a bout with the New Zealand middleweight Dan Creedon.

  In July 1899, he turned up in New Haven, where he earned a few dollars sweeping out Becky Stanford’s Cigar Store and poolroom on Congress Avenue and helped train a young featherweight named Kid Conroy. Conroy was white, Johnson remembered, but his mother had cheerfully fed and housed the man who was helping to make a boxer out of her boy. By fall, Johnson said, he had earned enough money betting on his man to buy himself a legitimate railroad ticket home to Galveston, the first time he had ever ridden “the cushions instead of the rods.”*

  To be able to purchase his own train ticket was a personal milestone, but Johnson remained, as he himself said, down on his luck. He was still unable to earn a steady income in the ring, still without a manager to make the matches that would enhance his reputation, and forced to depend on his boyhood friend Leo Posner, now matchmaker for the Galveston Athletic Club, to get him fights from time to time.†

  On April 6, 1900, he recalled, “I was digging in the corner of the garden when one of my little brothers hissed to me from the other side of the hedge, ‘Say, Jack, there’s some white folks here who say that Bob White can take you in 15 rounds. There’s money in it for you. What do you say?’” White weighed 235 pounds and had won a string of victories. “My answer was to drop my shovel and jump over the hedge. I didn’t feel well that day. I’d had nothing to eat,” he said. But Posner had come to get him in a carriage, and he wanted to be seen riding through his neighborhood in style.

  In those days there were very few carriages in [my] section of Galveston, so when one rode in a carriage one was considered some kid.

  Well, I rode down to the club where I received $100 in brand-new one-dollar bills and believe me those new bills looked good to me and they were good, too. I fought Bob 15 rounds winning the decision, which made me feel pretty good for I had whipped the best man in Texas.

  He continued to take on all comers, sometimes two a week. On May 1, a big, jeering white crowd gathered to see him face his first known white opponent, an Australian named Jim Scanlon. Another black fighter might have been intimidated, might even have thought it the better part of valor to hold back or even surrender early. Not Jack Johnson; he knocked Scanlon senseless in the seventh round. Six days later, he knocked out Jim McCormick in seven; three weeks after that, he knocked him out again in less than half the time.* In June, Johnson held Klondike to a twenty-round draw and knocked out Horace Miles at Josie’s Beer Garden for a twenty-five-dollar purse. After that fight, he remembered, “the managers, trainers and fighters all got into a dice game. I don’t remember who won all the money, but I do think that I did not.”

  * There are four of them: Ma Vie et Mes Combats, serialized in eighteen parts in La Vie au Grand Air in 1911; Mes Combats, a revised version of the magazine articles, published in Paris in 1914; a fragmentary manuscript in Johnson’s own hand, written while he was a prisoner at Leavenworth federal penitentiary, 1920–21, hereafter referred to as Prison Memoir; and Jack Johnson—In the Ring and Out, 1927, written with Bill Sims. Johnson also wrote, or cooperated with others in writing, a number of autobiographical magazine and newspaper articles.

  * It may seem odd to modern readers that Johnson would have felt it necessary to assert his Americanness this way. But in his time, whites routinely drew a distinction between black citizens and “real” Anglo-Saxon, native-born Americans. For example, in a Washington Post article published on August 10, 1913, headlined FEW STARS OF PRIZE RING OF NATIVE AMERICAN STOCK, the anonymous author asserted that “from the time of [John L.] Sullivan to the present time … only one real American [James J. Jeffries] has had the honor of occupying the throne, though an American negro also has held the title.”

  † As a boy he was known as Arthur and L’il Artha. Sportswriters would turn the latter into a derisive nickname. At some later point, he reversed the order of his names and became John Arthur Johnson.

  * Godfrey’s real name was Feabe Smith Williams. He named himself after the Canadian heavyweight George Godfrey, who had been one of John L. Sullivan’s two most serious black challengers.

  † Johnson’s theory would never be tested, because his successors as champion (Jess Willard, Jack Dempsey, and Gene Tunney
) refused to face any black challengers in the ring, just as James J. Jeffries had refused to face Johnson when he held the title.

  * Norris Cuney’s handsome home at 822 Avenue L was just two blocks behind Henry Johnson’s house; his brother Joseph, an attorney and clerk of the Customs House, lived just across the street from the Johnsons at 813 Broadway.

  † When Johnson went swimming off the docks with other boys and got too close to a steamboat’s paddle wheel, a youth named Cafferty Williams, presumably a member of the Eleventh Street and Avenue K gang, dove in and saved him from being sucked under. Years later, Johnson would express his gratitude by sending Williams five hundred dollars from his winnings. (Los Angeles Examiner, July 16, 1910.)

  * Sugar Ray Robinson, who won the welterweight title and held the middleweight title five times during his long career, told almost exactly the same story about his own beginnings. When a boy, he explained to the writer W. C. Heinz, “I would avoid fighting even if I had to take the short end. I’d even apologize…. I got to be known as a coward and my sisters used to fight for me.” Robinson, like Johnson before him, didn’t much like fighting but loved “out-thinking another man and out-maneuvering him.” (W. C. Heinz, What a Time It Was, p. 84.)

  * In 1910, he maintained with a straight face that he had loaded cotton purely for fun: “While I never worked as a longshoreman as some people have said I used to delight when I was a boy … to go down on the docks and handle heavy bales of cotton and the like. I didn’t do this for pay. I simply did this because I had a leaning that way. It developed my strength and I gained quite a name as a strong man.” (Milwaukee Free Press, May 8, 1910.)

  * In some versions of this story, Johnson claimed he made the trip in two stages. The first supposedly took him only as far as Key West, where he earned a little money diving for sponges and fought off a hungry twenty-three-foot shark before moving on. Of all his colorful tales this one seems among the least plausible. (Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out, pp. 28–29.)