Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Johnson looked formidable when the bell rang, Choynski remembered, and the “perfect stance that he exhibited in later years was in evidence even when he was a raw novice.” But it also quickly became clear that while Choynski was smaller and lighter than the younger man and had lost some of his celebrated speed over the past seventeen years, his skills remained intact.

  In the first two rounds, Choynski said, we both did a lot of dancing…. Johnson was awfully long and reachy and I remember … that I had a hard time getting my punches to his face. When the third round started I decided to take a chance. I felt that if I lost the fight, it would hurt my prestige and I couldn’t afford that. I walked out for that round with my guard high to tempt Johnson to lead for my ribs. He bit like a hungry bass at the bait, and as he did I lashed out with all my weight for his jaw with my left hook which, pardon me for saying so, was the equal of any man’s punch, bar none. It landed just below the temple.

  Johnson fell forward into Choynski’s arms, then slid to the floor, face down. As the referee began to count, Johnson rolled over on his back but could not get up.

  Before he could regain his senses, five Texas Rangers clambered into the ring waving revolvers. He and Choynski were arrested for engaging in an illegal contest. “I never asked anyone to let [the fight] go on,” Johnson remembered. “I was darn glad it was over, but I didn’t much like the trip to jail.” He and Choynski were locked into the same cell and photographed there together, peering glumly out between the bars like stray dogs at the pound. A grand jury was named to consider indictments against them. Texas law held that anyone who voluntarily engaged in “a pugilistic encounter between man and man, or a fight between a man and a bull or any other animal” for financial gain was guilty of a felony and subject to at least two years in state prison.

  But things were not quite as dire as they seemed. Henry Thomas, the sheriff of Galveston County, was a strict but fair-minded man. Locking up the boxers, he knew, had as much to do with politics as genuine law enforcement, and he saw no need for undue harshness. “Joe went to his hotel at night, and I went to my home,” Johnson wrote. “We would come back to the jail and stay there all day.”

  To while away the time—and perhaps to make a little pocket change for himself—Thomas allowed a crowd to gather every day at lunchtime to watch the two men spar. “A lot of us used to go up to the calaboose in the afternoon,” one local newspaperman recalled, “and sit around while Choynski and Johnson jabbed and swatted each other. Choynski would point out to Johnson how to lead, feint, move away from a blow.” The veteran was impressed by Johnson’s speed. “A man who can move like you,” Choynski told Johnson, “should never have to take a punch.” It was a lesson Johnson never forgot.

  On March 8, the grand jury announced that it had failed to find a true bill against either fighter. When the sheriff let the men out of jail that evening, he told them not to come back—and to get out of town before the overzealous state attorney general could come up with another reason to hold them.

  They did. Choynski went home to his family in La Grange. Johnson hopped a freight and headed for Denver. There he fought what the Rocky Mountain News described as a “very tame draw” with Billy Stift on April 26, and then joined what he remembered in his 1927 autobiography as “a motley crew of scrappers” living and training at Ryan’s Sand Creek House, five miles northeast of town. It was a remarkable company. At one time or another that spring, it would include heavyweights Tom Sharkey, Bob Armstrong, and “Mexican Pete” Everett; welterweight “New York” Jack O’Brien; featherweights Abe Attell, Young Corbett II, and George Dixon; and expert trainers Spider Kelly and Tommy Ryan. They would spend weeks fighting local challengers in Denver and Victor and Cripple Creek, and battling one another when no one else could be persuaded to take them on.

  Johnson’s first assignment was to spar with Sharkey, a thick-bodied veteran mauler whose two wars with Jim Jeffries had stunned even ringside veterans with their ferocity. Sharkey was training for a May 3 go against an oversized California heavyweight named Big Fred Russell. Johnson didn’t last long as a sparring partner, he remembered. “Sharkey could not hit me. He told [his trainer,] Spider [Kelly,] to tell me to hold my head up so he could hit me and Spider said, ‘You’re boxing him so you make him hold his head up.’”

  After that, Johnson was relegated to the kitchen most of the time, frying chickens and making biscuits for the training table. According to Johnson, Mary Austin was with him briefly in the rundown shack all the fighters shared in Cripple Creek—perhaps he had sent for her because he had steady work for the moment—until what he called “a dispute of minor origin” caused her to leave him and shift to Denver. They were reunited there a few weeks later. On August 23, he acted as a second for George Dixon in a losing effort against Abe Attell at Coliseum Hall. The show was a sellout. Johnson received $150 as his share of the proceeds, then doubled his money at the gambling tables.

  Flush for the moment, he abandoned Sharkey’s ménage and with Mary Austin boarded a train for California, then the boxing center of the country. He headed first for Stockton, where he’d heard that George E. Eckhart, superintendent and matchmaker for the Stockton Athletic Association, was looking for young fighters who could make big money for him. Johnson turned up at the matchmaker’s office looking so thin, one newspaperman wrote, that “it appeared as if his stomach was firmly convinced that his throat had been cut,” but without any of the meek deference expected of black boxers when in the presence of the white men who ran the sport. He could beat anybody, he said. Bring them on. Eckhart kept a couple of professionals on his payroll just to test newcomers. According to the Los Angeles Times, one backed off when he saw Johnson stripped and ready for action, but a young black welterweight named Aaron Lister Brown (who would one day become well known as the “Dixie Kid”) agreed to try him out. “Johnson made him look foolish,” the Times reported. “He slapped him, he poked him, he cuffed him and bumped him.”

  Eckhart was impressed. So was everyone else in the gym. But then, Johnson began asserting himself: if he signed with Eckhart, he said, he expected his room and board to be covered, and he wanted someone sent to the depot right away to pick up his trunk. Eckhart threw him out. He could not bear what he called Johnson’s “imperious manner”; didn’t “care about being a manager for such an unruly black.” He wanted no fighters in his stable whom he could not control.

  Frank Carillo of Bakersfield believed he could control anybody. A squat, tough-talking Mexican American with a knife scar on his cheek and a Colt revolver in his trousers, he was said to supplement his income as a saloon keeper, racehorse owner, and sometime fight manager by staging illegal cock-and dogfights, then arranging to have them raided by cooperative police officers so he could lend the arrestees bail money at high interest. He had briefly directed the career of California’s first important Mexican-American boxer, featherweight Aurelio Herrera. Carillo demanded half of Johnson’s winnings, but he also promised to match him against the best heavyweights in California.

  Johnson decided to stay on in Bakersfield and see what Carillo could do for him. It was a rough desert town, and its handful of black citizens all lived within a single small, carefully circumscribed neighborhood. Somehow Johnson managed to find himself rented rooms in the white part of town. Barriers were meant for others, not for Jack Johnson.

  That view flew in the face of most white people. It also went against the teachings of Booker T. Washington, the former slave and president of the Tuskegee Institute whose 1895 address at Atlanta’s Cotton States Exposition—delivered the same summer Jack Johnson turned professional—had made him a favorite of white philanthropists, and the most powerful black man in America. “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly,” he told a cheering white crowd that afternoon, and urged his people to “cast down your bucket where you are”: to stay in the segregated South, gain an education, and through good manners
, sober habits, and hard work, eventually win the respect of their white neighbors. Meanwhile, “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

  The Great Accommodationist already had his Negro critics, younger men and women mostly, who had never been slaves and who argued that no real progress for black people could be made without appeal to the courts and the ballot box. One of them would say a few years later,

  Today, two classes of Negroes, confronted by a united opposition, are standing at the parting of the ways. The one counsels patient submission to our present humiliations and degradations, it deprecates political action and preaches the doctrine of industrial development and the acquisition of property…. The other class believes that it should not submit to being humiliated, degraded, and remanded to an inferior place. It believes in money and property, but it does not believe in bartering its manhood for the sake of gain.

  Jack Johnson was a boxer, not an activist. He seems never to have been interested in collective action of any kind—how could he be when he saw himself always as a unique individual apart from everyone else?—but he was very clear early on that he did not identify with the Wizard of Tuskegee. He wrote:

  White people often point to the writings of Booker T. Washington as the best example of a desirable attitude on the part of the colored population. I have never been able to agree with the point of view of Washington, because he has to my mind not been altogether frank in the statement of the problems or courageous in his solution to them…. I have found no better way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist.

  Frank Carillo arranged for Johnson to fight Hank Griffin, the son of a runaway slave and his American-Indian wife, at New Harmony Hall in Bakers-field on November 4, 1901. A skilled defensive fighter, two inches taller than Johnson and so slender, one writer said, that opponents couldn’t see him when he stood sideways, he was called “Mummy” Griffin for his skeletal build and the impassive way he went about his work. His best punch was the kind of short, jolting right uppercut for which Johnson would one day be celebrated.

  Johnson’s first appearance in California was decorous but disappointing to fight fans. “The fight was one of the cleanest … ever witnessed in this city,” said the Bakersfield Daily Californian, “both men breaking nicely from the clinches … Griffin landed many hard punches during the evening, but so did Johnson.” Later, Johnson would claim he’d knocked Griffin down twice despite the fever he’d been running for days, and had held him to a draw, but no one else seems to have seen the knockdowns, and Griffin got the decision.*

  Nine days later, Johnson was in San Francisco. So little was known about him even in boxing circles then that he had been billed for the Griffin fight as “Jack Johnson of Denver” because his last official bout had been held there. But he was confident, nonetheless, that his skill and strength and quick wits would take him all the way to the top, would one day make it impossible for the heavyweight champion to deny him his fair chance at the title.

  James J. Jeffries was to defend his championship against Gus Ruhlin at Mechanics Pavilion on November 15, and Johnson was determined to have a look at him—and to do so for free if he could get away with it. He arranged to meet three friends outside the pavilion before dawn on the day of the fight: Abe Attell, lightweight Eddie Hanlon, and welterweight Harry Foley.† One by one, Johnson’s companions took advantage of an open transom to slip inside and make their way to their prearranged hiding place. But by the time Johnson had maneuvered himself through the small opening and dropped down inside, a night watchman was coming down the corridor, club in hand.

  Instead of running away, Johnson ran toward him. “Oh mister officer,” he said, “chase them boys quick. I’m the janitor of this here pavilion and they done sneaked in through the transom. I been chasing them all over the building.Hurry, or you won’t catch them.” The watchman vanished down the hall. Johnson joined his companions in their hiding place and shared a sack of doughnuts with them until fight time.

  The bout itself turned out to be something of a disappointment. In earlier fights, Ruhlin’s handlers had employed a special code: when they shouted “Akron,” the name of their man’s hometown, he was to pound away with both hands until they bellowed “Cleveland,” at which he was to retreat out of harm’s way. Ruhlin held his own for two rounds; in the second, one of his “Akron” rushes momentarily flummoxed the champion. But Jeffries was out to avenge an earlier draw and began to move relentlessly forward in his dreaded crouch, his jaw shielded, his left arm probing, pushing, prepared always to land the celebrated hook that needed to travel only a few inches to do its damage. Ruhlin was knocked down in the fifth. When he got up, Jeffries hurled a left into his ribs at the bell that one writer said “nearly broke him in half.” He was in such agony as he fell back onto his stool that when his manager, Billy Madden, proved slow in throwing in the sponge, Ruhlin grabbed it from him and hurled it into the center of the ring himself.

  As the crowd stood and cheered and Jeffries and his entourage made their way back to the dressing room, Abe Attell remembered, Johnson claimed to be unimpressed.

  “I could lick that fellow myself,” he said.

  “Be still, you dinge.”

  “Well, some day I’ll lick him.”

  That day was still a long way off. Jim Jeffries was a formidable fighter. Nat Fleischer, who saw in action every heavyweight champion from Jim Corbett to Muhammad Ali, believed to the end of his days that only Jack Johnson had been better. Born on an Ohio farm in 1875, the son of a part-time preacher, Jeffries was raised on a ranch within the Los Angeles city limits. His schooling ended at age fourteen, when he was expelled after beating his teacher bloody for threatening to strike a girl with a ruler unless she handed over a love note Jeffries had slipped to her. Big and powerful beyond his years—he had weighed fourteen pounds at birth and at the age of seventeen would stand six foot one and weigh 220—he labored in a tin mine, shoveled coal for the Santa Fe Railroad, then became a boilermaker, pounding hot rivets with a sledgehammer twelve hours a day.

  He began his boxing career by knocking out the same Hank Griffin to whom Johnson had lost in his Bakersfield debut. Few fighters have ever risen to the top so fast. Between 1896 and 1899 he held Joe Choynski and Gus Ruhlin to draws and defeated ten other contenders, including Tom Sharkey and two more black fighters, Peter Jackson and Bob Armstrong. In June of 1899, while Jack Johnson was still sleeping on the Chicago lakefront, and in only the thirteenth fight of Jeffries’ career, he knocked out Bob Fitzsimmons to become champion.* Since then, he had beaten three other challengers, knocking out two and beating Tom Sharkey a second time over twenty-five rounds.

  Jeffries was so big and solidly built that some opponents were unprepared for the speed with which he moved when on the attack. And they were unanimous in assessing his power. “The first time he really hit me in the body,” Fitzsimmons remembered, “I thought his fist had gone right through me.” Patience and apparent imperviousness to pain were also part of Jeffries’ armament. In fifty-eight bruising fights he was never once knocked off his feet. Fitzsimmons, one of the hardest-hitting fighters in heavyweight history, smashed Jeffries’ nose flat to his face and splintered his own hands battering Jeffries’ head but did not even slow him down. Jim Corbett, who outboxed Jeffries for most of thirty-three rounds in two fights, only to be knocked senseless both times, said, “Nobody can ever hurt him, not even with an ax.”

  Gruff and taciturn—“as silent as General Grant,” one admirer wrote—Jeffries was famously close with a dollar,† fond of fishing and hunting and drinking with his friends but uneasy in crowds and distinctly unhappy when the press got too close. He was hard to know, less loved by the boxing public than admired and respected. But everything about him, including the matted hair that covered his body and helped earn him the nickname the “California Grizzly,” implied ruggedness. �
��No mortal ever born can win from Jeff,” said the light heavyweight Kid McCoy. The cartoonist Homer Davenport was no less awed by him: “Jeff!” he said. “Why, Jeff’s the fellow that hoed up the Rocky Mountains.” When training, the champion rubbed his head and neck twice a day with beef brine and borax to “pickle” his skin and make it impervious to cuts. Awed admirers found plausible the tallest tales told about him: that he had drunk an entire case of whiskey in two days to cure himself of pneumonia, that he had so damaged Tom Sharkey’s ribs during their second savage bout that one protruded through the skin, that he had never hit anyone as hard as he could for fear of killing them.

  Like John L. Sullivan, Jeffries professed to be willing to defend his title against anyone, provided he was white. He had fought—and beaten—at least three Negro boxers before winning his title. But the risk of losing the championship to a black man was far too great to run. “I never will fight a negro,” he said; “back to the boiler works first.”

  Jack Johnson’s loss to Hank Griffin hadn’t done much for his reputation. He was still scuffling, still forced to spar with better-known boxers between bouts. In December 1901, he was at work across the bay from San Francisco at Croll’s Gardens in Alameda, helping prepare a tall, yellow-haired hopeful from Brooklyn named Kid Carter for a match with the Irish-born light heavyweight George Gardner.* A week before the fight, a boatload of sportswriters and boxing insiders crossed the bay to size Carter up. Among them were the city’s most important promoter, red-haired “Sunny Jim” Coffroth, and the cartoonist and sportswriter Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan. “Johnson, at that time, was a tall, happy-go-lucky young fellow who would rather tell jokes than box,” Tad remembered. “The newspaper boys used to sit around and listen to him spin yarns after each workout.” This time, they witnessed something else.