Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  He returned to Los Angeles in September, more determined than ever to demonstrate to Jeffries and the rest of the boxing world that he was the top heavyweight contender and to convince those skeptics who accused him of preferring to outpoint rather than outpunch his opponents that, when called upon, he could slug with the best of them. At Hazard’s Pavilion on October 18, he tore into Denver Ed Martin from the opening bell, knocking him out in the second round. Martin was unconscious for so long—nearly ten minutes—that the police entered the ring, ready to arrest Johnson for assault, and most of the crowd left the building for fear they might be seized as accessories.

  After Martin recovered, a relieved Johnson spoke to the remaining spectators. “I want Mr. Jeffries next,” he told them. “I think I am entitled to a fight with him and it was to prove that I am right that I went in this way tonight. I am faster than ever, and bigger and stronger.” The color line, he added in language calculated to anger the champion and perhaps even goad him into action, was a “time-worn, old, cowardly four flusher’s standby.”

  The Police Gazette concurred: now that Johnson, who was “fast as an electric spark, and as full of power as a 90-horsepower automobile,” had so spectacularly defended his “darkmeat” title, Jeffries had no right to draw the color line.

  This crude, uncouth, unpopular giant [Jeffries] fought Peter Jackson, old and war-weary; Hank Griffin, a third-rater; and Bob Armstrong, who hustled him for ten rounds. This trio was black. Why will he not give Johnson a match? Here is a man who can fight, and is ready and willing to do so.

  Jeffries doesn’t defend his position, but rather arbitrarily determines that he has the best right to say whom he will fight.

  “I do not care whether Johnson licks the Japanese army,” he says. “I have repeatedly declared that, so long as I am in the fighting business, I will never make a match with a black man. The negroes may come and the negroes may go, and some of the negroes may be excellent fighting men. Just tell the public that James J. Jeffries has made up his mind that he will never put on boxing gloves to give battle to an Ethiopian.”

  Later that month, Johnson tracked the champion to the San Francisco saloon owned by Jim Corbett’s brother, Harry, and demanded his chance at the title. No man could say he hadn’t earned it. Surrounded by amused cronies, Jeffries said again that he would never meet Johnson or any other black challenger in the ring. Then, he later claimed, he put twenty-five hundred dollars on the bar and told Johnson he’d fight him in the cellar, alone. If Johnson managed to make it back up the stairs, he could keep the money.

  Johnson stalked out. “I ain’t a cellar fighter,” he said. Behind him, the champion and his friends laughed and jeered. “A four-flusher?” Jeffries shouted. “You’re not even a three-flusher!”

  In early 1905, the black songwriting and vaudeville team of Bob Cole and Rosamond Johnson began a monthlong engagement at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco. Jack Johnson paid his way into the theater to see them several times. Afterward, he was invited back to the apartment they shared with Rosamond’s older brother, James Weldon Johnson, who asked the fighter for a lesson or two in self-defense. The poet, novelist, and future civil rights leader never forgot their sparring sessions.

  Jack … boxed with me playfully, like a good-natured big dog warding off the earnest attacks of a small one…. Occasionally, he would bare his stomach to me as a mark and urge me to hit it with all my might. I found it an impossible thing to do; I always involuntarily pulled my punch. It was easy to like Jack Johnson in those days and I liked him particularly well. I was, of course, impressed by his huge but perfect form, his terrible strength and the supreme ease and grace of his every muscular movement; however, watching his face, sad until he smiled, listening to his soft Southern speech and laughter and hearing him talk so wistfully about his chance, yet to come, I found it difficult to think of him as a prize fighter.

  Johnson understood he would have to create his own “chance.” His only rival as top contender was “Marvelous” Marvin Hart, the “Fighting Kentuckian.” Hart, a onetime plumber’s apprentice, and the twenty-first of twenty-three children, was what Johnson called a “slasher,” the kind of wide-swinging brawler he most enjoyed picking apart. If Hart could be eliminated, Johnson and Zeke Abrams reasoned, the pressure on the champion might finally prove too great for even Jeffries to resist.

  But Hart, like Jeffries, was unwilling to fight blacks: when Joe Walcott had climbed into the ring to challenge him after he beat Kid Carter in Boston the previous year, Hart turned him away, saying, “I am a Southerner and my folks would disown me if I fought you.” He had come to California planning to fight one or the other of two white contenders, Kid McCoy or Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, but when those fights fell through—leaving Hart badly in debt for training expenses—Johnson mounted an all-out campaign to shame him into the ring. Johnson’s friends charged that Hart was frightened of their man. One afternoon, Johnson himself turned up at the gym where Hart was training and called him a coward to his face.

  Finally, Hart gave in and signed to fight Johnson at the San Francisco Athletic Club on March 28, 1905. “I tell you right here that this coon will have to go some to beat me,” he said. “Before the twentieth round is reached—probably several rounds before—there’ll be a nigger prostrate on the canvas….I have got the wallop that will win.”

  Johnson was favored 2 to 1 and so confident of victory that he said he’d accept 40 rather than 60 percent of the purse if he didn’t knock Hart out within twenty rounds. But he had not counted on the influence of the fight’s promoter, Alex Greggains, who Hart’s camp had insisted would double as referee. Greggains was an ex-middleweight himself, suspicious of counter-punchers and dismissive of Johnson’s courage. He said,

  I have notified Johnson that he must fight all the time or the fight will be called “no contest.” I don’t expect any difficulty on that score. [Zeke Abrams] has also told him that he must win in a hurry. “If you stay twenty rounds for a decision,” Abrams told [Johnson], “we will run you out of town.”*

  For ten rounds, Johnson administered a boxing lesson to the Kentuckian, smiling at Hart’s awkwardness, countering only when Hart lunged at him, enjoying himself. Johnson’s cornermen were frantic. “Please hit him!” Tim McGrath shouted. “You can’t win unless you hit him!”

  “For God’s sake,” shouted Zeke Abrams, “go after him!”

  But Johnson continued to do as he pleased, catching or eluding punches, countering with stiff shots that bloodied Hart’s face but failed to knock him off his feet, then stepping back again as if to admire his work. He seemed to slow down a bit in the eleventh, the crowd started chanting, “Hart! Hart!” and over the next nine rounds the Kentuckian landed several times to Johnson’s body, forcing him to clinch. Just before the bell at the end of the twentieth and final round a flashbulb went off. Both men were momentarily blinded and started for their corners, somehow thinking the fight was over. Hart saw his mistake first, whirled, hurled himself at Johnson, and hit him with a solid right hand that made Johnson stagger at the bell.

  As soon as it sounded, Greggains touched Hart’s shoulder to indicate that he was the winner. His aggression—or Johnson’s lack of it—had won him the fight. Jim Jeffries sat, smiling, at ringside.

  Press opinion was divided as to who should have been given the decision. W. W. Naughton supported Greggains. “Though [Hart’s] face was prodded into … puffiness by Johnson’s straight left he never faltered for an instant,” he wrote. “The indifference to punishment and great pluck displayed by the white man seemed to discourage the negro. Johnson beyond a doubt shows that he lacks that essential fighting qualification—grit.”

  But the March 29 Los Angeles Times headlined its story FIGHT DECISION A QUEER ONE, and George Siler later told the Police Gazette it was “the opinion of all fair-minded witnesses that Johnson beat Hart.”

  Those were Johnson’s sentiments. He’d been robbed, he said. “After fighting until I reached
the top I have been thrown down by an unfair ruling.” Hart was a “mutt,” he added, and demanded a second shot at him, promising to beat him in every round this time. Hart just laughed. “That coon has enough yellow in him to paint city hall. Johnson is a fancy boxer, but when he gets stung he is strictly a ‘tin canner and staller.’ I’ll never fight another nigger.”

  That pledge would soon take on still more menacing meaning for Jack Johnson. Jim Jeffries had not put on the gloves since the previous summer, when he had demolished in two rounds a Montana miner named Jack Munroe who had dared falsely claim to have knocked the champion down in an earlier encounter. In April 1905, Jeffries got married and began making plans to settle down on a 145-acre alfalfa farm just outside the Los Angeles city limits. He had tired of his title and everything that went with it: the clamor from sportswriters for him to fight Johnson; the arduous weeks of training; above all, the crowds that followed him everywhere he went. “I’ve got all the money I want,” he told a friend. “There’s nobody to fight me. To hell with all this business—and the championship, too! What’s the championship? A lot of yaps run after me to pound me on the back. They don’t give a damn about me. I’m nobody. They’re yelling for the champ. Well, I’m sick of it.”

  On May 2, he made it official: since there were no more “logical challengers” for him to fight—by which he meant white challengers, of course—he was retiring from the ring at twenty-nine.*

  Nothing like this had ever happened in boxing before. No one was quite sure what to do. Then a shrewd promoter announced that Marvin Hart and former light heavyweight champion Jack Root would meet on July 3 at Reno, Nevada, in a fight to the finish for the vacant title. As an added attraction—and to add legitimacy to this unprecedented event—Root’s manager, Lou Houseman, talked Jeffries into acting as referee and declaring the winner the new champion. “I will never go back into the ring,” Jeffries said, “so you may do as you please. If the winner wants to call himself champion, it is all right with me.”

  The boxing world shared Jeffries’ ambivalence about the impending contest. The heavyweight championship was the greatest prize in sports, meant to be won or lost in the ring, not handed over. Neither contender had faced a champion, or even an ex-champion, wrote W. W. Naughton,

  Hart may win or Jack Root may win, but he will still remain Marvin Hart or Jack Root…. There will be no “tremendous throng” at the railway depot to meet him when he reaches his home city and the windows of saloons and restaurants will not be darkened with human faces as he indulges in a sup or a bite…. The glories of the top notch division have departed and the championship has become largely a county fair proposition.

  Just four thousand fans turned up in Reno for the fight. Jack Johnson was among them, and when he was introduced from the ring, he issued a challenge to the winner. Jeffries in his shirtsleeves towered over both fighters. Root weighed twenty pounds less than Hart but was winning in the twelfth round when the bigger man landed a right hand to his solar plexus that sent him to the canvas, gasping for air. Jeffries counted Root out, then held up Hart’s arm as the winner and new champion.*

  Afterward, Hart said he would gladly meet “any man in the world in a fair fight,” and then added the all too familiar caveat, “This challenge does not apply to colored people.”

  Jack Johnson was still out in the cold. Asked Omaha sportswriter Sandy Griswold,

  What right has Hart to throw Jack Johnson in the discard on account of his ebony complexion …? Both Jeffries and Hart have fought niggers, as they style their opponents, and why not fight them again? Collectively, the colored race was remote from Mr. Hart’s thoughts [when he barred blacks]. Mr. Hart knows, as well as he knows that he is alive, that Jack Johnson was entitled to that fight… and he also knows, I’ll bet my boots, that Mr. Johnson can lick him every day in the week, not even barring Sundays.

  Johnson had already moved east again, convinced after the Hart decision that he couldn’t get a fair shake on the West Coast. He would face nine opponents over the next three months and beat them all. None of the fights were difficult, though one was disappointing—he failed to knock out Jack Munroe, Jeffries’ last and least able opponent as champion—and two were bizarre.

  On July 18 he met Sandy Ferguson for a fifth time at the Pythian Skating Rink in Chelsea, Massachusetts. It was a hot, humid evening. Every seat was sold, and the aisles were choked with standees, so many and so closely packed that one frightened old man offered fifty dollars to anyone who could get him safely back out onto the street. Chelsea was Ferguson’s adopted hometown. Nearly everyone present was Irish and howling for Johnson’s blood. He paid no attention, picking off most of the punches Ferguson threw from a distance and smothering him whenever he got close, just as he had four times before. But this time Ferguson was evidently so embarrassed by his poor performance in front of his fans that in the seventh round he kneed Johnson in the groin—not once but three times. Johnson collapsed in pain. Ferguson’s fans roared their approval. Sure he’d won, the Irishman vaulted over the ropes and made his way to his dressing room. There he learned that the referee had awarded Johnson the fight on a foul. Ferguson and his entourage started throwing things. Patrons pushing their way out met angry Ferguson fans trying to get back in so that they could attack the referee. Fights broke out in the lobby.

  Johnson slipped out the back door. Just six days later, back at the National Athletic Club in Philadelphia, he took on Joe Grim, a local 150-pound favorite and one of the oddest figures in boxing history. He was an Italian immigrant—his real name was Saverio Giannone—with no boxing skills at all. He took part in at least seventy-five contests, almost all of them in his hometown, and never recorded a single victory. He was known to his legion of Italian-American followers as the “Iron Man,” and his peculiar appeal was based on an astonishing ability to absorb punishment and remain conscious no matter how hard he was hit. “I am Joe Grim and I fear no man,” he told his fans before and after each bout, and big Philadelphia crowds paid to see some of the best fighters of his time, including Joe Gans, Bob Fitzsimmons, Joe Walcott, and Philadelphia Jack O’Brien, try—and fail—to put him out.

  Jack Johnson’s turn came on July 24, and he bet heavily that he would succeed where all the others had failed. The club was packed, and some ten thousand mostly Italian fans waited anxiously outside to see if their hero could remain vertical for six rounds with the celebrated black out-of-towner. “It was a wonderful fight,” the Police Gazette reported with unaccustomed irony,

  the only one of its kind in the history of pugilism in America or anywhere else…. If Grim landed a blow of any sort on the colored man at any stage of the game it was not recorded, while the big fellow beat the game little Italian into a pulp soon after the opening gong sounded. After every trip to the floor the Italian would come up smiling only to walk into another haymaker that would stretch him lengthwise. He was cheered to the echo by the ringsiders.

  “He ain’t human,” Johnson was heard to mutter between rounds. By one count, Johnson knocked Grim down twice in the first, once in the fourth,five times in the fifth, and nine in the sixth—a total of seventeen knockdowns. Grim was unconscious for five minutes after the last one—but since it came just six seconds before the final bell, it didn’t count. As soon as he was able to move again under his own power, he dragged himself up on the ropes and shouted once again, “My name is Joe Grim. I fear no man.”

  After the fight with Grim, Johnson and Clara Kerr returned to Los Angeles, where he issued challenges to two young white fighters, Jack “Twin” Sullivan and the onetime amateur champion of the Golden State, big Al Kaufmann. But neither was interested in fighting him. His money began to run out.

  At some point late that summer, an old friend and fellow sport turned up, a racehorse trainer named William Bryant, whom Johnson had not seen since they’d been stable boys together in Boston. “I hailed him as an old and intimate friend,” Johnson remembered, “and invited him to share our home wit
h us. For a time, the arrangement was a mutually satisfactory one.” But Bryant and Clara Kerr were soon drawn together. “Unknown to me an attachment had developed between the two,” Johnson remembered, and late one October evening he returned home to find Bryant and Kerr gone. All the jewelry and fine clothes he didn’t happen to be wearing were gone, too.

  “I was dumbfounded,” Johnson recalled in the heavily ghosted 1927 autobiography that is the source for most of what little we know about Johnson’s personal life during his early years.

  For the second time, a woman whom I greatly loved had fled from me, but this time the cause, instead of a trifling domestic dispute, was another man. The shock unnerved me. For the first time in my life my faith in friends and humanity had been shaken to the foundation…. I set about making inquiries and learned in which direction the couple had fled.

  Johnson followed, and when he located his quarry, he called in the police. On October 16, a brief wire-service item appeared in newspapers all over the country:

  A colored beauty, Miss Clara Kerr, has been arrested at Tucson, Ariz., charged with stealing Big Jack Johnson’s bankroll, diamond rings and a diamond locket. The robbery was committed at Los Angeles, where she will have to answer the charges.

  Somehow, the two were reconciled. Johnson had been humiliated—sports left their women, their women did not leave them—and may not have wanted to return to face his friends. In any case, instead of returning to California, he and Kerr relocated to Chicago, where Johnson hoped they could start over.

  But big, moneymaking fights continued to elude him. Known white boxers ignored his challenges while his repeated bouts with the same black rivals—he fought the skilled Joe Jeannette of New Jersey six times between May of 1905 and September of 1906—drew small crowds and yielded even smaller purses. He pursued a frightened but fleet-footed Young Peter Jackson around a Baltimore ring for twelve rounds—stopping the chase in the seventh just long enough to tell the crowd, “I’d have liked to show you a fight, but I can’t catch Jackson.”*