Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

Johnson had become a hero to black sports fans all across the country, both for what he’d done in the ring and for the bold way he conducted himself outside it. When he umpired a charity baseball game between the Cuban Giants and the Philadelphia Giants at American League Park in Philadelphia on August 24, he was mobbed. “The scene after the game savored of a reception following a cakewalk,” the New York Times reported.

  As the players departed for the clubhouse there was a concerted movement on the part of the spectators to home plate where Johnson stood, evidently waiting for some such demonstration. Men and women vied with each other to show “Mistah” Johnson how much they thought of him. They tugged at his coat-tails, pulled his arms in their eagerness to grasp his massive hands, patted him on the back, and told him he was the greatest representative of the colored race before the public…. Many whites helped to swell the mob that wanted to show their respects to the vanquisher of Fitzsimmons.

  Johnson showed no disposition to resent the impromptu homage, but accepted it as though due him. He finally eluded his well-wishers and reached the street, his clothes somewhat ruffled and pulled out of shape. Even there he was not safe from the crowd which followed him cheering all the way to the subway station which saved him from further molestation. It was a grand opportunity for the colored folk, and they did not fail to make much of it.

  The combination of Johnson’s conquest of Fitzsimmons and Tommy Burns’ qualified willingness to fight him one day had made old John L. Sullivan more eager than ever to see Johnson eliminated from the heavyweight picture. To accomplish that feat—and to make some money for himself on the side—he helped groom a onetime wrestler named Charlie “Kid” Cutler in hopes of knocking Johnson out of contention. Johnson couldn’t have been more pleased. Before he and Cutler met in Reading, Pennsylvania, on August 28, he told the press to tell people to be in their seats on time, because he would end the fight early. Johnson then made good on his promise. “A wicked right hand,” Johnson remembered, sent Cutler to the canvas in the first round, “like a cherry dropping from a tree.” As Cutler’s seconds helped him to his corner, Johnson called out to the great John L., “How’d you like that, Cap’n John?”

  “I don’t see where they are going to dig one up to beat this big black fellow,” wrote the editor of the Police Gazette after the Cutler fight, unless Johnson’s “butterfly existence” did him in. Johnson now seemed to have no permanent address. Between fights he turned up in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York—wherever there were good times to be had. In Manhattan on August 8, he met the next important woman in his life. Her real name was Anna Peterson, but she called herself Hattie McClay, and when he met her, she later remembered, she was “living at what they called a ‘Call House’ … going out on calls, sporting.” She was not notably attractive—short, thick-bodied, sharp-featured—but she was fun-loving, liked a drink, knew how to play the piano, just as Lola Toy had. She also had no illusions and made few demands. Johnson called her “Mac” and thought her “a splendid pal” with “good business judgment; she understood me.”

  She was also white. “The heartaches which Mary Austin and Clara Kerr caused me,” he would solemnly explain in his 1927 autobiography, “led me to forswear colored women and to determine that my lot henceforth would be cast only with white women.” In fact, Johnson forswore nobody; he would pursue black as well as white women all his life. But from the moment he got back from Australia and his relationship with Lola Toy in 1907, he did travel continuously with white ones. It was they alone with whom he registered at hotels and boardinghouses as “Mr. and Mrs. Jack Jackson.”*

  Hattie McClay and two women friends cheered Johnson on from the balcony at Smith’s Theater in Bridgeport, Connecticut, two weeks later when he fought Sailor Burke, a middleweight novice whose real name was Frank Loughnane. Burke refused to shake hands before the fight began, a lack of courtesy for which he was made to pay. Johnson battered the lighter, less skilled youngster around and around the ring for six rounds. “The affair could hardly be called a contest,” he remembered.

  It was merely an exhibition in which I showed … that I was infinitely cleverer than Burke as a boxer, and much too strong for him as a mixer, and far too fast as a fighter…. I knocked Burke down 14 times during the fight.* In fact, he hit the floor about five times more often than his glove collided with any part of my anatomy…. Nearly every time I hit Burke after the first round I shot him to the floor and every time Burke found himself reclining on the canvas he settled himself snugly & rested for 9 seconds. It was merely an act of charity upon my part in allowing him to stay the 6 rounds.

  Later the suspicion grew that more than charity might have been involved, and to quell rumors that Johnson had been paid to carry the local favorite, Sam Fitzpatrick offered Johnson’s end of the purse—$1,950—to anyone who could prove there’d been “any sort of agreement with Burke.” There were no takers.

  In October, Fitzpatrick arranged a six-round rematch with Johnson’s old nemesis Marvin Hart in Philadelphia. Johnson simply stepped away from it, heading for San Francisco, instead, and a potentially more lucrative fight on July 4, 1907, with Jack Curley’s latest charge, Jim Flynn, the “Pueblo Fireman.” (Johnson’s departure from Chicago was delayed slightly when the police arrested him for trying to pass a bad fifty-dollar check.)

  Flynn was an Italian immigrant’s son from Hoboken, New Jersey—his real name was Andrew Chiariglione—who hoboed west in search of adventure as a teenager, settled in Pueblo, Colorado, and worked as a fireman aboard Denver and Rio Grande trains between bouts.† “There was a dearth of firstrate heavyweights at the time,” Curley wrote, “and Flynn, while not as good as he thought he was, was better than most.” Tommy Burns had knocked him out, but he had beaten George Gardner and Jack “Twin” Sullivan, and his aggressive, mauling style delighted fight crowds. “My advice to a young fighter is this,” Flynn once said. “If you’re going to get licked, get licked coming in.”

  That kind of thinking was music to Jack Johnson’s ears.

  Time was called at three o’clock. We immediately clinched and in the breakaway I closed Flynn’s left eye with a powerful blow to that member which was a handicap to him for the remainder of the fight….

  It was evident that Flynn’s only hope of winning lay in the landing of a chance blow either to my body or head with the hope that such a blow would take some of the fight out of me. However, that hope vanished in the 9th round. In that period I knocked the fireman down and when he came to his feet we clinched. In the walkaway I hit him with a right to the solar plexus. Flynn went to his hands & knees and a deathly pallor spread over his face. His seconds rushed in & carried him to his corner.

  Flynn showed his wonderful powers of recuperation by coming out at the beginning of the 10th round still full of fight. He came after me but I stopped his rush with a straight right to the head. Then he became desperate and butted me several times … and was warned by the referee. I landed right & left frequently to his body but he kept on trying, and he laughed and said, “Gee, but you are a tough nigger, ain’t you.” We went at it about 30 seconds in the 11th round when Flynn complimented me by saying, “You’re a clever big nigger.” With that I shot a straight [right] to his jaw. He fell on his side & then rolled over to his face.

  Flynn was unconscious for four minutes. Back in his dressing room, he was a gracious loser: “The best man won and all I can say is to warn the next man that is matched with Johnson. He is a great man and I was entirely outclassed.”*

  Johnson was in full agreement. “I knew I had him after I closed his eye. He is a game little boy, but too small for this class. I think that I have demonstrated to the world that I am not afraid and I challenge any one to find the ‘yellow’ in me. Tommy Burns is my next man, and I stand ready to fight him any time.”

  Boxing writers were now virtually unanimous that Johnson deserved a shot at Burns’ title, just as he had merited a chance when Jeffries and Hart had held the championship.
The St. Louis Dispatch spoke for most of them:

  Jack Johnson is a colored man, but we cannot get away from the fact that he is the greatest living exponent of the art of hit-and-get-away and as such, is the outstanding challenger for the title which Tommy Burns claims but to which he is not entitled until he puts Johnson out of the way…. It is up to Tommy Burns to heed the call of the fight fans. They demand that he get out of his hiding and put to rest for all time the matter of fistic supremacy between him and Johnson, between the white race and the colored.

  Burns had other ideas. He was off to England to fight the Indian army veteran and British heavyweight champion James “Gunner” Moir. When he got back, he promised, “it’s Johnson next, and when I do meet him there will be no love lost. I haven’t the slightest doubt that I’ll trim him and trim him good.”

  At the National Sporting Club in London, before an all-male crowd in dinner jackets, Burns carried the far-bigger, fearsomely tattooed British champion for nine rounds in order to ensure a brisk profit from the sale of tickets to see films of the fight, then knocked him out in the tenth. He spoiled the favorable impression he might have made by insisting that the referee officiate from inside the ropes instead of outside them as dictated by the Club rules, and by making what the British fancy thought a vulgar fuss about having the thousand-pound stake on hand and in cash before beginning the bout. “He rather rubbed us the wrong way,” recalled the veteran British referee Eugene Corri. As always, Burns was unrepentant. The niceties of ring etiquette did not interest him. Only money did, he said, and, eager to make more of it without too much effort, he resolved to remain in Britain rather than return home to face Johnson.

  Johnson wasn’t surprised. “Burns promised before he left for England to fight Gunner Moir that he would return immediately after the battle and meet me,” he told a reporter.

  Now I understand he is going to stay in England for several months and pick up a little easy money by beating the heavyweights over there. Burns could make as much in a fight with me in the United States as he could by beating half a dozen Englishmen. He knows that but as he is not confident that he can defeat me, Burns wants to stay and pick up the soft money floating around.

  The fights Burns took were soft, too. In London he knocked out Jack Palmer, whom one writer called “an English horizontalist,” in four rounds. On St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, it took him just 1:38 to knock out Jem Roche, the heavyweight champion of Ireland, so short a time that British papers seriously suggested that Burns’ opponents were beaten even before the bell rang because of the champion’s occult hypnotic powers.

  When reporters asked Burns about Johnson, he shrugged them off. “What do I care? I am having a mighty good time and getting a lot of experience and, what is considerably more to the point, I am getting the coin. They can call me crazy for not rushing over to meet Johnson, but just put this down in your notebook. They will never have to hold any benefit for me.”

  That winter, while Sam Fitzpatrick tried to find a way to get Burns into the ring with his fighter, Johnson had only one bout: a three-round exhibition in New York City with Joe Jeannette, the tenth time they had met. Otherwise, he toured in vaudeville, working out the stage act from which he would derive much of his income for the next four years. He shadowboxed, sparred, danced, declaimed a few lines in a determinedly theatrical style, and ended each performance by whacking a specially rigged punching bag into the audience—a trick pioneered on the vaudeville stage by Bob Fitzsimmons. He billed himself as “Jack Johnson, Heavyweight Champion of the World. The Man who made Jim Jeffries Take to the Alfalfa.”

  On March 17, 1908, the day before Tommy Burns demolished Jem Roche in Dublin, Johnson’s name appeared in Australian headlines once again, sparked by events that had occurred ten months earlier. A day or two after Johnson had returned from Australia, several American newspapers carried the following item:

  OAKLAND, May 9—Jack Johnson, the heavyweight colored pugilist, modestly stated last night that he was to marry Miss Lola Toy, a rich Australian white woman. The rumor was called to big Jack’s attention, and after much pressing, the dusky lad admitted the facts. “Yes, it is true that I am to marry Miss Toy and I expect to marry her in November. She will come from Sydney, Australia, and I expect that our wedding will take place in this country. I met her in Australia, and after my courtship she consented to accept me. I now have something to fight for aside from the honors. I want to make a name for myself that my future wife will not be ashamed of,” meaning that she, a white woman, was willing and had consented to marry a negro professional pugilist.

  The Sydney sporting paper The Referee reprinted the article. It caused a sensation, and Lola Toy dispatched an attorney to The Referee’s office to demand a retraction: she’d never consented to marry Johnson, his client said, had never even known him well. The Referee printed a qualified apology: “If the paragraph has caused Miss Troy [sic] any pain or annoyance we regret it.” But that did not end the matter. Strangers continued to say unkind things to her on the street. Anonymous letters and postcard photographs of Johnson covered with vile accusations filled her mailbox.

  And so in March of 1908 she went to the New South Wales Banco Court, claiming she’d been libeled and demanding two thousand pounds in damages from the Sunday Times Newspaper Company, which owned The Referee. G. H. Reid, attorney for the Times, sought to have the case thrown out on the ground that it was not intrinsically “libelous to say that a white woman was willing to marry a black man. That was a colour line that had never been drawn in a court of justice…. The noblest woman in the world could marry a colored man without the slightest imputation being made against her morality, charity or modesty.”

  Chief Justice Sir Frederick Darley said he could not possibly honor Reid’s request to dismiss the case; only the four-man jury could decide whether libel had been committed.

  Lola Toy was called to the stand. “Dressed neatly in white,” she testified that she had never been “familiar” with Jack Johnson, had only said “Good evening” to him once while passing in the street, certainly had never dreamed of marrying him, and was weary of the taunts and jibes of strangers The Referee’s story had inspired.

  In a caustic cross-examination, lawyer Reid did his best to break her down.

  MR. REID: Look at this [he said, handing her a photograph]. Are you not standing next to Mr. Johnson?

  MISS TOY: Yes, but I never saw this before. I was not aware that this picture had been taken.

  MR. REID: Aren’t you holding Johnson’s walking stick?

  MISS TOY: There is nothing in holding anyone’s walking stick.

  MR. REID: Look at his arm around your neck, with his hand resting on your shoulder. Do you want the jury to believe that you didn’t know that hand was there?

  MISS TOY: It was only a snap. I didn’t know Johnson had his hand there.

  MR. REID: And such a hand. It must have weighed a hundred-weight. Come now. Do you want the jury to believe that?

  MISS TOY: The jury will have to please themselves.

  MR. REID: Oh, but men only put their hands on women that they know won’t object.

  Toy fainted as she left the witness box and had to be helped out of the courtroom.

  Reid called other witnesses to bolster the company’s case. A guest at the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel remembered Miss Toy eagerly dancing with Johnson. Two constables said they’d seen Johnson and Miss Toy riding out alone together, and one remembered hearing her threaten to call him in to punch her stepfather. The trainer Stephen Hyland testified he’d seen Toy and Johnson together many times—she’d attended his public sparring shows, watched him train while he was “stripped to the buff,” and come and gone from his hotel room at all hours of the day and night.

  To refute their testimony, Toy’s attorney, J. C. Gannon, called his client back to the stand. She denied everything again, but she knew that Hyland’s testimony had been the most damaging. She had never been in a room alone with Jack Johnson, s
he swore. Never.

  MR. GANNON: The evidence of the witness Hyland bears only one meaning to your mind?

  MISS TOY: Yes.

  MR. GANNON: Will you then if necessary submit yourself to the most skilled doctors in Sydney.

  MISS TOY: Yes.

  MR. REID: Oh, this is too bad! No imputations have been made to justify such a proposal.

  The judge agreed with Reid: Miss Toy would not have to prove she remained a virgin.

  Two witnesses did what they could to bolster her testimony: a hotel guest who’d attended the ball said he had not seen Miss Toy dance with Johnson, and a young woman testified that Miss Toy had been unhappy at being photographed with Johnson and had slept in her hotel room during her visits, not Johnson’s.

  Reid’s summary for the defense lasted three hours and seemed aimed at the gallery as much as at the jury. The group photograph was incontrovertible evidence that Johnson and Miss Toy were close, he argued. If she had been uneasy having her picture made with him, her face should have shown distress, even dislike. Instead, it was “suffused with bliss and … beneath ‘the great black towering shade’ she was at perfect happiness and rest. [Great laughter.]”

  Johnson was the great gun of the occasion. He was the central figure. There he was like an emperor of old…. Those who considered themselves the most important got nearest to him. He had them to his right and to his left. Thus it was that they found Miss Toy figuring as she did in the photographs. They couldn’t tell him that a woman didn’t know when a man’s arm was around her [laughter] particularly the arm of Johnson [more laughter] a champion of champions. [Great laughter.] Besides, she was holding his stick. [Laughter.] They all knew what it was. [More laughter.] Sometimes there was a regular fight for the stick. [Great laughter.]

  There was also that drive in the sulky from Botany to Watson’s Bay. What a triumphal march was that for Miss Toy! [Laughter.] It was only a small sulky. [More laughter.] So the three of them had to sit pretty tight. [Great laughter.] There was no drawing of the color line there. [Roars of laughter.]