Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

“I had attained my life’s ambition,” Johnson wrote in his 1927 autobiography:

  The little Galveston colored boy had defeated the world’s champion boxer and, for the first and only time in history, a black man held one of the greatest honors which exists in the field of sports and athletics—an honor for which white men had contested many times and which they held as a dear and most desirable one. Naturally, I felt a high sense of exaltation but I kept this feeling to myself…. To me it was not a racial triumph, but there were those who were to take this view of the situation, and almost immediately a great hue and cry went up because a colored man was holding the championship.

  That hue and cry began within hours of Johnson’s victory. The Sydney Sportsman, which had once welcomed Johnson to Australia, denounced him after the fight as a “gloating coon” with “only the instincts of a nigger—pure nigger.” “Had [Johnson’s] nods, becks, wreathed smiles, etc. occurred in America,” said the Bulletin, “a prominent citizen would inevitably have risen impressively somewhere about the close of the fourth round, and, amid encouraging cheers, have drawn a gun upon Johnson and shot that immense mass of black humanity dead.” Furthermore, the paper continued, since Johnson’s “insolence” had all been captured on film, any jury of white men allowed to view it would have exonerated his assassin.

  Others, less outraged by the manner of Johnson’s triumph than by the simple fact of it, foretold dire consequences. The poet Henry Lawson warned his fellow whites of what he feared was coming:

  It was not Burns that was beaten—for a nigger has smacked your face.

  Take heed—I am tired of writing—but O my people take heed.

  For the time may be near for the mating of the Black and the White to breed.

  In the Melbourne Herald, Randolph Bedford—writer, would-be politician, and lyricist for “Australia My Beloved Land”—was just as agitated.

  Already the insolent black’s victory causes skin troubles…. An hour after [the fight] I heard a lascar laying down the Marquis of Queensberry to two whites, and they listened humbly. It is a bad day for Australia and not a good day for America. The United States has 90,000 citizens of Johnson’s color and would be glad to get rid of them.

  Blessings on the Immigration Restriction Act! I am forced to believe that much is to be said for Simon Legree and that it is a pity that the churchwardens of Liverpool and Bristol ever went into the slave trade, otherwise Johnson might still be up a tree in Africa.*

  Johnson, who decided to stay on in Australia for a time and capitalize on his fame with a theatrical tour, was accustomed to abuse in the newspapers, but at least once his irritation at this kind of hysteria—and a series of stories quoting Tommy Burns as demanding a rematch and complaining he’d been robbed by the illicit intervention of the new champion’s cornermen—broke through the determinedly cheerful exterior he usually reserved for the press. “As I am a descendant of Ham,” he told a reporter for the Herald, “I must bear your reproaches because I beat a white man.” But Burns had been a “mere child,” he said; he could have trounced him at anything from billiards to banjo playing. Still, if the former champion really wanted a rematch,“count me in. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, I just want to hear that white man come around whining for another chance. I’ll give him a real taste of my match-making genius. See how he’ll relish a chance of a beating for bare expenses.”*

  Then, in an indirect slap at the white Australians who continued to jeer him, he went out of his way to praise the aboriginal people, whom he knew they also despised. He’d been to the Sydney museum, he said, and seen their boomerangs and stone axes: “Your central Australian natives must have been men of genius to have turned out such artistic and ideal weapons”; he envied white Australians for being able to share their continent with the descendants of such extraordinary people.

  Compared to the most extreme Australian reaction, the response back home to Johnson’s victory seemed almost subdued. James K. Vardaman, the fire-breathing ex-governor of Mississippi, could be counted on to say something vicious: “Personally,” he said, “I took no other interest in the Johnson-Burns fight than to wish that any white man fighting a negro for money might get a knockout of sufficient proportion to cause him to continue on to eternal rest.” White southern newspapers paid as little attention to Johnson’s victory as possible; the Raleigh News and Observer devoted a single paragraph to the triumph of the man it called the “Texas Darky.”

  Most northern papers offered complete coverage of Johnson’s achievement, however. Some editorialists were genuinely alarmed by it: “Is the Caucasian played out?” asked the Detroit Free Press. “Are the races we have been calling inferior about to demand of us that we must draw the color line in everything if we are to avoid being whipped individually and collectively?” Other northern papers saw little to be concerned about: “Well,” said the Omaha Bee, “Bre’r Johnson is an American, anyway.” And at least one,the New York Morning Telegraph, even saw in Johnson’s win evidence of the absurdity of segregating sports.

  Now that Mr. Johnson, the Texas dinge, is the Champion face smasher in the world, the color line question is receiving an unusual amount of public attention. The color line was … used in the most select pugilistic circles as a subterfuge behind which a white man could hide to keep some husky colored gentleman from knocking his block off and wiping up the canvas floor of a square circle with his remains. It is a handy little invention which costs nothing and probably has saved many a white man’s life…. Many men who are well-known in public life today owe their well-preserved appearance and success to this lifesaving compound.

  The black press was exultant. A SOUTHERN NEGRO IS HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD, trumpeted the Richmond Planet. “No event in forty years has given more satisfaction to the colored people of this country than has the signal victory of Jack Johnson.” The Colored American Magazine hailed Johnson’s victory as “the zenith of Negro sport.” Even the editor of the sedate Cleveland Journal, who disapproved of prizefighting and believed pugilists especially prone to “high-living, failure and an untimely death,” couldn’t conceal his pleasure:

  Johnson is a Negro. And his triumph over Burns is only another example of the old saying, “All the Negro asks is a chance …” Whenever this chance has been made (it is more often made than given) even though we have to chase the other fellow all over the world, literally speaking, as Johnson did Burns, the Negro makes good…. God knows, the sons and daughters of ebony have never been weighed in the balance and found wanting. There is light ahead, and hope and joy for such a wonderful people.

  To cash in on that sort of sentiment, the lithographic firm of Brandt and Schweible began turning out an inspirational poster for sale to Negro households. Johnson stands at the center, stripped to the waist, fists cocked, beneath a victor’s laurel wreath. Behind him are two ovals: one frames a drawing of a Lincolnesque log cabin labeled BIRTHPLACE OF JOHNSON; the other shows the champion gripping a steering wheel and wearing a duster and driving cap with the caption, JOHNSON IN HIS CAR. Armed only with strength and grit and quick wits, Johnson had punched his way up from poverty to wealth and success. Nothing could have been more American.

  Johnson himself especially treasured a telegram from friends and family in Galveston—“the first cable ever sent to Australia by Negro citizens of the South,” according to one newspaper, paid for with nickels and dimes—applauding his triumph and promising a big torchlight parade in his honor as soon as he got home.

  The press solicited comments from former heavyweight titlists. Rather than concede Johnson’s superior skills, they chose to denigrate the ex-champion. “Burns never was the champion prize-fighter of the world,” said John L. Sullivan. Jim Corbett agreed: it was Burns’ fault that “the white man has succumbed to a type which in the past was conceded to be his inferior in physical and mental prowess,” and he devoutly hoped someone could quickly be found to restore the title to its rightful owners. Jim Jeffries initially declared h
e would not be that man. True, Burns had been a mere “newspaper champion,” Jeffries said, and had no one to blame but himself for his defeat. “He took a chance on meeting the black man and got the worst of it. John L. Sullivan would never give a colored fighter a chance to win the title, and I always drew the line.” Still, said Jeffries, “there will be no fight between Jack Johnson and myself…. I don’t want the money. I am out of the game and the public might as well understand it.”

  No one seemed willing to take Jeffries’ no for an answer. That was in large part the doing of the celebrity novelist Jack London, who had covered the bout for the New York Herald at twenty-five cents a word. He had been a mill worker and a hobo, a convict, a sailor, and a luckless gold miner before becoming a writer, and though he was a committed socialist, his solidarity with the working class did not extend to black people. “Personally,” London wrote, “I was for Burns all the way. He was a white man and so am I. Naturally, I wanted to see the white man win.”

  In the widely distributed story he wrote from ringside, London used his novelist’s skill to transform a prizefight into a one-sided racial drubbing that cried out for revenge. It had not been a boxing match but an “Armenian massacre,” he wrote, a “hopeless slaughter” in which a playful “giant Ethiopian” had toyed with Burns as if he’d been “a naughty child.” It had matched “thunderbolt blows” against “butterfly flutterings.” London was disturbed not so much by the new champion’s victory—“All hail to Johnson,” he wrote; he had undeniably been “the best man”—as by the evident glee with which he had imposed his will on the hapless white man: “A golden smile tells the story, and that golden smile was Johnson’s.” He ended his overwrought account with a sentence that put into words the thoughts of millions of disappointed whites all around the globe: “But one thing remains. Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you.”*

  Jim Jeffries had been out of the ring for five years. At first, retirement suited him. He enjoyed working his alfalfa fields near Burbank, went fishing and hunting when he liked, and made handsome profits selling scrubland to the developers who were fast turning countryside into city lots. He built himself a house in town and opened a saloon in Vernon, a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, which featured what was purported to be the longest bar on the Pacific Coast, and put his brother Jack in charge. With several partners, he also launched the Jeffries Athletic Club, an open-air arena at Thirty-eighth Street and Santa Fe Avenue in Vernon, where he promoted fights and sometimes refereed as well.

  But the saloon didn’t do well. Jack Jeffries seems to have been as luckless as a business manager as he had been as a heavyweight contender, and not even the daily presence of the former champion himself could attract enough steady customers to turn things around. The arena began to lose money, too, and would have to close its doors in January of 1909, leaving Jim Jeffries saddled with some nine thousand dollars in unpaid bills.† The ex-champion badly needed to make some money.

  Meanwhile, letters had begun to arrive at Jeffries’ home, echoing Jack London’s call for him to get himself back in shape, return to the ring, and demolish Jack Johnson. “They kept at me,” he remembered. “Even in the churches they were sermonizing that I was a skunk for not defending the white race’s honor.” Big-money offers for the fight came in, too, some from legitimate promoters, others from dubious sources, but all of them tantalizing: clearly, a Jeffries-Johnson championship fight promised a healthy profit.

  Jeffries asked his old friend DeWitt van Court, athletic director of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, what he thought he should do. Van Court gave him some hard-nosed advice. Fighting Johnson was a no-win proposition, he said; if Jeffries won, people would say Johnson had taken a dive; if he lost, they’d say Jeffries had been crazy to try to come back after such a long layoff. But if Jeffries really needed money, “he should get a vaudeville engagement of as long a period as possible, and … if the public seemed to fall for the idea, renew the engagement again and make all the money possible out of it”—and then announce he wouldn’t fight anyway.

  Jeffries wasn’t sure about the last part—“he said that if he made a start to get in condition to fight,” Van Court recalled, “he’d go through with it”—but he followed his friend’s counsel nonetheless. Less than a week after Johnson beat Burns, and after vowing he’d never fight again, Jeffries invited a handful of boxing insiders to come and see him work out at Van Court’s club. He looked nothing like the formidable fighting machine he had once been. Alcohol and inactivity had caused him to swell to nearly three hundred pounds; when he tried to pull on the tights he’d worn in his last fight he couldn’t get them much above his knees. And chain-smoking—seven to fifteen packs of cigarettes a day, he later confessed to one reporter—had badly weakened his wind.

  But to those, like H. M. “Beany” Walker of the Los Angeles Examiner, who were blinded by the need to see Johnson’s smile erased by a white man, none of it seemed to matter. Jeffries still “stepped around as spry as a 20-year-old youngster,” Walker assured his readers; he remained “the greatest big man in the world today. Give him six or eight months training and he will make Jack Johnson jump out of the ring.”

  A few days later, Jeffries announced plans for a thirty-week cross-country theatrical training tour. The American ticket-buying public would be able to see him spar with Sam Berger, the moon-faced heavyweight who would soon double as his manager, and judge for itself whether or not he was ready to take on the black champion.* Whichever way that decision went, his financial future seemed assured: the impresario William Morris had guaranteed him twenty-five hundred dollars a week.

  Wherever he went, the crowds continued to put on the pressure. When he arrived at the Oakland dock for his first engagement—two weeks at the Wigwam Theater in San Francisco—newsboys swarmed around him, shouting, “Say, won’t you fight Johnson, Jim?” At Grand Central Station in New York he fled through a baggage room rather than face the throng that turned out to shake his hand and urge him back into the ring. “If I were to whip Johnson,” he told reporters in Chicago,

  I realize that I would be hailed as the greatest champion in pugilism’s history. I know that it would mean more fame than ever fell to any fighter’s lot, and that it would make me a rich man. But I also realize that to lose to Johnson would make me a dog…. I simply won’t fight unless I know I am good enough to knock out Johnson. You don’t catch Jim Jeffries losing to a colored man.

  But the idea of a title bout was clearly growing on him. He began to insist that since he had retired undefeated, he, not Johnson, was still heavyweight champion and would demand to be treated as champion should he decide to return to the ring. “I want to see the championship come back to the white race, where it belongs,” he told one crowd. “I think I’ll be able to make Johnson sweat if ever I do box again.” It was still if, not when, but an anonymous British versifier, who signed his work “Pink ’Un,” thought he could already discern the drift of Jeffries’ thinking—and suggested what seemed to him the inevitable outcome:

  The shades of night were falling fast

  When through Los Angeles there passed

  A burly gent, a powerful bloke,

  Who shouted, “What? Me fight a smoke?

  NEVER!”

  His jaw was firm, his eyes were fierce,

  His voice was sharp enough to pierce.

  Each questioner he swept aside,

  And hissed, with each succeeding stride,

  “M’ NO!”

  “Think of it, Jim,” an old pal said,

  “You’ll need the coin before you’re dead,

  “Say, you can beat him. Won’t you try?”

  To which Jim Jeffries made reply,

  “I’D REALLY RATHER NOT.”

  “Think of it twice,” another cried.

  “You mustn’t let a fortune slide.”

  The big one gave his head a scratch,

  And said, �
��’Twould be a corking match—

  I’LL THINK IT OVER!”

  L’ENVOI.

  One evening, ’neath a harvest moon,

  The sexton tucked away a coon.

  The coon was Sam Fitzpatrick’s find—

  It seems that Jeffries changed his mind.

  On February 17, 1909, eight weeks after beating Tommy Burns and only hours before setting sail for home from Brisbane, the new heavyweight champion of the world made an unpublicized pilgrimage to the Toowong Cemetery. There, he climbed up a gentle slope and stood for a moment at the tomb of Peter Jackson, the black Australian who had never been given his chance to win the title that now, at last, belonged to Jack Johnson.

  * In The Sportsman on the eve of the Burns-Squires fight, a versifier named Annie Howe had made this especially plain.

  And these two men are, meeting face to face,

  A credit to the Anglo-Saxon race;

  Two men are they, beloved by British folk,

  Each with a heart as stout as English oak!

  Both have been manly in the battles fought,

  For nothing underhanded have they sought—

  Those are the warriors a world admires,

  Men of the kidney of a Burns and Squires!

  Source: Wells, Boxing Day, p. 89.

  * This notion underlay even Hugh McIntosh’s advertisements for the films of the upcoming bout: “FIRST TIME IN THE WORLD’S FISTIANIC HISTORY …,” they read, “the Champion Representatives of the White and Black Races have met for RACIAL and INDIVIDUAL Supremacy, since cinematographic pictures became a fine art.”

  * Johnson’s own sizable entourage was a revelation to Australian sportswriters. “A cloud of attendants surround him when his ‘work’ is done,” wrote one visitor to the Sir Joseph Banks. “He has the biggest staff of helpers the writer has ever seen in waiting on any fighter. The man who rubs him down doesn’t run with him; the runner doesn’t put the gloves on with him; his sparring partner does nothing but spar. It resembles the state of things that prevails in a big British household, where each servitor knows his or her duties, and is prepared to drop dead or ‘give notice’ if an innovation is suggested.” (“Leonce,” “Jack Johnson.”)