Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  * In the end, they would fight in a twenty-four-foot ring.

  * After the fight, the Police Gazette quoted an anonymous “veteran referee and matchmaker” who said he had “excellent reason for believing” that Burns had “insisted on having $30,000 … with only $5,000 for Johnson because he thought it would compel Fitzpatrick and Johnson to do business with him for a bunch of coin…. Anybody who knows Fitzpatrick will tell you that there isn’t a crooked hair on his head, but I’ll bet that if Burns made any such proposition, Fitzpatrick accepted it like a flash.” Without it, their anonymous source said, Burns would never have climbed into the ring with Jack Johnson. (Police Gazette, January 23, 1909; Milwaukee Free Press, December 24, 1908.)

  * Johnson had been so sure of victory, he remembered, that he took the time between rounds to gaze out over the crowd: “As my gaze wandered out into the surrounding territory, I saw a colored man sitting on a fence watching the fight with open mouth and bulging eyes. My glance returned to him again and again. He was one of the very few colored people present and he became a sort of landmark for me. I became more and more interested in him, and soon discovered that mentally he was fighting harder than I was. Whenever I unlimbered a blow, he, too, shot one into the air landing it on an imaginary antagonist at about the same spot where I landed on Burns. When I swayed to avert a blow from Burns, the fighter on the fence also swayed in the same direction and at a similar angle. When I ducked, he also ducked. But his battle came to an inglorious end when it was necessary for me to make an unusually low duck. He attempted to follow the movement and fell off the fence. This incident so amused me that I laughed heartily, and Burns and the spectators were at a loss to know what had so aroused my mirth.”

  This could not have happened precisely as described. There was no “fence” visible from the ring on which the phantom Negro could have sat. Also, the “open mouth and bulging eyes” with which he was supposed to have followed the action and the slapstick finale seem more like stock elements from a minstrel turn than real life; in 1924, in fact, Johnson would himself record a similar story as part of a vaudeville routine: “When I entered the ring with Tommy, I looked over the big crowd. Sittin’ way back on the fence, behind everybody, I saw one, just one, colored man. Well sir, Burns made a swing at me. I ducked, but he swung so hard that it must have excited my colored brother, and he fell clean off the fence. He ain’t got back on that fence yet! [Crowd laughs.]”

  There was metaphoric truth in the story nonetheless. People of color around the world followed Johnson’s every move that afternoon and delighted in every blow he landed. (Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out, pp. 166–67; Jack Johnson 1924 recording, “Runnin’ Down the Title Holder,” Ajax 17024. Tim Brooks Collection.)

  * Peter Jackson and Sam Langford both responded to this hoary canard the same way. “They are all after my body,” Jackson said. “Hit a nigger in the stomach and you’ll settle him, they say, but it never occurs to them that a white man might just as quickly be beaten by a wallop in the same region.” Langford is supposed to have answered it while in the ring. After a white opponent managed to land one to his belly, a spectator shouted, “The niggers don’t like them down there.” “No, they don’t,” he shouted back, “and do you know any man that does?” (Dartnell, Seconds Out, pp. 72–73.)

  † Johnson threw almost no body punches during the fight. “Why was I afraid to hit him below the chin?” he said afterward. “Because I would most likely have been disqualified if I had. I could not take any chances where it was so earnestly desired that the white man should win.” (Milwaukee Free Press, April 21, 1909.)

  * One newspaper reported that Johnson had said, “Poor little boy, Jewel won’t know you when she gets you back from this fight.” Given the fury his remark still evoked in Burns years later, it seems likely he said something a good deal gamier. (Quoted in Wells, Boxing Day, p. 175.)

  * Burns would later allege that Johnson’s seconds had falsely shouted that his jaw was broken in order to get the bout stopped and give the victory to their man. If they did, it’s unlikely anyone could have heard them.

  † The surviving footage stops abruptly with Burns halfway to the floor. Some have argued that someone ordered the cameramen to stop grinding at that precise moment, a considerable feat of long-distance coordination. But an account of the first showing of the film in Milwaukee describes clear footage of all the now-missing portions of the bout, including the final seconds. Evidently the offending footage was cut later in the editing room by someone who thought it best for moviegoers to be denied the sight of a black man pounding a white one into near-insensibility. (Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin, April 23, 1909.)

  ‡ Burns’ admirers would claim their man had done so much damage to Johnson’s ribs that he had been briefly hospitalized after the fight. Johnson himself claimed he’d gone for a swim, “followed it up with a motor drive and that evening entertained friends at dinner.” The confusion may have stemmed from a subsequent Johnson visit to a Melbourne hospital for stomach trouble. (Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out, p. 168.)

  * This was too much for some Australians, and Boxing Day, Jeff Wells’ vivid book on the Burns battle, includes several letters written to the Herald in protest, including one from a man who said Randolph Bedford, not Jack Johnson, was “an outrage on any civilized community.” (Wells, Boxing Day, p. 198.)

  * Humiliated by his defeat and uneasy about facing friends and family back home, Tommy Burns stayed on in Australia for fourteen months, drinking and eating too much and losing most of his thirty-thousand-dollar purse at the racetrack. In the spring of 1910, overweight and undertrained, he narrowly beat Bill Lang, to win the championship of the British Empire. He relinquished that title in 1911. When he finally went home, he sold clothing in Calgary, tried promoting, endured an acrimonious divorce, and eventually happily married again. He operated a pub in Newcastle, England, and a speakeasy in Manhattan; sold insurance in Texas; operated a saloon in Bremerton, Washington; and then turned to religion. In 1948 he became an ordained minister and began handing out business cards inscribed, “Compliments of Tommy Burns, former world’s heavyweight champion, a demonstrator of Universal Love.” “Looking back in memory to that great battle [with Johnson],” he wrote during the early 1950s, “I realize that … I actually lost that battle—through hate—before it started. How great is the power of man’s thought and feeling to either build or destroy himself.” He died of a heart attack in 1955. (Burns, “Tommy Burns.”)

  * Curiously, Tommy Burns would later accuse Jack London of being “a strong advocate of race equality” who “belittled me in every way. London took sides with the colored man, who badly needed a boost. It was an ill-deserved criticism of my valiant efforts…. It was small comfort to me to have Jack London, a highly nervous man, tender me a public apology a few weeks later. When he spoke, tears streamed down his face, but the harm had been done.” (Burns, “Tommy Burns.”)

  † In April, the club would be up for sale.

  * Berger had been the national amateur heavyweight champion until he was caught taking money for his bouts at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. In his first official match as a professional he went six no-decision rounds with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien in Philadelphia, in a contest widely suspected of being prearranged to set up a twenty-round rematch in San Francisco, where Berger’s popularity would ensure a full house. That bout never came off. Instead, Berger took on young Al Kaufmann and was knocked cold. He was in the haberdashery business when there began to be talk of Jeffries returning to the ring, and he eagerly volunteered to become his trainer and sparring partner. When Jeffries’ former manager, Billy Delaney, refused to have anything to do with the comeback, Berger eagerly took over those duties as well.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ____________________________________________

  THE CHAMPION

  IT TOOK THE CANADIAN-AUSTRALIAN liner Makura three weeks to steam from Brisbane to Vancouver, British Columbia, time enough for Jo
hnson and Hattie McClay to entertain their fellow passengers several times with after-dinner music; time enough, Johnson hoped, for the world to become accustomed to the idea of a Negro champion.*

  He had sought attention all his life. From earliest boyhood he had seen himself as unlike anyone else, and this should have been the moment the world saw it, too. Fourteen years of fighting in front of mostly hostile crowds had left him with few illusions about the likelihood of fair treatment, and countless encounters with newspapermen who deliberately distorted his words and cartoonists who portrayed him as less than human had only reinforced those feelings. But nothing he’d experienced had prepared him for what happened to him once he stepped onto the dock at Vancouver on March 9, 1909.

  As he made his way down the gangplank, wearing a full-length fur coat, smiling and waving at the hundreds of Canadians who had come down to the waterfront to see him, a knot of derbied reporters was waiting for him on the dock. Some were sportswriters, but most had simply been assigned to cover the arrival of a Negro celebrity, a phenomenon they had never encountered before.

  The questions they shouted were predictable.

  How had the Australians treated him?

  “I’ve got no kick coming,” Johnson said, though “they seemed to think more of Tommy Burns after I had licked him than they did of me, and me the champion.”

  Would he fight Jeffries?

  “I am willing to meet any man in the world,” he said, “and I don’t think anyone can get a decision over me, much less put me out. It amuses me to hear this talk of Jeffries claiming the championship. Why, when a mayor leaves office he’s an ex-mayor, isn’t he? When a champion leaves the ring, he’s an ex-champion. Well, that is Jeffries: he wants to try to get the championship back and I’m willing to take him on.”

  If Jeffries couldn’t get in shape, would Johnson consider other white challengers like Al Kaufmann or the hard-hitting middleweight champion, Stanley Ketchel?

  He would, if they were willing and the money was right.

  When someone mentioned that Galveston was planning a big welcome, the New York Times reported, Johnson’s “eyes sparkled and he showed his gold-tipped teeth…. ‘Tell them I’ll be there.’”

  The exchange was innocuous, though some found Johnson’s blithe self-assurance unseemly in a black man. But two things piqued the reporters’ interest: Sam Fitzpatrick was not at his fighter’s side, and a white woman was. As the champion pushed his way toward the customs shed to collect his luggage, he introduced the woman to one or two reporters as his wife, calling her “the former Nellie O’Brien of Philadelphia,” and she volunteered how proud she was of her husband. Her only regret about her visit to Australia, she said, was that she had not been permitted to watch him fight, but since Mrs. Burns (and all other women) had also been barred from the stadium, she supposed she really couldn’t complain.

  While Johnson and his companion saw their trunks loaded into a taxicab and started downtown in search of a hotel that would accept them,* the reporters gathered around Fitzpatrick, who had come ashore separately and was more than happy to offer his explanation of why he and Johnson were no longer together. The championship had gone to Johnson’s head, he said; he was “a different man before the fight. He would feed out of my hand then, but he is a hard man to handle now. Anyhow, he don’t want a manager now. He has got Mrs. Johnson as his manager.”†

  The reporters knew that the mere existence of this woman in Johnson’s company was enough to make headlines. Interracial marriage was officially outlawed in thirty of the forty-six states and discouraged by custom and the threat of violence in many of the rest. Nearly seven hundred Negroes had been lynched in the United States since 1900, some simply because someone had whispered that they had been “too familiar” with white women. The very first sentence of the Associated Press story that appeared in newspapers all over America the next morning referred to the champion’s “white wife, a former Philadelphia woman who threw in her lot with him.”

  Over the years, Johnson’s sometimes tumultuous domestic life had been a subject of interest in boxing circles, and now and again it had even sparked brief news stories—the arrest of Clara Kerr, Lola Toy’s libel suit, Johnson’s own occasional appearances in court—but neither the nonsporting press nor the general public had paid much attention. The private lives of heavyweight champions had never invited close scrutiny. John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett routinely traveled with sporting women whom they pretended were their wives, just as Johnson did. (Both were also charged with drunken violence toward women, as Johnson would be one day.) Most of their bad behavior was kept out of the papers. None of it seemed to matter much to their fans. Johnson did all the things Sullivan and Corbett did—and by doing so, outraged much of the country. The difference, of course, was that he was black and the women with whom he chose to live openly were white. And now his secret was out.*

  The next evening, the champion was to pick up a little easy money fighting a six-round exhibition at the Vancouver Athletic Club. Denver Ed Martin had been scheduled to go through the motions with him, but when Martin didn’t turn up, a substitute was rushed in: Victor Everleigh McLaglen, a strapping British-born veteran of the Boer War, who had been fighting second-rate heavyweights up and down the Pacific coast for nearly two years. It was no contest. In the first round, Johnson knocked McLaglen down with a punch to the stomach, then gallantly backed away until the younger man got his wind back. “I found Johnson the most charming opponent I ever met,” a grateful McLaglen remembered, “standing well back and waving me forward when I slipped into the ropes … chattering away blithely during the heat of a clinch.” Throughout the final two rounds, he wrote,

  I tried my best to rattle him, conscious of the fistic immortality that would be mine if I were to slip him a “sleeper.” But his grinning face darted in and out behind the thud of his gloves, his head bobbing up and down, taking off my blows on the side of the head, on the gloves, on the elbows, on the shoulders, anywhere, in fact, where they could do very little damage.*

  Johnson’s effortless win was duly reported in the sports pages. But there were other newspaper stories in the next few days as well, disturbing stories centered not on Johnson the boxer, but on Johnson the man and his supposed marriage. The Chicago Tribune was among the first to print them.

  BEWARE MR. JACK JOHNSON

  TEXAS AUTHORITIES WILL PROSECUTE THE

  CHAMPION IF HE TAKES WHITE

  WIFE TO THAT STATE

  Galveston, Tex. March 12.—[Special.]—If Champion Jack Johnson brings his white wife to Galveston he will be prosecuted under the Texas laws forbidding whites and blacks marrying. The reports that Johnson has a negro wife living here [presumably the elusive Mary Austin] brought a reply from Johnson saying he was legally divorced from her and he would bring his white wife with him. Johnson bases his defiance of the prosecution on the grounds that his marriage to a white woman did not take place in Texas. [But] the federal Supreme Court has ruled that the state has a right to prevent the union of whites and blacks and impose penalties even if they were married in a state permitting marriages of whites and blacks.

  Papers all over the country picked up the story. A telegram arrived for Johnson from the Galveston welcoming committee: it would cancel the parade in his honor if he insisted on bringing Hattie McClay with him. “The negroes in charge of the affair declare they have too many friends among the white citizens to offend them,” the Tribune reported the following day, and if Johnson “insisted on thrusting his wife upon the friends of his boyhood and his own relatives, the celebration would be declared off.”

  Some Negroes, like D. A. Hart, editor of the Nashville Globe, were also made unhappy by Johnson’s purported marriage to a white woman, their objections based on both racial pride and the impact they feared Johnson’s actions might have on the safety and well-being of other black people.

  It is reported that Jack Johnson has married a woman who is not a member of his people. If that r
eport is true, then Jack Johnson is wrong, entirely wrong, and that point of order is raised and sustained by every sensible and self-respecting Negro of this country. Johnson was born and reared in the South, where his relatives still reside, and if he could not find a woman of his race suitable for a wife, then he ought to have died an anchoret.

  If the persistently circulated report of his marriage is true, he has made a fatal mistake and subjected himself to the just contempt of every member of his race. If it is true, he stands before that awful and dread bar, public opinion, a defendant without defense….

  The Negro, be he high or lowly, who seeks to leave his race is a fawning, cringing, worthless rascal. And, without whitewashing it, no respectable Negro has the least patience with him. Out of the hundreds of thousands, yea, millions of honorable intelligent Negro womanhood any male member of the race can find a worthy and congenial companion. If he pretends that he can not, he absolutely and unequivocally lies, and deserves a fate worse than that which befell Robinson Crusoe.

  The Galveston parade was canceled; the hurricane loosed by news of Johnson’s purported marriage to a white woman prevented him from visiting his hometown and the now-widowed mother he hadn’t seen since 1905.* He had no home of his own. For fourteen years he had drifted from fight town to fight town. After the exhibition with Victor McLaglen, Johnson sent Hattie McClay home to Milwaukee to wait out the storm, and moved on to Chicago, where a sport named William “Toots” Marshall put him up in his Dearborn Street apartment.