Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  The majority of the throng footed it. A black streak of humanity stretched from the center of the town out over the single broad road that passes the arena. It was a stream constantly augmented from side streets, pulsing, shifting with cross currents, wavering in the channel. Every manner of man under the sun was in it. Here a miner from Rhyolite with trousers tucked rakishly inside the tops of his half boots; there a Chinaman padding the dust with his felt shoes, and a clubman from Frisco with a jeweled Shriner pin in the lapel of his coat walked by the side of a flashy race-track tout from New Orleans. There were overdressed Japanese who carried insolence in their eyes and assumed the air of sports conspicuously. There were plain dips and stickup men from Seattle, Los Angeles and Chicago, mine owners, stock brokers, touts, blacklegs, politicians, bank presidents and second-story men.

  Small boys with pitchers and tumblers moved through the hot crowd offering water for a nickel. Hawkers worked the periphery, selling flags, buttons, badges, shouting, “Here’s your only official badge of the lineup, boys. Wear a picture of Jeffries on your coat and show him you’re with him.”

  Carpenters were still banging together pine boards when the five gates opened and some twenty thousand people—including hundreds of women, for whom special curtained boxes had been constructed—began edging their way in past armed deputies posted by Rickard to confiscate bottles and make sure no firearms were carried inside. Fear that someone might try to harm the champion continued to nag at Rickard, and he had asked Jeffries himself to issue an appeal to his fans to remain calm whatever took place in the ring. “I would consider any move to intimidate Johnson as cowardly and a disgrace to the American spirit of fair play,” Jeffries said. “I expect to whip [him] and then shake his hand. If Johnson should by any chance win, though, he must not be harmed. I demand this.”

  “The fresh pine arena was built like a funnel,” Harris Merton Lyon remembered.

  Right in the heart of it lay the little twenty-two-foot ring with its two strands of ropes running around and its red canvas floor. Red because white would blind the fighter’s eyes. A bare, pine pit, smelling freshly, unsheltered from the sun and resembling … baseball bleachers…. The crowd came stalking in like sheep in a chute at half-past twelve. They peeled off their coats, tied handkerchiefs around their necks, bought palm-leaf fans and green eye-shades and sat down on the freshly painted number on their seats.

  “The betting was now 10 to 6 on Jeffries,” Arthur Ruhl reported, and as the crowd waited,

  the talk about 1,000 to 1 for Jeffries, too. You couldn’t hurt him—Fitzsimmons had landed enough times to kill an ordinary man in the first few rounds, and Jeffries had only shaken his head like a bull and bored in. The negro might be a clever boxer, but he has never been up against a real fighter before. He has a yellow streak, … and anyway, “let’s hope he kills the coon.”

  The rest of the country was getting ready for the fight as well. At Hutchinson, Kansas, twelve hundred Negroes in a tent set up behind a Holiness church had prayed all night for a Johnson victory and planned to keep at it until word came that he had won. Students and faculty gathered in an assembly room at Tuskegee to hear the round-by-round returns when they rattled in from ringside; Booker T. Washington took a dim view of prizefighting in general and Jack Johnson in particular, but he had agreed to allow them to install a special telegraph line, provided they came up with the fifty dollars it cost.* Thirty thousand New Yorkers streamed into Times Square, where giant bulletin boards had been set up on three sides of the New York Times building to provide details as soon as they started coming in from ringside. The San Francisco Examiner set up a ring high above the street and hired two boxers, one black and one white, to reenact the whole fight, punch by punch, for the throng gathering below.

  And in Chicago, twelve hundred black men and women anxiously took their seats at the Pekin, the showplace of the black belt and the most elegant Negro-owned theater in the country.* Its creator, Robert T. Motts—gambler, saloon keeper, Republican political power—was to read out the bulletins as they came in. Tiny Johnson and her daughters Fannie and Lucy were seated onstage as his special guests.

  Tex Rickard had provided none of the preliminary bouts that traditionally entertained fans waiting for the main event. Instead, he sent the Reno Brass Band into the ring. They began with “Just Before the Battle, Mother,”† then segued into “America” and “Dixie” while the crowd joined in. “Hats waved,” Rex Beach wrote, “flags fluttered, feeling ran high—Patriotism was riot.”‡

  The sun was hot. There was only the faintest breeze. The raw-pine seats oozed pitch. The lemonade being peddled up and down the aisles grew warm. And the band rapidly ran through its repertoire. It was not until 1:55—twenty-five minutes after the fight was supposed to start—that William Muldoon climbed into the ring to make a little speech, praising Nevada as “the only free State in the Union” because it was permitting the fight to go forward and calling upon the crowd to remain peaceful so that “no one should be able to say after it was all over that the Negro had not been given a fair deal.”

  There was a brief stir as Etta Duryea made her way to her sixth-row seat, accompanied by the wife of Sig Hart. Both women waved and smiled at the crowd. “By all odds,” said the Los Angeles Examiner, “Mrs. Johnson was the prettiest woman in the place … apparently a white woman and becomingly gowned.”

  Then Billy Jordan took over. A walrus of a man with a drooping white mustache and a voice that could reach the farthest edge of any crowd, he had been a fixture at big West Coast fights for decades. One by one, he led the celebrity spectators into the center of the ring, raised his right arm above his head, and paid each a florid tribute. Tex Rickard and Jack Gleason and Big Tim Sullivan, the Tammany politician who was the stakeholder for the contest, all took their bows. So did John L. Sullivan, Bob Fitzsimmons, Tommy Burns, Tom Sharkey, Hugh McIntosh, Stanley Ketchel, Tom McCarey, Jim Coffroth, Bill Lang, Sam Langford, Battling Nelson, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien—and more, so many that when they stood in line for the cameras they stretched from one side of the ring to the other. Hugh E. Keough of the Chicago Tribune called it “the last roll-call of has-beens,” and in the heat, the novelty of seeing so many famous men in one place faded fast. Some in the crowd began to boo. “Oh hell, pull the fight,” one man shouted. “Don’t introduce everyone in Reno.” Billy Jordan just got louder. Even William T. Rock, in charge of the battery of movie cameras set up on a platform thirty feet from the ring, was hailed as “Rock, the moving picture man.”

  There was still no sign of the champion or his challenger. A rumor spread through the crowd that a physician had found Johnson near “nervous prostration” and too frightened to leave his dressing room. When he finally did climb into the ring at 2:30, wearing a black and white silk bathrobe and followed by his seconds, there were cries of “Cold feet, Johnson,” and “Now you’ll get it, you black coward.” But there were calls for fairness, too: “Don’t talk to them. Give them a square deal.” And there were enough friendly voices that Johnson remembered being “amazed at the number of well-wishers I had. I heard many cheers. That’s more than took place in Australia where my entry brought lusty boos and hisses.”

  Then the scattered shouts for the champion were drowned by a great roar—Rex Beach called it “the first blood cry of the thousands … the race note sounding”—as the crowd spotted the Jeffries party and rose to cheer its hero. Johnson stood, too, smiled and clapped. Jim Corbett led the way. Then came Jeffries, dressed in a gray suit and checked golf cap, his big jaw working on a wad of gum. The rest of his seconds followed, including little Abe Attell in a straw hat and big Bob Armstrong carrying a giant paper circus hoop on a stick to keep the sun off his fighter between rounds.

  Jeffries seemed to pay no attention to the crowd, looked neither right nor left. And, as Arthur Ruhl noted, he spoke to no one.

  I have never seen a human being more calculated to strike terror into an opponent’s heart than this brown Colossu
s as he came through the ropes, stomped like a bull pawing the ground before his charge, and … glared at the black man across the ring. If looks could have throttled, burned, and torn to pieces, Mr. Jack Arthur Johnson would have disappeared that minute into a few specks of inanimate dust. The negro had his back turned at the moment, and as he took his corner and his trainer and his seconds, crowding in front of him, concealed the white man, a sort of hoot, wolfish and rather terrible, went up from the crowd. “He daresen’t look at him! O-o-! Don’t let him see him! Don’t let him see him!” And when Jeffries pulled off his clothes with a vicious jerk, and standing erect and throwing out his chest, jabbed his great arms above his head once or twice, I don’t suppose that one man in a hundred in that crowd would have given two cents for the negro’s chances.

  Johnson, unaffected, joked with his seconds. “The man of summer temperament smiled and smiled,” Jack London wrote, while the “man of iron, the grizzly giant, was grim and serious.”

  Jordan introduced Johnson as the “colored Heavyweight champion of the world.” Jeffries got more fulsome treatment. He was “the champion of champions, the great unbeaten white champion of the world, James J. Jeffries.”

  Rickard, in his shirtsleeves and wearing a straw hat against the merciless sun, announced that there would be no traditional handshake, no posing together for the cameras; the white man had refused to take part.

  Jeffries also wouldn’t sit on his stool, perching on the ropes instead, as if he couldn’t wait to get at Johnson.

  At 2:46, Billy Jordan finally bellowed his familiar “Let ’er go!” and the supposed Battle of the Century was on.

  Many in the crowd had expected Jeffries to rush at Johnson, seeking to intimidate and then chop down the champion, who would be undone by his inbred “yellow streak.” Instead, as Johnson remembered, “Mr. Jeffries feinted a bit, and then tried the clinching game,” hoping to use his greater weight to muscle his opponent around. (He weighed 227 to Johnson’s 208.) As the two men shoved and shouldered each other, Johnson did most of the backing up, but he also pinioned Jeffries’ arms so he couldn’t punch. After a couple of minutes of this, someone shouted, “Cut out the motion pictures.” The crowd laughed. Both fighters smiled, and when the round ended, Johnson reached out and gave his opponent a patronizing pat on the shoulder. “I was feeling quite fresh and going easily,” the champion remembered, “able to hit him when I wanted to, and I could tell he wasn’t going to beat me for strength.”

  George Little, sitting several rows back, thought Jeffries had won the round and bet Al Jolson four hundred dollars that he would go on to win the fight as well.

  Jim Corbett’s assignment that afternoon was to range up and down at ringside, shouting insults, trying to rattle Johnson, to break his concentration, make him angry—and careless. Johnson would remain as unruffled as he was when Tommy Burns insulted him in Australia, responding so politely that one writer praised him for displaying “the good sense … to keep the respectful, ingratiating ways of the Southern Darkey.” As the second round began, Corbett shouted, “He wants to fight a little, Jim.” Johnson answered, “You bet I do.” And when Jeffries, his jaws still working at his gum, tried the crouch that had intimidated earlier opponents, left arm extended, Johnson just smiled, stepped away, and landed a right-hand uppercut that forced the older man to clinch. “All right Jim,” Johnson said, his arms around the former champion. “I’ll love you if you want me to.”

  “Come on now, Mr. Jeff,” Johnson said at the start of the third. “Let me see what you got. Do something, man. This is for the championship.” Jeffries was embarrassed—one reporter thought he looked “sarcastic”—and when they came together, Johnson landed four right uppercuts in a row. “He’ll kill you, Jack,” a man shouted. “That’s what they all say,” Johnson answered.

  “Jeffries started out to cut me down in the fourth which was about the only round he did real well in,” Johnson recalled. The older man landed a right hand to the body that could be heard all over the stadium and a left that opened the cut in Johnson’s mouth Kid Cotton had given him in training.

  His golden smile reddened. A ringside telegrapher tapped out “First blood for Jeff!” and when those words flashed across the continent, the crowd in Times Square cheered for half a minute, according to the New York Times. “Men who had never seen each other before slapped each other on the back and said, ‘Jeff’s getting in his work’ or ‘It’ll soon be over.’” But back on his stool between rounds, the champion leaned down to assure John L. Sullivan at ringside that Jeffries couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt him.

  Johnson was in charge through rounds five and six, seven and eight. He bloodied Jeffries’ mouth, reopened an old cut on his right cheek, closed his right eye. At one point, he encircled Jeffries with his arms and walked him toward Corbett’s side of the ring, asking, “Where do you want me to put him, Mr. Corbett?” As the two men fought on the west side of the ring, Johnson overheard W. W. Naughton dictating to his telegrapher: “Jeffries took a left hook to the jaw.” “Is that all he took, Mr. Naughton?” Johnson asked, and landed two more.

  Jeffries was embarrassed again but unable to retaliate. All the worst fears that had gripped him in the hours before the fight were coming true. “My eyes could detect openings—or danger—as they had in other years,” he said afterward. “But my muscles wouldn’t respond as quickly to the dictates of the brain…. They were slow, slow, slow.”

  Between the seventh and eighth rounds, Corbett pulled Jack Jeffries aside. “Jack,” he said, “your brother’s whipped. What are we going to do?” The younger Jeffries had tears in his eyes. They couldn’t let him lose to Johnson, he said, and suggested that Corbett try to talk his brother into deliberately losing on a foul. Neither had the heart to suggest it.

  When a series of Johnson jabs forced Jeffries to crouch still lower than usual in the ninth and Johnson said, “I’ll straighten him up in a minute,” a fan at ringside yelled, “He’ll straighten you up, Nigger!” Johnson ignored him and landed an uppercut that brought the older man’s head back up within punching range.

  Jeffries did his best to talk back through bloodied lips. “Ain’t I got a hard old head?” he said to Johnson after weathering a series of blows.

  “You certainly have, Mr. Jeffries,” Johnson said, and pounded it again.

  Etta’s voice could be heard shouting, “Keep it up, Jack!”

  Jeffries managed to land several hard shots to Johnson’s stomach in the ninth and tenth, but Johnson countered with a left hook to the liver that made Jeffries stagger—“I didn’t show you that one in Sydney,” Johnson called out to Tommy Burns—and followed it up with several left hands to the head.

  By the eleventh, Jeffries’ “wind was going fast,” Johnson recalled, “his arms were getting weak, and he couldn’t put them up to block or stop my blows.” In the twelfth, Johnson parried Jeffries’ rushes so ably, battering his bloody face with hard lefts, that some in the crowd at last began to cheer him for his skill. Corbett seemed almost apoplectic now, shrieking and waving his arms as he ran back and forth. Johnson spoke to him over Jeffries’ shoulder: “Thought you said you were going to make me wild.”

  During the fourteenth, Johnson jarred Jeffries again and again with left hands, calling out, “How you like ’em, Jim?” as the former champion’s head rocked back and forth. “Do they hurt?”

  “No, they don’t hurt,” Jeffries answered. But they did. One made him cry out, “Oh!” and his own clumsy attempts to damage Johnson’s body missed their target. Corbett was frantic. “Why don’t you do something?” he shouted at Johnson, hoping he might still somehow be made to lose his head. “So clever,” Johnson shouted back. “So clever.” And then, grinning, “Just like you.”

  At the end of that round, Jeffries’ nose was broken, his eyes were swollen nearly shut, his shoulders and thighs were laced with blood, and he was desperately tired. Seated on his stool between rounds, gasping for air, he told his seconds he could ha
rdly lift his arms. Jim Corbett, Arthur Ruhl noted, suddenly looked “grey and drawn and old. Across the ring, John L. Sullivan was half rising from his seat…. Behind Sullivan was Fitzsimmons, his round red face sober and anxious. No need to tell these defeated champions what was coming. They had all been there in their time.”

  Jeffries stalked into Johnson’s corner at the beginning of the fifteenth, stoical as ever. Johnson hit him with a right hand. They clinched. Johnson shoved Jeffries back, then seemed to hurl himself at the older man, landing repeatedly with both hands. Jeffries backed into the ropes, turned, and began to stumble toward his own corner. Johnson pursued him, landing a right uppercut, then three lefts in quick succession. Jeffries sank to his haunches, one arm draped over the lower strand of the ropes. “A great silence fell,” one ringsider noted, and “a guttural gust of pity came from twelve thousand chests. It was a queer, uncanny sound—‘Aw-w-w-w’—from profoundly affected men.” Jim Jeffries had never been off his feet before.

  The timekeeper reached nine before Jeffries, shaking his massive head from side to side to clear it, managed to struggle to his feet. He spat out a mouthful of blood and tried to clinch. Johnson avoided his grasp and hit him again with his left hand. Jeffries went down a second time, sprawled over the bottom rope, dazed and confused. “Don’t let the nigger knock him out!” someone shouted. Others took up the cry. “Don’t let the nigger knock him out!”

  Abe Attell and Jack Jeffries jumped up onto the ring apron, hauled the beaten man to his feet, and shoved him, tottering, back toward the center of the ring.