Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Johnson was waiting.

  Corbett waved his arms in anguish. “Oh, don’t, Jack, don’t hit him!”

  Jack London could not bear to watch what happened next. Johnson moved in. Still cautious but sure now of victory, he slipped to the side and hit Jeffries four more times as he reeled along the ropes and collapsed once more on the opposite side of the ring. Johnson stood over him, ready to strike should he manage to rise again. Rickard shoved Johnson back and began the count. Jeffries’ seconds had seen enough. Sam Berger stepped through the ropes to stop the fight. Bob Armstrong threw in a towel. Rickard clasped Johnson’s shoulder as a sign that he was the winner.

  Jeffries wobbled back to his corner. “I couldn’t come back, boys,” he said over and over again. “I couldn’t come back.”*

  Johnson was euphoric. “I could have fought for two hours longer,” he told his cornermen.

  It was easy. Where is my lucky bathrobe? I’m going to give one of my gloves to Jeffries and the other to Corbett. I guess Jeff won’t be so grouchy now. Somebody wire to my mother. I wish it was some longer. I was having lots of fun. Not one blow hurt me. He can’t hit. He won’t forget two punches I landed on him. He was only half the trouble Burns was.

  Within seconds, scores of spectators clambered into the ring. Johnson’s seconds formed a cordon around the champion for fear that someone might attack him. But he pushed his way past them and across the ring, hoping to offer his hand to the loser, still slumped on his stool. Jeffries’ seconds wouldn’t let him get close enough.

  Jeffries climbed unsteadily through the ropes and out of the ring. “I could never have whipped Jack Johnson at my best,” he would tell a reporter later. “I couldn’t have reached him in a thousand years.”

  A few fans cheered Johnson. Others began cutting up the ropes for souvenirs. But most of the crowd filed out of the stadium in what one reporter called “funeral gloom, grim and silent.” A wealthy white woman at ringside was so overcome with grief at her hero’s loss, she begged the stranger sitting next to her for help. “Please show me the way out Mister, I’m crying so I can’t see.” The stranger, a massive rancher and future film actor named Bull Montana, was no help. “Madame,” he said, “you’ll have to lead me out for I’m crying harder than you are.”

  Back in Chicago at the Pekin Theater, a reporter for the Tribune had kept his eye on the champion’s mother as Bob Motts read out the round-by-round reports from Reno.

  She did not show many outward signs until the eighth round when Johnson, while in a clinch, asked Corbett how he liked it…. This brought Mrs. Johnson to her feet for at the Johnson home Corbett is considered one of the family’s bitterest enemies. At this stage of the fight Lucy Johnson [said she] wished it was Corbett that Jack was fighting.

  The seventh round was the last to be announced, and at its conclusion there was a good deal of speculation as to how long the fight would go, when suddenly the instrument clicked off the words which would send the black belt into a state bordering on insanity. The operator whispered the words “Johnson wins in the fifteenth” to the champion’s mother and without a moment’s hesitation Mrs. Johnson burst into tears and shrieked:

  “I knew he would do it. I knew he would do it…. Oh, ain’t it fine—ain’t it fine for Texas. All the South and all the North never turned out a hero like him…. There were eighty million people against him today, but he beat them all. If his father had only lived to see it! It is certainly grand to be the mother of a real hero.”

  The crowd swept her onto their shoulders and carried her outside to the chauffeured car her son had arranged for her. On the sidewalk, a drunken old white man with a bandaged face begged for a handout, oblivious to the excitement all around him. “Gracious me, if there isn’t poor old Jeffries now,” Tiny Johnson said. “To look at him, you wouldn’t think he’d refuse to shake hands with my boy.” The crowd roared. The car pulled away, taking the champion’s family home.

  But no sooner had they made it into their house than the big crowd gathered outside began to call for Johnson’s mother to come back out so they could cheer her. She finally did, stepping gingerly onto the roof of her front porch, holding a poster of her son in one hand and a victory bouquet in the other. A band struck up “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” and she and the crowd joined in. “The gritty old woman stood waving the picture and flowers,” reported the Tribune, “and sang so long that hoarseness robbed her of her voice so she just stood and cried.”

  Meanwhile, people were pouring into the streets up and down Chicago’s black belt, banging on pots, blowing horns, chanting “Jack, Jack, J.-A.-J.! Jack, Jack, J.-A.-J.” over and over again. Hundreds pinned the front page of the Chicago American to their clothes, with JOHNSON WINS spelled out in big red letters above a larger-than-life-size portrait of the grinning champion. A black minister with a waxed mustache stood at the corner of Thirty-first and State shouting, “Oh that golden smile!” then knelt to offer a prayer of thanksgiving. Five blocks away, a well-dressed young black man leaped onto a broken-down float abandoned that morning by the Independence Day parade and shouted, “What’s the matter with Jeffries?” “Too much Johnson!” the crowd shouted back. “Too Much Johnson!”* Hundreds of policemen were kept in reserve in case of trouble. There was none. “It’s their night,” said the officer in command. “Let them have their fun.”

  The news had spread all across the country. President William Howard Taft emerged from a Boston auditorium where he had delivered a speech on education, and asked the nearest newsboy, “Say, sonny, who won the fight?” In the mid-Atlantic a tanker steamed toward the passenger ship Carmania flying flags that seemed to indicate that she urgently needed help. Jack Curley was among the passengers who crowded the deck wondering what could be wrong. When she drew closer, the tanker signaled, “W-H-O W-O-N T-H-E F-I-G-H-T?”

  From Lillian Paynter’s whorehouse at 47 Caldwell Street in Pittsburgh, Belle Schreiber sent her maid out several times during the fight to bring her the bulletins; when she learned that Johnson had won, Belle went down to the telegraph office herself to send congratulations to the winner. Later, asked why she’d done it, she couldn’t say. “There was no reason,” she said. “I didn’t want to bring myself to his notice again.” But she had.

  At Barron’s Café in Manhattan, a big, well-dressed crowd had gathered around a ticker-tape machine to follow the action in Reno. “I had seen pool tables lined up and stacked with silver dollars at Mush Mouth Johnson’s saloon in Chicago,” the blues composer and impresario Perry Bradford remembered, “but New York sports had more green cabbage than I had ever seen before.” When word came of Johnson’s victory, Barron Wilkins himself jumped up onto the bar and shouted, “Everybody have some champagne on the house.” Then, Bradford said, the place became a madhouse. A sport named Lovely Joe Robinson strutted in, “clinking like a knight in armor,” with thirty twenty-dollar gold pieces in the pockets of his jacket. Another named Dude Foster, Bradford recalled, had also

  cashed in plenty. Dude was a character widely known in the sporting world as being full of notoriety. He was walking around shaking two bottles of champagne and waving five or six one thousand dollar bills and shouting, “I am God’s gift to Women. All you beat up gals and what came with you, if you need any of that little thing called money, see the Dude.”

  It was a Jack Johnson crowd.

  In the poorest part of the southern Illinois coal mining town of Du Quoin, called the Bottom, black families celebrating the Fourth of July in their backyards got the news from a group of running, shouting men who had been hanging around the newspaper office. “The Negroes were jubilant,” a black woman who had been a little girl then remembered:

  Everybody wanted to buy someone else a dinner, a glass of beer, or a shot of whiskey. Jerome Banks who had lost his leg in a mine accident came down the street waving one of his crutches…. The older people laughed and cried, and the children danced around and knocked each other about in good fun.
Grandma Thompson stood under the grape arbor and raised her quivering voice in song. We all joined in:

  “Hallelujah, hallelujah, the storm is passing over, hallelujah!”

  Little Arthur had delivered. We were now a race of champions!

  Later, in a poem called “My Lord What a Morning,” the poet William Waring Cuney—grandson of Norris Wright Cuney, the political strongman who had dominated Johnson’s boyhood neighborhood—recalled how his family and friends had felt when they got the news:

  O, My Lord

  What a morning,

  O My lord,

  What a feeling,

  When Jack Johnson

  Turned Jim Jeffries’

  Snow-White Face to the Ceiling.

  That evening, Johnson and Etta and their entourage sped into Reno from Rick’s Roadhouse to pick up the champion’s earnings: $121,000, a sum that may have been larger than any black American had ever earned in a single day before. The streets were still filled with fight fans. Most had come to Reno hoping to see Johnson beaten into submission. Many had lost money betting on the loser. But now they applauded the winner, and a paperboy ran alongside his car till the grinning champion reached out to shake his hand.

  At the depot, where they were to catch the Overland Limited to Chicago, they had a hard time making their way through the densely packed crowd of spectators waiting to board their own trains for home. Kid Cotton did his best to keep up, carrying a big Victrola under one arm and holding the leash of Johnson’s bulldog with his other hand. Some Negroes who had come to Reno hadn’t actually attended the fight, fearing that the crowd might turn on them. But they had been inside the stadium in spirit, and they now cheered Johnson loudly. One black woman was seen carefully removing her hat before stepping onto her train. Asked why, she answered, “’Cause I wants everybody to know that I’m a nigger, that’s why, and I’m proud of it.”

  As he made his way through the crowd, Johnson spotted Tommy Burns and Hugh McIntosh. “Howdy-do, Tommy,” he said. “Pretty easy wasn’t it?” Burns allowed as how it had been, then asked if there was any chance of his getting a rematch. Johnson just smiled as he and his party swept into their private car.

  The news of Johnson’s triumph had spread along the Southern Pacific Lines, and everywhere Johnson’s train paused, crowds were waiting. Most people were eager just to have a look at the champion.* At Carlin, Utah, where he got out to stretch his legs, he was asked how it felt to be the undisputed titleholder. “Same as yesterday,” he said. “I’m just the same old fellow that I was before I had the pleasure of Mr. Jeffries’ company for a short time.” Five thousand people turned out to see him at Cheyenne, Wyoming, including a thousand men from the all-Negro 9th Cavalry, the “buffalo soldiers” who had fought Indians in the West and the Spanish in Cuba. The troopers surrounded the champion’s car, waving their hats and cheering. Johnson got down to shake their hands, answer their questions, sign autographs, and bow to the ladies, including a shy young woman with an infant she said she’d named for him. The champion carefully shook the baby’s tiny hand.

  Ed Smith of the Chicago American, also traveling back to Chicago aboard the train, marveled at the way Johnson handled himself.

  The black man, were he of white skin, doubtless would be the most popular champion we ever had. He has all the manners to make him such, and is so accommodating and polite all the time that people who know him well get to like him immediately. No matter what the request Johnson is willing to go out of his way to grant it. Especially is he willing to pose for amateur photographers along the way and laughs and jokes continuously during the process…. He is naturally that sort of way. He is sunny Jack, for sure.

  But that same morning, the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper that had been the first to portray Jack Johnson as more than merely another Negro boxer, issued a chilling warning to his black admirers. “A word to the Black Man,” it began:

  Do not point your nose too high. Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly. Do not be puffed up. Let not your ambition be inordinate or take a wrong direction…. Remember you have done nothing at all. You are just the same member of society you were last week…. You are on no higher plane, deserve no new consideration, and will get none…. No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of the victor at Reno.

  And as the train rattled its way eastward, Johnson began to get word of trouble erupting everywhere. “Rioting broke out like prickly heat all over the country,” the New York Tribune reported, “between whites sore and angry that Jeffries had lost the big fight at Reno and negroes jubilant that Johnson had won.” The Fourth of July had always been greeted with drunken violence, but nothing like this had ever been seen before. There were confrontations in Chattanooga and Columbus; in Los Angeles and Norfolk, Pueblo and Philadelphia, Roanoke and Washington, D.C.

  On Canal Street in New Orleans, a ten-year-old paperboy named Louis Armstrong was told to run for his life. “Jack Johnson has knocked out Jim Jeffries,” one of his friends shouted. “The white boys are sore about it and they’re going to take it out on us.” Nearby, members of a black marching band struck up a joyous tune when news of Johnson’s victory flashed—and had to flee for their lives from a shower of bricks. In Clarksburg, West Virginia, a mob of more than one thousand whites stormed through black neighborhoods, driving everyone off the streets. White sailors from the Norfolk Navy Yard roamed the town, attacking Negroes “wherever they met them.” In Pittsburgh, when more than one hundred black men and women rounded up for rioting seized the courtroom and demanded that their cases be heard by a black judge, the police locked the doors and “clubbed them unmercifully.” In Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood—a warren of densely packed tenements in the West 60’s—a mob set on fire a building occupied by blacks, then tried to block the doors and windows so no one could get out. A white passenger on a Houston streetcar slit a black man’s throat because he had dared to cheer for Johnson. When whites in Wheeling, West Virginia, came upon a Negro driving a handsome automobile, as Jack Johnson was now famous for doing, they dragged him out from behind the steering wheel and hanged him. Near Uvalda, Georgia, white riflemen opened fire on a black construction camp, killing three and wounding five.

  At least eleven and perhaps as many as twenty-six people would die before it was over. Hundreds more were hurt, almost all of them black. No event since emancipation forty-five years earlier seemed to mean so much to Negro America as Johnson’s victory. And no event yielded such widespread racial violence until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fifty-eight years later. To some, like William Pickens, president of the all-black Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, all of it had been worthwhile.

  It was a good deal better for Johnson to win and a few Negroes be killed in body for it, than for Johnson to have lost and Negroes to have been killed in spirit by the preachments of inferiority from the combined white press…. [White writers had been] ready to preach insulting homilies to us about our inferiority. Many … editors had already composed and pigeonholed their editorials of mockery and spite—and we shall not conceal … our satisfaction at having these homilies and editorials all knocked into the wastebasket by the big fists of Jack Johnson.

  At every stop more news of unrest was brought aboard Johnson’s train and, one reporter noted, by the time the train reached Milwaukee the champion’s mood had changed.

  His black tilted brow puckered in deep frowning thought as he read of white men fighting black ones all over the country.

  “And just because my black fists happened to be too many for a pair of white fists,” he said sadly. “If both colors knew the real Jack Johnson they’d behave themselves, like he does.”

  “And what is your idea of the psychology of these outbursts?” I asked….

  “The psychology of it is the American small boy,” he replied promptly. “It is the little kid of 12 or 14 who knows he is immune from physical punishment who starts most
of these riots. He makes a nasty remark or two and gives the idea to the grown-ups in the crowd. They do the rest.”

  Johnson’s point was illustrated at the next stop. The crowd grew impatient when Johnson did not appear on the platform. The ever-present small boy blurted out, “Ah, bring out the damned coon; we won’t hurt him.”

  In a moment the men had taken up the small boy’s attitude and became abusive because their curiosity was denied.

  “There is good and bad in each color,” Johnson went on, deeply serious on a subject he has always before refused to discuss.

  “The fellows that are making trouble over my victory at Reno ain’t got no class. They’re only scum. The black ones that swell up and cut a swath because I’ve got a hard fist are without education. If they had any manhood they wouldn’t fight. The whites are supposed to know better on general principles.”

  Chicago planned a big South Side welcome for the champion on July 7. Bob Motts organized everything, even printing up handbills meant to guarantee a peaceful celebration:

  Don’t talk to white strangers.

  Don’t drink any gin.

  Don’t tote a gun.

  But be there.

  They were. The mayor had refused to issue an official parade permit in Johnson’s honor, fearing the kind of racial violence that had convulsed other cities, but even he admitted that there was no way to keep people from coming out to cheer their fellow Chicagoan. Thousands mobbed the Dearborn Street Station, including large numbers of whites. Thousands more lined State Street from Twelfth all the way south to Thirty-fifth. It was as if there had been no victory celebration in Chicago three days earlier.

  Eighty policemen with clubs struggled to keep order on the platform as Johnson’s train hissed to a stop nearly four hours late. A reporter noticed an old black man holding his granddaughter high above the crowd. “Now watch close there, honey,” he said, “’cause you’re going to see the greatest colored man that ever lived.”