Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  When Johnson emerged from the train, the crowd surged so strongly and seemed so intimidating to the outnumbered police that they rushed him out of the depot, pushed him into a hansom cab, and ordered the driver to whip up his horses. The champion shifted to a taxi as soon as he could, but in the general jubilation it took half an hour for the parade organizers to locate him again. During the scramble, “colored men stood in automobiles which forced their way through the crowd and looked in every direction for the missing pugilist.” The Chicago Daily News sheepishly reported that one of its reporters was fooled

  when he saw the burly figure of “Rube” Foster [now managing as well as pitching for Chicago’s Leland Giants], a Negro whose complexion, stature and smile are almost identical to Johnson’s, standing in a big red automobile as the car rounded the corner from the station into Wells Street. The reporter told in vivid fashion his story of how Johnson smiled at the plaudits of the crowd, when the smiling one was Foster.

  Johnson finally got seated in the right car, and the parade began the slow ride through the dense crowds along State Street. At nearly every corner, the same white traffic policemen who had arrested and harassed him so many times before now reached out to grasp his hand.

  The brass band that belonged to the all-black 8th National Guard Regiment had been forbidden to escort Johnson from the railroad station, so it had set up on his mother’s lawn instead and was playing “Hail the Conquering Hero Comes” when he swung into view. A big portrait of the champion framed by the American and Texas flags hung over the front door. Thirty little black girls in blue dresses with blue ribbons in their hair formed a sort of honor guard up the porch steps and waited for their hero.

  The car inched its way through the throng. There were so many people so eager to clasp Johnson’s hand and pat his back that he could not open the car door. He had to climb over it, then muscle his way up the sidewalk and onto the porch, where his sister Fannie and Tiny Johnson were waiting. “Oh, Jackie,” his mother shouted as she took him in her arms, “you kept your promise.”

  Johnson disappeared inside. The crowd called for a speech. He stepped out onto the porch roof twice to give one but couldn’t make himself heard above the cheering and had to be content with waving the big white handkerchief with which he wiped the perspiration from his brow. The last revelers did not leave Johnson’s trampled lawn till 5 a.m.

  The next morning, Johnson deposited more than $100,000 in the First Trust and Savings Bank. “There’s plenty more where that came from,” he told the teller. Then he bought a $3,000 car for his mother’s “exclusive use” and wired a total of $4,000 to eight friends in Galveston. Four had been members of his old Eleventh Street and Avenue K gang; $750 went to Ed Harrison, according to the Los Angeles Examiner,

  an old-timer who taught Johnson how to fight on the docks. He used to tell the young darkey that one day he would be a great fighter and Johnson often promised the old man that if he ever got to be champion he would buy him two suits and a red necktie. Sure enough he kept his promise and sent word to order two suits of clothes and not to be stingy with the price.

  The climax of the two-day celebration was to come that evening at Bob Motts’ Pekin Café, a black-tie banquet in the champion’s honor, attended by fifty of the most prominent black Chicagoans. Johnson was getting dressed for it when he happened to look out the window and saw a white man with a rifle walking up Wabash Avenue. The police were called. The man was arrested. He turned out to be a drunken Canadian-born mechanic from St. Louis named Richard McGuirk, who had lost his savings betting on Jim Jeffries. His weapon was unloaded when he was seized, but the police believed he’d come to town to kill Johnson. The champion did not press charges.

  Etta was said to be ill that evening—perhaps she had been unnerved by the rifleman or undone by the frenzied crowds—so Johnson drove off alone to the Pekin for an evening of music, dancing, and champagne. He bathed in the attention and needed little urging when his host asked him to say a few words. He planned to stay out of the ring for at least a year, he said, and he might retire altogether; there was no one else to fight, and he now had enough money in the bank so that “I never will be broke.”

  He was proud that he had resisted the temptation to increase his take by lying down to Jeffries. “Not alone has Jack Johnson shown the world that there are honest men in the black race,” he said, “but I also have shown the world that there is one black man who loves honor more than money.”

  He would be off the next morning for New York and a return to the vaudeville stage, he continued, but he would always remember this outpouring of affection. Chicago’s love for him seemed so overwhelming, he wanted one day to be buried here “among my friends.” But his study of history had also taught him to be wary. “I only hope the colored people of the world will not be like the French,” he told the crowd. “History tells us that when Napoleon was winning all his victories the French were with him, but when he lost, the people turned against him. When Jack Johnson meets defeat, I want the colored people to like and love me the same as when I was the champion.”

  * Here and there across the country, news of Gans’ triumph caused trouble. In New York, a black man who shouted “Colored gentlemen can always lick poor whites” to a cluster of disappointed Nelson fans had to be rescued by the police, and in Chicago there was a fistfight between blacks and whites who had gathered around a South Side saloon to hear the telegraphed returns.

  * Not all whites shared this view, of course. In New York, on October 29, the artist John Sloan went to see the Johnson–Ketchel films at Hammerstein’s Victoria and came away dazzled by Johnson’s skill: “The big black spider gobbled up the small white fly—aggressive fly—wonderful to have this event repeated.” (Dan Streible, Fight Pictures, p. 161.)

  † No such sums had ever been seen in boxing before. When the news got out, the Philadelphia Evening Star headlined on December 1, 1909, SEEMS HARD TO IMAGINE THAT SO MUCH REAL MONEY IS IN THE WORLD.

  * Jack Gleason went through the motions of making a separate offer as well, ostensibly on behalf of Sunny Jim Coffroth. There were evidently plots within plots. Coffroth was said by some to have thought Gleason was acting on his behalf, to have known nothing of his secret deal with Berger, and to have been so angered by what he saw as Gleason’s betrayal that he lobbied to have the contest banished from his city. But other stories suggest that Coffroth got half of every dollar Gleason made from the contest.

  † Mindful of what had happened to him in his fight with Marvin Hart, Johnson told Jack Gleason he wanted two judges at ringside, and that one of them should be black. In the end, no judge of either color would be appointed.

  * Washington suggested that the Post approach T. Thomas Fortune, ex-editor of the New York Age, but Bonfils said Fortune was not “well enough known.”

  * Frazee would go on to buy the Boston Red Sox in 1917—and to earn the undying enmity of Boston fans by selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees three years later.

  * Jack Johnson was married at least three times and had countless lovers. So far as anyone knows, he had no children. He may have seen Belle’s alleged pregnancy as his opportunity to become a father.

  * Sugar Ray Robinson would make the same sort of symbol out of the pink Cadillac he drove around Harlem in the 1950s. “When my car arrived it was not only exclusive, it was a symbol. When people think they recognize a celebrity, they hesitate a moment. But when they saw me in that car, they didn’t have to hesitate. They knew. There was only one like it—Sugar Ray’s pink Cadillac. Whenever my car was parked in front of my café, the grownups liked to drop in for a drink or for some fried chicken. They knew that if my car was out front, I was inside and they wanted to talk to me about the color and, more than anything else, about how much it had cost. The kids stayed outside, staring at it and reaching over to touch the pink fenders or the black leather seats. That car was the Hope Diamond of Harlem. Everybody had to see it or touch it or both to make sure it was real. A
nd to most of them it literally was the Hope Diamond because if skinny little Walker Smith could come off the streets to own a car like that, maybe they could, too.” (Quoted in Nathan, “Sugar Ray Robinson.”)

  † This same story was later told about Satchel Paige and about Madame Zzaj, the comely, fast-moving protagonist of Duke Ellington’s A Drum Is A Woman, as well.

  * No one seemed more eager to see Jack Johnson deposed than Jim Corbett. He had been retired for six years when Johnson won the title, but if Jeffries had proved unable to get himself in good enough shape to take Johnson on, he had said then, he felt it his duty to do so himself. “I am out to meet the negro purely and simply for the respect that I have for the white man,” he told reporters. “Ever since Johnson squeezed the championship from ‘Lemon Tommy’ I have been preparing myself for a return to the ring should Jeff let the big black boy go around the country sticking out his chest.”

  On March 28, 1909, just a few days after Johnson’s return to Chicago from Australia, Corbett and Harry Frazee had called at Toots Marshall’s place with a proposition for Johnson. He and the champion would later differ over just what it had been. Corbett said he’d simply told Johnson he hoped he’d consider fighting him if Jeffries didn’t. But years later, after Corbett accused him of facing only second-raters, Johnson shot back that during their visit Corbett and Frazee had offered him big money to carry the ex-champion for ten rounds. Whatever the truth about their conversation that day, there remained no love lost between Jack Johnson and the man who had been his boyhood hero. (Chicago Tribune, March 28 and April 4, 1909; Milwaukee Free Press, January 9, 1912.)

  * According to Little, he had to spirit Johnson into Oakland after dark to keep the press from learning of his condition. There, he said, “a colored doctor” who could be trusted to keep his treatments quiet used two thirty-two-candlepower bulbs to rub mysterious oils into Johnson’s torn muscles until he recovered. (George Little’s “Confession.”)

  * They failed to get at least one good one. According to George Little, he and Johnson and Barney Furey were out doing roadwork one morning when “about two miles from the [hotel] we passed through a small town where colored people are not permitted to reside. There was a bunch of little girls standing at the roadside and as we trotted past they began to shout, ‘Nigger, nigger, never die; black face and shiny eye.’” Johnson shouted at the children. All but one ran away. Furey rushed at her with a cane and struck her across the back. “Do you want to get us all lynched?” Little asked. Somehow they all made it back to Seal Rock without anyone else learning about the incident. (Chicago American, July 10, 1910.)

  * The Rev. Reverdy Ransom, an activist A.M.E. pastor from New York, took out after white clergymen for railing against the title fight but remaining silent about crimes against blacks: “Is a prize fight more revolting and atrocious than those lynchings and burnings which are of much too frequent occurrence?”

  A. G. F. Sims, writing in the Chicago Defender, argued that race, not morality, was the real reason the Philadelphia clergymen were so vehement in denouncing the fight. “Just because the Negro has an equal chance, that in itself, in their opinion, is enough to constitute a national disgrace.” Since that was so, he added, he hoped that when the time came, Johnson would demolish Jeffries in the ring “just to make it a good national disgrace.” (Gilmore, Bad Nigger!, pp. 34–35.)

  * According to John Lardner, Flanagan was not Johnson’s first choice to take over from Little. He had first asked the boxing veteran Billy McCarney. Half an hour after McCarney said he would, Johnson telephoned him and asked for a loan of one hundred dollars. McCarney said he never advanced money to fighters. “Then I have to tell you, Mr. McCarney, that you’re discharged.” (Lardner, White Hopes, p. 36.)

  † The Milwaukee Free Press (February 13, 1910) had already commented on the startling number of managers Johnson had discarded over the years: “There should be enough of them to give an annual parade which would take four hours to pass a given point.” To find suitable seconds for the Jeffries fight, it continued, “Johnson will have to write Booker T. Washington and King Menelik [the ruler of Ethiopia].”

  * Jim Corbett, whom Sullivan had always loathed, was instructed to guard the gate against him. “What the hell do you want?” Corbett asked when Sullivan appeared. The two glared at each other. “If you’re running the camp,” Sullivan said, “I don’t want to see him.” He stalked off. Tempers cooled. Sullivan was invited back. Jeffries asked the old warrior for his advice about how best to beat Johnson. He was worried, he confessed. “I don’t see why I have to be the favorite.” “Jim,” said Sullivan, “all I know is God Almighty hates a quitter.” (Farr, Black Champion, p. 105.)

  * A local judge, Lee J. Davis, offered still another race-based notion. Because of Nevada’s fierce sun, he said, Johnson’s color might actually give him an advantage over Jeffries. Davis had been to Alaska, he said, and noticed that miners who wanted to avoid snow blindness smeared lampblack beneath their eyes. Johnson’s dark skin might have the same effect. The newspaper that reported Davis’ theory (Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1910) went on to remind its readers that Johnson’s possible advantage would likely be minimized by the fact that Jeffries was himself browned by the sun.

  * Langford was in town because a San Francisco promoter named Sid Hester was hoping to stage a fight between him and Stanley Ketchel in Rickard’s stadium on the morning of the Fourth. When Rickard refused to allow it, Hester pledged to build an arena of his own but failed to make good on his promise.

  * “The big fellow did not know how much he hurt them,” wrote a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. “The victims are now taking their meals from the nearest to a mantelpiece they can find in Reno.” (Quoted in Bob Lucas, Black Gladiator, page 102.)

  * The arena was built on the site of the stadium in which Jim Jeffries had declared Marvin Hart his successor as heavyweight champion five years and one day earlier.

  “The local blacks have a very low regard for the negro prize-fighter and they have gambled hook, line and sinker—and this is literal for the Richmond negro spends much of his time fishing—against his chances.

  “And not only do the local blacks think Jeffries will win—they want him to win. They dislike Johnson, and many wish that ‘dat fool niggah gets his haid busted open for bein’ so smaht …’

  “The chief reason for Johnson’s unpopularity with the Southern negro probably lies in the fact that he is tryin’ to ‘copy the white folks.’

  “ ‘He must tink he’s bettah dan de res’ of us,’ said a local, ebony-hued sport. ‘He am’t,’ he continued. ‘He’s black—black as I is. He ain’t got no sense neithah, scootin’ round in one of dem automobiles. He bettah gone and git hisself a good steady job while he got da chance. Aftah Mistah Jeffries gits through with him he won’t be fit for hirin’.’ ”

  If anyone actually said such things to a white reporter, it seems likely that it was because it was what they were sure he wanted to hear.

  * On July 1, 1910, the Baltimore American ran a story claiming that the black community of Richmond, Virginia, was actually rooting for Jeffries, not Johnson. “Cornbread and water will be about the sole diet of Richmond negroes for several weeks to come if Jack Johnson whips Jim Jeffries Monday.

  * The Pekin Theater was so much admired by black Americans that by 1909, 33 of the 112 black-owned theaters in the country bore its name. And the man in charge was compared by the Chicago Broad-Ax to Benjamin Banneker, Toussaint-Louverture, and Booker T. Washington and hailed as “the new Moses of the Negro race in the theater world.” (Quoted in Kenney, Chicago Jazz, p. 6.)

  † According to Jim Corbett, Jeffries could hear the sentimental Civil War favorite from his dressing room: “I never knew just what that tune meant before and I stole a look Jeff’s way. The big fellow was bent over, fumbling at his shoe laces, and I could see the big tears pattering down on the backs of his big brawny fists. That tune, coming when it did, helped more than anything els
e to send Jeff into the ring in a complete state of collapse.” (Boxing, August 13, 1910.)

  ‡ According to Beach, plans to play the fifteen-year-old favorite “All Coons Look Alike to Me” were canceled at the last minute because “racial feeling was too high.” Hugh McIntosh, who was also present, claimed it was played, and “received with great enthusiasm.” (“Pride of the Blacks.”)

  * Jeffries’ sparring partner, Bob Armstrong, may have offered the best explanation for the ex-champion’s defeat: “When a horse ain’t got a race in him, he can’t win a race.”

  * This was a play on the title of a perennially popular stage comedy by William Gillette, first produced on Broadway in 1894.

  * At Ogden, Utah, three white drunks did try to get into his car, and when they were barred, began to curse him. One called him “Nigger” and, according to the Los Angeles Times (July 6, 1910), got spattered with tobacco juice and slapped “in a rather vigorous fashion for his trouble” by members of the champion’s entourage. Two railroad detectives then climbed aboard to protect Johnson as far as Omaha.

  BOOK TWO

  ___________________________

  THE FALL

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ____________________________________________

  THE BRUNETTE IN A BLOND TOWN

  THE MORNING AFTER THE FIGHT in Reno, Major P. M. Ashburn, a white surgeon in the Army Medical Corps who professed to have “the highest esteem for the Negro,” sat down and wrote what he evidently believed would be a helpful letter to his friend Emmett Jay Scott, Booker T. Washington’s secretary at Tuskegee. He was delighted at the champion’s victory, Ashburn said, but deeply concerned about his behavior. Johnson, he said,