Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  will now for some years be the most talked of and in some respects the most eminent black man in the world. It seems to us a matter of great importance whether his eminence is to be that of the purely sporting, loud, dislike-exciting nigger, or that of a sober, sane, wise and admirable Negro.

  With his youth, health, wealth, international reputation and fair education (I think you said he went to school with your wife) almost anything is possible for him, and a sane bearing that will excite sympathy and admiration rather than antipathy and distrust is not too much to ask. Conduct that was condoned in John L. Sullivan will be cursed in Jack Johnson and if his success should lead him into similar courses it will be a misfortune for his cause.

  The condescending tone of Major Ashburn’s letter aside, the concerns he expressed were now shared by a good many people of both races. And the violence that followed in the wake of the Jeffries fight had only intensified their anxiety. Johnson knew that, and sometimes did his best to try to put their fears to rest. But the private life he’d created for himself, the enemies he’d made along the way, and his own unwillingness to let anything or anyone interfere with his pleasures all had begun to work against him.

  There was something else at work as well. No black man—and very few Americans of any color—had ever drawn the unrelenting fire that Jack Johnson had attracted over the past two years. Damning editorials and death threats had been directed at him almost daily. It was not Johnson’s race alone that inspired such hatred; it is hard to know how the white public would have reacted if, say, Sam Langford or Joe Jeannette or some other more acquiescent black fighter had won the title. Johnson had proved not only that he could beat white men—but that he could take the women who they believed were theirs alone, as well. It was this lack of deference toward white men and the power they wielded, his refusal ever to remain in the “place” to which they insisted his color had permanently assigned him, that so inflamed their passions.

  Johnson was incapable of living any other way, but the relentless pressure had begun to take its toll. “I was not myself for a year after the Jeffries fight,” he would later concede, and he sometimes claimed to have suffered from what he called “brain fever.” Whatever may have been wrong with him, he exacerbated it with alcohol. He had always been a heavy drinker, settling for beer at first, then demanding wine and finally fine champagne. He was said to have been badly hungover for at least two of his fights—against England’s Ben Taylor and Philadelphia Jack O’Brien—and it seems unlikely a sober man would have bothered to do as much damage to the diminutive Norman Pinder as he had done earlier in the year. Now, he seems to have become more and more dependent on alcohol, and more and more erratic.

  New York Negroes had joined in the nationwide black celebration of the champion’s victory. “I have never seen so many colored people reading newspapers as since the fight,” Lester A. Walton wrote in the New York Age.

  I saw one enthusiastic citizen of color with every New York daily paper of July 5, including a German and a Hebrew paper he could not read. He told me that he wanted to cut out the pictures of the two fighters. That the Negro race should feel highly elated over the fact that a member of their race is champion of champions is to be expected. All other races feel proud of their members who achieve name and fame; then, why not we?

  And black Manhattan’s reception for Johnson on July 10, organized by his old friend Barron Wilkins, came close to matching black Chicago’s. Hundreds of handbills had been passed out in Negro neighborhoods.

  TO EVERY COLORED MAN, WOMAN OR CHILD IN GREATER NEW YORK, BE AT GRAND CENTRAL STATION AT 9:30 O’CLOCK MONDAY MORNING, AND LET US ALL SHAKE THE HAND OF THE STALWART ATHLETE, THE GREATEST OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. COME ANY WAY YOU CAN. COME IN VEHICLES OR ON FOOT. ALL BE THERE.

  Thousands mobbed Grand Central and lined Johnson’s route. And as in Chicago, there were also a fair number of whites in the throng. The Twentieth Century Limited had arrived five hours late, the Washington Post reported, so there was no time to stop at the Little Savoy before Johnson performed for the matinee audience at Hammerstein’s Victoria.

  The Victoria was jammed alow and aloft. No negroes sat in the auditorium but the balcony and gallery [were] solid with them…. Up went the curtain and showed nothing but a punching bag swinging gently. A short thick-necked person waddled to the footlights and announced that the audience was to have the pleasure of seeing “the champeen of all champeens, Mr. Jack Johnson.”

  Out danced Johnson from the wings in a blue low-necked and sleeveless jersey with a silk American flag for a belt. He flashed a smile and went about his business. The more you looked the more you saw what Jeffries was up against. Johnson moved his great bulk with a cat’s quickness. He tapped the bag until he had it hammering the oak…. Finally, the rope broke and the bag went spinning. The spectators clapped enthusiastically. Johnson grinned and ran off the stage.

  He returned, sparred three decorous rounds with Walter Monahan, and then made a short speech, extolling Jim Jeffries as “the gamest man I ever fought” and promising to hold on to the title as long as he could, defending it against “all comers … fair and square.” “There was applause all over the house,” the Post continued. “Not a man … hissed him or showed sign of disapproval.”

  The crowd outside the theater was so big that the police allowed him to drive through an alley to get to the Little Savoy.* There, as soon as he and Etta were settled in their suite, the champion invited Nat Fleischer up for an interview. The future boxing historian and founding editor of The Ring was then a young reporter for the New York Sun-Press. Johnson was still brooding about the violence triggered by his latest victory:

  Nat, why should they bring in the black race against the white race? I licked Tommy Burns fairly. I did the same in my fight with Jeffries. My battle with Jeffries was not a contest between a black man and a white man. But between two boxers…. I beat him and now the matter is settled. Let’s avoid any talk that is likely to antagonize my people or yours.

  The champion’s statesmanlike summary of the fight and its meaning ran in the next morning’s Sun-Press. What happened next did not. As the two men wound up their interview, Etta emerged unexpectedly from the bathroom. “She had been preparing for the evening’s celebration,” Fleischer remembered, “and, having no idea that Jack was entertaining a guest in the living room, was completely nude.” Embarrassed and furious at Johnson for failing to warn her that he was not alone, she began to shout at him. “Jack tried to explain,” Fleischer remembered, “but was cut short when his wife, her eyes blazing menacingly, raised a chair. Discretion being the better part of valor, this seemed to both of us the propitious moment to leave. The chair caught Jack in the center of the back as we raced down the stairs with her curses flooding after us.”

  Stories like this one were thought off-limits by newspaper editors in those days. Fleischer wouldn’t commit his memory of Etta’s fury to paper for more than four decades. But other tales were now circulating about the champion. Hattie McClay called on Bat Masterson at the New York Telegraph, hoping to embarrass her former lover into letting her in on his financial success. “According to her story,” Masterson reported,

  she has been pushed aside for another woman whom Johnson took with him from this city when he went out to San Francisco…. The original Mrs. Johnson asserts that she pawned what jewelry she had to defray the expenses of her and her husband’s trip to England at a time when Johnson was unable to procure the funds necessary to make the trip.

  Meanwhile, back in Chicago, George Little called reporters in to have a drink with him at the Workingmen’s Exchange, the cavernous saloon from which Hinky Dink Kenna ran the First Ward.* Johnson’s quarrels with his earlier managers had only occasionally made the papers. But big money was at issue now. Newspapers all over the country had carried Johnson’s charge that his ex-manager had offered him $100,000 to throw the Jeffries bout, and Little was determined to strike back. Furious at having been fired and having
lost thousands betting on Jeffries, the ex-bagman and brothel keeper assumed an air of injured piety and attacked his former fighter’s character. Johnson, he charged, suffered from the universal Negro trait of “prevarication.” It was “a downright lie” that Little had ever proposed to fix any fight. It had all been Johnson’s idea. The “real reason” for their split had been the champion’s refusal to honor the tradition that “women are barred” from training camp. “Johnson’s wife insisted on being with Jack most of the time”; she also wore “a whole lot of diamonds that Jack borrowed from me and I got sore and demanded their return.” As proof that he could have provided such baubles, he displayed a ring the Chicago Tribune said outshone all the electric lights in the Exchange.

  Five days later in New York, halfway through Johnson’s act at Hammerstein’s Victoria, Little rose from the audience and tried to storm the stage. The ushers stopped him. As they wrestled him out the door, Johnson shouted, “I’ll see him in my dressing room.” The two men spent an angry hour and a half behind closed doors, but nothing was resolved. Little went off to write a four-page self-serving “confession,” typed up for use by his lawyers, in which he alleged that Johnson’s recent fights in the West—against Al Kaufmann, Stanley Ketchel, and Jim Jeffries—had all been fixed. Then he filed suit against Johnson to recover the cost of a diamond ring he said he’d loaned the champion after his return from Australia. Johnson didn’t deny that he’d borrowed the ring but said he’d more than made up for it with gifts for Little over their time together—a $125 pair of eyeglasses, a $500 trunk, and much more. It was clear that Johnson and his former manager now detested each other.

  On the morning of July 13, Johnson drove Etta and Sig Hart from Manhattan over the East River to Vitagraph Village, the moviemaking complex in Flatbush where the films of the Reno fight were being duplicated for release to theaters. Johnson no longer had any financial interest in them. Like his opponent, he had sold his share before ever entering the ring—he’d said then that he’d rather have fifty thousand dollars than risk being cheated by middlemen—but he still wanted to see for himself just how he had beaten Jim Jeffries.

  As the first images flickered on the screen, Johnson leaned forward, fascinated at seeing himself in action, and started a running blow-by-blow commentary that kept Etta laughing through all fifteen rounds. He seemed to remember everything Jim Corbett had shouted at him and everything he’d said in response. “That’s where he got me good,” he said when Jeffries landed to his stomach in the fourth round. He pointed out punches that looked powerful on-screen but had had no actual effect and others that looked like what he called “love taps” but had done serious damage. At the end, the Vitagraph workers watching from the back broke into applause.

  Most Americans would never get a chance to see the films at all. Within twenty-four hours of the Reno fight, a nationwide crusade had been launched to stop theater owners from showing them. The United Society of Christian Endeavor, four million strong, started it, sending a wire to every governor.

  RACE RIOTS AND MURDER IN MANY PLACES FOLLOWING ANNOUNCEMENT OF JOHNSON’S VICTORY…. THESE RESULTS WILL BE MULTIPLIED MANY FOLD BY MOVING PICTURE EXHIBITIONS. WILL YOU JOIN OTHER GOVERNORS IN RECOMMENDING PROHIBITION OF THESE DEMORALIZING SHOWS? SAVE OUR YOUNG PEOPLE. WIRE ANSWER.

  Many southern governors wired yes. So did the chief executives of several northern and western states. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union seconded the call. The Hearst papers, which had devoted yards of column space to promoting the fight, now gave over their front pages day after day to trying to prevent anyone from seeing what had actually happened in the ring. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, who had told friends how much he looked forward to the fight, also now called for the films to be banned.

  There had always been those who believed prizefighting wicked and dangerous to public morals. But race gave this campaign its special urgency. It was simply wrong, said the San Francisco Examiner, to make it possible for white women and children to see “members of their own race beaten into physical disability by a gigantic negro.” Boss Ed Crump of Memphis issued a ban on fight films—and Negro boxers—in the town he ran. “Labor on the cotton plantations is needed badly,” he explained. “Negroes may make an honest living there. The South has been through one bloody war on account of the negro. It is not ready to repeat.”

  Mrs. James Crawford, vice president of the California Women’s Club, claimed that her opposition to exhibiting the films was based on the best interests of black people:

  The negroes are to some extent a childish race, needing guidance, schooling and encouragement. We deny them this by encouraging them [through the showing of these films] to believe that they have gained anything by having one of their race as a champion fighter. Race riots are inevitable when we, a superior people, allow these people to be deluded and degraded by such false ideals.

  Black editors were quick to point out the hypocrisy in all this. No one interfered with the staging of melodramas like Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, which preached race hatred, and the same newspapers that now editorialized against the fight films willingly carried advertising for them. Clergymen who denounced boxing films did nothing to stop parishioners from sending picture postcards of lynchings through the mails. “Had Jeffries won,” said Lester A. Walton,

  there would have been no opposition …, but as Johnson came out victorious the cry “Don’t show the fight pictures” was set up which now extends as far as India…. The attitude of the anti-fight picture clan reminds me of the reluctance of some mothers to put long trousers on their overgrown sons—fearing that the young men will become too fresh and mannish.*

  “What folly!” said the Washington Bee. “There are separate moving picture theatres among the whites and blacks in this country…. Let the pictures be shown, and if the whites get mad with themselves and fight themselves, they are to blame. The blacks on the other hand will shout among themselves only.”*

  In the end, the films were shown without incident in several large cities, including Kansas City, Missouri, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, and Hoboken, New Jersey. Johnson never publicly commented on the issue, but it must have seemed to him that whites were once again intent on keeping him from showing the world what he could do.†

  Milton W. Blumenberg, president of the American Cinephone Company, offered him a way to get around them. Commercially viable sound films were still seventeen years away, but Blumenberg’s firm was one of several already trying to create talking pictures by showing silent footage simultaneously with specially recorded disks that provided a kind of primitive soundtrack. He paid Johnson to stand before the silent camera in his street clothes and describe the action in the ring—even though nothing he said could actually be heard. Then, eleven days after his visit to the Vitagraph Studios, Blumenberg took Johnson to the New York studio of the fledgling Columbia Phonograph Company, where the champion stood in front of a big funnel-shaped sheet-metal horn to record his version of the fight. Footage of the bout might be forbidden, but no one was going to stop Jack Johnson from telling about it himself. And he would deliver it in the distinctive staccato style he used onstage that made everything he declaimed sound almost like free verse.

  Ladies and gentlemen,

  with your kind indulgence

  I will endeavor

  to say a few words

  in regards

  of the great

  heavyweight battle

  which took place

  Fourth of July of this year

  between myself

  and one of the gamest

  and greatest

  heavyweights

  that ever laced on.

  a boxing glove

  And the name:

  Mr.

  James

  J.

  Jeffries …

  Johnson went on to offer the highlights of each round with special emphasis on the one-sided finale.

  Round fifteen

  was th
e round

  that Jeffries met his Waterloo.

  And a great round it was.

  I fought with all the courage,

  all the science

  and gameness combined

  that I had in me.

  And then a left

  to the jaw

  that staggered Jeffries,

  and a right hand uppercut

  which knocked him down.

  And then he was assisted to his feet

  by a few of his seconds …

  and Jeffries went down,

  and I was declared

  the winner.

  And the sports at the ringside

  considered me

  one of the greatest

  of modern times.

  And they all wished me well,

  and the battle was fought

  strictly on the level

  and the best man won.

  Like a good many schemes that piqued Johnson’s interest over the years, this one does not seem to have paid off. The challenge of synchronizing the footage of the champion speaking with his recorded voice must have been too great for most theater managers, and the result, according to Moving Picture World, was not very compelling: “Orally, Mr. Johnson was a success; photographically, and histrionically, Mr. Johnson was not…. He just stood there on the screen, unaccompanied by the fistic gestures we naturally look for.” But the champion presumably received his check, and was glad to get it.* There seemed to be no big-money fights on the horizon. He’d beaten everybody. Even Jim Corbett had to admit it: “The worst of it is we have no white man in view able to defeat Johnson and two colored fighters won’t draw training expenses.”

  The champion could not help but laugh at the implausible challengers the newspapers came up with. Major-league ballplayers said they’d be willing to take him on in the interest of restoring the white race to its rightful place. So did Earl M. V. Long, the center on Harvard’s varsity football team. Corbett himself suggested that wrestling champion Frank Gotch might be prevailed upon to undergo emergency boxing training. A big black former convict was said to be on his way north from Mississippi, his passage paid by planters, who said that if a black man had to hold the title, at least he should be one who knew his place. (Their candidate doesn’t appear to have turned up; maybe he was just looking for a one-way trip north.) When former featherweight titleholder Young Corbett II appeared outside the Little Savoy late one night, spectacularly drunk, shouting that he was the “natural defender of the supremacy of the White Race” and daring Johnson to step outside so he could prove it, no one even bothered to wake the champion.†