Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  As the champion drove his long, six-cylinder seventy-horsepower Thomas to the starting line and pulled alongside his rival, he leaned out and said, “Mr. Oldfield, which heat am I going to win? Mr. Pickens said I was going to win one heat.” It was a perfectly reasonable question; Oldfield’s barnstorming races were often rigged to add excitement. Not this one.

  “He did, did he?” Oldfield shouted back, jamming his frayed cigar into his mouth and impatiently revving the engine of his sixty-horsepower Knox. “Well, let me tell you something. If you win a heat in this race, it’ll be the one Pickens drives.”

  When Tim Sullivan, the Tammany stalwart who had been the stakeholder at Reno, waved the starter’s flag, Oldfield roared away, spattering Johnson with mud and finishing the five-mile course in 4:44, more than half a mile ahead of the heavyweight champion. Oldfield slowed down a bit in the second heat, perhaps to make sure the cameras could get footage of both cars in the same shot, but he still finished far in front of his rival. There was no need for a third.*

  “A sorrier lot of spectators were never seen,” one writer noted. “The whites were sore Johnson had no accident, and the blacks were down in the mouth because Oldfield not only romped away with the event, but made joy-riding Jack look like a dead one.”

  The AAA made good on its threat. Oldfield was indefinitely suspended for “conduct injurious to the welfare of the sport,” and for two years would be forced to make his living working county fairs. But Oldfield believed his easy victory over Johnson had been worth it, because it had forestalled the sort of blow to white pride that had been struck by Jeffries’ defeat.

  I raced Jack Johnson for neither money nor glory, but to eliminate from my profession an invader who would have had to be reckoned with sooner or later. If Jeffries had fought Johnson five years ago, the white man would have won, and after Jeffries retired he would never have had to fight him again.

  If I had ignored Johnson for a year or so, he would probably have gained much experience on the tracks and bought high-powered cars, while I am not getting better from day to day.

  I am glad if my victory over Johnson today will have any effect on the “white man’s hope” situation.

  “No more of that automobile racing for Jack Johnson,” the champion said. “I may be able to drive a car fast on a straight road, but I never will take any chances on the turns like Oldfield does…. He has had so much experience in that sort of work that he made a monkey out of me.”

  The editor of the Chicago Defender took in stride Johnson’s defeat on the racetrack: after Reno, he wrote, white people probably needed some harmless “consolation.” But the editor of the accommodationist Indianapolis Freeman believed that Johnson’s defeat had been an embarrassment to the Negro race.

  Jack Johnson just had to keep on monkeying until he got what he wasn’t looking for…. The Freeman tried to argue with Mr. Jack, fairly prayed to him, virtually saying, please don’t make a fool of yourself. O, please don’t Mr. Jack…. Well, Barney put him out and nobody is sorry. We are all chagrined, however, … to think Johnson insisted on this display. We hope he is cured, and that he stays cured.

  Johnson was cured. But he had never seen the contest in racial terms. Like the one-sided battle at Reno, it had simply been a case of the best man winning. The manner in which Oldfield had outdriven him, he said, “convinced me that I was not meant for that sport.” He did not, however, promise to slow down on country roads or city streets.*

  Back in Chicago in late October, Belle Schreiber was waiting for Johnson, still without a home or a job. Her sister, Gladys, had come with her from Pittsburgh. She, too, was homeless—and pregnant. He met both women at the Hotel Vendome on South State Street. He was sorry Belle’s relationship with him had caused still another madam to turn her out. But why depend on madams? he asked her. She should go into business for herself. “He said to me to get my furniture and open a flat,” she remembered, “and I might as well make the money as to give half of what I was making to someone else, and for me to keep a couple of girls … and make money in that way.”

  He volunteered to help get her started. She picked out a flat in the Ridgewood Apartments at Twenty-eighth and Wabash. There were sixty-eight flats in the building. Some were brothels, others were home to call girls; as Bertha Morrison later testified, “I don’t think [a man] could make a mistake by ringing a bell.” Morrison and Lillian St. Clair, both old friends from the Everleigh Club, became Belle’s first employees. Johnson paid the first month’s rent—there were no leases at the Ridgewood; no one wanted anything incriminating in writing. Then he escorted Belle to the Marshall Ventilated Mattress Company, where they picked out furnishings—four beds and mattresses, tables, linens, pillows, commodes, rugs, curtains, even framed pictures for the walls—for which he paid $1,196.53. He also made arrangements with the Heileman Brewing Company to supply beer off the books and gave her an additional five hundred dollars for incidental expenses. For these acts of generosity he would one day be made to pay a heavy price.

  On Sunday evening, November 7, two days before Election Day, Johnson was in Manhattan, where Tammany Hall had contracted with him to make a whirlwind tour of black churches in support of Alderman Tom McManus—known as The McManus—and Thomas G. Patten, the Democratic candidate for Congress.

  Johnson was still at least nominally a Republican and had recently campaigned on behalf of Edward H. Wright, the first black candidate for alderman in Chicago, at some risk to his reputation. Advisers had told him to stay out of politics in the months leading up to the Jeffries contest: things were tense enough, and he didn’t need new enemies. But he had refused to keep silent. “I was told not to come here,” he’d told one black Chicago crowd.

  I was told I was a man before the public. I replied I was a man fighting against the world. I’ll be surrounded by 30,000 or 40,000 people on July 4, and some will holler “good” and some will holler “bad,” but the most will holler “bad,” and the more they holler “bad” the braver I’ll be. That’s Jack Johnson’s motto. That’s what this man Wright’s going to do in local politics—lick ’em. You can put it down, Johnson and Wright will win.

  Johnson did. Wright did not, though he remained a behind-the-scenes power in the GOP—and a prominent attorney whose services Johnson would one day need.*

  But the champion was not averse to switching parties if the Democrats in one place or another seemed more likely to act on behalf of black people than the Republicans—especially if there was a little something in it for him as well. And, like many black Republicans, he had been genuinely angered by the way Theodore Roosevelt had handled an incident in his native Texas in 1906. Three companies of the 25th Infantry (Colored) that had fought alongside Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba had been assigned to Fort Brown, Texas, that year. Resentful of their presence, the white citizens of nearby Brownsville barred the troops from saloons, shoved them off sidewalks, beat them when they resisted. One summer night, shots were fired in town, killing one white man and wounding another. The mayor blamed the black troops. So did Roosevelt. When none would confess to knowing anything about the shooting, he ordered every single soldier—167 men—dishonorably discharged without so much as a hearing. Until that moment, T.R. had been a hero to most black voters, in part because he had invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House five years earlier. But afterward, many felt betrayed, and some northern Democratic bosses were still working hard to exploit that feeling.

  The one-day canvass of black churches did not go as smoothly as Johnson’s Democratic handlers would have liked. Four black ministers refused to turn over their pulpits to the champion because of his well-publicized private life. When he and his party swept into the Bethel A.M.E. Church at 336 West Sixty-second Street, they found three hundred men and women on hand for a prayer meeting. The pastor blanched, but before he could object, the Montreal Daily Herald reported, a local Democratic leader named Lee raced up the aisle, and launched into an introduction
of the champion.

  “Sisters and brothers,” said Lee. “The church must do its part in this campaign. Let us not become excited, but I am here to introduce a man who came thousands of miles to tell you folks what to do at this next election. He is the greatest man that ever lived.”

  Then, with a sweep of both arms, Chief Lee called Johnson to the reading desk. Behind the speaker sat Jimmy Hagan, leader of the district, and “The” McManus.

  “Mr. Roosevelt, he travels on one thing,” roared Johnson. “He ate dinner with Booker T. Washington.” A thump of the fist imperiled the Bible stand. “It’s one of the greatest honors for a colored man to sit with a white family, but it’s an insult for a white man to take a colored man in a private room to meals. Let Roosevelt be sincere from the heart and say, ‘Booker, come dine with my wife and family.’ But when he dines ‘alone,’ he is not a man.*

  “When Roosevelt was in Cuba, our great black army saved him. After that he comes home and hears one man was killed in Brownsville and expels the whole army. I don’t want no favors but only fair play for the race. Ladies, remember your meat bill. I am here to fight for you and your men, just as I was on the Fourth of July.”

  Meanwhile, word had spread that Johnson was in the neighborhood, and hundreds of men, women, and children had streamed out of the surrounding tenements to see him. Someone broke a window. People began climbing inside. Others tore the door off its hinges and rushed up the aisle, cheering for “Our Arthur.” The McManus could not make himself heard. The champion thought it best to leave. “As the taxi in which Johnson had been carried swiftly from prayer meeting to prayer meeting rolled up San Juan Hill into Tenth Avenue,” the newspaper continued, “a horde of negroes followed.”

  In public, Jack Johnson remained a hero to his admirers. But in private, his behavior seemed more and more unpredictable, its legal ramifications steadily more threatening. The lawsuit lodged against him by Norman Pinder had just been dropped: neither Pinder nor any of his witnesses turned up in court in October, perhaps because Johnson or people working for him had paid them off. But George Little’s suit still hung over his head. So did the one lodged by the impresario Barney Gerard. A New York sculptor named Cartaino Sciarrino had recently gone to court as well, seeking four thousand dollars for a full-size statue of the fighter Johnson had commissioned and then refused to pay for.

  In November, Johnson, Etta, and Walter Monahan began yet another arduous series of one-night stands through New England. An eighteen-year-old French “automobile mechanician” named Gaston Le Fort had been hired to do the driving. His presence would soon trigger a near-tragedy.

  It is impossible to know precisely what happened over the next few weeks. Only scattered hints appeared in the newspapers, but clearly, events were spinning out of control. The trouble seems to have begun at Lawrence, Massachusetts, on November 12. The champion went onstage as usual, punched the bag, and sparred—then could not remember a single line from the speech he’d been delivering nearly every day since July. “I couldn’t seem to understand what was going on,” he said afterwards. He ran offstage, frightened and agitated; poured cold water on his head to cool down; and gave his revolver to Etta, telling her to keep it away from him “as something told me I might do harm with it.” A doctor who was called told him he badly needed a rest.

  Two days later, at Haverhill, he forgot his lines again. At Lowell on the seventeenth, after drinking from a bottle of beer, he became violently ill and convinced himself that someone was trying to poison him, just as he had been sure George Little had sought to poison him at Seal Rock before the Jeffries fight. He was committed to a sanitarium for at least one night.

  Friends “fear he has fought his last battle,” the New York Times reported; while Johnson looked well enough, his constitution had been undercut “by the rapid pace at which he has been living.” He tried to be reassuring after he was released. “I’m all right,” he said, “except that sometimes I don’t know what is going on around me.”

  But he wasn’t all right. In Portland, Maine, on the nineteenth, he broke down again, refused to go onstage at all this time, threatened suicide. If Etta hadn’t been with him, he said, and willing to nurse him day and night, he would have hanged himself or leaped from the window of his room. The hotel doctor was called. He diagnosed Johnson to be suffering from “aggravated nerve exhaustion” and told him he must not drive the hundred frigid miles to his next engagement at Rumford Falls, Vermont. Instead, the New York Times reported, “to the astonishment of the natives the big fellow nonchalantly ordered a special train, and the party of three whirled over the Maine central to Rumford Falls, with tracks ordered ‘clear ahead.’”

  The next day, the Milwaukee Free Press ran a stern editorial.

  JOHNSON SUFFERS FROM SERVILE FLATTERY

  Traveling burlesquers have passed the word along and their stories of the capers of the negro reflect no credit to him. Johnson, with his easy-going ways, love of adulation, and hankering for white trash company, has been living it up almost continuously since his Reno victory.

  It is the old, old story, with only the scenario and characters changed. Pugilistic champions by the score have gone the same route that Johnson is traveling…. Black fighters especially are prone to fall for the servile flattery of that class which delights to fawn upon successful gladiators….

  The champion says, though, that he has seen the light and will switch before it is too late. He will have to, or else the black bugaboo of the prize ring will be removed without the necessity of developing another white man’s hope.

  That light was still only dimly seen. On November 25, Johnson and Etta were in New York, on the way home to Chicago, when the police came for him again, this time with a month-old charge of disorderly conduct. At the Gaiety Theater back in October, a few days before he addressed the New York prayer meetings on Tammany’s behalf, he had asked Miss Henrietta Cooper, “a white woman appearing in a burlesque chorus,” to join his traveling show. When she said no, he grabbed her wrists, she told the police, and only her loud protests made him let her go. Johnson claimed it was a frame-up, and, according to the New York Times, “drew from his pocket a roll of bills as round as a teacup, peeled off a $1,000 bill and tossed it on the desk, remarking as he did so: ‘I guess that’ll hold me for a while.’”*

  Etta Duryea, who had spent the last week nursing her increasingly disturbed lover, cannot have been pleased, either at learning that he had made a clumsy pass at a chorus girl or by the humiliating newspaper stories it inspired. Still, she returned to Chicago at his side.

  There, Johnson did his best to appear as if all was well again. He had a doctor pronounce him in tip-top shape. “The only thing that worries me is my health,” he assured a reporter. “It’s getting so good I’m afraid it will challenge me.” He planned to spend at least one thousand dollars on Christmas gifts for friends and family, he said. On December 15, he learned that his Chicago lawyer, Gustav Beerly, had obtained a divorce for Etta. She and Johnson were now free to marry.

  But all was not well. Again, the details are sketchy and sometimes contradictory. But it seems clear that a friendship of some kind had grown up between Etta and Gaston Le Fort, the young Frenchman who now drove her around town each day. It would have been understandable. Etta was a handsome woman, often lonely, resentful of the champion’s serial infidelities, perhaps even angry enough about them to want to show him that she, too, was attractive to others. Certainly she would have been happy to have a sympathetic ear.

  Johnson grew suspicious. Chronically unfaithful to the women with whom he lived, he was bitterly resentful of anyone who even hinted at disloyalty to him. When Clara Kerr had run away from him in Los Angeles the first time, he’d tracked her all the way to Tucson, and when she left him again in Chicago, he’d spent weeks drinking heavily and scouring Pittsburgh and New York for her, looking for revenge. When Belle Schreiber had suggested that Etta was two-timing him the previous summer, he had believed it and forc
ed her to prove her innocence.

  Now, when he had to go to Pittsburgh on business for a couple of days, he hired a detective to follow Etta and the chauffeur while he was gone.

  He left on December 19. The next day, he got a bit of good news. Part of Barney Gerard’s suit had been thrown out of court. Sig Hart, not Johnson, had signed the original contract with Gerard, and the champion’s attorney was able to make the case that Hart had merely been a “messenger boy,” unauthorized to represent Johnson.* That evening, he was at ringside at Pittsburgh’s Labor Temple, where he had arranged a six-round fight for Walter Monahan. He had taken it into his head to turn his young sparring partner into his own personal “white hope.” Monahan needed schooling, Johnson admitted, but he hit as hard as anyone in the division. Any challenger who wanted to fight Johnson would have to beat Monahan first, the champion said, and as Monahan’s manager, he would be entitled to a piece of the action. To make sure his protégé looked impressive in his first East Coast outing, Johnson had hired for his opponent his own former sparring partner, Kid Cotton. But things didn’t go as planned. Cotton was a journeyman at best—he had a career record of nineteen fights with just one win—but he was abler than Walter Monahan and may have resented his former employer’s attempt to build up Monahan’s reputation merely because he happened to be white. In any case, Cotton had his opponent reeling from the first round, and only Johnson’s shouted advice to clinch and hold on kept Monahan upright until the final bell. Johnson and Cotton cursed each other all through the fight.