Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  [Johnson] was about five or six stone heavier than the well-trained pugilist of the films. [I]n a year or so, if he does not take better care of himself, he will become too “streaky” (to use Jem Mace’s phrase) ever to get back into hard condition and will degenerate into a vast, human punching bag. For all that, he gave an engaging display of artistry in the three short easy rounds with his sparring partner, who thumped away to the best of his ability. All the great gifts of the great boxer born and made were there, the panther-like glide in and out of distance, the straight infallible left, and the power of timing an antagonist to the third place of decimals. He does not withdraw into himself like the average American boxer … but stands up… and makes the most of his height and reach. It was pretty to see how, in every little mix up, he contrived to be inside the unhappy Cutler who could never get away without taking both body blows and hooks to the head….

  On the other side of the Atlantic Johnson passes for a “flash nigger,” a type not to be encouraged by those who have kept ten millions of black men in subjection to the dominant race. In private life, however, the conqueror of Jeffries is an amiable person with a fund of quaint humour and a sportsmanlike trust in human nature (as long as it is not a question of dollars) which reconciles one to his golden teeth and the multitude of diamonds which cause him to resemble a starry night. It is to his credit that he feels at home in England, which he believes, not without reason, to be inhabited by a race of sportsmen.

  Afterward, a reporter asked the champion if, when he entered the ring overseas, he saw himself as fighting for his country.

  “Fight for America?” Johnson answered. “Well, I should say not. What has America ever done for me or my race? Here I am treated like a human being.”

  “Are you going back to America?”

  “Not until I have to, and then as soon as I get through I am coming right back here.”*

  The following day, July 5, Johnson rented a flat at Luxborough House, an apartment-hotel in Paddington, just off Regent’s Park. Etta was to spend the next few weeks there while Johnson toured provincial music halls. To keep her happy in his absence, he ordered an $18,000 royal blue limousine with $2,500 worth of interior fittings, including “a solid gold arrangement” of flasks and cigarette boxes. Brown, the chauffeur, stood ready to drive her anywhere in the city she wanted to go.

  It didn’t work. Left alone to brood, Etta retreated into depression. There were angry arguments whenever Johnson came home. Neighbors complained. On July 22, the landlady ordered the Johnsons to vacate the premises, weary of what she called the champion’s “lively conduct.” They told her they would go, but when she returned to clean the flat on August 5 she found Etta still inside, pleading that she was too ill to move. The flat was “filthy,” the landlady said, and she would later collect thirty-seven pounds from Johnson for smashing her crockery.

  The couple shifted to a hotel near Piccadilly the next day. Two weeks later, Johnson suddenly canceled his theatrical tour, telling the press his wife was suffering such “great nervous prostration that the attending physicians fear for her life.”* They would proceed to Paris instead, he said, where he would train while staying close to her bedside.

  It was actually Johnson who feared for her life, and with good reason. She had tried—or threatened—to hurl herself from the window of their hotel room. And, if a later interview with her mother is to be believed, it was Johnson’s insistence on shifting to Paris that had helped drive her to it. Etta had bitterly opposed the move, perhaps because she feared that her husband would prove unable to resist the city’s pleasures. “Before she left for Paris,” Mrs. Terry said, “she told me she would rather die than go.” They went anyway, but from that moment on, Johnson would live with the constant fear that his wife might harm herself.

  Johnson knew that Negro boxers had been big attractions in Paris since his old rival Sam McVey had begun fighting exhibitions there in 1907. And the French fascination with them had only intensified after McVey and Joe Jeannette staged a grueling “finish fight” in which they knocked one another down a total of thirty-eight times before the battered McVey, no longer able to see his opponent, was forced to quit after the forty-ninth round. Sam Langford’s arrival to fight McVey in the spring of 1911 further excited Parisians: one sporting magazine headlined its coverage LE CHOC DES DEUX SAMS (The Clash of the Two Sams), and the French press was filled with overwrought stories about black American heavyweights—their power and dark skin and supposed exoticism.†

  Now the French press welcomed the heavyweight champion back to Paris as the greatest of them all. He made the most of it. After checking into the Grand Hotel, he invited the French reporters—over whom he towered—up to his suite to watch him bathe and dress before making his first appearance onstage at Magic City in Montmartre. They were suitably awed. One pronounced him “as handsome as a Congolese Apollo.” Because he was naked, wrote another, one could admire his chiseled arms and shoulders, and his legs, so “beautiful and slender.” A third, watching as two valets helped him into evening dress and carefully put all his diamonds in place, compared him to an African king. This private display made the champion two hours late for his performance at Magic City, but the crowd in evening dress cheered him anyway as he sparred gracefully with the handsome young French favorite, welterweight Georges Carpentier.

  For the next few weeks Johnson continued his nightly exhibitions at Magic City and worked out each afternoon in front of paying crowds at the Pelican Boxing Club on the Rue des Acacias as well. All his appearances were well attended, but it was clear to boxing insiders that Johnson wasn’t working very hard. The reason was simple: Bombardier Wells was genial and good-looking and much loved by his British fans, but he was also inexperienced, fatally unenthusiastic about finishing his opponents, and the frequent victim of a sort of stage fright that made him dangerously vulnerable in the early rounds.* Johnson did what he could to build up the gate, praising the Bombardier’s courage to any British reporter who would listen, talking with a straight face of his opponent’s youth and speed and science, pretending always that he faced a serious challenge. But he was fooling almost no one. And when an American writer took him aside and asked about his lax training, Johnson let his guard slip a little.

  “How about your training?”

  “For Wells?” he smiled. “I don’t have to do much trainin’. I never did have to train much. I didn’t train but a month for Jeffries …”

  “How about Wells?”

  “I’ll beat him easy.”

  Photographs published in the French papers that month show the Johnsons having what looked like a wonderful time: watching the balloon races at Saint-Cloud, Johnson in a handsome suit and straw boater, Etta in furs and a vast hat set off with a white egret feather at least a foot and a half long; seated in their new ninety-horsepower Thomas Flyer racing car somewhere in the French countryside; laughing together as they help clear a herd of sheep from their path in the Bois de Boulogne.

  But behind closed doors, things remained tense and troubled. Etta’s gloom had not lifted. Women waited for Johnson at the Grand Hotel, just as they had haunted the sidewalk outside their first London flat, just as she had feared they would, and she knew that Magic City was surrounded by all the temptations of Pigalle. Hattie McClay, Johnson’s companion on his first visit to the City of Light, had never felt that she could interfere with his nighttime adventuring. Etta was determined to do so. She was his wife and so insisted that they move out of town and that her husband come home to her every night, to a furnished house in the quiet suburb of Neuilly. Johnson did so, but reluctantly. Soon a newspaper story quoted unidentified sources close to the champion as saying that Etta’s “watchfulness” was keeping him from “seeing ‘the sights’ and spoiling his good time. They hint that he is somewhat peevish with Mrs. Johnson, too…. Jack is giving up Paris rather than fall out with her.”*

  On September 23, Johnson and his wife headed back across the Channel. They were
on their way to a new training camp in Epping Forest on London’s northern edge to make final preparations for the big fight, now just nine days away. Every one of the ten thousand seats in the Empress Theater had been sold. But as the Johnsons settled into their new quarters, there was growing reason to believe the bout would never take place.

  The heavyweight championship had been caught up in the intricate world of British ecclesiastical politics. The Reverend F. B. Meyer—the charismatic young Baptist secretary of the Free Church Council, a coalition of churches that did not conform to the doctrines of the Church of England—had been looking for a national issue around which its members could rally. A recent campaign to ban the works of Karl Marx and the American economic reformer Henry George had failed. Meyer hoped a crusade against the evils of prizefighting in general and the Johnson-Wells contest in particular might be just the thing.

  On Sunday, September 15, he signed a letter calling on all Nonconformist clergymen to devote the following Sunday’s sermon to arousing the public’s conscience against a spectacle that was sure to be bloody and degrading, sullied by gambling and high stakes and meant only to “gratify that craving for the sensational and the brutal which is inconsistent with the manhood that makes a great nation.”

  Clergymen all over Britain followed Meyer’s suggestion and called for the fight to be stopped. So did the fifth Earl of Lonsdale, president of the National Sporting Club, though for a different reason. The bout would be a mismatch, he said; sending Bombardier Wells into the ring against Jack Johnson would be like matching a two-year-old against a three-year-old.

  Still, the editor of Boxing was confident that what he called the “Sackcloth and Ashes Brigade” would fail in the end to stop the bout. Boxing remained the best possible test of British manhood, he argued; it would be a sign of weakness to ban it.

  Then race was injected into the debate. George Swinton, a London County councillor, started it. A fight between “a white soldier and a black champion,” he said, was likely to spark “quite unnecessary trouble,” and he urged Winston Churchill, the home secretary, to keep it from taking place. The Rev. J. H. Shakespeare, secretary of the British Baptist Union, raised the stakes still further. If the fight went forward, he wrote to the London Times, “white and black will be pitted against each other in anger, revenge and murder, especially in those lands like America in which the negro is the gravest of all problems….

  There can be no greater disservice to the negro race than to encourage it to seek glory in physical force and in beating the white man. Booker Washington is incessant in the cry to his people, “Educate, educate.” Slowly, they are climbing the steep path but every voice which exalts animal passion in them is that of an enemy. It matters not to us if an Englishman is beaten, for we have proved our place in the realm of courage, endurance, service, art, and learning. But to a race which has not as yet achieved glory it is a crime to turn its ambitions to such glory as can be found in the prize ring.

  The Rev. Meyer now felt free to include race in his bill of particulars as well. “When white opposes black it is not a game of skill,” he told the press, “for the black nature has more fire in the blood than the white and has more passion…. It introduces the element of animalism.”

  Still others now saw the proposed contest as a threat to the empire itself. R. W. Rose-Innes, a South Africa–born Briton, explained the problem as he saw it to readers of the Times:

  We have hitherto … attempted with success … to maintain the supremacy of the ruling caste—viz, the European element. To affect this by weight of numbers is, of course, impossible, but there are other means. Surrounded, as we are, by natives in all stages of civilization, from the sea to the Zambesi, we seek to establish our supremacy, by force of character and by codes of conduct … based upon principles that we can stand up for and defend.

  To attempt to do this by precept, if not backed by example would be futile and worse than futile, for we should be held up to scorn and derision by the natives who think—and there are many such—and who draw conclusions and comparisons.

  How can we look them in the face when such a fight is permitted to take place in the heart of the Empire? …

  Why pit black against white at all, and why do so with all the odds in favour of the black man? And why permit the contest to take place in London before a European audience and with official sanction? The baneful effects will be felt far beyond the spectators who witness the fight. It will make the position of the white man more difficult still in distant parts of the Empire.

  Johnson was disgusted. English preachers knew nothing about boxing, he said, and even less about black people. Boxing simply pitted one individual against another. It had nothing to do with race. But still more Nonconformist clergymen had rallied to Meyer’s cause, and many of their Anglican counterparts now felt called upon to join them. On September 20, the archbishop of Canterbury himself wrote to Churchill, urging him to halt the fight. The bishops of London, Oxford, Ripon, Durham, and Truro echoed his call. They were joined by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, as well as the Lord Mayor of London, and the headmasters of Rugby, Dulwich, Mill Hill, and Taunton schools.

  On September 24, Churchill gave in. “I have made up my mind to try to stop the Wells-Johnson contest,” he told his wife. “The terms are utterly unsporting and unfair.” The director of public prosecutions promptly took out summonses against Johnson and Wells, their managers, and promoter James White. All five were ordered to appear at the Bow Street Court of Summary Jurisdiction to answer the home secretary’s charge that they planned a “breach of the peace.”

  The following morning, Johnson was getting a rubdown after his first morning’s workout at the Royal Forest Hotel in Chingford when a detective-sergeant from Scotland Yard knocked on the door. “Come right in,” the champion called out. “You’ve got a summons for me. I know who you are or you might have had a rough time.”

  The detective advised Johnson to hire a solicitor. The champion thanked him for his advice but said he’d prefer to speak for himself.

  So many people gathered outside the court on the morning of September 28, eager to have a look at the champion and his challenger, that traffic in Bow Street came to a halt. Johnson’s automobile had to inch its way to the curb. Etta sat beside him, one newspaper reported the next day, dressed in “a Paris costume of dark brown, with a long ermine fur and many diamonds.”

  The Daily Mail reported every detail of the morning’s proceedings.

  From the moment when Jack Johnson, with his retinue of secretaries, sparring partners, and massage men behind him, shouldered his way through the multitude and entered the court he was the dominant figure of the proceedings. All the interest concentrated on this huge coloured boxer with his golden smile, which shone round on everybody, including the Rev. Meyer. It was apparent that even Mr. Marsham, the magistrate, behind his official bearing was amused by the … champion.

  Johnson, Wells, their handlers, and James White stood shoulder to shoulder before the bench. When they were told to be seated, Johnson alone remained on his feet.

  During the opening statement by the Solicitor General [Sir John Simon], Johnson leaned easily against the rails of the dock behind him, letting his eyes wander in search of acquaintances, and when he caught a familiar face his upper row of gold teeth flashed out in his capacious smile. When he had occasion to speak he leaned toward the magistrate. His words were clear; his sentences as straight to the point as one of his “left-hand leads.”

  When the solicitor general misspoke, saying that “Jackson” held the heavyweight title, the champion interrupted, “‘Johnson,’ if you please.”

  Sir John bowed to acknowledge his error, then went on to argue that the proposed fight was a financial matter rather than a sporting venture; a violent contest, not a scientific exhibition, meant “so [to] reduce the other [man] that when he was knocked to the ground he could not rise.”

  The first witness for the gove
rnment was Superintendent McIntyre, the police officer in charge of the Earl’s Court area, whose testimony was to be based on his reading of newspaper accounts of prizefights. The magistrate asked Johnson if he objected. He did.

  Yes, I object because these papers printed in England are no authority upon contests in America. In these records, which the honourable solicitor holds in his hand, it is said Jack Johnson fought Jim Scanlon 14 rounds. The contest only lasted eight rounds; the records are wrong.* From these records the witness is simply refreshing his mind. Reading a paper refreshes his memory of things he has perhaps never known.

  The objection was overruled, and the officer was allowed to testify as to his belief that the upcoming match would constitute a breach of the peace.

  “I want to cross-examine him now,” Johnson said as soon as the policeman had finished. The magistrate—whom Johnson carefully called “His worship”—again advised him to leave that work to the better-qualified “legal gentlemen” present.

  The champion thanked the “honorable solicitors” but went ahead on his own.

  “Are you familiar with Queensberry rules?”

  “No I am not.”

  “Did you say I knocked Tommy Burns out in the fourteenth round?”

  The officer turned pages in his bound volume of newspapers.

  “I object to your looking at that book every time I ask you a question,” Johnson said sharply. “You are simply refreshing your memory.”