Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  The officer apologized, saying he’d meant to say only that the fight ended in fourteen rounds. There had been no actual knockout.

  “He admits he made a mistake,” said the magistrate.

  Johnson went right on: “Why do you say that when Jack Johnson and Mr. Wells box on October 2 there will be a breach of the peace?”

  “I said I feared there might be.”

  “Did Sam Langford and Bill Lang [when they fought at the National Sporting Club in London] cause a breach of the peace?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Did you see that fight?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever seen any championship contest?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have no idea what they are like.”

  “No.”

  With a dismissive wave, Johnson turned to the magistrate and said, “The witness can go now.”

  His cross examination had been “a sharp, swift attack, very skillful for one not experienced in courts,” according to the Daily Mail, but in the end it made no difference. While the magistrate’s court had been in session, the London Metropolitan Railroad, which owned the land on which the Empress Theater stood, had persuaded the High Court to issue an injunction against the promoters of the contest.

  There would now be no championship purse, no return to Australia, no victory tour of imperial outposts.* Instead, Johnson and his wife would live out of trunks for nearly three more months, moving around the Continent and back and forth across the Channel while he performed in theaters and cabarets for smaller and smaller fees. Rumors began to spread that Johnson was penniless, that he had had to pawn his wife’s jewels to pay their passage back from Paris to London and had been forced to travel third class. Back in the United States, Tex Rickard told the press he thought the champion had gone through more than $100,000 since Reno.

  Johnson bravely denied it all in an open letter to his old friend Tad Dorgan. “Does this appear like a man who is broke?” he asked. “I can write a check any day in the week for $100,000. Besides this, I have property in the way of automobiles and jewelry. I value my cars at $25,000 and jewelry at $60,000, and I have a few thousands in my pocket. Outside of that, I’m kind of shy.”

  The champion’s indiscreet remarks about how much better he was treated overseas than at home, unwisely delivered in London on America’s Independence Day, had been reprinted widely in the States. So had subsequent stories about the Bombardier Wells debacle and the Johnsons’ domestic diffaculties. And in December, when the Chicago Tribune’s H. E. Keough learned that the champion was finally setting sail for home, he typed out some doggerel aimed at putting Johnson in his place.

  And so you’re coming home, Jack, to settle down for life,

  Resolved forever to eschew the pugilistic strife.

  Your title, we suppose, Jack, you mean to let it lapse,

  Or pass it on to Langford, or to Fireman Flynn, perhaps,

  O, well, you’re twenty-one, Jack, and free—and though not white,

  We’re not inclined to interfere—do what you think is right.

  You’ll find that when you return, Jack, no prejudice obtains

  Against the colored person with a normal set of brains,

  Who picks his line of going, understanding all the while

  That a stingy inch of license does not contemplate a mile.

  If you will cut the pace, Jack, below the second speed,

  We’ll try to get ourselves to think your presence here we need.

  But if you come in strong, Jack, the way you used to come,

  You’ll find you’ll be as welcome as a crutch or a bum.

  If you will flaunt again, Jack, the garish and bizarre

  As if you do not realize just who and what you are;

  If ever you repeat, Jack, the things you used to do,

  We’ll try to make it plain, Jack; this is no place for you.

  The Johnsons landed at New York three days before Christmas, bringing with them an English valet and sometime secretary named Joseph Levy; Charles Brown, their American chauffeur; plus a Pomeranian named Baby, three cars, fourteen trunks—and a mountain of debt. The European journey, meant to add to the champion’s fortune, had depleted it. Jack Johnson needed to make some money.

  Once again, Jack Curley turned up to help provide it. Like Johnson, he had recently had his ups and downs. His hopes for a lucrative victory tour by Jim Jeffries had been dashed by Johnson’s victory at Reno. In September of 1911, he’d put on a hugely successful wrestling show at Comiskey Park in Chicago, a two-out-of-three fall grudge match between George Hackenschmidt, the “Russian Lion,” and America’s favorite, Frank Gotch. Curley sold ninety thousand dollars’ worth of tickets and took home fifteen thousand dollars as his share. “The American won,” Curley recalled, “the championship remained in this country—and all was right with the world.” Then rumors began to fly: Hackenschmidt had wrenched his knee in training; Curley had insisted that the bout go on anyway because he’d already spent his share of the advance sale; the match had been a fake. No arrests were ever made, and Curley indignantly dismissed all the complaints as “synthetic squawk.” But the Illinois legislature banned professional wrestling in the match’s aftermath, and Curley found himself back in the fight game.

  He was still the manager of record for Jim Flynn, whom Johnson had knocked out five years earlier. Curley had largely lost interest in Flynn after that fight. But while Johnson was overseas, the hard-hitting “Pueblo Fireman” had banged out four knockouts. Curley reassessed his man’s money-making potential and got him a fight with young Carl Morris, whom the papers were hailing as the first serious white heavyweight challenger to come along since what some writers called the “tragedy” at Reno.

  The hunt for a “white hope” hadn’t been going well. Size now seemed to be everything. If a white fighter with sufficient skills couldn’t be dredged up from somewhere, the argument went, surely one could be found who was simply big enough to make victory inevitable.

  The veteran Ohio sportswriter William A. Phelon, who had been at ringside since the end of the bare-knuckle era, explained the folly of their reasoning:

  Nowadays every manager who has unearthed a white hope brags mainly of his enormous size. “My man is 6 feet 4, and weighs 245 pounds,” is the one and only argument they seem to use when proclaiming the virtues of a new protégé. They seem to think that a champion must be a mastodon—that he must be at least as large as Jim Jeffries, last of the great white champions—and any boxer around the 170-pound mark is regarded with pity and derision by these impresarios. It is the Reign of Fat—not even the Reign of Beef and Brawn—and these elephants are a sight to look upon. They are immense, bovine, amiable-faced young men, clumsy and shambling, falling over their own feet—the sort of monsters whom the old-time football coaches used to play guard positions. The strength is there, of course, but they don’t know what to do with it. They can hit a dreadful blow, but they don’t know how, when, or where to hit. What earthly good are they, excepting to wallop one another.

  There had been some genuinely freakish entries in the white-hope sweepstakes. An eight-foot-tall vaudeville attraction named George Suger made headlines briefly, one writer likening him to a “playful skyscraper”; and Fermin Arrudi, Suger’s counterpart from Spain, who weighed four hundred pounds, was briefly considered a possible challenger, though his sole qualification seemed to be that he’d once eaten eleven dozen eggs at a sitting.

  Carl Morris appeared to be the most plausible contender. He was a big, amiable twenty-four-year-old railroad engineer from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, who had supposedly jumped down from his cab on the day Jeffries lost to Johnson, vowing, “I’m going to quit this job right here. I’m going to be a fighter and whip the Negro sure.” He stood six foot four, weighed 240, and was billed variously as the “Sapulpa Giant” and the “Original White Hope” (though he was only an honorary Anglo-Saxon, since he had some Cherokee ancestors). He scored seven
early-round knockouts in a row in his native state. Two of his victims—Marvin Hart and the man who handed Tommy Burns his first defeat, Mike Schreck—were celebrated if long past their prime. When Curley and Flynn challenged him to fight at Madison Square Garden in September of 1912, the Oklahoma oilmen who backed him eagerly accepted.

  A few writers worried that Morris might be being moved along too fast, but the New York Evening Sun was rapturous when he arrived.

  A WHITE HOPE IN THE MAKING

  CARL MORRIS AND HOW HE TRAINS AT ALLENHURST

  AN UNUSUAL MAN

  HE IS MIGHTY OF BODY AND PLEASANT OF FACE

  HAS A WISE MODESTY

  SAYS HE IS NOT ABLE TO BEAT JACK JOHNSON TODAY

  He wasn’t able to beat Jim Flynn, either. Morris was big and he hit hard, but he was slow and clumsy, too, and utterly unprepared for the kind of onslaught an old pro like Flynn could still mount on a good night. In what the Los Angeles Times called “the bloodiest fight ever seen in this city”—so bloody the referee had to change his shirt after the fifth round—Carl Morris’ career as a serious contender ended and Jim Flynn’s was reborn.*

  On the strength of this much-headlined victory, Curley recalled, “I immediately launched a boom for Flynn as the logical contender for Johnson and took him on tour at the head of a troupe of fighters and wrestlers.” The tour opened—and closed—in Oklahoma; even in Choctaw and Muskogee few proved willing to pay good money to see the conqueror of Carl Morris shadowbox. An easy win over a California journeyman named Charlie Miller added nothing to Flynn’s luster. And when he went to Salt Lake City for a December 27 bout with Tony Caponi—another second-rater he’d already beaten—and Curley’s old friend Billy Porter, sporting editor of the Herald-Republican, refused to help publicize the mismatch, even Curley did not put up much of an argument.

  But then his luck changed again. Flynn knocked out the hapless Caponi early, just as Porter had scornfully predicted he would, but Porter wasn’t there to see it. He’d started drinking in a bar across the street early in the evening, and by the time the main event began was too drunk to leave his stool. His job was now in peril. Curley, convinced that he could still snatch a public-relations triumph from an otherwise meaningless evening, hurried to the newspaper office, told the night watchman that Porter had sent him, commandeered a typewriter, and banged out a blistering assault on everyone involved in the one-sided fight, including himself. Then he signed Porter’s name to the story and handed it to the compositor.

  When it appeared in the next morning’s paper, Billy Porter was badly hungover but deeply grateful for Curley’s apparently selfless act. “What a friend!” he kept saying, “What a friend!” How could he ever repay him? By interviewing him for the paper, Curley said. “Gladly,” Porter answered. “That’s the least I can do.” Porter’s interview with Curley was reprinted all over the country. In it, the promoter issued still another challenge to the champion. Flynn was so sure he could beat Johnson, Curley said, that he would fight him for free.

  Curley got back to Chicago three days later and was attending a New Year’s Eve party at the College Inn when he got a call from the champion just before midnight. “Come right out to my house to a real party,” Johnson said. “There are a lot of your friends here who want to see you.”

  The promoter hailed a cab. When it pulled up in front of 3344 South Wabash, the champion was waiting in the doorway. He embraced Curley and ushered him inside. “Gentlemen!” he said to the other guests, black and white. “Meet your old friend Jack Curley! I have just accepted his offer to defend the heavyweight championship … against Jim Flynn!”

  “Accepted my offer!” Curley wrote later. “I hadn’t made an offer!” He did so right away: thirty thousand dollars (again, the sum Tommy Burns had insisted on for fighting Johnson) plus eleven hundred dollars for travel and training expenses and one third of the film rights for a forty-five-round contest to be held on July 4, 1912, two years to the day after Reno.

  Johnson eagerly accepted. His troubles were multiplying. Most were trivial annoyances of the kind to which he’d long since grown accustomed: his sister Lucy’s landlord was suing him for $110 in back rent; the Elite Laundry Company won a judgment against him for three months’ worth of unpaid bills; a young woman named Ruth Mehl filed suit for damages, claiming he had permanently injured her when he swatted his specially rigged punching ball out into the audience at Chicago’s Plaza Theater.

  But then in mid-January, Etta’s fifty-eight-year-old father, David Terry, died after a long illness in Brooklyn. He had not spoken or written to his daughter since learning of her secret marriage to Jack Johnson. Etta was devastated. She thought it best not to attend his funeral, but she had once been close to him, and after his burial in Hempstead, on Long Island, she made a private visit to Brooklyn to see her mother. “I begged her to stay with me,” Mrs. Terry remembered.

  But even as I begged her I could not give her assurance that all her old associates would forgive her [for marrying Johnson]. I begged her not to go back to the life she was living. I begged her to stay—just with me. But she just kissed me, and said she was afraid that would not do—could not be thought of. And she went away.

  Three weeks later, on February 10, the Terry family’s hometown paper, the Brooklyn Eagle, carried a story headlined CHAMPION JOHNSON WED FORMER MRS. DURYEA, WELL-KNOWN IN HEMPSTEAD. The Johnsons had been married more than a year and had managed to keep Etta’s identity a secret all that time. But someone in the clerk’s office in Pittsburgh had got hold of their marriage license application and gone to the authorities and then the press with it, suggesting that Johnson had lied when he said he’d never been married previously. If not, who were all those women he’d introduced as “Mrs. Jack Johnson” over the years?

  Similar stories appeared in papers all over the country in the next few days. The Washington Post reported that Etta had once been “one of the popular society girls” of Hempstead, “a pronounced brunette, particularly attractive. It is generally understood that she would have inherited a portion of the estate of her grandmother, Mrs. James P. Whaley. She probably will now be ignored.”

  Reporters badgered the champion for further details. When a writer for the New York Herald called him at home in Chicago, Johnson refused to say anything about Etta’s family or previous life. “Who she was before I married her concerns nobody but me,” he said, “and I’m not bothering my head about it.” He also refused to answer any questions about what the Tribune called his “alleged previous marriage … to a negress” except to say that “in the presence of my wife, my mother and my sister, who are all sitting here, I want to say I never was married until I married this woman.”

  Four days after that, Secret Service agents knocked on Johnson’s front door. They had a warrant for a diamond necklace. Since his hoboing days, Johnson had often been at odds with local law enforcement. Now, for the first time, the federal government was interesting itself in him. Sometime soon after their return from Europe, he and Etta had attended a party at which she showed off her husband’s latest gift, a necklace of fifty-five white diamonds. He boasted to the other guests that he had paid nearly two thousand dollars for it in London and had managed to get it past the customs inspectors unseen. Word got around. Someone alerted the Treasury Department. The Johnsons now faced smuggling charges. He offered to pay four thousand dollars—twice the purchase price—to have the charges dropped. The Treasury Department refused. Arraignment before the U.S. Customs commissioner was set for July.

  Reeling from all these blows, Johnson returned to the vaudeville circuit, traveling with Etta through the Midwest this time: Omaha first, then St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri. There, when no hotel would house them, the manager of the Century Theater and his wife moved out of their upstairs apartment so the Johnsons could have somewhere to sleep. But on opening night, a long line of would-be ticket buyers was kept waiting in the cold along Twelfth Street long after showtime. Etta had tried to kill herself
again, this time by swallowing carbolic acid. A doctor was called. Her stomach was pumped. Johnson refused to go on until he was sure she would recover.

  The Johnsons struggled on—to Indianapolis, then Louisville, and Cincinnati, where a 128-pound housepainter named Joe Clark ran out into the street and punched the champion in the head as he drove past. A reporter asked Clark why. “Just did it because I don’t like him,” he said. He was not arrested. In Pittsburgh, on April 24, Johnson was leaning out of his car to shake hands with black admirers when a truck sideswiped him. It may have been deliberate; the truck kept going. Johnson’s car was smashed. He was thrown to the ground, pulled tendons in his back, and, on doctor’s orders, had to postpone the start of his training for Jim Flynn.

  Meanwhile, Jack Curley looked for a site for the fight. He had hoped to hold it at Madison Square Garden, but Frank O’Neill, the New York state boxing commissioner, vowed that Johnson would never fight in his state so long as he was in charge. “I guess that’s discrimination for you,” the champion said. “As an American citizen why have I not the same right to box in New York as anyone else?” He was particularly incensed that other black fighters like Joe Jeannette and Sam Langford remained free to fight there. Clearly, the commissioner’s ban was purely personal.

  Eventually, Curley settled on Las Vegas, in the brand-new state of New Mexico. Once a thriving trading center on the Santa Fe Trail, then a haven for tuberculosis patients, Las Vegas had recently been eclipsed by nearby Albuquerque. Town boosters believed that a title fight would help restore some of its former glory and were willing to put up a $100,000 guarantee to make it happen. “Las Vegas will be the cynosure of the world’s eye on July 4,” said the Las Vegas Optic and Livestock Grower.

  If Flynn should … redeem the glory of the white race, Las Vegas will be regarded as having performed a patriotic service indeed, which the entire Caucasian people cannot fail to appreciate and reward. Sooner or later, some American state and town would have to do it, and why should not Las Vegas, New Mexico, accept the chance to become the most popular city in the civilized world?