Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  * On August 25, Johnson made a second appearance at the Empress Theater to drum up interest in the bout. Among those who came up afterward to shake his hand was twenty-year-old Manuel II of Portugal, who had just lost his crown when the cities of Lisbon and Porto voted to establish a republic. Someone asked Johnson how it had felt to meet an ex-king. “Sir,” he answered, “I tried to put him at his ease…. I’ve never been hard on a guy just because he’s fallen.”

  * This last-minute decision would cost him $7,500 for breach of contract.

  † When the San Francisco promoter Sunny Jim Coffroth visited Paris in 1911, a French reporter asked him why battles between superb fighters like these drew such big crowds in France and such small ones back home. “For one simple reason,” Coffroth said: “blacks are detested in America.” McVey spent almost four years fighting in France, then three more in Australia, where Langford also spent the best part of two years. (Claude Meunier, Ring Noir, p. 37.)

  * American observers differed as to his skills. Jim Corbett, ever hopeful that Johnson would be defeated, said he believed Wells was the white man who could “dangle the scalp of the illustrious darky.” The American heavyweight Frank Moran, on the other hand, called Wells “all chin from the waist upwards” and would prove it by knocking him cold in 1915. (Dartnell, Seconds Out, p. 21.)

  * She did not entirely cramp his style, apparently. “Paris!” he told a reporter on his return to the United States. “There’s the place that makes an old man young and a young man old. Only Cook County, Chicago, has it beaten.” One evening at the Café de l’Opéra, he said, he “danced the Turkey Trot and the grizzly bear from midnight until dawn.” Both dances were officially illegal in Chicago. (Police Gazette, January 13, 1912.)

  * The record was wrong, as Johnson said, but the actual number seems to have been seven.

  * Back in the summer of 1910, one of Jack Curley’s London promotions had nearly suffered the same fate. He had brought the American wrestler, Dr. B. F. Roller, across the Atlantic to take on an Indian grappler, the Great Gama, at the Alhambra Theater. On the eve of the match, Curley remembered, he received a summons from the Foreign Office. There, a pleasant young man told him he’d allow the match to go on since it had already been announced, but henceforth “there must be no more matches between Indians and Caucasians in England. The danger that the Indian might triumph was inimical to the security of Great Britain’s hold on the subject races. It would not do to get it into the heads of these races that one of their numbers could humble a white man at anything. Did I understand? I did.”

  Several “Indian potentates in … huge and colorful turbans looked on from boxes” at the theater the next evening, Curley wrote, but “the match, sad to relate, did not last long. Gama, having completed what apparently was a prayer ritual in his corner, grunted once or twice and, with a cry, leaped at Roller, hurled him to the mat, flattened him …, and broke three of his ribs.” (Curley, “Memoirs.”)

  * Morris stayed in the game for thirteen years, derided sometimes as the “Sapulpa Bleeder.” He won more fights than he lost—even beating Jim Flynn twice in 1914—but he also served as a hapless name “opponent” for up-and-coming youngsters like Jack Dempsey, who took just fourteen seconds to knock him out in 1918.

  * One of those who worked with him during the hot afternoon sparring sessions was a very young Harry Wills. “I was still growing,” Wills remembered, “but I already had a right hand to the body that I thought I could hit anybody with. I was working with Johnson one day and sure enough, I nailed him…. I got cocky and in the next round I tried the same thing again. Old Jack reached down and caught my fist like you catch a ball and grinned at his wife who was sitting at the ringside.”

  * He canceled a similar engagement in Albuquerque when no hotel in that town would give him a room.

  * A few days before the bout, Tommy Ryan had suddenly walked out of the Flynn camp, telling the press only that the challenger was overweight and sure to lose. Curley had then explained the embarrassment away by saying that Flynn had found Ryan too dictatorial. But after the fight, Ryan offered a fuller explanation: “If ever a man deliberately trained to fight a foul fight…, Jim Flynn was that man. You have heard the stories about Flynn’s partners being disabled? Well, they were disabled through the same sort of thing as Flynn attempted to pull on Johnson. He practiced butting and fouling, and it was a surprise to me that he did not bite Johnson when he got into the ring.” (Boxing August 3, 1912.)

  * In the end, no one would make money from the motion pictures Naughton and Kelly watched that day. On July 31, Congress passed a law barring the interstate shipment of it and all other prizefight films. The bill, sparked by films of the Johnson-Jeffries bout, had languished on the Hill for two years until the prospect of the Johnson-Flynn contest breathed new life into it. The notion that the American public was about to see yet another film of a black man battering a white one was more than most congressmen could endure. “No man descended from the old Saxon race can look upon that kind of contest without abhorrence and disgust,” Congressman S. A. Roddenberry of Georgia said on the House floor. “I call attention to the fact that the recent prize-fight which was had in New Mexico presented, perhaps, the grossest instance of base fraud and bogus effort at a fair fight between a Caucasian brute and an African biped beast that has ever taken place.”

  † Following the Flynn bout, Johnson was reported to have asked his old friend Rube Foster, now managing the Chicago American Giants, if he could try out for first base. Foster invited him to take morning batting practice to see what he could do. No one knows whether Johnson ever turned up. (James A. Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues. New York, 1994, p. 436.)

  * Also according to Stump, a reporter once asked Johnson for the secret of his staying power. “Eat jellied eels,” the champion answered with as straight a face as he could manage, “and think distant thoughts.” (Stump, “The Rowdy Reign of the Black Avenger.”)

  * It was a decision for which Mrs. Terry would never forgive him. Nor would she ever understand what Etta had seen in him.

  † Within hours of Etta’s death, the Pekin Theater had begun promising to show exclusive film of her funeral. Johnson’s friend Bob Motts had died, and the new white owners of the Pekin thought they would make a killing. Their crew captured seven thousand feet of film of the cortège. Johnson was furious. “This exhibition,” he said, “which is unauthorized by me, may cause the impression to go abroad that I am profiting financially from the pictures. I am going to fight hard against anyone who tries to show the pictures.” Before the film could be processed, Johnson obtained a restraining order against showing it, then personally called on the chief of police to make sure nothing got onto the screen. (Chicago Defender, September 21, 1912.)

  CHAPTER TEN

  ____________________________________________

  THE ACCUSED

  JACK JOHNSON WAS A MASTER of timing in the ring, seemed always to know just when to strike, when to lie back and wait. Outside the ropes, that mastery often deserted him. One evening in the first week of October 1912, Bricktop remembered, the champion turned up at the Café de Champion with Lucille Cameron on his arm. It had been just over two weeks since he had buried his wife.

  Before the tragedy, Lucille had possessed just one outfit, as far as we could tell—a checked suit that she wore all the time—but that night, when she and Jack walked in after seeing Thomas Shea in The Bells, Lucille was wearing a black broadcloth suit, a big hat covered with white egrets and diamonds all over her hands. Whether these things had belonged to Mrs. Johnson, I don’t know, but we knew Lucille had never worn a diamond before. Naturally, our eyes went from Lucille to Ada Banks. We giggled among ourselves, because Ada had been so nasty and mean to us because she was Jack’s girl….

  We all went over to do our songs. I did my song with the prizefighter stance. Jack’s favorite song for Ada to sing was “My Hero,” and when her turn came she started to s
ing it. She went along fine until she got to one of the high notes, then her voice cracked and she broke into tears. She ran through the café. With me behind her. Trailing me were two or three other girls telling me to leave her alone—she deserved to cry, the way she had treated everybody.

  A few nights later Ada and Lucille met in the ladies’ room. Ada said, “We’ll see who’s going to be the next Mrs. Jack Johnson!” The white girl didn’t open her mouth. She knew who the next Mrs. Johnson was going to be.

  Johnson could not have picked a worse moment to return to the public eye—or a companion better suited to draw the lightning.

     •   •   •

  Reform had come to Chicago. It had been on its way for several years, though Johnson seems to have been too preoccupied to notice. In his early years in the ring every large city to which he traveled had a “segregated” district like Chicago’s Levee, a carefully delineated area in which vice was tolerated even if technically illegal. He knew them all intimately. And every city he visited had also been home to men and women determined to close them down, often the same men and women who were determined to ban his profession as well. Like most sports, he was scornful of them all.

  But on the evening of October 18, 1909, two days after Johnson knocked out Stanley Ketchel in California, a British-born evangelist named Gipsy Smith had led thousands of Chicagoans through the vice district, pausing to pray and sing hymns in front of its most notorious resorts. After the parade broke up, the district was said to have had the busiest night in its history. (“We were certainly glad to get all this business,” Minna Everleigh said, “but I was sorry to see so many nice young men down here for the first time.”) Gipsy Smith was not discouraged. “Time will show that great good has been done,” he said.

  He knew segregated districts like the Levee were now being attacked from many directions. Clergymen had always opposed them on moral grounds. But now the Social Hygiene movement demanded they be put out of business for reasons of public health. Muckraking journalists were laying bare the nexus between corrupt politicians and saloon- and brothel-keepers. And middle-class Americans everywhere fretted that more and more young single women were moving away from home and into the cities where degradation seemed to lurk around every corner. Millions were convinced that young white women were in constant danger from organized bands of cruel and wily men—immigrants mostly—intent on coercing them into becoming prostitutes, or “white slaves.” As one crusader wrote, “We know that no innocent young girl would or ever could go [into prostitution] of her own free will—those who are there are enticed—those who employ these artifices are men—devils in the guise of men.”

  No one was a more zealous believer in the existence of this underground traffic than the U.S. district attorney in Chicago, Edwin W. Sims. He claimed to know to “a moral certainty” that there was a nationwide network of white slavers run by a mysterious “Big Chief.” Their agents lurked everywhere, he said; even “the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider’s web for … entanglement”—especially if run by a “foreigner.” (Eastern European Jews and Frenchmen were particularly suspect.)

  There never was any evidence of such a network, and the best estimate seems to be that nine out of ten prostitutes were not coerced, but facts did not matter in the midst of what by 1909 had become a national frenzy. Lurid best sellers were built around white slavery. Movie screens showed white girls menaced by swarthy white villains.

  “The white slave traffic … is much more horrible than any black-slave traffic ever was in the history of the world,” said Republican Congressman James Robert Mann of Illinois. And in 1909, with District Attorney Sims’ help, he drafted the White Slave Traffic Act, which came to be known as the Mann Act. It barred the transportation of women in interstate or foreign commerce “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purposes.” It had gone into effect on June 1, 1910, when Johnson was busy training for his fight with Jim Jeffries, but the first arrest under its provisions was not made until July 8, the day he thanked Chicago’s black elite for their big welcome after he’d retained his title. Deputy U.S. marshals had arrested a madam named Jenkin as she was about to board a train at Chicago’s Union Station that morning; she had just bought tickets for herself and five women she had hired for her resort in Houghton, Michigan, which catered to the copper miners who worked the Upper Peninsula.

  That was the sort of straightforward arrest most of the act’s supporters had had in mind. Their intent had been to suppress the interstate traffic in prostitution. But the language of the act was loosely drawn, and both within and without the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the F.B.I.), there were those who believed that “debauchery” and “other immoral purposes” might be more broadly defined to include what the newspapers called “escapades,” sexual relations between consenting adults.

  On September 28, 1912—fourteen days after Etta Johnson’s funeral—more than five thousand people marched through the Levee District despite a steady downpour, demanding that John E. W. Wayman, the state’s attorney of Cook County, close it down.

  Six days later, he did. On the evening of October 4, a fleet of patrol wagons pulled into the Levee. Scores of policemen went from door to door, handing out summonses, evicting the inmates. Johnson’s friend Roy Jones and his wife, Victoria Shaw, were among the brothel keepers taken to jail. “Electric pianos stopped as if paralyzed,” said the Chicago Record-Herald.

  Bright lights went glimmering. Into the streets poured a crowd of half-dressed women, some with treasures tied in tablecloths. Others were packing suitcases as they moved, and most of them were running, a majority not knowing where they were going, but anywhere to get out of the district. In front of a few of the more pretentious establishments automobiles suddenly appeared. Women soon loaded them down, and they raced away.

  More than one hundred resorts were shuttered. Hundreds of prostitutes found themselves without a base of operations. Ike Bloom, the district’s most powerful vice lord, tried to strike back by sending the women who worked for him and several others into respectable neighborhoods with orders to walk the streets wearing daring outfits and smoking cigarettes to shock the citizenry into calling for the Levee to be reopened. It didn’t work.

  The raids continued on the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth.

  It was during that week, against that background, that Jack Johnson decided to end his brief mourning period and introduce the world to Lucille Cameron.

  On Friday, October 11, a short, determined woman in a very large hat arrived in Chicago. She was Mrs. F. Cameron-Falconet, Lucille Cameron’s mother, and she was looking for her daughter. A Chicago reporter had called her at home in Milwaukee, she said, and asked if she knew that Lucille was “under the influence of Jack Johnson.” She had not known, and she was horrified, or so she said. She caught the first train to Chicago and hurried to the last address she had for Lucille, a boardinghouse on Grand Avenue. The landlady told her her daughter hadn’t been there for at least three weeks. She had no idea where she had gone.

  Mrs. Cameron-Falconet got herself a room at the Brevoort Hotel and spent a sleepless night. The next morning, she called Jack Johnson and demanded to see her daughter. It was Saturday. Johnson said he knew where Lucille was and would take her there. He picked Lucille’s mother up in his car and drove her to the Sheridan Road home of Jack Curley and his wife. Lucille greeted her mother. Mrs. Cameron-Falconet urged her to come away with her. Lucille refused. Johnson took mother and daughter back to the Brevoort, where they talked some more. Lucille wouldn’t budge. Then she told her mother she had to make a phone call, went downstairs, and disappeared.

  The next morning, the Chicago papers happened to carry interviews with Johnson. He was in an expansive mood. He’d signed for three fights overseas, he said. First, he planned to go to Australia, where Hugh McIntosh had guaranteed him fifty-five thousand dollars to fight Sam Langford in Syd
ney on Boxing Day, the fourth anniversary of his victory over Tommy Burns. Then he would take on Sam McVey in an Australian city to be chosen on a date to be decided. Once he’d disposed of those two, he thought he’d go to Paris, where Jack Curley wanted him to face Fireman Jim Flynn for a third time. Following that, he’d come back to the States and take on the likeliest of the latest white hopes, Luther McCarty. Curley would promote that contest, too; Curley was his friend, Johnson said, and since he had lost money promoting the second Flynn contest, in New Mexico, it was only fair to give him “a chance to get it back.” The champion was eager to get away from Chicago and “forget my troubles” for a while, he added, and while he didn’t say so publicly, it seemed likely that when he sailed for Australia on October 25, Lucille Cameron would go along to help with his forgetting.

  Her mother determined to stop her. To help, she hired one of Chicago’s most colorful and controversial criminal lawyers. Charles E. Erbstein specialized in murder and divorce—he took part in 1,772 divorce trials—and he gloried in the publicity that went with many of the cases he handled. He represented more than one hundred accused murderers during his long and lucrative career and liked to boast he never lost one to the executioner. Because of his divorce work and because every one of the twenty-two women he’d represented in murder cases had been found not guilty, he liked to portray himself as the gallant defender of innocent women. He also had a statewide reputation for cutting corners in and out of the courtroom, and had been brought up before the Illinois legal grievance commission at least twenty-seven times by the time Mrs. Cameron-Falconet signed on with him; a former state’s attorney denounced him as “an unconscionable crook, a trickster, a jury fixer and suborner of perjury.”