Together, the angry mother and the shrewd but unscrupulous lawyer set out to ruin Jack Johnson.
On Thursday, they went to the police, claiming that the champion had kidnapped Lucille. When the police pointed out to them that the young woman was over eighteen and there was therefore no way they could force her to leave the champion if she didn’t want to, the two went straight to the newspapers.
With a good deal of prompting from Erbstein, Lucille’s mother offered a lurid, teary account of her encounter with the champion, calculated to wring sympathy from whites and destroy what was left of his reputation. The front page headline of the Chicago Daily News was typical:
“JACK” JOHNSON DEAF TO PLEA OF A MOTHER
MRS. F. CAMERON-FALCONET,
BETWEEN SOBS, TELLS HOW
NEGRO HOLDS DAUGHTER
INSULTED HER SHE SAYS
She said her innocent daughter had attended business college after high school and had come to Chicago with her mother’s blessing “to take up a business position. I had reason to believe she was under the best of influences.” Instead, she had come under the influence of the heavyweight champion. “Jack Johnson has hypnotic powers,” she said, “and he has exercised them on my little girl.” When she had confronted her daughter’s captor and begged him to give her up, she claimed he had cruelly taunted her as well.
When his automobile arrived [to pick Mrs. Cameron-Falconet up,] he was in it himself, although he had said he would send an empty car for me. When I entered the car I drew down the shades of the limousine so as not to be seen. This nettled Johnson.
“Oh, some of the best white women in Chicago ride in this car,” is what he said to me.
I told him he must give up my daughter. I begged him to give her up. He said he wouldn’t. Then he leered in my face.
They brought her in [at Jack Curley’s home], but the Negro hung around all the time and did not let me see her for long at a time. She wept and told me she had gone too far to go back. She said she did not know what to do or which way to turn, that her mind was in the balance.
Every little while the Negro would walk into the room, and once or twice she went out and talked with him away from me. I told her I should stick to her through thick and thin and would do anything in my power to save her.
Johnson has told me he will give every dollar he has to hold her. When he said that I told him I could not understand how she could be attracted by such as he, and he said he could “get” any woman he wanted. “I could get you, too, if I wanted you.”
Jack Johnson was not a humble man. Nor would he have sat still for individual insults of the sort Mrs. Cameron-Falconet had leveled at him. But it seems inconceivable that even he would have said anything so instantly inflammatory as this. Charles Erbstein was a master manipulator of the press,and it seems most likely that this was an embellishment he urged his client to “remember” for maximum effect.*
“I am appealing to all of Chicago to help me,” Mrs. Cameron-Falconet said in conclusion. “It does not seem possible that such things could happen in Chicago or that white men would see their civilization so outraged.”
Her story seemed to affect every white man who heard it. The assistant chief of police telephoned Captain Max Nootbar, in charge of the Thirty-fifth Street station house. “Get a warrant out for Johnson,” he shouted. “If there is anything he can be arrested for in connection with this case bring him into court.” “There is nothing I would like better than to punish this man,” he told the papers. “My blood boiled when I heard the story told by the mother.”
The white public’s blood was soon boiling, too. The story had everything: a grieving mother; a presumably innocent white girl from out of town; a notorious black man who pursued white women and seemed almost to enjoy the havoc he caused.
Within hours, the police had Mrs. Cameron-Falconet sign a complaint against her daughter for disorderly conduct, the only way the police could think of to get her away from Johnson. “I am doing this for humanity’s sake,” said Captain Nootbar. “Legally, I have no right to hold the girl … but I believe the case warrants my action.”
At about 5 p.m., the champion himself brought Lucille in a taxi to the Harrison Street Annex of the city jail. In the captain’s office, Frank H. Hilliard, a Minneapolis businessman and friend of Lucille’s mother, stood alongside her. Johnson smiled, stuck out his hand, and said, “Howdy.”
Hilliard turned away, his hands in his pockets. “I won’t shake hands with scum of the earth like you,” he said.
“What!” the champion said and stepped forward, fist cocked. “You call yourself a gentleman? Why you dog, what do you mean?”
Captain Nootbar separated the two men.
“When Miss Cameron appeared,” the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin reported,
she was stylishly dressed in black silk and a black velvet picture hat with yellow feathers, and wore a haughty mien. However, she began to cry when she entered the captain’s office. For several minutes she lay sobbing on a couch. Then, she collected herself … [and told] Nootbar she loved Jack Johnson, and that while the negro champion had not made her a proposal of marriage, she expected to become his wife in the near future.
At that, Mrs. Cameron-Falconet collapsed in tears. “I would rather see you spend all your life in jail,” she sobbed, “than one day in the company of that nigger.” Lucille was led away to a cell. Jane Addams of Hull-House came to see her there. So did a social worker from New York and Mrs. Alice Phillips Aldrich, president of the Law and Order League. Lucille insisted to each of them that she was not a victim, nobody’s white slave.
Meanwhile, Johnson seemed sure that this would all blow over. “How can I help it if the girl is crazy about me?” Johnson said as he left the police station. “I’m going to pick my own girls.” He vowed that he’d bail Lucille out right away.
To keep that from happening, Erbstein quickly persuaded another judge to order Lucille’s detention until her sanity could be examined. Only a deranged white girl, he argued, could believe herself in love with Jack Johnson. The judge agreed.
When Johnson got back to his café that evening, he found Ada Banks waiting for him upstairs. Like Hattie McClay and Belle Schreiber and Etta Duryea and others before her, she had hoped to emerge as Johnson’s favorite. She had left her husband for him, had even sung at his wife’s funeral. But the newspapers had now made clear what her fellow entertainers at the café already knew: Johnson’s first choice was Lucille Cameron, younger than she, and white. Banks had a pistol. There was a confrontation. She may have pointed the weapon at Johnson, even fired and missed. Then she fled. A rumor spread that the champion had been shot. (A white Mississippian immediately sent a congratulatory wire to the Chicago chief of police: “The undersigned and 100 others will back the woman or man $50,000.”) When Banks was tracked down several days later and asked by a newspaperman if she really had shot Johnson, she would only say, “I didn’t do quite that.”*
• • •
Public furor had forced the Chicago police to act, even when they weren’t quite sure they had the authority to do so. It now influenced the federal government to do the same. The Justice Department had targeted Johnson for possible violation of the Mann Act almost from the moment it came into effect,* but when U.S. Attorney General George W. Wickersham first heard about Johnson and Lucille Cameron, he’d sent a cautionary wire to James H. Wilkerson, the U.S. district attorney in Chicago: “Suggest great care … so as not to involve federal authorities in mere question of abduction or anything not within the general scope of evils sought to be reached by the white slave act.”
But Wilkerson and others in the Chicago office were convinced that there was a city “clearing house for the procuring of white girls for well-to-do negroes.” This case might be the one that led to its exposure. Wilkerson dispatched special agents Bert Meyer and Martin J. Lins to see what they could find out. “[Miss Cameron] denies that she has been intimate with Jack John
son or any other person,” Lins reported. “Her appearance, however, belies that statement, as she dresses in the height of fashion, wearing a hat said to cost $150; and it is known she has deposited six or seven hundred dollars in a local bank since she came to Chicago.” Further investigation showed that her mother had either not known much about the life her daughter had been leading, or had hoped it could be concealed. Lucille Cameron had been in Chicago since April, months before she met Johnson. She’d spent the first two weeks of her stay at the Brevoort, where her bills had been paid by a “friend” she refused to identify. Her claim to have been a “cloak model” in a downtown store was false. And she continued to insist that she had fallen in love with Jack Johnson the first time she saw him, didn’t “care whether he was black or white,” and hoped someday to marry him. It was hard to see how a federal case against Johnson could be constructed around Lucille Cameron.
Special Agent Meyer was more hopeful. There was at least a possibility that a woman named Catherine Dorsey had introduced Lucille to the champion and might therefore be guilty of “procuring girls for immoral purposes,” though the all-important “transportation feature,” without which no federal charge could be made to stick, still seemed to be lacking. It was a start. Wilkerson filed a case against Dorsey for violating the Mann Act, and had Lucille confined to the Winnebago County Jail at Rockford as a material witness. “Public sentiment was aroused to such an extent,” he said, that he could do no less. Lucille’s bond was set at twenty-five thousand dollars. No one other than her mother or a federal agent was to be allowed to communicate with her in any way for fear that Johnson or his agents might influence her testimony.
The next morning, Thursday the 17th, Lucille’s mother and Charles Erbstein appeared before a municipal judge and persuaded him to sign a warrant for Jack Johnson’s arrest on a charge of abduction. He was arrested at home at one o’clock. Bail was set at eight hundred dollars, and he was released to find a judge to approve his bond. He had nothing to worry about, he told a reporter. “They can’t get me. I’ve got money. You can keep on knocking me all you want to.”
Johnson was to be arraigned on Friday morning. When he drove up to the Municipal Court Building at South Dearborn and West Monroe, a knot of angry white people shook their fists and shouted at him. Johnson acted as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He “strolled into the courthouse half an hour late,” the Daily News reported, “carrying a long black cigar in his mouth and smiling at every step.”
Entering the courtroom, he glared at Lucille’s mother.
She would not even glance at him.
Erbstein asked the judge to raise Johnson’s bail because of the gravity of the alleged offense.
“I don’t think it is necessary to increase the bond,” Johnson said. “I am a responsible citizen. I have a business [the Café de Champion] worth $60,000.”
“It may be worth that to you,” Erbstein said. “But it’s illegal and you ought to be put out of business.”
“All right, Mr. Mayor,” Johnson said with a laugh.
“If I was mayor,” Erbstein snapped back, “you would not be in business three days.”
The judge raised Johnson’s bond to fifteen hundred dollars and continued the case until October 29.
Johnson offered a check for seven hundred dollars to make up the difference.
“No checks go with me,” said Erbstein.
The champion said he’d make it cash and brought in a professional bondsman to post bail. “I’m going to marry Lucille,” he said, “no matter what they do. They can put her in jail or try to put her in the asylum but I’ll marry her in time, anyway.” And he had powerful allies of both races that would help him. “Just to show how I stand, my café was crowded with white folks last night. I’ve got plenty of friends sticking to me.”
He drove to the First National Bank. As he walked toward the door, someone hurled an inkstand from a tenth-floor window. It missed, spattering the sidewalk with ink. He stepped inside and withdrew several thousand dollars. A big angry crowd gathered outside. When he came back out and started for his car, someone shouted, “There he comes! Get him now!” The crowd pressed forward, but no one quite dared throw a punch. The champion found himself with his back to the wall. He edged back inside, then hurried out the rear entrance, hailed a cab, and disappeared into the sanctuary of his own café. The mob hung around the bank until it closed. “Popular indignation over the numerous outrages on public morals perpetrated by the negro prize fighter,” reported the Chicago Examiner, “has reached such a stage that it is dangerous for him to walk in the public streets.” When Johnson tried to hire detectives from the Burns and Pinkerton agencies to protect him, he was told neither one wanted his business.
Threatening letters now arrived daily in the mail. Strangers telephoned day and night to curse him. Hugh McIntosh canceled plans for the Langford and McVey fights Down Under; Australians wouldn’t stand for them now, he said. W. W. Naughton thought Johnson’s behavior had “eliminated [him] “as thoroughly from the pugilistic outlook as though he had been signally defeated by some rival heavyweight.” The Police Gazette denounced him as the “vilest, most despicable creature that lives…. He has disgusted the American public by flaunting in their faces an alliance as bold as it [is] offensive.” Sam Sparks, former state treasurer of the Lone Star State, called for one hundred Texans to follow him north to Chicago to “attend to Jack Johnson.”*
A reporter for the New York World looked up Mrs. David Terry, Etta Duryea Johnson’s mother, to see if she might have anything to say about her ex-son-in-law’s latest troubles. She did. It was her “Christian duty,” she said, to do all she could to aid Mrs. Cameron-Falconet: “If the suicide of my daughter might be taken as a warning by other white girls; if I thought it might save someone else from a similar fate, my own crushing burden of sorrow would be easier to bear and I would feel that her death has not been in vain.”
What should be done with Johnson?
It would be wrong for me to tell you what ought to be done. It is not for me to judge. God will do that, but every night a prayer goes up from my pillow asking God to send upon this man the punishment he deserves. Two weeks ago I had a vision of Jack Johnson and I believe that vision was God’s promise of its fulfillment.
In a vision as plain as day, I saw a boat on a beautiful stream. In that boat was my daughter, dressed in white, talking to my dead husband.
Suddenly, out of the water rose a giant, glistening black man. It was Jack Johnson. With both hands he grabbed for the boat as if he would crush it. But he missed it. My daughter rowed away and disappeared with a ripple of happy laughter on her lips. Then the water turned black as ink and swallowed the black man up. It was all so real that it frightened me, though I am a practical woman and not given to visions.
The interview was widely syndicated. When it ran in the Los Angeles Times the headline was, HOW JACK JOHNSON TORTURED HIS WHITE WIFE. THE STORY OF A BEAST. WHY DIDN’T JEFF KILL ’IM?
More and more Negroes were now edging away from Johnson, too. The black Philadelphia Tribune headlined one story JACK JOHNSON DANGEROUSLY ILL, VICTIM OF WHITE FEVER. A Negro mass meeting at the Cosmopolitan Baptist church in Washington asked “all self-respecting black men and women” to repudiate Johnson. “How silly!” said the black Nashville Globe.
Negroes can be depended upon to go to extremes on such occasions…. Negroes who have common sense have never been affected by the victories of Jack Johnson to the extent to make them forget themselves; and when he married a white woman right-thinking Negroes lost all respect for him. In the present trouble Johnson is not receiving any sympathy from Negroes. They have turned him over to his white friends…. There is nothing in common between the champion and the race to which he belongs.
He has placed a great gulf between himself and his people. He has no respect for black women and black people despise his name.*
On Sunday, October 20, before the Detroit Y.M.C.A., the Wizard of Tuskeg
ee made his feelings known. Booker T. Washington had never approved of Johnson or the life he led. Now he formally disowned him—as if he’d ever owned him in the first place.
It is unfortunate that a man with money should use it in a way to injure his own people in the eyes of those who are seeking to uplift his race and improve its conditions. Chicago is now witnessing a good example of the result of educating a man to earn money without due attention having been given his mental and spiritual development.
In misrepresenting the colored people of this country this man is harming himself the least. I wish to say emphatically that his actions do not meet my personal approval, and I am sure they do not meet with the approval of the colored race.
Johnson, fortunate or rather unfortunate, it seems, in the possession of money, is doing a grave injustice to his race. It only goes to prove my contention that all men should be educated along mental and spiritual lines in connection with their physical education.
A man with muscle, minus brains, is a useless creature. Education, in addition to fitting a man for earning money, should prepare him for the attainment of some of life’s higher ideals.
Asked for a response, Johnson would say only, “I never got caught in the wrong flat. I never got beat up because I looked in the wrong keyhole.”†
Early on Monday morning, a mob of some one thousand white Chicagoans gathered at the corner of Clark Street and Montrose Boulevard, slung a rope over a tree limb, and hauled up a dummy with a blackened face. Somebody called the police and the crowd was hustled off the corner. But the dummy was left dangling from the tree so that men and women riding the streetcars to work could see it. A placard pinned to its breast read, THIS IS WHAT WE WILL DO TO JACK JOHNSON.
That same morning, Charles Erbstein and several deputy U.S. marshals banged loudly at the door of Johnson’s café, armed with subpoenas for women the Justice Department thought might know something about his relationship with Lucille Cameron and demanding that they be allowed to come in and look around. No women were present. When Johnson spotted Erbstein, his friends had to hold him back. “Throw that lawyer out of the place,” he shouted, “or I’ll kill him.”
Unforgivable Blackness Page 41
