Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  He was given only a bar of soap.

  “When I was in jail in San Francisco,” he said, “those gentlemen treated me like a prince. And I am a prince, ain’t I?”

  His mother and sisters came to see him. So did Sig Hart, a part of his inner circle once again and bearing a box of cigars.

  Meanwhile, Benjamin Bachrach petitioned the federal court for a writ of habeas corpus. The thirty-thousand-dollar bail Judge Landis had set was excessive and “on terms onerous and prohibitive,” he argued, and the Mann Act itself was unconstitutional. When federal judge George A. Carpenter denied his petition, he took it straight to the United States Supreme Court for review. There, without ever mentioning Johnson’s name for fear of prejudicing the justices against him, he tried to argue that his client be admitted to bail pending a hearing. But the government objected. Solicitor General William Marshall Bullitt interrupted to say, “That’s the Jack Johnson case.” The Court did not order Johnson’s release, but it did agree to hear arguments on January 6, 1913, along with several other cases challenging the legitimacy of the Mann Act. Until Johnson’s case was heard by the Court and a decision was rendered, no date for the trial could be set.

  While Benjamin Bachrach saw to Johnson’s federal appeal, two prominent black Chicago attorneys went to work to get him out on bail: W. G. Anderson, who specialized in habeas corpus cases, and Johnson’s old friend Edward H. Wright, the only black man ever to serve as president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and still a force in the Republican Party. It took them a week to come up with thirty thousand dollars in surety acceptable to the government. Half was provided by property owned by a real estate agent named Matthew S. Baldwin, the other half by the Wabash Avenue home Johnson had bought for his mother. The champion celebrated hard the evening he came home, sending out three of his cars to ferry guests to and from the party. He still was assuring everyone that there would never be a trial. He was a rich man, and rich men didn’t go to jail.

  Mrs. Cameron-Falconet had been overjoyed when Johnson was locked up. Now that “the negro has been indicted for bringing another woman from one state to another,” she’d said then, she wanted her daughter released. Judge Landis wouldn’t hear of it. If he let her out, she might elope with Jack Johnson, he said; she would have to stay where she was. But as the weeks went by, it became more and more clear that Lucille was unjustly confined, that the government’s case against the champion had nothing to do with her. Finally, on November 25, Judge Carpenter allowed Mrs. Cameron-Falconet to pay a reduced bond of one thousand dollars and take her daughter back to her Chicago hotel.

  Meanwhile, Belle Schreiber was causing trouble for the government. Striking back at Johnson had appealed to her at first, and she enjoyed being taken seriously by the agents who questioned her and escorted her everywhere. But she hated being confined to the Waverley Home. Occasional walks and car rides, accompanied always by one agent and shadowed by another, did not lift her spirits. Neither did dinners out or visits to the movies. The home was “a regular prison,” she wrote to a friend. “Bars on the windows—no papers to read—no fire and cold indoors—this is a place for wayward girls—girls in the family way and witnesses for the government—food awful—retire at 9 p.m. and get up at 6:30 a.m.—what a life! I am almost crazy and so unhappy.”

  Her unhappiness was due in part to enforced withdrawal from the absinthe and narcotics upon which she had come to depend. A physician was finally called and dosed her with what an agent called “special medicine for such persons.” It didn’t help. She wanted to move to a hotel, she said. She was a witness, not a criminal; they had no right to keep her locked up this way. She asked to be taken to visit an old friend named Mrs. Vickers. Vickers turned out to be a madam, and when Belle arrived, she applied for a job once she was free to take it. Her embarrassed escort hurried her back to the Waverley Home. Forbidden to contact any more madams about future work, she talked a fellow inmate into writing a letter doing so on her behalf; the letter was discovered, and the woman who wrote it and had been on probation at the home was sent back to prison for a year.

  Then Belle learned that Lucille Cameron had been released from jail. She was still more upset. She wrote to Raymond S. Horn, a Bureau of Investigation official in Washington, demanding to know why the Cameron girl was free to move about while she remained confined. Horn tried to pacify her. Miss Cameron was unimportant—“All that she knows worthwhile to the Government could be bottled up in a thimble”—while Belle should be proud that she was essential to the government’s case and needed round-the-clock protection from the defendant’s agents. Since her “surroundings were so utterly different from those to which you have been accustomed,” he sympathized with her loneliness, but surely it was “consoling to know you will soon render your country a service such as few are ever fortunate enough to duplicate and one that will go a long way toward wiping out those acts of your past which I know you are not particularly desirous of reflecting upon.” He couldn’t tell when the trial would take place—that was up to the federal courts—but he hoped it would be soon. In the meantime, he urged her to “continue to be the good little girl that you have been.”

  On November 30, in Chicago, Llewellyn Smith, a black messenger working in the U.S. district attorney’s office, was asked to take a fresh subpoena for Belle to the office of the Bureau of Investigation. The subpoena was marked for the Manhattan office, whose task it would be to serve it on her. Smith did as he was told, then made straight for the champion’s house. He would later say he’d gone there to call on one of Johnson’s sisters, but his superiors insisted that his real purpose was to tell the champion Belle Schreiber was somewhere in New York. He was fired two days later, and the restrictions on Belle Schreiber’s movements were tightened still further. It made her “peevish,” according to her guards. Three days later, her peevishness would turn to fury.

  Lucille Cameron had moved into her mother’s hotel room after her release from prison, but she didn’t stay there long. It is impossible to be sure precisely what went on over the next few days. In his autobiography, Johnson said she came to him and begged him to marry her. She was “ruined in the eyes of the world,” she knew, but “her mother was making her the object of abuse and nagging which she could not bear.” He said it was the wrong moment to marry, and she agreed to go to Toronto to think things over. But she returned within a day or two, “again begging me to marry her.” He said yes.

  There may have been more to it than that. Johnson’s sister Jennie Rhodes would later allege that in order to be able to marry Lucille without fear of further harassment from the state, her brother met with State’s Attorney Way-man at the Pekin Café on Sunday evening, December 1, and handed him an envelope containing ten thousand dollars. And Tiny Johnson claimed that her son had also had to pay five thousand dollars to Mrs. Cameron-Falconet—of which Charles Erbstein, “her brave defender and protector of all women,” kept five hundred dollars—in order to keep them from making any more trouble for the couple. The whole thing, she insisted, had been a shakedown.

  Whatever happened behind the scenes, Johnson and Lucille drove up to City Hall on Tuesday morning, December 3. She stayed in the car while he strode inside to the marriage clerk’s office and applied for a license. “They ought to refuse him on general principles,” one woman shouted. But there were no grounds on which to turn him down, and he emerged a few minutes later with the all-important piece of paper.

  “I had a long talk with Miss Cameron yesterday, and we decided to be married tonight,” he told the City Hall reporters who quickly gathered around him.

  I explained that I had been blamed for ill-treating her and that we might as well be married right away. She is alone in the world now. Her mother has left her and her step-father is quoted as saying he wants to have nothing more to do with her. We love each other and I see no reason why we should not be married. We will spend our honeymoon near Chicago, but will not leave the state.

  They were mar
ried in Tiny Johnson’s parlor that afternoon. The Reverend John Robinson, who had officiated at Etta Johnson’s funeral less than three months earlier, performed the ceremony. Fred Daniel, a white saloon keeper, was best man. Johnson’s brother Henry hurled the first fistful of rice. Deputy Marshal Edward C. Marsales, who had grown fond of Lucille while in charge of her incarceration at Rockford, joined in the champagne toasts that followed.

  “I am so happy,” the bride told the press. When a reporter asked where her mother was, she said, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  Asked what she thought of the marriage, Tiny Johnson kept her own counsel. “Sometimes I say things Jack doesn’t like, so I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.”

  As the reporters filed out the door, one looked back and saw Johnson remove his bride’s new twenty-five-hundred-dollar wedding ring and slip it into his own pocket.

  As always, the front page of the Chicago Defender offered Johnson its unqualified support.

  THE WEDDING CEREMONY WAS HELD AT THE HOME OF THE

  JOHNSONS, 3344 WABASH AVENUE, AND WHITE AND COLORED

  FOLKS FREELY MINGLED WITH EACH OTHER WHILE SHOWERING

  CONGRATULATIONS AND KISSES ON THE NEW BRIDE

  THE GROOM PRESENTED HIS BRIDE WITH A $2,500 DIAMOND RING

  A $5,000 NEW MOTOR CAR AND TOSSED THE COLORED PREACHER

  A NEW HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL FOR MARRYING THEM

  MRS. CAMERON-FALCONET HAS WASHED HER HANDS CLEAN OF

  THE WHOLE WHITE AND BLACK MESS AND HAS RETURNED TO HER

  HOME IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. IN UTTER DISGUST

  “I never will believe that [Johnson] married his white women just to spite white people,” his friend Bricktop wrote. “I just think he did what he wanted to because he wanted to do it.” That was pretty much why he did everything. But his second marriage had all sorts of repercussions for all kinds of people, close to home as well as far away.

  Deputy Marshal Marsales, an eight-year veteran of the Justice Department, lost his job for attending the wedding. News of the marriage further infuriated Belle Schreiber. It was bad enough that she had to remain isolated and confined, but to learn that Johnson, whom she blamed for all her troubles, was still out on bail and free to celebrate yet another wedding was more than she could bear. She vowed to run away if she was still locked up at New Year’s. On the evening of December 14, agents tried to cheer her up by taking her along to a series of cafés to search for one of her friends from the old days, Lillian St. Clair. They didn’t find St. Clair, and when, after midnight, it was time to take her back to her room at the Waverley Home, she refused to go. Standing on 125th Street outside what one agent called “a nigger joint,” she began shrieking that she could not stand being a prisoner anymore. A crowd gathered. The agents got her into a cab and checked her into the Prince George Hotel for the night. Then they wired Washington for instructions.

  They were told to bring her back to the capital the next morning. “During the trip from New York,” one of her escorts reported, “Belle acted in a manner which caused some embarrassment. She also accosted one Jerry Moore, a passenger on the train, whom she remembered as a former patron of hers when she was an inmate of the Sinclair house of prostitution in Washington.” Belle was transferred to Baltimore and placed in a new institution, the Florence Crittenton Home. She lasted only a few days before the matron in charge asked that she be removed. Agents found her a room in a boardinghouse at 926 North Calvert and made sure the door was guarded day and night so she wouldn’t run away and Jack Johnson’s agents couldn’t contact her if they managed to track her down.

  Whites who had denounced Johnson for marrying one white woman were enraged to learn he’d married another. An Oklahoma woman expressed her anger to an Ohio paper: “Down in this part of the country, he would never have lived to marry the second white girl.” In Shreveport Louisiana, funds were collected in a saloon to pay a posse currently pursuing a Negro offender in the area to turn its attention to Johnson. At the National Governors’ Conference at Richmond, Virginia, Governor Cole Blease called for the champion to be lynched: “There is but one punishment, and that must be speedy, when the negro lays his hand upon the person of a white woman.” Northern governors used less inflammatory language, but they, too, deplored what had happened. “That Johnson wedding,” said Governor John Dix of New York, “is a blot on our civilization.”

  Congressman Seaborn A. Roddenberry of Georgia, who had campaigned in 1910 against the interstate shipment of films showing Johnson beating a white man in the ring, took the floor to introduce an amendment to the U.S.Constitution banning marriage between whites and “any and all persons of African descent or having any trace of African blood.”

  No brutality [said Roddenberry,] no infamy, no degradation in all the years of southern slavery possessed such villainous character and such atrocious qualities as the provision of the laws of Illinois which allows the marriage of the Negro, Jack Johnson, to a woman of Caucasian strain…. Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit…. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery of white women to black beasts will bring this nation a conflict as fatal and as bloody as ever reddened the soil of Virginia or crimsoned the mountain paths of Pennsylvania…. Let us uproot and exterminate now this debasing, ultra-demoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy.*

  On the evening of December 14, Lucille Cameron Johnson and three friends—two women and a man, all of them white—swept into the elegant Pompeiian Room at the Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue and asked for a table. They were quickly seated by the maître d’. “Bedecked with diamonds and clothed in white furs, [Lucille] attracted the attention of several hundred guests,” the Los Angeles Times reported the next morning. “It was whispered she was some famous actress. No one knew them.”

  Two young men came in. One murmured to the other. They laughed and sat down at a table near Lucille’s party. Then, “in a voice that could be heard all over the great dining-room one of them said, ‘Harry, that’s Lucille Cameron, wife of Jack Johnson.’ Immediately, there was confusion. Women and men pushed their chairs from their tables and walked out. Orders were cancelled by those who had not been served.”

  Several guests stormed into the manager’s office to protest Lucille’s presence.

  Detectives were ordered to eject the Johnson woman. The man with her objected. She said, “Why, you have no right to put us out. We are orderly. They serve us elsewhere.”

  The detective placed his hand on the man’s shoulder and said: “You will have to get out. We do not want your money here. The other guests object, and you will have to get out now.”

  Apparently unabashed, Johnson’s wife rose and stared at the shocked diners who were standing in the halls. She attempted to go down the corridor toward the main entrance but was prevented by the detective who showed her to the side door. The other two women in the party did not say a word. They hung their heads and followed. As they walked toward the door accompanied by the detective, women guests … standing in the hall caught their skirts and shrank back. The men only glared angrily at the retreating party, but said nothing.

  As soon as the news of Johnson’s marriage to a second white woman broke, his two black attorneys, Edward H. Wright and W. G. Anderson, went to court to have their names stricken from the records. They were so appalled, they assured the New York Times, that they no longer wished to be associated with him. Politics may have played a part in Wright’s abandonment of his client. Defeated during his campaign for alderman in 1910—when Johnson had taken considerable risks to campaign for him—he may have calculated that continuing to be linked to the champion might damage future opportunities.

  Anderson’s break with Johnson was more symbolic than real. He continued to work with him on a scheme that promised to profit both men by exploiting the fears of well-to-do bigots. The story surfaced just before Christmas. Johnson had anonymously obtained an option to buy the big
lakeside home of the late Helen M. Sherman in the heart of one of Chicago’s most exclusive summer colonies, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It was to be a thirty-five-thousand-dollar Christmas gift for his new bride, Johnson told the press, and he was also buying a farm just down the road on which he planned to raise cattle and a herd of buffalo. The house was surrounded by the vacation homes of some of Chicago’s wealthiest families. Henry J. Evans, director of the National Biscuit Company, lived next door. John G. Mitchell, president of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank, lived a few doors away. When a reporter called Mitchell to see how he’d taken the news, the banker tried a joke: Johnson’s purchase, he said, constituted a case of “black male.” Mrs. Mitchell was not amused. “It is an outrage,” she said. “I am astounded that Mr. Sherman should have sold his property to a negro.”

  The seller, the late Mrs. Sherman’s seventy-year-old son, was unrepentant: he needed to sell, he said, and no one other than Johnson had made him a decent offer.

  From the point of view of the colony’s residents worse was to come. Johnson and Lucille did not plan to be alone at their new address. According to lawyer Anderson, the champion was just one of ten black investors, who planned to transform part of the Sherman mansion into the “Lincoln Social and Athletic Club.” Then he offered the Chicago Tribune a description of what would go on there, carefully calibrated to further alarm the colony—and eventually loosen its purse strings:

  We intend to make a clubhouse of the place [but] the social amenities are to be given their proper place. In view of the fact that Mr. Johnson is one of the chief investors and is himself a leading athlete, it is to be expected that more or less attention will be paid to calisthenics. But the merely physical is not to be allowed to predominate. There will be dances and soirées, receptions and carnivals. The best people in Chicago from the district of the south side … will participate.