Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  On May 1, Johnson had to go to court again and plead not guilty to the new indictments still more invasive of his private life than the earlier ones had been. “If the attitude of the Grand Jury can be taken as any criterion of the jury trial,” Charles DeWoody boasted to his bosses in Washington, “there will be no difficulty in convicting Johnson. That evening, an anonymous federal informant found the champion at home, suffering from what he called “a fit of the blues.” He said he was weary of being watched and followed. Men and women he had thought his friends were lining up to testify against him. He’d never been able to find Belle Schreiber. There now seemed to be no hope.

  Four days later, on the morning of May 5, 1913, the case of the United States v. John Arthur Johnson, finally got under way in Chicago’s Federal Building.

  Judge Carpenter closed the courtroom to everyone but newspapermen, and a small group of Johnson’s friends and family. Those whom the judge called “scandal-seekers” crowded the halls of the courthouse to see Johnson arrive, but then had to wander off when the bailiff closed the door.

  At Bachrach’s instruction, Johnson wore a conservative suit in the courtroom and not a single diamond. Tiny Johnson sat at his side. Lucille stayed away: his lawyer feared that her presence would further inflame the jury. It took two long days to pick twelve jurors in part because Bachrach sought to bar from it anyone who admitted having “convictions” against blacks’ marrying whites. Several men were excused, the Washington Post reported, “because they said they had decided opinions about Johnson’s guilt and strong convictions as to the punishment they would mete out to him.” Bachrach eventually ran out of challenges, and twelve jurors were seated, some of them, as one government agent noted happily, “strongly prejudiced against negroes.”

  On the morning of May 7, Assistant District Attorney Parkin began to lay out the government’s case. There was nothing complicated about it, he said. “The charge is simply and solely that the defendant, on the date mentioned in the indictment [October 15, 1910], aided, assisted, caused and induced this girl to go from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Chicago, Illinois.” After they had heard all the evidence, the gentlemen of the jury would need to ask themselves just two questions: Did he do it? And, if he did, did he do so for “an immoral purpose”? Parkin promised to prove beyond a moral certainty that Johnson had had not one but three such purposes: prostitution, “the giving up of a woman’s body to indiscriminate intercourse”; debauchery, by which he meant traveling (and sleeping with) two and sometimes three women; and a third purpose—almost “too obscene to mention”—which was “to compel these women to commit the crime against nature upon his body.” He would demonstrate how Johnson “controlled” the three women with whom he most often traveled, and show that he had ordered Belle to come to Chicago from Pittsburgh, had sent her seventy-five dollars for her ticket, then spent an additional one thousand two hundred dollars setting her up as a madam. And he would show that Johnson was himself “one of the men who practiced immoral purposes and conduct in that flat.”

  “Now, the defendant is a prize fighter,” he continued;

  and in that connection it will be interesting, as the evidence develops, to see upon what victims he practiced the manly art of self defense. It will appear these women whom he carried about the country with him were very, very many times, when he had a fit of anger, or when the girls refused to do some of the obscene things which he demanded of them, that he practiced the art of manly self-defense upon them, blacking their eyes and sending them to the hospitals.

  When Parkin sat down, all twelve jurors were glaring at the defendant.

  Benjamin Bachrach began his case for the defense by begging them to maintain open minds. If the “horrible story” Parkin had told were true, he said, “there is hardly any punishment great enough for the defendant.” But it was not true. When Johnson came into prominence as a pugilist, he said, “as is customary with a certain class of women, sporting women, they are attracted by an exhibition of physical prowess and throw themselves in the way of a pugilist.” The evidence would show that Belle Schreiber was “an ordinary prostitute” when she first met Johnson, that she often moved from sporting house to sporting house for reasons having nothing to do with the champion. He reminded them that nothing Johnson did before July 1, 1910—the date the Mann Act went into force—was relevant to the case.

  Prior to that time, however much you might deprecate the idea of a … bachelor having intercourse with a woman not his wife, it was no crime against the laws of the United States to do it, and it was no crime for a man, if he saw fit, to take a prostitute with him when he took a trip, to take her along and have intercourse with her on the train in the stateroom.

  Johnson had never taken Belle Schreiber anywhere after July 1, 1910, Bachrach declared. He had never sent her money to move from Pittsburgh to Chicago; and he’d given her money to rent and furnish an apartment only because he’d wanted to help her establish a home for her pregnant sister and aged mother. “He did not get her to engage in any prostitution. She was a prostitute, and had always been, so far as he knew; and there was not anything that he did in any way that violated any federal law.”

  The government called six witnesses to set the stage for the main accuser and supposed victim, Belle Schreiber.

  Jack Mervin, Johnson’s chauffeur for much of 1910 and 1911, described driving Belle Schreiber to and from hotels to see Johnson in several cities.

  Lillian Paynter, who ran the Pittsburgh whorehouse in which Belle had worked in 1910, testified that Belle had been fired as soon as it was learned that she was “mixed up with a colored man.” Her sister, Estelle, took the stand to say she was the one who had actually “ordered her out.”

  John T. Lewis, the building manager at the Ridgewood, remembered renting an apartment to Schreiber, though he claimed he hadn’t known anything about her “occupation” or what went on in any of the building’s sixty-seven other apartments. “How can I, except I seen it?” he asked.

  Bertha Morrison—“Jew Bertha”—said she’d also worked out of a sporting flat at the Ridgewood and had noticed Johnson there two or three times, though under cross-examination she admitted that she’d never actually seen him inside Schreiber’s apartment.

  John O’Halloran, a Chicago patrolman, testified that until the preceding March, the Ridgewood Apartments had been wholly occupied by prostitutes, either entertaining customers on the premises or going out on call. He’d made many arrests there over the years.

  Finally, Leopold Moss of the Marshall Ventilated Mattress Company offered a detailed receipt listing all the furnishings—including four mattresses—he’d sold to the champion for Schreiber’s flat.

  Belle Schreiber was called to the stand on the morning of Thursday, May 8. She was modestly dressed and without the vivid makeup people had often remarked upon when she had been the champion’s companion. She spoke in “a low voice,” according to the Chicago Daily News the next day, “haltingly and seemingly embarrassed.” Parkin led her through a numbing chronicle of her life with the champion, from the moment they met at the Everleigh Club in the spring of 1909 until her last sight of him in March of 1911, after his marriage to Etta Duryea and before he headed for California. To prove that the champion had borne all the costs, Parkin offered into evidence a clutch of receipts signed by his agents George Little and Sig Hart. And to show how close Belle and Johnson once had been, he introduced the photograph the champion had given her early in their relationship, inscribed “To my little sweetheart Belle from Papa Jack.”

  In October of 1910, she said, she’d been desperate after losing her job with the Paynter sisters and would have gone anywhere, done anything. It had been entirely Johnson’s idea, not hers, that she come to Chicago and set herself up in business. She testified that he had been a frequent visitor to her sporting flat at the Ridgewood, that he had had sex with her there, and that she had once paid him twenty dollars out of her earnings as a prostitute. And every day during t
he week after Christmas in 1910, while Etta Duryea lay in the hospital, she said, she had ridden back and forth with Johnson aboard the train between Chicago and Milwaukee—crossing still another state line for immoral purposes.

  In his cross-examination, Benjamin Bachrach did everything he could to shake Belle’s story and cast doubt on her character. He showed her the inscribed photograph again and asked, “Were you his ‘little sweetheart’?”

  SCHREIBER: I suppose I was.

  BACHRACH: Were you in love with him?

  SCHREIBER: I don’t know.

  BACHRACH: Don’t you know now? Did you think you were then?

  SCHREIBER: I don’t know what love is.

  BACHRACH: The favors that you extended to him, were they extended simply for money?

  SCHREIBER: I don’t know….

  BACHRACH: You cannot say now whether you were in love with the defendant or not?

  SCHREIBER: No.

  BACHRACH: At this time?

  SCHREIBER: I don’t believe I ever was in love….

  BACHRACH: Isn’t it a fact that from the time you first met Johnson you determined to get out of him all the money you could.

  SCHREIBER: No. It is not a fact….

  Then why had she kept all those hotel bills? Bachrach asked.

  SCHREIBER: I don’t know why I saved the hotel bills and didn’t save anything else. It is not a fact that I saved those bills so that at some future time I might be able to testify that I was at those places with him…. I probably did it because I feared he might not believe me when I said my hotel bill was a stipulated amount.

  Hadn’t she once told Sig Hart that she planned to get all the money she could from the champion? She had not. Then why had she kept asking him for more money?

  She’d only gone to Johnson after she was let go in Pittsburgh because “I didn’t have any more friends. I lost all my friends, and he was the only one I could turn to. I suppose I regarded him as my friend, too. I thought it was due for him to see me through my trouble.”

  BACHRACH: And did you love him then?

  SCHREIBER: I told you I did not know what love was.

  BACHRACH: Well, did you think you loved him then?

  SCHREIBER: I don’t remember what I thought. My memory is good on all the other portions of the testimony, but about this one question—whether I was in love with him or not—my memory is poor….

  Bachrach took Belle through a catalog of all the trips on which she’d accompanied the champion.

  BACHRACH: You were not forced to go on any one of these trips?

  SCHREIBER: No, not forced.

  BACHRACH: You were not coerced?

  SCHREIBER: I was asked to go, that was all.

  BACHRACH: And you acceded to the request, did you?

  SCHREIBER: Yes.

  BACHRACH: You were willing, were you not?

  SCHREIBER: I suppose I was….

  If she’d kept her hotel bills, why hadn’t she kept a copy of Johnson’s telegram that supposedly promised to send her seventy-five dollars? She couldn’t say.

  Belle had testified that she’d been “on the outs” with Johnson at the time of the Jeffries fight in Reno and therefore hadn’t traveled there with him. If that was so, Bachrach asked, why had she sent him a congratulatory telegram?

  She didn’t remember why. “I did not want to bring myself to his notice again.” She never called him, she said, “unless it was absolutely necessary.”

  “To get money?”

  “Yes, when I was put out.”

  What did she mean by “put out”?

  When she was recognized as Jack Johnson’s companion, and therefore “not admitted into a house.”

  “Oh,” Bachrach said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, “did you apply to houses of prostitution and try to get in?

  “Yes.”

  “And you were refused admittance?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you would call up Johnson for some money?”

  “Yes, when I could find him.”

  How often had she got money out of him this way? Fifty times? Twenty-five times? Ten times?

  “Three or four,” she said.

  The flat had all been Johnson’s idea, she insisted. She’d never wanted an apartment of her own, “because I never knew how to take care of any.”

  Hadn’t she told him he owed her help since he was about to marry Etta Duryea? Never, she said. She hadn’t known anything about his coming marriage. Nor had she ever told him she wanted a place for her pregnant sister or her mother to live.

  But hadn’t she used Johnson’s money to pay for her sister’s fare from Pittsburgh as well as her own?

  “Yes.”

  And didn’t her sister live with her in her flat?

  “Yes.”

  Three more government witnesses followed Schreiber. None was on the stand more than a minute or two. Her former maid, Julia Allen, said she recalled seeing the seventy-five-dollar postal telegraph from the champion; Hattie McClay began an account of her relationship with Johnson, which Bachrach cut short by successfully objecting that since they had been together long before July 1, 1910, her testimony was irrelevant. James Stilwell, an attorney for the Pennsylvania Railroad, attested that at the time of the alleged offense it had been a common carrier in interstate traffic and therefore covered under the Mann Act.

  The government rested its case.

  When Johnson finally took the stand on the morning of May 13, “he spoke in a low voice and at times hesitatingly,” one reporter noted. “Sweat stood out on his forehead and trickled down his face.”

  He denied everything. He had never beaten anyone, had taken only one train trip with Belle, well before the Mann Act went into effect; had given her money only because she said she’d lost her job and needed help. He had never told Belle she should go into business for herself, had never even meant for her to come to Chicago. “She said she was sick,” that was all. And when he met her at the Hotel Vendome, he added, she had claimed that her sister was pregnant and needed a place where she, her mother, and her sister could all live. “I said, ‘Certainly, I will do anything to make you happy.’” He’d had no foreknowledge that she was planning to open a brothel and had never taken a penny of her earnings.

  How much money did he think he’d given Belle Schreiber over the years?

  “As near as I could guess, it would be between nine and ten thousand dollars [roughly $179,000 in today’s terms]; that includes all that I spent on her, everything—expenses and everything.”

  His voice was growing stronger, his manner more confident. Even here, Jack Johnson seemed to enjoy the spotlight.

  He said he had not traveled back and forth between Chicago and Milwaukee with Belle during Christmas week of 1911. Nor had she stayed with him in Milwaukee all week. They’d had a disagreement, he said; she’d been “a little angry” because he “was not paying the proper attention to her…. I had a reason for not being attentive to Belle Schreiber up to that time; it was because I was going to be married—and I told her and explained everything to her.”

  It was the government’s turn to cross-examine. Harry Parkin leaped to the attack.

  PARKIN: Why was Etta Duryea hospitalized?

  JOHNSON: She was sick, that is all I know.

  PARKIN: That is all you know about it?

  JOHNSON: That is all I know.

  PARKIN: What was the cause of her sickness?

  JOHNSON: I don’t know.

  PARKIN: As a matter of fact that was a sickness caused by blows from your hands, wasn’t it?

  Bachrach objected to this as irrelevant. The judge overruled him and directed Johnson to answer.

  JOHNSON: No.

  PARKIN: Well, was it caused by a blow or blows from your hand?

  JOHNSON: No, no.

  PARKIN: Was it not caused by blows received by Etta Duryea in the Pekin Theater here in Chicago at your hands?

  JOHNSON: No.

  PARKIN: Did you not carry he
r out or have her carried out and put in the automobile and taken to the Washington Park Hospital after you had beaten her up?

  JOHNSON: No, no, and I will take the oath on it. No.

  Belle had given him a share of her earnings, had she not?

  “How could she give me money, [when I was] making $2,500 a week? … I say I never took any money from Belle Schreiber, not a newspaper.” Nor had he had any idea what kind of business she and the other women living at the Ridgewood flats were doing.

  “You knew it was full of fast women, didn’t you?”

  “I did not.”

  Parkin pointed out that Johnson had lived less than a mile from the Ridgewood for several years. Surely he knew what went on there.

  JOHNSON: I can look the jury right in the face and as a man tell them I didn’t know that the Ridgewood was a sporting house, and look at them and swear to it…. I didn’t know anything about the fast women. I was not keeping up with them….

  PARKIN: Now, you say you were not keeping up with the fast women. You had as many as three at a time in your travels, didn’t you?

  JOHNSON: No, sir.

  PARKIN: Didn’t you [sometimes] have Hattie and Etta and Belle there at the same time?

  JOHNSON: No….

  PARKIN: Now, why did you have Belle come to Atlantic City?

  JOHNSON: I never had her come to Atlantic City.

  PARKIN: You entertained her there?