Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  JOHNSON: I wasn’t there long enough to entertain myself.

  PARKIN: What did you do there with her?

  JOHNSON: Nothing.

  PARKIN: Did you buy her meals or pay her hotel bills or give her any money?

  JOHNSON: I never gave her nothing that trip at all.

  PARKIN: Did you buy her meals?

  JOHNSON: Never—nothing.

  PARKIN: Pay her hotel bill?

  JOHNSON: Nothing. Never even bought her a drink.

  PARKIN: So she spent her own money at that time?

  JOHNSON: She must have, she didn’t spend mine.

  PARKIN: Well, did you have sexual relations in Atlantic City?

  JOHNSON: Belle and I were very friendly….

  PARKIN: Just answer the question. Did you have sexual relations with her in Atlantic City?

  JOHNSON: I did not.

  PARKIN: In August, 1910?

  JOHNSON: I did not.

  PARKIN: [But] you did in every town where you and she were together?

  JOHNSON: I don’t remember. I never kept tab.

  PARKIN: Well, did you skip any?

  JOHNSON: Oh certainly, everybody skips.

  Some in the courtroom laughed. Parkin bore down. Did Johnson have more than one woman with him when he visited Philadelphia?

  JOHNSON: They may have been there; I did not have them. There is a lot of women in that town; that doesn’t signify that I have them. I have told you I never kept tab of those things. I am here today and gone tomorrow. I never kept any tabs. I was too busy. I had too much to think of.

  Parkin pressed him. Didn’t he have both Belle and Hattie with him in California at the time of his fight with Stanley Ketchel?

  “Lots of people came to see me….” They may have been there. He hadn’t paid their way.

  “Did you not, on December 9, 1909, the date of the Kaufmann fight, have sexual intercourse with the girl Anna, ‘Mac’ [Hattie McClay]?”

  “I did not. After a man has a fight, he is not feeling like it.”

  Bachrach objected again and again that these events were irrelevant since they allegedly took place before the Mann Act went into effect. Judge Carpenter overruled him each time and insisted that Johnson answer.

  PARKIN: The Ketchel fight was after the Kaufmann fight, wasn’t it?

  JOHNSON: Yes.

  PARKIN: Did you win the Ketchel fight?

  JOHNSON: Did I win it?

  PARKIN: Yes.

  JOHNSON: It is in the book, doesn’t the book say so?

  PARKIN: Just answer my question….

  JOHNSON: I suppose I did. Somebody might say I did not.

  PARKIN: You knew you were going to win it before you went into it, didn’t you?

  Bachrach objected that this line of questioning was also irrelevant; Parkin was trying to attack his client’s character by suggesting that he took part in “crooked fights.”

  “They are all crooked,” Johnson muttered as the lawyers argued.

  Over Bachrach’s repeated protest, Parkin once again tried to get Johnson to admit that he’d beaten the women with whom he’d traveled.

  Hadn’t Hattie once been hospitalized after he’d mistreated her?

  JOHNSON: No.

  PARKIN: Did you have any similar difficulty with Belle—fisticuff difficulty?

  JOHNSON: I don’t understand the definition of the word….

  PARKIN: You had struck Belle on various occasions?

  JOHNSON: Never in my life.

  PARKIN: Do you remember using an automobile tool on her?

  JOHNSON: Never in my life.

  PARKIN: You never did that?

  JOHNSON: Never.

  PARKIN: You say you did not?

  JOHNSON: I say no; emphatically no.

  PARKIN: And bruised her side until it was black and blue?

  The judge objected. Johnson had said he’d never beaten anyone. Next question.

  Parkin wound up his cross-examination by attacking Johnson’s account of the time he and Belle Schreiber had spent together in Milwaukee. The champion said again that he had told Belle of his marriage plans while they were there.

  But after he told her, Parkin asked, hadn’t they continued to live together in their hotel room in Milwaukee?

  “Some of the time.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  Johnson stepped down from the stand. Seven defense witnesses did their best to bolster different parts of his case. They included chauffeurs, trainers, hangers-on, some of them still on Johnson’s payroll, as well as his old Pittsburgh friend Frank Sutton, who had overheard Belle’s half of her money-seeking telephone call to the champion. Several of the witnesses denied that Belle had ever accompanied the champion on the trains he took back and forth daily between Chicago and Milwaukee during Christmas week.

  As a final rebuttal witness, the prosecutor called Johnson’s old friend Roy Jones. He confirmed that the champion had told him he’d had “a fight” with Etta Duryea on Christmas Eve and feared being prosecuted for it. He also claimed to have seen Belle get off the train from Milwaukee at least once in Johnson’s company. In cross-examining him, Bachrach did his best to imply that Jones’ testimony had been heavily influenced by the predicament in which he found himself. Like Johnson, Jones had lost his saloon license; unlike Johnson, he hoped to get it back again. Helping to fortify the government’s case would make the licensing authorities feel more warmly toward him.*

  With that, the trial ended.

  Bachrach immediately moved that since the government had failed to produce any evidence of “debauchery” or “crimes against nature,” four of the eleven indictments should be thrown out. Judge Carpenter agreed. All four were dismissed.

  Few in the courtroom had any doubt of what the jury’s verdict on the remaining seven counts would be. “If you should find the defendant not guilty,” the prosecutor said in his summation, “I do not see how you could ever look squarely in the faces of your mothers, wives, and daughters.”

  The case went to the jury at ten in the evening. In less than two hours Johnson was found guilty on all counts.

  Sentencing was set for June 4.

  For once, the champion refused to talk to the press. “I have nothing to say, not a thing. My attorneys will speak for me.”† Benjamin Bachrach said only that it had been “a hard case” and that he would file an immediate appeal.

  Harry Parkin was not so reticent. “This verdict will go around the world,” he told reporters on the courthouse steps.

  It is the forerunner of laws to be passed in these United States which we may live to see—laws forbidding miscegenation. This Negro, in the eyes of many, has been persecuted. Perhaps as an individual he was. But it was his misfortune to be the foremost example of the evil in permitting the intermarriage of whites and blacks.

  Five years ago he was obscure, penniless and happy. He beat down a man and became famous with a blow. He beat down another and riches poured into his pockets.

  Money and fame, such as it was, brought white women. One is a suicide, the others are pariahs. He has violated the law. Now, it is his function to teach others the law must be respected.

  Parkin was right that the Johnson case would inspire calls for laws against miscegenation. During 1913, such statutes were introduced in the legislatures of half the twenty states that did not already have them. Five were proposed in Illinois alone. In the end, neither Congressman Roddenberry’s anti-miscegenation amendment nor any of the state statutes would be enacted.*

  The day after the verdict was handed down, Frank Sutton was to return to Pittsburgh by rail. The champion drove him to the Union Depot and walked him to the train. As it began to pull out, Johnson looked up into the eyes of Belle Schreiber, peering at him through the Pullman window. She, too, was headed back to Pittsburgh, where so much trouble for both of them had begun. They did not try to speak, or even make the smallest gesture of recognition. But they stared at each other until the train disa
ppeared from sight.

  Johnson was desperate now. At the very least, he expected a large fine, and he now had very little money left with which to pay it. He swallowed his pride, set aside the tradition that required champions to wait for others to challenge them, and called on Luther McCarty, who had beaten Al Palzer on New Year’s Day to win the dubious “white heavyweight championship of the world,” to face him for the real title.† Born on a Nebraska ranch, McCarty was just twenty-one, but he could box well and hit hard enough with both hands to have beaten Carl Morris, Al Kaufmann, and Jim Flynn. DeWitt van Court thought him “unquestionably the greatest young heavyweight since the days of John L. Sullivan,” and a fight between him and Johnson was thought likely to draw a big gate. Jack Curley hoped to be the one to stage it, back in Las Vegas, New Mexico, on July 4. But on May 24, before the details could be worked out, McCarty stepped into the ring at Calgary against Arthur Pelkey. During a clinch in the first round, Pelkey landed to McCarty’s head. McCarty winked at his cornermen to show he hadn’t been hurt. The referee separated the fighters. McCarty collapsed. He was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage within eight minutes. There would be no big-money fight that summer for Jack Johnson.

  On the afternoon of June 4, the day of his sentencing, Johnson clung to two hopes. First, that Judge Carpenter might agree to Benjamin Bachrach’s motion for a new trial based on alleged errors made in the first one. If that failed, the judge might still simply impose a large fine and let it go at that. The champion was to be disappointed on both counts. There would be no new trial, and he would have to serve time in the penitentiary as an example to other Negroes.

  “The crime of which this defendant stands convicted is an aggravating one,” Carpenter explained. “The life of the defendant, by his own admissions, has been such as to merit condemnation.”

  We have had a number of cases where violations of the Mann Act have been punished by fines only. We have had a number of defendants found guilty in this court of violating the Mann Act who have been sentenced to severe punishment, from one to two years in the penitentiary.

  This defendant is one of the best known men of his race, and his example has been far reaching and the court is bound to consider the position he occupied among his people. In view of these facts, this is a case that calls for more than a fine. Considering all circumstances in this case, therefore, the sentence of the court is that the defendant, Johnson, be confined to the penitentiary for one year and one day and be fined $1,000.

  Johnson’s lawyers had two weeks to file an appeal. “Oh well,” Johnson said afterward. “They crucified Christ, why not me?”

  On Tuesday evening, June 24, the heavyweight champion of the world disappeared. He’d seemed to be everywhere in Chicago that day, buzzing through the streets in his unmistakable red racer, and when he returned to his home in the evening, the informants who were paid to watch him evidently assumed that he was there to stay. They were wrong.

  At about four o’clock Thursday afternoon, someone reported to Charles DeWoody that Johnson had been spotted in Montreal. DeWoody called the house on Wabash Avenue. Joseph Levy answered, sounding so nervous that DeWoody concluded the rumor must be true. He asked to speak to Jennie Rhodes. She said her brother and her son, Gus Rhodes, had left town for Johnson’s old haunts at Cedar Lake, where they planned to fish for a few days;they’d be back by the weekend. But when DeWoody called Bob Russell, the Cedar Lake resort keeper who’d rented the champion a cottage several times in the past, Russell said he hadn’t seen him for at least three weeks.

  At three the following morning, acting Bureau of Investigation Chief Bielaski wired DeWoody from Washington that the Associated Press confirmed Johnson’s presence in Montreal. He seemed to be on his way to Europe.

  This time, Johnson’s escape had been meticulously planned. Benjamin Bachrach had persuaded Judge Carpenter to halve the thirty-thousand-dollar bond, thus making Matthew Baldwin the sole bondsman and guaranteeing that Johnson’s mother could hold on to her house while he was gone. Violation of the Mann Act was not an extraditable offense north of the border, but as a convicted criminal he might still have been deported back to the United States as an “undesirable alien.” To get around that, Johnson had quietly purchased tickets from Chicago to Le Havre via Montreal, thus making himself an alien in transit through Canada—and untouchable. Lucille had slipped out of town and reached Canada on her own before her husband vanished. Two of Johnson’s cars had been sent ahead as well.

  Preparations for flight were one thing. But how had Johnson and his nephew managed to slip out of town unseen—particularly when the authorities had been given so many hints that he might try to do so? The story to which Charles DeWoody and his colleagues always clung doesn’t seem entirely plausible: uncle and nephew had set out on what seemed to be a fishing trip, they said, and then, somehow, the most celebrated—and notorious—black man in America had managed to drive himself over the border without being recognized by anyone along the way. So far as Justice Department files reveal, their superiors never seriously questioned their story.

  Part of the reason for the apparent laxity may have been the nature of the bond on which Johnson remained free. So long as he was on hand for his court appearances it was unclear whether or not he could leave the country, and federal agents remained angry that Judge Carpenter had criticized them for halting his first flight back in January: “If Johnson had told me he was going to step aboard a train and leave the jurisdiction,” Charles DeWoody said long after the champion made good his escape, “I would have made no effort to detain him.”*

  But Johnson couldn’t have been certain DeWoody felt that way. He offered two other, very different versions of how he got away. In one—which would make headlines early the following year—he claimed to have paid thousands of dollars to federal and state officials to look the other way while he left town.

  He first told the other tale to a British reporter about two weeks after it allegedly happened. He and Gus had indeed dressed in old clothes as if they were going fishing, he said, but instead of driving into the countryside, they’d had someone take them to Englewood Station. There, Johnson had arranged to meet his friend Rube Foster and his Giants baseball team, who were waiting for a train to Canada. As soon as the train pulled in, Johnson and Gus, their arms full of bats and gloves, climbed aboard with the ballplayers. White policemen patrolled the station, but, unable to distinguish one big athletic black man from another, they failed to recognize the champion. The train pulled out. Johnson stepped into the drawing room he’d reserved for himself and locked the door. “I am not a coward, gentlemen,” he told his British listeners, “but I can assure you I trembled every time the car stopped.”

  Some writers doubt the Rube Foster story. One biographer states flatly, “It never happened.” But two bits of evidence suggest that it could have. First, according to the Chicago Defender, Foster and his Giants really did leave Chicago for “Detroit, Buffalo and Canada” on the evening of Tuesday, June 24, just when Johnson said they did. Then, too, Johnson and Foster had been mistaken for each other before: hundreds of white Chicagoans—and many black ones as well—who turned out to welcome Johnson home from Reno in 1910 had cheered Rube Foster as he drove down State Street in an open automobile, convinced he was the champion.

  At Hamilton, Ontario, Johnson and Gus hopped off the train. They were arrested and taken before a justice of the peace. But someone had provided them with the telephone numbers of two local solicitors. With their help, Johnson and his nephew were released on the ground that there was no official demand for their return to the United States. (There was no such demand in part because the U.S. authorities still had no idea Johnson had left the country.) “That j.p. never had a chance,” Johnson said afterward. “Those lawyers just talked me loose.”

  Tom Flanagan drove the fugitives to his hotel in Toronto, where he served them beer and cheese sandwiches and Lucille joined them. Then the trio moved on to Montreal.

  On June
28, Charles DeWoody got a telegram from the champion.

  AM SAILING SUNDAY MORNING … YOU DON’T NEED TO WORRY. WILL BE BACK FOR TRIAL. ANSWER STEAMER CORINTHIAN.

  JACK JOHNSON

  There was a mix of frustration and relief among federal officials back in Chicago. “This may solve the whole problem,” said one assistant U.S. attorney. “The passengers may mutiny and heave [Johnson] away on an iceberg.” The Defender offered its own front-page bon voyage.

  JACK JOHNSON IS CRUCIFIED FOR HIS RACE

  FAMOUS FISTIC GLADIATOR SAILS FOR FRANCE AFTER

  BEING PERSECUTED IN THE UNITED STATES.

  WHAT HAS HE DONE? IF HE CHOSE A WOMAN OF

  A DIFFERENT COLOR FOR HIS COMPANION

  AND LEGALLY MARRIED HER, WHOSE BUSINESS IS IT?

  WHAT HAS THE WHITE MAN DONE?

  JACK JOHNSON HAS DONE NO DIFFERENT

  FROM ANY OTHER BIG SPORT

  FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN WHIPPING JEFFRIES

  AND BEING A NEGRO IS JACK JOHNSON PERSECUTED.

  CONSORTING WITH WHITE WOMEN IS NO CAUSE.

  JACK IS ONE OF THAT HOST THAT

  JOHN COULDN’T NUMBER.

  * According to a sworn deposition by Johnson’s sister Jennie Rhodes, her brother’s British valet, Joseph Levy, was present at the station house when Mrs. Cameron-Falconet told her woeful tale to the press and heard Erbstein prompt his client to add this incendiary detail. (Undated Rhodes Grand Jury deposition, DOJ File.)

  * Some papers reported that Johnson had been wounded in the foot, and at least one reported that he had been seen limping, but a prison physician who later catalogued Johnson’s scars and distinguishing marks noted no such injury. Banks herself later said the whole notion that she had fired at him was “ridiculous.” (Jack Johnson File, Inmate Case Files, United States Penitentiary–Leavenworth; Records of the Federal Bureau of Prisons; Record Group 129; National Archives–Central Plains region; Chicago Defender, November 2, 1912.)