Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  On the evening of February 18, 1915, the day after Curley’s agents made their pitch for leniency to federal officials in Chicago, President Woodrow Wilson, and his cabinet gathered in the East Room of the White House in Washington to see D. W. Griffith’s epic film The Birth of a Nation.

  The Birth of a Nation was based on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 best seller, The Clansman, and offered an upside-down version of Reconstruction in which the terrorist night riders of the Ku Klux Klan were portrayed as heroes while, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, the freedman was “represented either as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician or a faithful but doddering idiot.” The main black characters were portrayed by white actors in blackface.

  The distinguished audience loved it. “It teaches history by lightning,” President Wilson told the director when the lights came on again.

  Chief Justice Edward White agreed after he, his fellow judges, and eighty-eight senators and congressmen attended another special screening at a downtown hotel the next night. He had himself ridden with the Klan and believed it had been a fully justified “uprising of outraged manhood.” Millions of white Americans already shared their view.

  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People mounted a national campaign to ban the film—and succeeded only in further publicizing it. The Birth of a Nation opened at the Liberty Theater on Broadway in March, beginning a record run of forty-four weeks. It would become the most-seen movie of its time. Miscegenation was the supposed evil at the heart of its story—and its moral was that every self-respecting white man had a duty to avenge it if he could.

  With Jess Willard matched to fight Jack Johnson, white Americans would finally get their chance at vengeance—in the ring.

  Preparations for the fight moved forward at Juárez. Willard went into training at El Paso. Then, on February 22, Curley got a telegram from Johnson at Havana. He wasn’t coming to Mexico.

  SHIPS HERE REFUSED CLEARANCE FOR TAMPICO OR OTHER MEXICAN PORTS BECAUSE OF TROUBLE IN THAT COUNTRY. BRING THE FIGHT HERE. THIS IS AN IDEAL SPOT FOR IT.

  With less than two weeks to go, Curley hurried to New Orleans, boarded what he remembered as “a vermin barge” bound for Cuba, and went to see the champion. Carranza’s ultimatum had had something to do with Johnson’s change of heart, but there was more to it than that. He now feared that if he made it to Juárez, federal officials might somehow snatch him across the border. And, Curley wired a friend at the New York Morning World, he also “didn’t want to take a chance on having some hot-headed Texan pop him off while he was punching Willard around the ring, a feat he feels absolutely sure he can accomplish.”

  Curley would have to move the fight to Havana and set a new date.* Curley went right to the top. He called on the Cuban president, General Mario García Menocal, offered him a suitable “gift,” and received the go-ahead. H. D. “Curly” Brown, the American sport who owned the Orient Race Track at Mariano, six miles from town, said he’d be happy to have the fight take place there. It was rescheduled for the day after Easter, Monday, April 5.

  The upcoming bout was not likely to be a real title fight, said the New York Times, but, rather, a “contest between Champion Johnson and another ambitious heavyweight.” The boxing world had seen it all before. Johnson had faced seven white hopes in the six years since winning the title. None had come close to beating him. And there was little to suggest that Jess Willard would be different. Asked who would win, Bob Fitzsimmons said, “Why, Johnson, of course. Willard hasn’t a chance in the world. He is a big raw novice. The ‘Smoke’ will cut him to ribbons.” John L. Sullivan reluctantly agreed; so did Gunboat Smith and Joe Choynski. Tommy Burns and Jim Jeffries confessed that, while they would of course be rooting for the white man, they really didn’t know much about him. A newspaper columnist named Walt Mason spoke for most insiders.

  Jess Willard would restore the wreath that Johnson wrested from the whites; With warlike zeal he grinds his teeth, this hero of at least two fights. Alas, our bosoms are not warmed when such a hero gambols in. Unless black Jack is chloroformed, we do not see how Jess can win. The chances are he’ll come to grief before they’re fairly down to biz; For, while he’s surely long on beef, the spark of genius isn’t his….

  He has the lard, his heart is game, he has the height, he has the reach; But, oh, he lacks that deathless flame which makes the pugilistic peach. With confidence he goes to meet the greatest fighter on this sphere, But he will tumble o’er his feet and cork himself and interfere.They’ll bear him helpless from the ring while drearily the White Face groans,

  And Johnsing, he will dance and sing, and draw his thirty thousand bones.

  Reporters still flocked to Havana, and there were the predictable personality profiles meant to point up the differences between the two men. Johnson met “witty remarks with rapier-like answers,” the New York Herald noted,

  while Willard simply stares at the facetious one, slowly assimilates the point of the jest and more slowly allows a boyish, bashful smile to shyly illuminate his face. He is … a slow thinker, a plodder, but one who knows what he is seeking and one with a dogged courage. He is trained to the minute and looks the part. His skin is dazzling in its pureness.

  Their training camps, too, were examined in search of telling contrasts. A writer for the same newspaper visited both camps.

  Veteran sports in Havana today are marveling at the great changes in the conduct of prize fighting since the days of the early championship contests…. The crude and rigorous regime of former days has been abandoned in favor of an up-to-date and pleasant diet.

  For example, Willard’s camp is in the most expensive hotel in Havana, where he has a large suite of rooms with windows and a balcony overlooking a broad boulevard. There is a striking view of the ocean. Willard eats his meals in a palm garden, among the other guests….

  Jack Johnson lives a little further out of Havana on the same shore road. He has rented a large private apartment, breezy and with a good view, beautifully furnished and with service supplied. His meals are prepared by the Cuban cook, except when the champion desires to do this himself. Johnson takes great pride in his culinary ability, and claims to be almost as good a chef as he is a pugilist.

  Willard worked hard to get in shape, hammering away at his sparring partners, including Johnson’s former protégé, Walter Monahan. Tom Jones and his fighter were said to be so confident of victory, another paper reported, that they spent their idle hours planning “a triumphal entry into the United States … [with] back-platform speeches in every town and hamlet between Key West and New York.”

  By contrast, Johnson seemed to be coasting. He clowned during sparring sessions with Bob Armstrong and Sam McVey, swam in the Caribbean rather than do roadwork. He was “fat to the point of a paunch,” wrote the New York Herald’s man, and “appears to breathe heavily and with difficulty after even light exercise….

  One of his coworkers said that after the camp is escaped by the visitors Johnson discards his smile, forgets his wit and enters upon a tirade against the forces that command him to get into condition. The champion, this man says, is a different man entirely when he is not showing off to the crowds, the followers, the curious, the hero worshippers who create an atmosphere which when absent almost seems to leave the negro much in the same condition as a lamp would be if the oil was taken therefrom. Johnson lives on applause. Without it he fades away to nothingness.

  Johnson was seen often at the Orient Race Track, leaning on a silver-headed black cane and wearing a blinding white head-to-toe ensemble. One morning he bet on a black gelding at 8-to-1 odds. “I know that baby can’t lose,” he said. “He’s got the winning name. They got him billed here as negro.” When the horse came in first, he laughed and said it was a sign he’d knock Willard out in eight rounds. He was scheduled to spar in public that afternoon, but when it began to rain, he decided not to bother; disappointed fans threw chairs and pillows and had to be subdued by the polic
e.

  Johnson’s casual attitude toward training further fueled rumors of a fix. The champion professed to be indignant. “There is not enough money in Cuba to make me forfeit my title to Willard or any one else. I like the honor of being heavyweight champion of the world and when I lose it there will be a knockout administered by a better man. And that won’t be Willard.”*

  Johnson was cocky in private, too, and apparently still optimistic that Jack Curley would influence the government on his behalf. “I AM GETTING TIRED OF KNOCKING AROUND,” he wired his mother on March 15. “AS SOON AS I HAVE WHIPPED WILLARD I WILL COME BACK TO CHICAGO AND TAKE MY MEDICINE, AS THE GOVERNMENT HAS FIXED IT UP FOR ME.”

  On Easter morning, Curley dropped by the champion’s headquarters with the final installment of his purse—$28,500 in cash. Johnson immediately sought to multiply his money.

  Betting was unusually light for a heavyweight championship contest. Newspapers reported that sports in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and New York all seemed reluctant to risk their money. Trying to stir things up, Johnson stalked into the lobby of Willard’s hotel, loudly offering to bet ten thousand dollars on himself at 10 to 8, but he could only place twenty-five hundred. He was chatting there with Jack Welch, an old San Francisco friend who was to referee the fight the next day, when the big challenger happened to saunter in with his manager.

  “Here’s your cute little friend,” Welch said.

  Johnson grinned. “Yes, he’s so small I’m going to take advantage of him Monday.”

  Willard smiled, too. “You’d better get a ladder, Jack.”

  “Everybody tells me I’ll need a Gatling gun.”

  Tom Jones led Willard away.

  That afternoon, both men went to the bullfights. A torero panicked when his bull got too close, and jumped behind the barricade to avoid its horns. The crowd jeered. “Hey señor,” Johnson shouted. “What are you afraid of that little bull for? You should see Willard!”

  That evening, with the fight just hours away, Damon Runyon wired the Baltimore American that a “fistic frenzy has now completely enveloped the Cubans. Nothing is discussed in the clubs and cafés but this fight. On every corner brown-skinned small boys are seen squaring off at one another by way of illustrating the American amusement.” Havana hotels were overbooked. Some fans were quartered in private homes. Hundreds more were still fighting to get onto ships at Key West for the ninety-mile voyage to Cuba. The Cuban Congress was suspended so that its members could be at ringside. And at the race track crews would work all night to construct a ring and set up wooden benches where horses had raced that afternoon.

  The sun was already hot and a band was playing ragtime from the covered grandstand as the first ticket buyers began looking for their seats at ten thirty on the morning of the fight. By one o’clock, when the contest was scheduled to begin, the ringside temperature would be nearing 105 degrees, Runyon reported:

  From the stands the scene unrolled like a panorama. Groups of soldiers and barefooted natives dotted the distant green landscape beyond the pagoda-like judge’s stand, while in the immediate foreground was a maze of bobbing straw hats, dotted here and there with black derbies and felt hats from the States.

  Herbert Bayard Swope wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

  Never in the history of the ring was there such a wild, hysterical, shrieking, enthusiastic crowd [as] the 20,000 men and women who begged Willard to wipe out the stigma that they and hundreds of thousands of others, especially in the south, believe rested on the white race through the negro holding the championship. Nowhere was the feeling stronger than in Cuba, whose race hatred is near the surface, although the negro is ostensibly received on a parity with the white.

  Hundreds clutched miniature white flags meant to symbolize their solidarity with the white challenger. Mounted cavalry and soldiers with carbines were on hand in case of trouble.

  At about twelve thirty, Johnson’s chief trainer, Tom Flanagan, escorted Lucille to her box seat. She wore a light summer dress and a white hat with a long feather. “There was a mad craning of necks,” the Los Angeles Examiner reported, “and someone yelled at Fred Mace, director of the motion pictures, but he only grinned and made no attempt to take the picture. ‘Where would I show it?’ he asked. Someone asked Lucille how she thought the fight would go. “I am absolutely confident that Jack will win. I don’t know in what round, but Jack told me he would knock out Willard before the twentieth and he keeps his word.”

  The buildup had seemed all too familiar to the sporting world. So did the first few rounds. Johnson had said he planned to take the heart out of the challenger from the opening bell, to show him he was just a beginner, and then put him out early. Everything seemed to go just as Johnson predicted it would. He befuddled and punished his big, awkward opponent in the first round, wanting to show him who was boss. “I can hit him any place at any time I want to,” he told his seconds after the bell. The second and third were more of the same. In the fourth, when Willard missed with a big clumsy right, Johnson laughed, slamming a right hand into Willard’s body. “You got to do better than that. Here’s the spot,” he said, tapping his own chin with his glove.

  In the fifth and sixth, Willard still looked “puzzled,” according to the New York Times. Johnson flew out of his corner in the seventh, apparently determined to end things. He drove the taller man back to the ropes and pinned him there, reaching up to rock his head back and forth again and again. Willard was beginning to show the evidence of his pummeling. His lip was bleeding. So was his cheek. The whiteness of his torso was blotched with red where Johnson’s fists had landed. But he was still standing when the bell rang, and Johnson was breathing hard.

  Willard took the initiative in the eighth and ninth, and for the first time backed the champion up. Johnson continued to land, but Willard was unaffected and he had begun to land as well, including a right hand to the body in the eighth that momentarily slowed the champion down. Toward the end of the tenth, ringsiders noticed that the champion’s mouth was bloody.

  “Johnson,” an American bellowed, “you’ll get yours today.”

  “Well,” Johnson shouted back. “There’s good money in it, isn’t there?”

  Cubans began to chant, “Kill the black bear!”

  Johnson took the tenth and easily won the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth. He ended the fifteenth with five hard rights in a row to Willard’s head. “What a grand old man!” he said after landing the last one.

  Willard was being outfought, but he was not being overwhelmed. And slowly, as the rounds stretched on in the fierce heat, his size and Johnson’s age began to tell. The champion was no longer smiling, no longer talking. It was harder and harder simply to reach his big opponent. Willard leaned his great weight on Johnson in the clinches and began to block more of his punches. By the twentieth, the pace had slowed so much that some in the crowd began to shout, “Get busy!”

  Johnson was still doing the most damage in the twenty-first, but Willard kept coming. As the champion stalked back to his corner he looked grim, and for the first time in his career his legs seemed unsteady. He slumped on his stool and asked Harry Frazee to bring Jack Curley to him. It was important, he said. Curley was still at the box office tallying the proceeds, but Frazee agreed to go get him.

  Johnson struggled through the next three rounds. The challenger was now often beating him to the punch. In the twenty-fifth, Willard landed a right hand above Johnson’s heart that made him grunt with pain and gasp for breath. When he tried to hold on, Willard shoved him back, working to wear him down, to keep him from getting any rest.

  By the end of the twenty-fifth, Jack Curley had made it to ringside. Johnson leaned down and whispered to him, “Jack, go take my wife away…. Tell her I’m awful weak and that I want her to leave.” Curley sent Johnson’s old acquaintance, the international sports promoter Richard Kegin, to Lucille’s box. She was already on her feet. “Johnson looked pitifully toward his wife,” the N
ew York Herald reporter wrote. “His expression was a hopeless one of despair and helplessness that those who saw it will never forget. It was as though Johnson had called aloud to his wife—‘The end has come. They’ve been clamoring for it this last five years. Now they’ve got me.’”

  Someone called out that Johnson had quit laughing. Johnson turned and winked. But he did not smile.

  The bell rang. He was slow getting off his stool. An eager Willard met him two thirds of the way across the ring and landed a long left to the face, then a hard right to the stomach. Johnson held on. Jack Welch separated the two men. Willard muscled Johnson toward his corner and slammed a left into his body that made the champion’s legs quiver. Then he feinted as if to hit him there again, and when Johnson lowered his hand to block it, Willard hurled an overhand right to his jaw. Johnson fell forward and clutched at Willard’s legs to keep from collapsing completely. The challenger kicked himself free. Johnson sprawled on his back.

  “Oh my God,” Lucille screamed.

  Johnson lay motionless, his right arm over his face.

  The crowd was on its feet. Welch began the count. Johnson did not move. Welch reached ten, and raised Willard’s hand in victory. Hundreds of spectators waved white handkerchiefs and flags in honor of the white man’s triumph. Some hurled their hats as high as they could. Others took off their coats, ripped them up the back, and tossed the pieces into the air.

  As Willard’s admirers climbed into the ring in celebration, Johnson’s seconds helped him to his feet. He seemed confused at first. “What’s the matter?” he asked, and made as if to go back at Willard. Sam McVey stopped him, patted him on the back, draped a towel over his head.

  It was all over.

  “Something approaching a race riot followed,” Damon Runyon wrote.

  “Thousands paraded the race track, chanting, ‘Viva El Bianco!’” while “blacks drew off in little groups.”