Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  He is training at the home of Gen. Alfredo Brecceda…. Despite all reports of his indolence, Mr. Johnson is in fine physical condition. He weighs 215 pounds and his wind is almost perfect…. His home, of the sort that one might find in the 1000 block on Lake Shore Drive, has become a social center. Already, Mrs. Johnson’s social secretary has been kept busy answering invitations for the Johnsons to accept dinner parties and theatrical engagements.

  At least at first, Mexicans did treat him as a celebrity, even as an honored guest. Some expatriate Americans did not. One hot afternoon in April, he and Lucille strolled into the House of Tiles, a fashionable restaurant run by a Californian named Walter Sanborn. The American waitress refused to take their order. The Johnsons stalked out and entered a restaurant down the street, where one of Johnson’s friends among the ruling generals happened to be dining. Johnson told him what had happened. Three hours later, the couple returned to Sanborn’s, accompanied by three generals in uniform. Everyone ordered ice cream. The generals and Lucille got theirs. The former champion did not. The soldiers berated Sanborn. He argued that Americans would no longer come to his restaurant if it were known that a Negro had been served there. The generals threatened to close him down. An angry crowd gathered. A lawyer raised his cane to strike the restaurant owner. Lucille stopped him. The police came. Sanborn gave in, shook Johnson’s hand—and personally brought him a dish of ice cream.

  Four days later, the Johnsons were having a late supper in another restaurant when a noisy delegation of businessmen from New Orleans stumbled in after a night on the town. One of them, a man named D. H. Moore, said loudly that no nigger could eat with white people where he came from. Gus Rhodes reported:

  Unfortunately for him, Jack overheard the remark and without further preliminary landed an uppercut on his chin. No arrests were made, as the champion was in a country where the color of a man’s skin is no bar to him receiving justice. Although D. H. Moore attempted to have Johnson arrested, he was only laughed at by the police and was told that any man would resent such an insult.

  Johnson had several fine-sounding schemes to make money in Mexico. He announced plans for two motion pictures, For the Love of the Flag and The Call of the Heart, in which he was to play a “Mexican adventurer in the old days on the Mexican border.” And he allowed a syndicate of real estate men to form the Jack Johnson Land Company and signed his name to a handbill addressed to “the Colored People of the United States,” promising a bright future as farmers in Mexico.

  You, who are lynched, tortured, mobbed, persecuted and discriminated against in the boasted land of liberty…. Own a home in Mexico. Here, one man is as good as another, and it is not your nationality that counts, but simply you.

  Rich, fertile land only a few miles from Mexico City … is now on sale for $5 an acre and up. The soil is very productive and capable of raising four crops a year. The climate is the best in the world, neither too warm nor too cold. Beautiful scenery enhances the lover of nature.

  Best of all, there is no race prejudice in Mexico, and severe punishment is meted out to those who discriminate against a man because of his color or race.*

  But as always, Johnson had to fall back on boxing to pay the bills. Also as always, trouble seemed to follow. He sold tickets to those who wanted to see him train—the old flying punching bag trick played well with Mexican fans who had never seen it before—and the promoters of his first exhibition on June 22 hoped it would spark interest in boxing all over the country. They even persuaded El Democrata to print the Marquess of Queensberry Rules to help people understand what was happening in the ring. But, nothing much did. Johnson’s opponent was an ex-soldier named William Hamilton, who fought as Captain Bob Roper and had had just one fight since leaving the army. Johnson toyed with him for ten rounds without throwing a single serious punch. Lucille was at ringside, El Democrata reported, and “don Jack, whenever he could in the clinches, cast loving and tender glances at his beautiful wife.” The crowd grew restless, then angry. They’d expected a knockout. Some became so vociferous the police had to be called in.

  A week or so later, Johnson made headlines again outside the ring. The businessmen who had paid his way to Mexico were now suing him for failing either to pay them back or to agree to engage in the serious contests they’d hoped to put on. The judge ruled in their favor and sent three officials to the Johnson home with instructions to seize the champion’s car as partial payment. Lucille saw them coming. She refused to hand over the keys to the car, ordered her servants to lock the doors and windows, and telephoned her husband. The officials called the police. Five officers turned up just as Johnson arrived with five friends. The police took a look at them and put in a call for armed reinforcements. Johnson tried to drive away. The police blocked him. Then, wrote a reporter for El Universal, “in the grand tradition of Hernán Cortés burning his ships on the beach at Veracruz 400 years earlier, he proceeded to rip out some essential parts of the motor, so the police would not be able to drive his car. They had to hire some laborers to drag it away.”

  Johnson was soon reduced to burlesque bullfights and meaningless exhibitions. Only one fight made news, and this time Johnson had nothing to do with it. On September 28, three thousand people paid their way into Mexico City’s bullfight arena to see him go six rounds with one of his old sparring partners, Kid Cutler. During one of the preliminaries a novice referee made a controversial call that inspired jeers from the crowd and a dressing-down by one of the ringside judges. As the opening bell of the main event rang and Johnson and Cutler advanced toward each other, two shots were fired at ringside. The humiliated and hot-tempered referee had borrowed a pistol from a friend and returned to shoot the judge who had dared criticize him. Police overpowered him. The exhibition went on.

  Meanwhile, back home, the heavyweight picture had changed. Jess Willard’s popularity had not lasted long past Havana. He continued to dislike boxing and to recoil from boxing fans. Money remained his sole motivator. He fired his manager, Tom Jones, rather than share profits with him, severed his connection with Curley and Frazee rather than pay them their commissions, and defended his title just once in four years, winning a newspaper decision against Frank Moran. He much preferred to earn his living touring the country in his own private Pullman with the 101 Ranch Wild West Show. But he had wanted one more big payday before he retired, and Jack Johnson must have been envious when he read that Tex Rickard had guaranteed Willard a record one hundred thousand dollars to fight young Jack Dempsey.

  The fight was scheduled for July 4, 1919, at Toledo, Ohio. Willard’s inactivity had left him overweight and out of shape. His opinion of his own skills was inflated, too. “There isn’t a man living who can hurt me, no matter where he hits me or how often he lands,” he said. “I am better today than when I restored the championship to the white race.” Willard supervised his own training to save money, had himself driven to and from his sparring sessions in a chauffeured town car, and remained so sure of victory he asked Rickard to provide him legal immunity in case he killed Dempsey, who stood several inches shorter and weighed some forty pounds less than he did. Even Dempsey’s father feared that his son would get hurt.

  He should have known better. He had once advised his boy to think of obstacles as stepping-stones; if he couldn’t get around them, “goddamit go through them,” and that was how he fought. Born in a log cabin near Manassa, Colorado, in 1895, the ninth of thirteen children, Dempsey had just one toy as a child: a wooden top whittled by his father. His mother hoped he’d be a boxer like her hero, John L. Sullivan. His oldest brother, Bernie—also a fighter, but cursed with a glass chin—was his trainer; he made the youngster chew pine pitch to strengthen his jaw and, to toughen his fists and face, had him soak them in buckets of beef brine hauled home from the butcher shop. Dempsey began fighting professionally at sixteen as “Kid Blackie,” flattening bullies and barflies in saloons for a hatful of change. His real first name was William, but when he graduated to small-t
own smokers in 1915 he renamed himself Jack Dempsey after a legendary Irish middleweight nicknamed “the Nonpareil.” Most boxers hope to demolish their opponents; Dempsey seemed bent on obliterating his. He fought from a crouch that made him look smaller than he was, but he came at his adversaries in furious rushes, teeth bared. He could hit hard with either hand and from any angle (including from behind, whenever he could get away with it). Such niceties as retreating to a neutral corner after knocking your opponent down were still years away, and Dempsey was especially effective at standing over his opponents and hitting them on the rise.

  Even he was intimidated at first by Willard’s size—“God, he was big!” Dempsey remembered thinking before the bell rang at Toledo—but size turned out not to matter. Dempsey tore Willard’s title from him. He knocked the champion down seven times; cracked four of his ribs; knocked out six teeth; splintered his jaw in seven places. Willard quit on his stool rather than answer the bell for the fourth round. As he stumbled out of the ring he was heard muttering to himself over and over again, “I have a hundred thousand dollars and a farm in Kansas.”

  Jack Dempsey now occupied the stage Jack Johnson had once had all to himself. In a January 1920 interview with the New York Times, Johnson argued that since Willard had not really defeated him in Havana, Dempsey’s victory at Toledo had meant nothing; he would never be the real champion until he beat Jack Johnson. Dempsey and his manager, Doc Kearns, both insisted that he would never fight a black challenger. But Johnson had heard that before. He knew time was against him, but he was now eager, he said, to find some way to go home, serve his time, and then shame Dempsey into getting into the ring with him before he fought anyone else. Friends approached Charles F. Clyne, now the United States district attorney in Chicago, with a message from Johnson: he was willing to come home if he could have thirty-six hours to arrange bail and confer with his attorneys before he was arrested. Clyne answered that the only basis on which he could proceed was “unconditional surrender”; Johnson would have to submit to arrest the moment he stepped onto American soil.

  Johnson was coming closer to taking that step. In late February, he and his party left Mexico City and headed north, toward the border town of Tijuana, where the son-in-law of the governor of Baja California hoped to make some money in the fight game. According to Johnson’s own account, Yaqui Indians held up his train in Sonora—and allowed it to move on unmolested once they realized who was aboard. At the Pacific port of Mazatlán, they bought passage on a gasoline-driven launch being used to smuggle fifty Chinese into the United States. It skirted the coast for nearly a thousand miles, buffeted by storms. Johnson and Rhodes feared for their lives. Lucille remained stoical. “I never knew such gameness in man or woman,” Johnson wrote. They finally entered the mouth of the Colorado and made their way upriver to an unmarked landing. The Chinese left the ship and set out on foot for the Texas border. Johnson and his companions got off, too, only to suffer what he called a “regrettable accident”: somehow, his revolver discharged, badly wounding his nephew in the arm. They managed to telephone Tijuana for a car and got Rhodes to a hospital before he bled to death.

  On January 16, the Eighteenth Amendment had gone into effect in the United States, and transformed the dusty little border town of Tijuana into a pleasure resort to rival Chicago’s Levee District or any of the other segregated vice zones with which Jack Johnson had once been familiar. Five hundred to a thousand cars rattled across the wooden International Bridge into Tijuana every day, filled with thirsty American sports looking for a drink and a good time. “Imagine a wide main street after the old Western style, or the Spanish plaza of colonial pueblos,” wrote a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

  On either side is a succession of saloons, dance halls, moving picture barns and gambling dens. In other places, not so largely advertised, one may cook a pill or otherwise dally through the lotus hours. The air reeks of dust, warm humanity, toilet perfume, stale tobacco and that curious congenial aroma which makes the camel twitch its nostrils afar. And also the welkin rings and vibrates with the laughter and chatter of abnormal good spirits, the notes of an occasional fracas, the whirl of the roulette wheels, the clatter of the little ball seeking its owner’s salvation, the musically liquid swickety-swish-swish of the Great American cocktail, the tap-tap-tap of hammers where new joy palaces are being shot up overnight to accommodate the business of this prohibition boomtown, and, above all, a continuous jangle of jazz—the smiting of cymbals, the raucous clatter of cowbells, the frenzied runs and trills of the automatic piano, and the voice of the saxophone.

  Tijuana seemed made for Jack Johnson. He haunted the racetrack, knocked over carefully selected opponents in the bullring, and presided over a ramshackle saloon and gambling palace—he was either a greeter or a part-owner, sources differ—called the Main Event. “He struts about like a chanticleer in his own barnyard,” the Times continued,

  expecting homage from all strangers and bestowing his famous smile on all who come up to shake hands. A large revolver slung beneath his sweater in front of his left hip is one of his proudest possessions, and although he insists he is no bad man, he likes to create that atmosphere.

  Old friends came to see him, including a flamboyant onetime Chicago alderman named Tom Carey, who had represented the stockyards district for many years. After making millions as a banker, brick manufacturer, and owner of the Hawthorne Race Track, he had retired with his wife to Los Angeles, but he remained a dedicated sport and was a frequent visitor to the Main Event. Johnson badly wanted to go home to Chicago, he told Carey, but he didn’t have any way of raising money for his bond. Carey was reassuring and expansive. Johnson was welcome to borrow up to fifty thousand dollars to get himself out of trouble. Money had always talked in Chicago. He knew a good lawyer, too. Johnson took Carey up on his offer and began negotiating his surrender by telephone with federal and state officials in California. He wanted to go straight to Chicago, he said; he wanted a Negro deputy sheriff to escort him; and he wanted no “indignities,” no handcuffs, no strong-arm stuff. No one made him any promises.

  Johnson was ready to take his chances, but he insisted on surrendering at a time of his own choosing, no one else’s. On June 5, a Tijuana judge ordered him to leave Mexican territory within thirty days. He said he’d cross on July the fifth, then the ninth, then the fifteenth. He didn’t leave then, either. A newspaperman asked him why he’d delayed his departure so many times.

  “Well,” he said, “the word was passed out that I had to leave Mexico by July 5 and I want to show them all that I don’t have to leave until I get ready.”

  He was ready at last on the morning of July 20. Lucille and Gus Rhodes had gone ahead and were waiting for him in Los Angeles. Sheriff John Cline of Los Angeles picked him up at the battered desert cottage in which he and Lucille had been living and started walking with him toward the customshouse at the border. Johnson asked to stop at the Main Event for one last drink. “Several white women there drank with him at the bar,” the Los Angeles Times noted, “wishing him much good luck and regretting that he was leaving. The only time Johnson lost his famous L’il Arthur smile was when he started away from the crowd there. He applied his handkerchief vigorously to his eyes, saying it was hard to leave friends.”

  Crowds were waiting on both sides of the border. Johnson hesitated until he was sure all the motion picture cameras were trained on him, then stepped across the line and shook hands with the federal agents who were waiting for him. “The center of the stage or none for him,” the Times wrote.

  Deputy U.S. Marshal George Cooley read out the warrant for his arrest. Johnson listened, asked to read it himself, then handed it back and walked to one of several waiting automobiles. There were no handcuffs. “I’m back home,” Johnson said, “and it sure feels mighty good. It is home sweet home for me and no one who has never been away can know how good it feels to get back again, whatever is in the future.”

  Cline and Cooley drove him first t
o San Diego, where he was arraigned and bond was set at ten thousand dollars, then on to Los Angeles, where he was to spend the night in the county jail before leaving the next morning for Chicago. He was hungry when he got there, and two accommodating deputies walked him down the street to a restaurant, where he ordered two plates of pork and beans, downed his first glass of near-beer with a shudder, and asked after old L.A. friends.

  A big crowd gathered outside, then followed along as, juggling two bars of toilet soap, he strolled back to jail. There, his belongings were taken from him—$463 in cash and a pair of red dice—and he was told to have a seat in the general waiting room until he got his cell assignment. “Johnson sprawled down in a seat,” a reporter noted, “pulling the cuffs of his shirt so that the stripes would show, balanced his … straw hat on his head, gave his kid gloves an extra twist, and took his ease.”

  When the deputies finally ushered him out of the room toward his cell, the Times noted, “the colored visitors crowded around him, everybody wanting to take the hand that had put the kibosh on Jim Jeffries.” So many people stood around outside to peer through his cell window that he finally called for the blinds to be drawn.*

  He boarded a train with two federal agents the next morning. Initial plans had called for him to take the southern route through Texas. He had protested, fearing that someone might board the train and attack him, and the government had agreed. Crowds waited to cheer him at every stop—“It was a memorable journey,” he remembered—and thousands gathered in Chicago to welcome him home to the South Side. He never got there. Deputy marshals, fearing trouble, flagged down the California Limited at Joliet, Illinois, and locked him up in the Will County Jail on July 22.