Not long after Johnson got to Leavenworth, he welcomed an old acquaintance to the prison. Melville Butler was a jug-eared stickup man and former cheese salesman from Indiana who, like the ex-champion, was beginning a one-year sentence for white slavery.* The two men had met somewhere in Mexico, where Johnson had told so many gaudy stories about himself that Butler asked why he hadn’t published an autobiography for American readers. Never had the time, the ex-champion had answered then. They had nothing but time now, Butler said. Why didn’t they try to produce a book together? Johnson liked the idea and began jotting down in pencil in his big self-confident scrawl what he remembered best about his boyhood and early ring career. Butler corrected his sometimes wayward grammar and spelling but was careful not to alter Johnson’s distinctive voice. “I have used his expressions,” Butler wrote. “The prize ring is not an elocution contest…. My story is [meant] for the virile, the red-blooded.” The little heap of pages in Butler’s cell grew slowly, but Johnson lost interest once he had described in loving detail just how he’d beaten Tommy Burns, and the manuscript was never finished.†
Johnson had plenty of other things to do to fill the time. Over the years, nothing had amused skeptical white reporters more than his occasional claims that he was an inventor as well as an athlete; the idea of a negro inventor—especially one who was also a prizefighter—struck white newspapermen and a good many of their readers as inherently ludicrous. At various times, he said he’d been working on a new kind of coupler for railroad cars, a flying machine, even a treatment for tuberculosis. Johnson was not above exaggerating his accomplishments, and no evidence survives for any of those claims, but in the spring of 1921 “JOHN ARTHUR JOHNSON, a citizen of the United States, and a resident of Leavenworth, in the county of Leavenworth and State of Kansas,” applied for two patents—for an improved automobile wrench and a “theft-preventing device for vehicles”—and was awarded them: Nos. 1,413,121 and 1,438,709.*
He also seemed to have plenty of time to get to know other prisoners, both black and white. Perhaps his closest friend was a black Kentuckian named Roy Tyler with whom he sparred, worked out, and played countless hours of dominoes. Tyler was one of sixty-eight soldiers sentenced to life for taking part in the Houston Riot, a 1917 shoot-out between black troops of the 24th U.S. Infantry, angered by their treatment at the hands of white policemen, and white citizens of the city. He also played baseball so well with Leavenworth’s black team, the Booker T. Washingtons, that in 1925 he was paroled to the care of Rube Foster, for whom he played parts of three seasons. Since Johnson was a friend of both men, it seems likely that it was he who suggested that Foster take responsibility for the younger man.
Certainly it would have been like him. “He was a good friend to have,” a white inmate remembered, “regardless of creed or color. While in prison he expended hundreds of dollars in charitable acts. Many a black boy, and many a white boy, would have left Leavenworth friendless and penniless had it not been for the philanthropy of this gladiator of the dusk.”
“Nothing seemed to trouble him,” an inmate who arrived after Johnson had left remembered being told by others who had known him. “He would get as many as six and seven letters daily from as many woman friends and many more from sharpies, promoters, and leeches. He’d read them intently. Then, with the air of a man tearing up an advertisement, he pulled them to pieces and threw the scraps away, always grinning to himself.”
He didn’t throw them all away. Every couple of days, Johnson visited the record clerk’s office, where a forger named Ray Perry acted as his typist in exchange for handfuls of the fat cigars Johnson asked his friends to send him, fifty at a time. Johnson’s Leavenworth file is thick with correspondence.
He had three main agendas while in prison: to make sure his wife and family were cared for in his absence; to see if he could find some legal way to get out of prison; and to rekindle public interest in his career so that he could return to the ring and start making big money again the moment he got out.
After Tiny Johnson died, the handsome Wabash Avenue home her son had bought for her with his winnings was sold. Lucille, Jack’s sister Jennie, and her son, Gus Rhodes, all now lived in far humbler rented quarters at 3642 Grand Boulevard. Johnson’s first task was to find some way to keep them all afloat. On November 1, 1920, he signed a two-year contract with a new manager, a Kansas City, Missouri, lawyer and entrepreneur named Lawrence K. Goldman, who was so pleased with the terms of their agreement, he spelled them out in Billboard. He would represent Johnson in “every field,” he said. “Johnson will work for no one else.” Goldman planned to organize a “great athletic carnival and, with Jack as the chief attraction, tour the country as the first step of Johnson’s coming back.” Then he would try to arrange a fight with Dempsey. When Johnson was not on the road, he was to manage Goldman’s Lincoln Theater in Kansas City, “said to be the largest colored motion picture theater in the United States.” Johnson didn’t argue. All he cared about for the moment was that Goldman was willing to advance him a weekly check to send home to Chicago.
Then he set about trying to get himself either paroled or pardoned. With his friend Denver Dickerson heading the Federal Parole Board, Johnson was optimistic about his chances. He asked Gus Rhodes to see if he could enlist Clarence Darrow in his cause. When that didn’t work out, Goldman armed a black lawyer from Topeka named Elisha J. Scott with copies of Johnson’s trial transcript and sent him to Washington to speak with Federal Pardon Attorney Robert H. Turner.* The attorney was authorized to say that if Johnson was pardoned, he would willingly pay his thousand-dollar fine. “Scott will win sure,” Johnson wrote to a friend; the attorney general himself, A. Mitchell Palmer, had agreed to see him.
Meanwhile, Johnson set about seeing what he could do from inside prison walls to restore his reputation as a fighter. Within days of his arrival he sent a wire to Lucille asking Gus to send him “boxing gloves, punching bag and arm bracelets to pull against horses. Need them very bad.” He worked out with Roy Tyler, and on October 21 entertained inmates, prison officials, and a delegation of visiting Shriners by boxing three two-minute rounds with fellow inmates. He toyed with his two black opponents—a brash youngster named Malcolm Brockenbrough, who had challenged the ex-champion the day he arrived at the penitentiary, and Henry “Overseas” Jackson, a left-handed pitcher for the Booker T. Washingtons who, Johnson said, was a good enough boxer to beat Georges Carpentier—but he knocked out the white one, an Irish-born army deserter named Thomas Scullion, serving a life sentence for killing two Frenchmen.
The Shriners were thrilled. So was the warden, who asked Johnson to organize another “boxfest” for Thanksgiving Day. Prisoners would fight one another in the preliminaries, but in the main event this time, Johnson would face two professionals in front of a big crowd that would include sportswriters for midwestern dailies as well as inmates.
That was just what Johnson wanted. He was forty-two years old. American writers hadn’t seen him perform in the ring since his loss to Jess Willard in 1915, and reports of his barnstorming through Europe and Mexico had only further damaged his standing. This was his opportunity to begin to restore it, to show the world he was still capable of taking on the best of the current crop of heavyweights. To help get him into shape, he hired Billy McClain, an old friend, minstrel star, and sometime trainer.
But as always, Johnson saw no reason to take unnecessary chances. It had been left to him to pick his two opponents. He did so carefully. One would be “Topeka Jack” Johnson, a slender ex-sparring partner and professional baseball player, with whom he planned to go through the motions to show off his old defensive skills. But he needed to seem powerful as well as scientific, capable of not just avoiding trouble but dealing out real punishment. To be sure that he made just the right impression, he needed a cooperative opponent. Frank Owens was his choice, a formidable-looking but minimally talented black heavyweight from Chicago. Owens seemed to offer no serious opposition—a few weeks aft
er facing Johnson he would be savaged by an obscure second-rater named Rough House Wilson. But just to be sure there would be no embarrassment on his big day, Johnson sent his wife a coded message: “Tell Gus to … locate [Owens] immediately and find out if everything is O.K.” By “everything is O.K.” he meant that he wanted his nephew to ask Owens if, for a price, he would be willing to look good but lie down, just as he had wanted to be sure that everything was O.K. with Frank Moran before their bout in Paris.
Owens was agreeable. Everything was O.K.
A day or two before Thanksgiving, Lucille had a dream in which her husband hadn’t managed to get back in shape and got hurt. She wrote to him about it. “Nothing wrong with me,” he wrote back. “Feeling fine. Sorry you had bad dreams…. Everything is fine for Thursday. Sorry you can’t come to see me, but you will understand—no ladies admitted…. I’m going to try and make this the greatest fight and exhibition that I’ve ever had.”
The inmates enjoyed a big Thanksgiving dinner on November 25. Then more than a thousand of them filed into the prison yard, where they found three hundred outsiders, including a row of reporters, already in their seats. They enjoyed the preliminaries. The prison band played between bouts. But, as Joseph A. Kerwin, the editor of the prison paper, wrote, everyone was there to see Jack Johnson in action. At the first sight of him, Kerwin noted, a big cheer went up from his fellow inmates; for perhaps the only time in his life, the fans at ringside that afternoon saw Jack Johnson as one of them.
There comes Jack now. He looks mighty good in that flowing bathrobe and skullcap. He has conditioned himself as best he could…. He weighs two hundred and fifteen after three weeks’ training.
Take this INSIDE tip from us…. Jack Johnson is not all in.
Following Jack is that Grand Old Man, Frank Owens, who has come all the way from Chicago to give our lads a show…. He’s going to try to stay six rounds with Jack. Frank weighs two hundred twenty-seven.
Into the ring they get and the timekeeper pulls the gong….
Man what a scrap! Every time Frank would make a lead, Jack would stop him with one of these famous counters and uppercut. Jack kept his glove in Frank’s face—oh, CONSTANTLY! In the second round, Frank let one go and caught Jack on the portside of the jaw. Things got all mixed up right then! Jack don’t like to get walloped on the jaw. Frank tried to hunt cover, but the great, great sky was all around him…. He had to take Jack’s comeback. The canvas was the closest cover—and Frank took that—for the count of eight. Getting back perpendicular seemed easy for the big fellow, for he got right into the way of another haymaker a moment after, went down, came back quickly—and then tried the whole thing over again, for fear that some of us missed seeing the first two. Jack was fighting a cautious battle the while, never letting Frank get settled for another stinger. But the more that Jack let Frank have, the more Frank came back for more. Talk about your scrappers taking punishment—well, Frank Owens deserves a special medal. Johnson’s uppercuts in the clinches sounded as though he had broken all Frank’s jawbones, but Owens just grinned and came back for the same dose in the same way. He went down for the count twelve times in the five rounds of fighting, and every time you could read, “For heaven’s sake, are you back again?” on Johnson’s face. A body blow and a cross to the jaw finally put Frank out of the running for the big count. But in his defeat he became a popular hero with the fight fans here. They admire him for the sacrifice he made for our entertainment.
The four-round exhibition with “Topeka” Jack Johnson, one of Arthur’s old training camp warhorses, showed what Jack knew about the scientific side of the boxing game. He toyed with “Topeka” almost at will, and showed us all the probable openings a fighter exposes for the final dreamland touch. “Topeka” weighed two hundred ten and showed speed and the powers of assimilation. He proved himself a good receiver-general.
Are we thankful? YOU HEAR US. WE ARE!
Johnson was thankful, too. It had all gone perfectly. “Hello dear,” he wrote to Lucille. “Everything went lovely…, had a fine show. Was sorry that you weren’t there…. Lovely crowd, sport writers and papers were here. Sending you clippings.” The clippings were proof that his ploy had worked: “It was the opinion of newspaper men and boxing critics at the ringside,” the New York Times reported, “that Johnson is in very good condition and still retains much of his punching power…. At the finish of the bouts he seemed as fresh as when he started.”
That was precisely what Johnson wanted the boxing world to believe. “I am filled with power and strength, not dope,” he would declare in an open letter to the manager and promoter Alfred Lippe. “If I get any stronger I’m liable to bust. I am just like T.N.T. and ready for the time to put the fuse to it and let the public see what I can do. I cannot see Jack Dempsey as champion. I can beat all the Dempseys that ever put on the gloves.”*
Then, more good news. Elisha Scott’s trip to Washington appeared to have paid off. The Federal Pardon Attorney had ruled that Johnson could not officially apply for a pardon until late January, when he had served half his sentence, but Scott believed clemency was possible if he could prove his client’s claim that providing Belle Schreiber with rail fare to Chicago from Pittsburgh had been a “purely philanthropic act.” Meanwhile, the Leavenworth parole board was meeting in early January. Johnson would have a chance to make his case in person. He wrote Lucille on New Year’s Eve that he hoped to be reunited with her soon, “and then we will continue our happiness.” Johnson was at his most charming and persuasive at the hearing. The board unanimously recommended parole. Warden Anderson and Deputy Warden Fletcher sent telegrams to the attorney general urging that the ex-champion be placed on the New Year’s list of parolees. Denver Dickerson agreed. Only A. Mitchell Palmer’s approval was needed.
But functionaries at the Justice Department, still smarting at Johnson’s charges of bribery and still outraged that he had slept with white women, determined to sabotage him. Asked for a straightforward outline of the case to accompany the parole petition when it went to the attorney general, they produced instead a shrill document filled with fresh and wholly unsubstantiated charges. Johnson had “abducted” Lucille Cameron, its authors said, knowing that he hadn’t. They charged him with kidnapping another woman in June 1911, at a time when they should have known he was on his way to England with his wife. Without offering a scrap of evidence, they claimed that because of his “mania,” there were “30 or 40 young white girls who fell victim to his vicious practices without the interstate feature.” And as an afterthought, they alleged that while in Mexico he had sought to incite “riots among Negroes” in Texas and Louisiana, a false allegation carefully calculated to prejudice Palmer, whose obsession with supposed radicals and revolutionaries had brought about the arrest of some four thousand men and women, most of them innocent of any crime other than political dissent.
The Bureau of Investigation’s report carried the day. On January 21, 1921, Palmer overruled the board’s recommendation. Parole was denied. Johnson would have to serve out his sentence.
Two months later, his hopes rose again. The Wilson administration left office in March and Palmer went with it, replaced by the new Republican attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty. Republicans were still thought more likely to be sympathetic to Negro grievances than were Democrats. If Daugherty could be persuaded to review the case, Johnson wrote to a friend, it would be obvious to him “what an unfair trial they gave me. I am sure our Attorney General will be fair.” The problem was to get him to look at the evidence. An old friend and Harlem casino owner named Dick Ellis assured Johnson that two “influential friends” close to the new Warren Harding administration would be happy to lobby Daugherty on his behalf—provided the money was right. Johnson agreed to provide it—and fired Lawrence Goldman and Elisha Scott.
Ellis’ friends took the money but got nowhere. Then Denver Dickerson lost his job, replaced by Vice President Calvin Coolidge’s brother-in-law, the Reverend Heber Votaw. Johns
on was now without any strings to pull, and when the Chicago sport Bill Bottoms wired Johnson in late April saying he had a friend who could arrange his release in ten days for just $250, Johnson wearily turned him down: “Cannot see my way clear. Too many have failed.”
The former champion was disappointed at his failure to win a parole or pardon, but he couldn’t help but be pleased that his impressive Thanksgiving showing had let loose a flood of proposals from old friends and eager strangers, all hoping to cash in on his comeback once he was free. “From Jack Johnson’s correspondence,” the New Era reported, “you can bank on it that he will have all the mitt business he can care for when he’s released.”
There were offers from would-be promoters in El Paso, Philadelphia, Omaha, Havana. The Committee of American Woodmen of St. Louis wanted him to lecture on his travels overseas. The most promising offer came from Elmer Tenley in New York, a guarantee of thirty thousand dollars plus 35 percent of the gross for a Jersey City fight with Johnson’s former sparring partner Harry Wills, who was now the leading black challenger for Jack Dempsey’s title. Johnson eagerly agreed.
But that did not prevent him from simultaneously signing up with others, including Bill Bottoms, who advanced him $2,000 with a promise of $1,500 more for a series of Chicago exhibitions in the basement of his Dreamland Café. He also accepted a $1,000 advance against $7,500 from W. A. Andlauer, a Kansas City, Missouri photographer, to star in a motion picture, The Heart of Jack Johnson. Andlauer’s attorney explained what his client had in mind to Warden Anderson:
The idea is that a young man who is rather a physical weakling goes to Johnson, who has a gymnasium as a physical trainer, to be coached in boxing so that he can “lick” a rival in his love affairs, who it seems is, through “bullying” the boy, taking his sweetheart away from him. He later succeeds in “licking” his rival, through Johnson’s training, and later marries the girl, at which time Johnson returns him the check he gave in payment for the training as a wedding present.
Unforgivable Blackness Page 55
