Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  We called on the old champion at the offices of his agents in a building way over in the West Forties. He sat in a swivel chair behind a desk, gesturing every now and then with a big, banded cigar, closing his eyes to listen, opening them wide when he talked. His plans are uncertain, but he may go into vaudeville as he did some years back, or he may fight some more obscure fights as he has been doing off and on for several years, for small profits in the West and Southwest. He won a match in 1926 but was knocked out the following year by an unknown colored boxer named Bearcat Wright of Omaha, tasting the bitter cup that he himself handed to Fitzsimmons in 1907 and the groggy Jeffries in 1910. He still thinks he could lick Tunney, and that Dempsey would be easy. (“Dempsey is one o’ dem slashin’ boys, and de slashin’ boys is mah meat.”) Corbett is the only white heavyweight for whom he has any real respect and the only one he calls “Mistah.” It saddens him to recall that Mistah Corbett picked Jeffries to win on that Fourth of July nearly twenty years ago.

  Some people have the notion that Johnson is still legally banned from America. He gave himself up in 1920, however, and served ten months in Leavenworth for violation of the Mann Act, after evading sentence for seven years, living abroad. He is free to come and go. The churches and the women’s clubs, which made his heyday miserable, have forgotten him. The death of his first white wife, and his subsequent marriage to another white woman, are vague memories. Proof of this was given, not long ago, when Johnson was cheered by the clergy at a general conference of the Methodist Church in Kansas City at which he denounced liquor saying, “To serve God you must train the mind as well as the soul.” His Café de Champion in Chicago was padlocked some years ago.

  Johnson enjoys recalling the old times. He loves to talk of his favorite city, Budapest, and of the time at the start of the war when the Germans did not molest several trunks containing all his wife’s sables. During the war, he says, he did secret-service work in Spain, at the request of a Major Lang, U.S.A. Of his “deeper life” he is proud and sensitive. “Ah am,” he says, “a very tendah man.” He likes to display his hands and face to show how unscarred they are by battle. There is no mark on his head. His skull was X-rayed in San Francisco eighteen years ago. It took five and a half minutes for the rays to go through, as against the customary five to fifteen seconds. The bone was found to be from a half to three-quarters of an inch thick, which is thicker than the skull of an ox. Surgeons said that a blow which would fell a steer would simply jar Mr. Johnson.*

  We were going to ask him about the time Ketchel knocked him down but thought better of it. Anyway, the old boy probably remembers only that a few seconds later he knocked the gallant middleweight into the next county. We inquired about Mr. Johnson’s literary tastes, and he said that he enjoys the books of Richard Harding Davis. Apparently he has never heard Paul Robeson sing. At any rate, he told us he had never met him. We found ourselves on dangerous ground when we brought up the name of [master tap dancer] Bill Robinson. Jack’s eyes had been closed, but they opened quickly and shone like the headlights of a Pierce Arrow. “Nevah mention Bill Robinson in the same breath with Jack Johnson,” he warned us. “When he takes off his dancin’ shoes he is through, whereas Ah am a deep an’ culluhful personality.”

  Jack Johnson is living up on 148th Street now, no longer in the magnificent style of the years of his grandeur. He once had an apartment in New York that you reached by walking over an expensive, deep and colorful crimson plush carpet. Legend has it that the day Johnson took up residence there, the carpet was stretched all the way out to the curb. But those were the great days of the dimming past, the days when Li’l Arthuh owned a white Mercedes racing car, hired white people to serve him, and was feared by every white heavyweight prize-fighter in the world.

  In December, Johnson was filmed leading an orchestra at a place called the Checkers Club in Harlem. He is in evening clothes, wearing patent leather shoes with velvet bows. He speaks directly to the camera, declaiming in his now-familiar short phrases.

  Ladies and gentlemen,

  I have been requested by many

  To tell you just how

  I knocked out

  So many of my oh-pponents.

  As far as I am concerned that day is past.

  I have a new way of knocking them out

  And I will show you.

  Then the eleven-piece band breaks into “Tiger Rag” and Johnson pretends to lead it, baton in hand. The musicians seem amiably disposed toward him but pay little actual attention as he begins a lumbering soft-shoe and manages to end with an uppercut more or less at the same moment they reach the tune’s climax. The band and the club lasted just long enough for Johnson to give his profession as “orchestra leader” when the police pulled him over in January 1931 for racing down Central Park West at forty-four miles an hour.

  Two months later, he was back barnstorming the Midwest with Brad Simmons, who had beaten him the previous year. In Tulsa, Simmons outpointed him again in a ten-round contest that left Johnson gasping for air. That evidently didn’t go down well with the former champion, who must have spoken sharply to his overeager employee; according to The Ring, six days later in Wichita, Kansas, “Jack Johnson made a few voodoo passes at Brad Simmons in the second round … and Brad swooned and passed out.” The Wichita Eagle agreed: “Nothing of the great master of other days was apparent in the quick fiasco which ended when Brad Simmons … curled up in the second round…. Johnson was puffing with exertion…. Someone said afterwards that Simmons didn’t feel well and quit. No one gave much credence to the Johnson knockout punch.” Two days later, the pair were barred from ever fighting again in Topeka.

  Summer 1932 found him living in Los Angeles, running a place called the Club Alabam, next to the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue. He got a few days’ work in Hollywood as a bit player alongside Tom Sharkey and the wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko in a Jack Oakie comedy, Madison Square Garden. In its climactic brawl, in which Sharkey, Zbyszko, and other former ring stars polish off gangsters trying to take over the fight game, Johnson alone never throws a punch. A quarter of a century after Reno, Hollywood evidently still thought it best not to let Jack Johnson be seen hitting a white man onscreen.

  He continued to fight occasional exhibitions up and down the West Coast. He went three rounds at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles with Ernest Bendy, a promising young black heavyweight who called himself Dynamite Jackson; toyed with Chief White Horse at Oakland; outclassed Bob Frazie in Seattle. But when he signed to face a more serious-seeming opponent, the six-foot-eight-inch “Portuguese Giant,” Joe Santa, the California boxing commission refused to sanction the bout. Letting Johnson fight someone like Santa, its chairman said, would be “a crying shame. We gave Johnson an exhibition permit on the understanding that he was to go in with the right kind of sparring partners. We won’t let him be matched with young men who might like to make a reputation by knocking him out. The title he once held should protect him against that.” Johnson demanded a hearing in Sacramento, only to be told that his age alone made him “physically unfit” to fight seriously in California. “Physically unfit!” he said. “Why man alive there isn’t a man on the board nor in this city of Sacramento who is in better shape physically than I. I may be a little round around the belly, but I’m hard as a rock.” The commission was unmoved.

  The Club Alabam soon went under—Johnson’s fondness for locking the doors in the early morning hours and letting everyone inside be his guest hadn’t helped receipts—and when the staff sued him for back wages, he fled the state rather than appear in court to answer the charges.

  In December of 1932, Johnson and Irene set sail for Europe. He planned to appear in a series of exhibitions in Paris, he told the press, then head for Berlin, where he said he had had an offer to open a boxing school.

  On January 2, he sparred one round each with two young European heavyweights, Maurice Griselle and Ernst Guehring in the French capital, and was given “a tremendous ovation as he left th
e ring.” Afterward, the Johnsons headed for Bricktop’s, the elegant cabaret run by the entertainer Ada Smith, who’d received her first big break at his Café de Champion in Chicago. “You had to come up a flight of stairs to get into Bricktop’s,” she remembered, “but you still weren’t inside once you got there.

  First, the big patent-leather curtains had to be parted. Whenever they [were,] everyone in the room would turn around to see who it was. On the night that they parted and Jack Johnson stood there with his last wife … the room went into an uproar. There was no mistaking those broad shoulders and that big wonderful smile of the Champ. I flew over to him and threw my arms around him …

  He came in night after night. No one ever created the commotion Jack Johnson did when the curtains parted and he stood there. His prestige in the world at large may have dropped, but Jack the Champ still stopped traffic out on the street and up in Bricktop’s. People like Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguette would come into my place asking if Jack Johnson was coming in…. Even Cole Porter, who never got excited over nothing or no one, watched those curtains … to see if Jack Johnson was coming through them….

  Jack and his wife came to my house nearly every night for dinner…. One night … my butler called me aside and said, “Madame Bricktop, Monsieur Johnson is on his fourth or fifth chicken.” I told him to tell the cook to give the Champ fourteen chickens if he wanted them….

  If anybody ever made me feel proud of who and what I am, it was Jack. He bowed to no one, yet everything was “yes,” “no,” “please,” and “thank you.” His behavior only made stronger my belief that you’re either born with “it,” or you’re not. Greatness comes from knowing who he is, being satisfied with nothing but the best, and still behaving like a warm, gracious human being.

  The Johnsons evidently never got much beyond Paris. Adolf Hitler was within weeks of winning power in Germany, and even Jack Johnson may have viewed the prospects for a black-run boxing enterprise in Berlin under the Nazis less than bright.

  Johnson was back in Chicago in the summer of 1934, appearing in Dave Barry’s Garden of Champions, a sort of sideshow at the Century of Progress International Exposition organized by a veteran referee to compete with such attractions as the Midget Village, Sally Rand’s Balloon Dance, and the Aunt Jemima Cabin. For a dollar, children could throw punches at Jack Johnson while he ducked and laughed and popped his eyes. One evening, he fought an exhibition there against Tom Sharkey, whose sparring partner he had briefly been back in 1901. It was supposed to be a nonviolent sparring session, but the old brawler was incapable of pretending. He rushed at Johnson, murder in his eyes. Nothing much had changed in thirty-three years. Sharkey still couldn’t hit him. Johnson tied him up, and winked at the audience. “What you aim to do to me, Tom?” he asked, grinning and pinioning Sharkey’s arms. “What you tryin’ to do?”

  Johnson took off the evening of July 4. A twenty-year-old Negro named Joe Louis from Detroit was making his professional debut at Bacon’s Casino, and Johnson didn’t want to miss it. Even he now knew that his ring career was over. The novelty of seeing him onstage had long since worn off, and vaudeville was dying, in any case. None of his other moneymaking enterprises had paid off. He needed a meal ticket, and if this young Golden Gloves winner from Detroit was as good as people said he was, he might be just what Johnson had been looking for.

  Born Joseph Louis Barrow on May 13, 1914, almost a year after Jack Johnson’s flight to Canada, Louis was an Alabama sharecropper’s son raised by his mother in a Detroit neighborhood called Black Bottom. His managers were two Negro real estate men: John Roxborough and Julian Black. Both were streetwise—Roxborough was also a successful numbers operator; Black ran a casino—but neither knew much about the fight game. For boxing expertise, they’d turned to a veteran Chicago-based trainer, Jack Blackburn.

  Jack Johnson hated Blackburn. Blackburn, a wiry, hot-tempered, hard-drinking man with a razor scar across one cheek, hated Johnson. Blackburn said it all began in early 1908 when Johnson had swaggered into a Philadelphia gym with several admiring women and called for someone to spar with him. Blackburn stepped forward, though he was only a lightweight, and, as he told it, managed to bewilder Johnson with his skill and speed, bloodying his nose and parrying everything the increasingly embarrassed heavyweight threw back at him.* Johnson left the gym in a rage. The following year, Blackburn found himself behind bars for manslaughter—he had killed a former friend and wounded the man’s mistress in a street fight—and asked Johnson to come see him in jail and help raise money to mount a legal appeal. Johnson took pleasure in turning him down. “Let the son of a bitch stay in jail,” he said.

  Blackburn was pardoned in 1914, but while he kept fighting and mostly winning for nine more years, he never managed to reestablish himself as a serious contender. As a trainer, he worked almost exclusively with white fighters and was reluctant at first to take on a Negro novice, even one as promising as Louis. Colored heavyweights were a dime a dozen, he said. Just as in Johnson’s day, there was nowhere for them to go. And, Blackburn believed, Johnson himself was to blame. He might have opened the door when he beat Tommy Burns, but the way he behaved once the title was his had slammed it shut again. Blackburn made that clear to Louis during one of their first meetings:

  You know, boy, the heavyweight division for a Negro is hardly likely. The white man ain’t too keen on it. You have to be something to go anywhere. If you really ain’t gonna be another Jack Johnson, you got some hope. White man hasn’t forgotten that fool nigger with his white women, acting like he owned the world.*

  Blackburn carefully chose Louis’ first professional opponent, a sturdy white journeyman named Jack Kracken, whom Louis felled in less than two minutes. Afterward, Johnson was invited up into the ring to say a few words. The mostly black crowd expected to hear some encouragement for the newcomer from the sport’s black elder statesman. They didn’t get it. The young man might make a good fighter someday, Johnson said. But a big punch wasn’t enough. Louis needed better training: his stance was all wrong; he didn’t move his feet correctly. The crowd began to get restless. One or two began to boo. Johnson kept right on. He was used to hostile audiences, though until now they’d always been white. Above all, he said, Louis needed a new trainer. Jack Blackburn would never do.

  Johnson loathed Blackburn, but he couldn’t deny that the man’s protégé was impressive. In his first eleven months as a professional Louis thumped out twenty-two straight victories (with eighteen knockouts). In June of 1935, he reached the big time, a fight with the ex-heavyweight champion Primo Carnera at Yankee Stadium. He had earned $750 from his last fight; the Camera bout promised more than $60,000. Jack Johnson, reduced for the moment to peddling “Old Champ L’il Arthur Gin—The Gin That’ll Make You Smile,” wanted a piece of the action. He drove up to Louis’ training camp at Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, and introduced himself to the newcomer.

  “It was thrilling to meet Johnson,” Louis remembered. He’d heard stories about him since boyhood. “I liked him. He never mentioned the problems he was having…. He was an impressive-looking guy and a good talker. He told me I was going to run into every kind of situation possible, and he warned me to keep my head at all times.” After Johnson left, a newspaperman asked Louis what he thought about the way the older man had lived his life. “Every man’s got a right to his own mistakes,” Louis said. “Ain’t no man that ain’t made any.”

  Johnson took to hanging out at the Renaissance Restaurant, Louis’ Harlem headquarters on Seventh Avenue, where, a writer for the Amsterdam News noted, he “imbibed with joy the looks of respect and wonder” the hangers-on gave him. He was back at the center of things and full of praise for Louis, who most experts predicted would lose. Carnera, a former circus strong man who stood six and a half feet tall and weighed 275 pounds, was simply too big. Johnson begged to differ. “Louis has the stuff,” he said. “He oughta win. I reckon he’ll win.”

  Louis did win, knocking the
oversized Carnera down three times. (“He went down slowly,” wrote John Kieran, in the New York Times the next day “like a great chimney that had been dynamited.”) Afterwards, Johnson elbowed his way into the victor’s dressing room, pounded him on the back, and shouted, “Boy, you’re the greatest fighter in the last twenty-five years!” Much of Harlem celebrated that night, its pleasure amplified by the triumph of a black man over an Italian just as fascist Italy was about to march into Ethiopia. And Johnson celebrated with it, leading the crowds in cheers for Joe Louis.

  A day or two later, Johnson made his move. He called on John Roxborough with a business proposition. “I can make a champion out of that boy if you turn him over to me,” he said. Blackburn, of course, would have to go. Roxborough turned on him. “He cursed Johnson out,” Louis recalled, “told him how he had held up the progress of the Negro people for years with his attitude, how he was a low-down, no-good nigger and told him he wasn’t welcome in my camp anymore.”

  Stung, Johnson took his case to the newspapers. Louis was just a “flash in the pan,” he said now. Even at fifty-seven he could beat him—and Carnera, too. The younger man read the story and couldn’t believe it. “I respected this man; he had come to my training camp and all. It really disappointed me.” A few weeks later, Johnson turned up again at Pompton Lakes, where Louis was getting ready to fight a second ex-champion, Max Baer. Louis spotted him in the bleachers and refused to enter the ring to spar until he left. “Get that black cat out of here,” he muttered to his handlers. “I don’t want him in my camp.” Johnson returned to his car and drove back to the city. A few weeks later, he turned up again. Life magazine wanted a photograph of Johnson and Louis together. This time, Julian Black ordered Johnson away; no such picture would be taken. From then on, Jack Johnson would remain a relentless critic of the rising star.