Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  As Joe Louis punched his way through the heavyweights, hoping to win a chance at the title, two Jack Johnsons haunted him. One was the real man—middle-aged, down on his luck, envious of anyone getting attention he insisted should be his, an irritant but not a real obstacle. The other was the grinning specter of the gaudy figure he once had been. That Jack Johnson threatened to bar him and all other Negro heavyweights from the championship.

  The treatment Louis received from the white press was more respectful than that which Johnson had had to endure, but not by much. Cartoonists portrayed him as a stereotypical “darkey,” precisely as they had Johnson. His race remained a central element of nearly every story. He was the “Brown Bomber,” the “Dark Destroyer,” the “Sepia Slugger.” Everything he said was translated into Uncle Remus dialect. Paul Gallico of the New York Daily News, one of the more sympathetic sportswriters, nonetheless felt free to say that Louis “lives like an animal, fights like an animal, has all the cruelty and ferocity of a wild thing.”

  If he were to get a shot at the title, Louis’ handlers told him, he had to be made to seem as different from Johnson as possible. He was forbidden to smile in the ring, or to say anything unkind about an opponent, or to exult in victory. And he was never to be photographed with white women.* Louis liked cars, just as Johnson had; to be sure there would be no headlines about speeding tickets, Roxborough and Black hired him a chauffeur. “One time,” he remembered, “we were talking about these little black toy dolls they used to make of fighters. Those dolls always had the wide grin with thick red lips. They looked foolish. I got the message—don’t look like a fool nigger doll. Look like a black man with dignity.” Louis wouldn’t eat watermelon or fried chicken for the cameras, refused to pretend to shoot craps.

  Louis demolished Max Baer on September 24, 1935. That same day, he married Marva Trotter. She was lovely and slender—and reassuringly black. Afterward, he promised a Negro reporter that he would “never disgrace the Race.” Even Louis’ mother joined the chorus. “If Joe becomes champion,” she told a reporter, “he’s going to make Jack Johnson ashamed of himself all over again.”

  It is little wonder, then, that Johnson came to see every Joe Louis victory, every sports-page paean to the young boxer’s alleged humility and exemplary private life, as a personal slap at him. Every time Louis was called “a credit to his race,” the implication was that Jack Johnson had been a discredit to it.

  On June 19, 1936, Louis was to face his third former heavyweight champion, Max Schmeling of Germany. Schmeling was considered over-the-hill and more or less an easy mark for Louis, who entered the ring at Yankee Stadium a 10-to-1 favorite. But Johnson disagreed. “Louis holds his left too low,” he told everyone who would listen, “and the first fellow who makes him step back and then throws a right at his chin will knock him out.” He was right, and Johnson was at ringside to see it. Schmeling hit Louis with overhand rights all evening, and in the twelfth round, groggy and bewildered, he was knocked out. His steady march toward a title shot had been halted by the German veteran, just as Johnson’s had been by Marvin Hart twenty-seven years earlier.

  Johnson couldn’t have been more pleased. He’d bet heavily on Schmeling, and after collecting his winnings he headed uptown with a fat roll, which he insisted on waving around as he walked along 125th Street. Black fans who had already taken out their disappointment on several whites who had happened to stray into Harlem—five had been sent to the hospital—were not amused by Johnson’s noisy celebrating. An angry crowd surrounded him. Punches were thrown. Policemen had to be called to rescue Jack Johnson from the people who had once lined the same street to cheer him.

  Louis fans were unforgiving. Months later, when Johnson was introduced from the ring at a charity boxing show in Harlem, the crowd rose to its feet to jeer him. “Once the hero of his race, he is now the most despised man in it,” the Pittsburgh Courier reported. “Jack Johnson felt the full brunt of his own people’s disapproval of him. Johnson attempted to make a speech, but such a salvo of boos greeted him, he stood in embarrassment for five minutes, while the crowd refused to give him a chance to talk.” The Amsterdam News headlined its story JACK JOHNSON RAZZED—AGAIN.

  Johnson was unrepentant. White people had never been able to make him change his mind or alter his behavior. Black people couldn’t, either. When James J. Braddock unexpectedly granted Joe Louis a shot at his championship—the first time a white champion had given a Negro challenger a chance to fight for the title since Tommy Burns faced Jack Johnson twenty-nine years earlier—Johnson not only continued to denigrate the black challenger but volunteered to help train the white champion. “Jack Johnson was still running his mouth,” Louis recalled. “He was telling anybody and any paper who’d listen to him that Braddock had everything in his favor, and what he lacked, Johnson’d bone him up on it. He’d advise Braddock from his corner [just as Corbett had counseled Jeffries at Reno], and this would unnerve me. With all his talking and such, Braddock never hired him. Nobody likes a poor, sore-ass loser.”

  The champion could have used the help. On June 22, 1937, at Comiskey Park in the heart of the Chicago black belt that had once hailed Jack Johnson as its hero, Joe Louis battered Braddock for seven rounds and knocked him out in the eighth to become heavyweight champion of the world. A big crowd was waiting outside when the champion and his wife got home. One black man shouted his thanks to God that “we got another chance!” Another called out, “Don’t be another Jack Johnson.”*

  As Joe Louis reached the pinnacle that year, Jack Johnson slid further toward the bottom. A small-time promoter named Morris Botwen sued him for $360.90 for failing to promote “Old Champ Liniment” as he had promised. “I figured out the formula years ago,” Johnson told the judge. “I have given it away to friends for years, and they all say it will cure toothaches, headaches, or any other kind of ache. I just refused to make personal appearances for Botwen because I didn’t think the stuff he was making was the same as my product.” Then a man named Alex Sachs sued him to get back his $619 deposit for a coat-room and cigar-stand concession in a new Fifty-second Street nightclub that never materialized.

  That same year, Johnson began what would be an annual thirty-five-dollar-a-week run at Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus, a cellar sideshow just off Times Square.* Brooks Atkinson wrote:

  When the culture quotient of 42nd Street began to decline during the thirties the Flea Circus was blamed. It was rated as one step lower than the burlesque houses, which in turn were the poor farm of the theater…. By the time 42nd Street had become the most depraved corner of the Broadway district, patrolled day and night by male and female prostitutes, Hubert’s Museum was the ranking cultural institution.

  There were pool tables and pinball machines on the first floor, and punching bags young men could batter for a dime. For ten cents more, they could peer into a movie machine and see Jack Dempsey beat Luis Firpo or lose to Gene Tunney. There were no films of Jack Johnson, winning or losing.

  To see Johnson in person, visitors had to pay a quarter, a writer named Linton Baldwin remembered. Yellowing newspaper clippings from Johnson’s career were taped to a booth in which a bored hawker sat making change without looking up from his Daily Mirror. Visitors pushed through a little turnstile, made their way down a flight of stairs, and took their seats in the dank, dimly lit cellar. One dreary act followed another—a sword-swallower, a trick dog, a half-man-half-woman, Congo the Wild Man, Sealo the Seal-Finned Boy. Finally, a paunchy little man in shirtsleeves stepped in front of the curtain. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “here to answer your questions about boxing, training and the world of sports is the former heavyweight champion of the world—Jack Johnson.”

  Johnson stepped smoothly onstage, wearing a blue beret, a blue tie, and a worn but sharply cut suit. He held a glass of red wine with a straw in it. He smiled and asked his visitors what they would like to know.

  An elderly man asked who had given him his toughest fight.
<
br />   “Sam Langford could step around right well.”

  He grinned when his questioner said he’d been there in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in 1906 to see it happen.

  “How do you think you would have done against Joe Louis?”

  “I’d have done okay.” He sucked on the straw. “On the whole I don’t think modern fighters are as good as the old boys were.”

  Had hard-living and dissipation undercut his career?

  He didn’t much like the question.

  I made a million and a half dollars in the ring. I’ve still got some of it left. I have one of the nicest Bugattis you’ve ever seen in the parking lot down the street. As for dissipation, I fought my last official fight when I was forty-eight… and won it. I can honestly say that I never overindulged in overeating, overdrinking or in any other way.

  He’d always exercised, he said, taken long walks, gotten plenty of sleep and eaten plenty of the bananas that he believed gave him strength.

  Someone asked about alcohol. When not taken in excess he said, “it is beneficial…. It’s heat producing and invigorating. A glass of wine—not too cold—is an excellent aid to weak stomachs and I believe good beer, in moderation, is health building. Does that answer your question, sir?”

  It did. A smirking man asked, “How about the Willard fight?”

  Johnson’s face betrayed nothing. “The Willard fight?”

  “Yeah, you know. Did you dump it?”

  “You saw the picture didn’t you?” Johnson said. Then, “Thank you for your attention,” and he was gone.

  Joe Louis continued to win—and Johnson continued to scoff at his skills. “It didn’t do him much good,” Louis recalled. He was working at Hubert’s Museum, “and by my standards that ain’t shit. And the black people who were rallying around me put him down for talking against me.”

  When the champion signed to fight Max Schmeling again in the spring of 1938, Johnson was the only one of ten living ex-champions to predict that the German would win again. “Everybody thinks I’m jealous of Joe Louis,” he told Nat Fleischer, “but it ain’t so. Louis, to me, is the hardest hitter that ever fought, but I still think his stance is all wrong.”

  After Louis demolished Schmeling in two minutes and four seconds of the first round, Johnson tried to get right with the Negro public. “I want to say here,” he told a reporter after the fight, “that I think Joe’s victory has done the race a lot of good and has improved race relations in every field of endeavor.” But in an article about Louis’ victory for the Pittsburgh Courier, he did his best to redirect the focus back where he was always sure it belonged—on himself. In his day, he wrote,

  intense race hatred burned everywhere. White people were inclined to think that the victory of a black man over a white man was indicative of the racial superiority of the Negro race, but today they think differently and more sanely. We might call this a development of mental processes. But I think the sociologists of the future will be able to trace this change to my fight with Jeffries. They finally decided that my fight with Jeffries was merely a fight between two men and had nothing to do with racial superiority. As soon as this point was driven home, the road was paved for Joe Louis to come along and fight for the heavyweight championship…. If you want to know the truth, these thoughts were on my mind when I met Jess Willard in Havana. I was thinking of the Joe Louises who were to come along in my wake. I didn’t want to make the road harder for them.

  Johnson continued privately to try to make the road as hard as possible for Joe Louis. He helped train a six-foot-five white hope named Abe Simon, only to see him toppled by the champion in thirteen rounds in one fight and six in the rematch, and he later took the veteran Jersey Joe Walcott aside to volunteer his services if and when Louis gave Walcott a chance. “Johnson’s background wasn’t savory,” Walcott remembered. “I knew that whatever fame I might win would be in his shadow. I did not want to march arm in arm to success with him.” He turned Johnson down.*

  In June of 1943, billed as THE CHAMPION OF ALL CHAMPIONS, THE IMMORTAL JACK JOHNSON, he appeared every evening for a week at Fred Irvin’s Gymnasium on 116th Street in New York, sparring three rounds with young heavyweights. “Johnson has stated,” reported the Amsterdam News, “that he does not want any of the men he will meet to have respect for his age. If they want to slug, he says that he will slug; if they want to box, he’ll meet them on their ground.”

  In March of the following year, he and Jess Willard sparred genially for servicemen in Los Angeles. Current heavyweights “got plenty of nothin’,” he said afterward, and he talked of organizing an old-fashioned medicine show to tour the country and sell a line of liniments and salves with his initials on the containers. He also appeared on a West Coast radio interview show with Tor Johnson, a bald, three-hundred-pound wrestler who billed himself as the “Super Swedish Angel.” The host, sportswriter Al Stump, asked each guest how he’d lost his hair.

  “The Angel said he’d lost his slipping headlocks,” Stump recalled.

  “And you, Jack?”

  “Lost mine makin’ babies.”

  In 1945, Clem Boddington, a small-time Manhattan promoter, arranged for Johnson and his old friend Joe Jeannette to put on the gloves one more time in the ballroom of the Henry Hudson Hotel to raise money for Liberty Bonds. Johnson was sixty-seven and Jeannette sixty-four. Harry Wills was to act as referee.

  The night before, Jeannette called Boddington to say he couldn’t come. He was running a limousine service in Jersey City. There had been an accident involving one of his cars, and he was required to appear in court. The promoter called Mayor Frank Hague and got the court date postponed. Then Johnson called. He, too, had to go court, he said. A car dealer was suing him.

  How’d it happen?

  “It was like this,” Johnson said. “I bought a car in California and made the first payment. After I drove it here, the finance company got hot under the collar and wanted me to fork over a second payment.”

  What was wrong with that?

  “I told them that since deterioration had set in since the first payment there would have to be some adjustment made.”

  Boddington somehow got Johnson’s Manhattan court date set aside as well, and the old masters put on a good show for three rounds. Afterward, Johnson made an impassioned speech calling on the crowd to buy bonds. They did—nearly $15,000 worth. When the crowd had filed out of the ballroom, Johnson asked Boddington for twenty-five dollars and a dozen bottles of gin. He got his money plus two bottles and an invitation to Boddington’s home for dinner. Two former bantamweights, Terry Young and Packey O’Gatty, came, too, and after the table had been cleared they asked the old champion if he thought he could keep them from hitting him. Johnson just grinned. They moved the furniture, Boddington remembered; Johnson took off his jacket, then picked off every punch while he “conversed with my wife as if he had nothing else to consider.”

  On Monday June 3, 1946, Johnson dropped by Nat Fleischer’s office at The Ring. He had a big check and was waving it around. “This,” he told the editor, “is the beginning of a new era for your pal, Jack Johnson.” Fleischer was glad to see him, even if he’d heard it all before. Johnson was on his way south by car, back to his native Texas, where he was to perform for a few days with a traveling tent show—punching a bag, telling his stories, and passing out signed photographs to old fans and well-wishers.

  His opinion of his own skills had not lessened with time. Nor had his assessment of Joe Louis’ skills risen. “In my humble opinion,” he told Fleischer in an interview that appeared in the issue of The Ring on the newsstands just as he started south, “not only could I have whipped Joe when I was at my best, but I’ll name Sam Langford, Jeffries, Corbett, Choynski, Tom Sharkey, Fitz and Tommy Ryan among some of the old timers who would have taken Joe into camp.” Louis was to meet light heavyweight champion Billy Conn for a second time at Yankee Stadium on June 19. Conn had out-boxed Louis in their first fight in 1941 and might have won, had
apparent success not gone to his head; in the thirteenth round he’d made the fatal error of mixing it up with Louis and been knocked cold. “I still think [Louis’s] fighting stance is all wrong,” Johnson said. “He must knock Conn out in six rounds or that sour stance will get him so tired that Conn will come out the winner.” Johnson wanted to be back in town to see it, and Fleischer promised him a ringside seat as his guest.

  He was on his way back from Texas on the evening of June 9 when he pulled into a diner just outside Raleigh, North Carolina. With him was a young man named Fred L. Cook whom he had hired to relieve him at the wheel when he got tired. “They told us we could eat in the back or not at all,” Cook remembered. “We were hungry and the food had already been served, so we ate. But back in the car, Jack really got angry.”

  Johnson took the wheel of his latest high-powered automobile, a Lincoln Zephyr, and roared north along Highway One at better than seventy miles an hour. Hurtling around a sharp curve near the little town of Franklinton, he didn’t see the truck rushing toward him until it was too late. He lost control. The car swerved across the white line, left the road, and slammed into a telephone pole.

  Fred Cook was thrown clear and survived.

  Jack Johnson died in the hospital some three hours later.

  His funeral was held in Chicago at the Pilgrim Baptist Church on South Indiana Avenue, just a couple of blocks from the home he’d bought for his mother thirty-seven years before. He would have liked the venue, a big, richly ornamented former synagogue designed by Louis Sullivan and celebrated for its gospel choir. The turnout was impressive, too: twenty-five hundred people were seated inside, and thousands more stood outside to say goodbye. But he would not have relished the Reverend Junius Caesar Austin’s funeral sermon. It paid tribute to Johnson’s fearlessness, but it also placed him in a supporting role. “He struck the first blow as the heavyweight champion,” Austin said, “and had it not been for a fighter like Jack, there might not have been a fighter like Joe.”