Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Afterward, a gleaming hearse bore Johnson’s casket slowly northward. Behind it, heavily veiled in black, Irene Pineau Johnson rode alone. A long line of automobiles filled with old friends followed her. The cortège moved slowly along Lake Shore Drive to the gates of Graceland Cemetery, then wound its way past the tombs and mausoleums of some of Chicago’s most prominent citizens, toward the stone obelisk where the champion would be buried next to Etta Duryea Johnson.

  The press had never hung back when it came to Jack Johnson, and at the graveside, a reporter dared ask his widow just what it was she had loved about her husband. “I loved him because of his courage,” she answered. “He faced the world unafraid. There wasn’t anybody or anything he feared.”

  * “Throughout my prison term,” Johnson wrote in his autobiography, Dickerson remained “a staunch friend and adviser … and one of the greatest things in the world is friendship.” More than mere friendship may possibly have been involved in the relatively gentle treatment Johnson received at Leavenworth. The murderer Robert Stroud, who would one day be known as the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” had been a prisoner at Leavenworth for several years when Johnson arrived; he claimed that the champion had paid someone seven thousand dollars to exempt him from hard labor. Stroud was a conscienceless liar when it came to his own crimes but would not seem to have had any motive for fabricating this story. It is impossible now to know whether he was merely reporting prison scuttlebutt or repeating what Johnson himself told him—and if it was the latter, whether Johnson was telling the truth or just boasting of his wealth and influence. (Thomas E. Gaddis, Birdman of Alcatraz, p. 74.)

  * Johnson served as an Isolation orderly for three months. It was a euphemistic title for an often ugly job. Orderlies were expected to act as strong-arm men, helping guards impose brutal discipline on uncooperative prisoners already enduring solitary confinement. Isolation was a separate two-tiered facility, a prison within a prison. Men caught fighting or smuggling or flouting prison rules who were expected eventually to rejoin the prison population were housed downstairs. Upstairs were the hard cases who had no hope of ever leaving their dark cells: rapists, escape artists, men like Robert Stroud who had murdered guards. During Johnson’s time there was also a third category of inmate in Isolation: conscientious objectors who had refused to fight in the Great War and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), whose unwillingness to obey the orders of federal officials was met with regular beatings administered by orderlies, sometimes with baseball bats. According to Stroud, Johnson was a relatively benign presence in Isolation—his size and reputation alone may have discouraged defiance—but some prisoners, at least, never warmed to him: “It pays to be a celebrity,” a bitter I.W.W. member named Ralph Chaplin wrote after spotting him returning from lunch at the warden’s house, “all duded up” in a starched trusty’s “snitch jacket.” (Babyak, Bird Man, pp. 84–86; Gaddis, Birdman of Alcatraz, p. 74; Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly, p. 267.)

  * The woman he’d been caught taking across a state line for allegedly immoral purposes was now his wife—and was herself in prison in Arizona for prostitution.

  † When Butler left prison in the summer of 1921, he unaccountably left the manuscript in the care of a thief named Bernard A. Muckerman. When he wrote to the warden, asking that he be allowed to contact Muckerman to tell him where to send it, the warden refused to help: ex-convicts were not allowed to communicate with one another, and no one had given either him or Jack Johnson permission to write anything for publication while in prison. The fragmentary manuscript languished, unread, in the Leavenworth files for some eighty years. Excerpts from it appear throughout the first half of this book, attributed as “Prison Memoir.”

  * A fellow inmate named James Pearl Thompson shared the second patent with Johnson. He worked in the prison automobile repair shop and was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World from Chicago, imprisoned for “conspiracy.” Johnson had quietly obtained still another patent—for a “hydraulic lift”—back in 1910. (Chicago Tribune, December 10, 1910.)

  * Scott was one of the most prominent black attorneys in Kansas: mail addressed simply to “Colored Lawyer, Topeka” was routinely delivered to him. He was also instrumental in establishing the Negro National League. In 1951 two of his sons, John and Charles Scott, would help file the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case.

  * The day’s festivities were filmed for use in an official motion picture “to be exhibited generally over the country to show what the prison system of the Government is doing.” But the U.S. attorney general ordered the boxing sequence cut after Kansas Governor Henry J. Allen objected to the showing of films of Johnson anywhere in the country. The footage seems to have disappeared. (New York Times, December 16, 1920.)

  * On July 2, Dempsey faced the most hostile American crowd any heavyweight champion had faced since Jack Johnson made his way into the ring at Reno. But public sentiment did not help Carpentier any more than it had helped Jim Jeffries. Dempsey knocked him out in four rounds.

  * In the end, the film was retitled As the World Rolls On, and its melodramatic plot was supplemented by a grab bag of footage Andlauer thought would be sure to draw black patrons: Rube Foster and the Chicago Giants were in it; so were Sam Crawford and the Kansas City Monarchs, and Bruce Petway of the Detroit Stars, plus “scenes of Elks Celebration, Odd Fellows encampment (St. Joseph) and Knights of Pythias National Conclave (Topeka).” In one scene, Johnson routed a band of bullies, and audiences were promised “close-ups of his great masculine body of steel responding instantaneously to perfect control of mind over action.” Andlauer ordered two thousand dollars’ worth of handbills:

  THRILLING FAST MOVING. INTERSPERSED WITH EVENTS OF

  UNUSUAL INTEREST. THIS PICTURE WAS MADE AND PRODUCED

  IN AMERICA BY AN ALL STAR AMERICAN COLORED CAST.

  DO NOT CONFUSE WITH FOREIGN MADE PRODUCTIONS

  A REVELATION IN RACE PHOTOPLAYS

  DON’T MISS IT!

  The film opened at Love’s Theater at Twenty-fourth and Vine in Kansas City on September 18, then played four days at King’s. It netted $213. The film evidently no longer exists. (Exhibitor’s file card, George P. Johnson Collection, University of California at Los Angeles.)

  * Dempsey wouldn’t “dignify” any Negro with a fight. He had no personal objection to taking on a black challenger. He’d fought and beaten Negro boxers on the way up. But his manager and big promoters like Tex Rickard were against it, and so, like his predecessor, he drew the color line and never had to face Johnson or Harry Wills.

  * She was his wife, of course.

  * In later years, Johnson would declare this victory his last “official” fight, conveniently rendering all the less impressive ring appearances that followed mere “exhibitions.”

  † The previous month, in his own hometown of Drumright, Oklahoma, Simmons had ended the career of forty-six-year-old Sam Langford. Langford was blind in the left eye by then—he’d fought at least 190 times—and very nearly so in the other. A first-round punch by Simmons destroyed what little remained of Langford’s vision, forcing him finally to leave the fight game.

  * Black Boy was not the only play to be inspired by Johnson’s struggles. Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope opened on Broadway in 1968. Its hero, “Jack Jefferson,” was, as Randy Roberts has written, “Jack Johnson as he wished to be remembered.” With James Earl Jones’ magisterial performance as the embattled champion and Jane Alexander’s sensitive portrayal of his tragic lover, it won the Tony, the Pulitzer Prize, and the New York Drama Critics Award.

  It also profoundly affected Muhammad Ali, who saw, in the way the government pursued the protagonist because of the way he chose to conduct his private life, the precursor of the way it was pursuing him because of his refusal to register for the draft during the Vietnam War. “When Ali came to see the play and came backstage,” Jones remembered, “he said, ‘That’s my story. You take out the issue of the white women and r
eplace that with the issue of religion. That’s my story.’ He kept coming back. He kept bringing people back to see the play.”

  Drew “Bundini” Brown, Ali’s confidant and cornerman, took up the cry, the late George Plimpton remembered, and in the midst of several of the champion’s biggest fights Bundini was heard to shout, “Ghost in the house. Ghost in the house. Jack Johnson’s here. Ghost in the house.” Johnson “sort of overrides boxing,” Plimpton said, “and the whole culture that surrounds it like some sort of a ghost. ‘Ghost in the house.’” (Roberts, Papa Jack, p. 228; Ken Burns’ film Unforgivable Blackness.)

  * At Madison Square Garden the following year, Johnson happened to encounter New York Democratic Party chairman James A. Farley at ringside. “In this diplomatic crisis a strange expression overspread Mr. Farley’s features,” wrote Westbrook Pegler, who happened to be sitting nearby. “It was a far-away expression, such as cartoonists generally ascribe to a gentleman who has stooped to pick up a lady’s glove and heard his trousers rip.” But in the end, Farley offered his hand and Johnson took it, smiling with pleasure. Johnson and the Democrats eventually made peace, and after FDR’s election in 1932, he was sometimes called upon by the party to explain to Negro voters the advantages of abandoning their traditional Republican loyalties and rallying to the New Deal. “Franklin Roosevelt is champion now,” he said in his stock speech, “and he is wearing the belt. Abraham Lincoln was a good fighter in his prime but he can’t help us now. Always string along with the champion.” The reason Jim Jeffries lost at Reno, he sometimes added, was that Jeffries was a Republican. (Washington Post, November 2, 1934.)

  * Thurber dug up this vintage bit of racist nonsense from a newspaper morgue. Since few opponents ever managed to hit Johnson in the head, it’s hard to see how this alleged anomaly helped his career.

  * Blackburn was a remarkable fighter, so remarkable that men like Stanley Ketchel, Billy Papke, and Battling Nelson thought it wise to avoid him. He fought at least 163 times and lost only 10.

  * Johnson must have found Blackburn’s piety on this point especially galling. The razor scar on his cheek had been put there in 1908 by his brother Fred after an argument over Blackburn’s alleged fondness for white women, and the common-law wife in whose defense Jack Blackburn said he had shot two people in 1908 had been white as well. Nor did the prosperity Joe Louis’ success brought Blackburn do much for his behavior. After a drunken brawl in 1935, he staggered home to get his pistol, returned, and opened fire, hitting two bystanders: an elderly man, who died, and a nine-year-old girl, who was badly wounded. Mysteriously, no charges against him were ever filed.

  * “They never told me not to go out with white women,” Louis remembered, “they said don’t ever get your picture taken with one—that would be the end of my career.” This was an important distinction for him. Like Johnson, he was a magnet for women of every color. Among those with whom he had discreet but intimate relationships were said to have been the film star Lana Turner and the Norwegian skater and actress Sonja Henie.

  * The integration of heavyweight championship boxing took an unconscionably long time, but it took less time than did the integration of other big-time sports. The first black football players did not take the field for the old All-America Football Conference until 1946. Jack Robinson did not play for the Brooklyn Dodgers until 1947. And it was not until 1962 that Charlie Sifford was allowed to join the Professional Golfers’ Association.

  * It was owned and operated by “Professor” Roy Heckler, the son of William Heckler, whom the magic historian Ricky Jay calls “the doyen of the American flea world.” (Jay, Anomalies, p. 41.)

  * As later as 1963, some black boxers were still blaming Johnson for the difficulties they faced getting big-money fights. “We’re still paying for him,” light heavyweight champion Archie Moore told the sportswriter Al Stump that year. “The man was a disaster to anyone who came near him.” (Stump, “Black Avenger.”)

  ____________________________________________

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Those who write about boxing often work too hard to find high-minded reasons for the visceral pleasure they take in watching two total strangers try to batter one another senseless. Even A. J. Liebling, the undefeated heavyweight champion among boxing essayists, could be uncharacteristically portentous about it. A boxer, “like a writer,” he once intoned, “must stand alone.”

  In writing this book I was never alone for a moment. The idea for the documentary from which it grew came from my friend and fellow fight-fan, Dave Schaye, more than a decade ago; his enthusiasm for Jack Johnson and his story has never flagged over the years. Ken Burns’ decision to make the film got me started; more than twenty years of working with him have only made me more glad to know him.

  Boxing is a tough, unforgiving game, but I have found boxing fans—at least those who share my fascination with the sport’s history—generous and welcoming. Six of them were central to writing this book:

  Ben Hawes allowed me to consult Jack Johnson’s early autobiographical writings published in French, provided never-before-seen images of Johnson and his world, and let me spend an unforgettable day rummaging through his family collection.

  Hap Navarro and Charles Johnston shared with me their encyclopedic knowledge of early boxing in Los Angeles, where Johnson got his start in the big-time.

  Clay Moyle not only allowed me to consult his extraordinary boxing library but continued over the course of my research to send me care packages filled with copies of obscure items he thought I shouldn’t pass up.

  Harry Schaffer made available to me thousands of pages of newspaper clippings from the Archives of Antiquities of the Prize Ring (antekprizering.com) on everyone from Bob Armstrong and Abe Attell to Joe Walcott and Harry Wills.

  And Kevin Smith, omniscient about early black boxing, spent hours on the phone with me, patiently answering questions to which only he has the answers. (If you want to know how “Scaldy Bill” Quinn got his nickname, Kevin’s your man.)

  I am grateful to Stanley Crouch, who helped me thread my way through several potential briar patches over the course of this project, and to Gerald Early, who was kind enough to look over a partial early draft and ease at least some of my anxieties about the finished product.

  I also owe a debt to Arly Allen, Ellen Beaseley (who helped me make sense of the geography of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Galveston), Dave Bergin (who let me ask for help on his Web site pugilistica.com), Tim Brooks (who let me hear rare recordings of Jack Johnson’s voice), Lee Brumbaugh of the Nevada Historical Society, Tracy Callis of the International Boxing Research Association, Kate Egan, Alan Governar, Douglas Hales, Jim Johnston (who shared copies of hard-to-find items from his collection), Jim Kroll and Bruce Hanson at the Western History Collection of the Denver Public Library (who confirmed Johnson’s presence in the Rockies during the summer of 1901), Bill Loughman (who let me pore over precious original newspapers), Bradshaw Mathews, Mike Musick of the National Archives (who took on the task of solving the puzzle of Henry Johnson’s Civil War service), Kelly Nichols, Rick Nott, Lynn Novick (for her friendship and forbearance), Rich Pagano, Gary Phillips, Randy Roberts, Phil Schaap, Dan Streible, Tracy Thibeau, Andrew Ward, Casey Ward, Jacob Ward, Nathan Ward, Jeff Wells, and Jason Wesco.

  My old friend Mike Hill, the biographer’s secret weapon, provided me with a wealth of new material patiently gleaned from scores of sources. A new friend, Timothy Rives, Archives Specialist at the National Archives—Central Plains Region office in Kansas City, went far beyond the call of duty to hunt down answers to esoteric queries ranging from the crimes for which Johnson’s fellow inmates at Leavenworth were locked up to the playing schedule of Rube Foster’s Chicago Giants.

  Other researchers were essential, too: Jeannine Baker scoured Australian newspapers to help me reconstruct the story of Johnson’s relationship with Lola Toy; Elizabeth Hoover helped me breathe at least a little life into the elusive Etta Duryea; Shana Johnson explored Jo
hnson’s little-known movie career in the George P. Johnson Film Collection at UCLA; Elizabeth Patterson heroically made transcripts of stories from Chicago newspapers too delicate to copy; Paul J. Patterson found important material on Johnson’s adventures in Britain and Europe at the University of Notre Dame; Patricia Perry consulted early Galveston newspapers in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University in Lubbock; Damon Wright at the Dallas Historical Society confirmed Johnson’s youthful visits to that city.

  Susanna Steisel gathered the photographs in this book, several never previously published. (Thanks to her, there are plenty more where these came from.) Once again, Wendy Byrne brought her taste, skill, and professionalism to the book’s design.

  I’d like to thank everyone at Florentine Films, but especially Paul Barnes, for his patented calm, creative determination to do justice to whatever subject he tackles; Erik Ewers, who helped make Johnson come alive onscreen; Brenda Heath, who continues to take my quarterly calls without complaint; Dan White, who at key moments made it possible for me to see footage of my subject, inside and outside the ring. I’m also grateful to Gerald McCauley and Carl Brandt, as well as the team at Alfred A. Knopf: Ashbel Green, Sonny Mehta, Kathy Hourigan, Kevin Bourke, Luba Oshtashevsky, and especially Candice Gianetti, who did a heroic job of copyediting.