Jack Johnson pursued heavyweight champion Tommy Burns for nearly two years. “I virtually had to mow my way to Burns,” he remembered, following him from the United States to England to France and back again to England. The inset photograph was made in a Paris saloon in the spring of 1908; Johnson’s late-night companions are Sam McVey and Hattie McClay, the new “Mrs. Jack Johnson.” Johnson finally caught up with Burns at Rushcutter’s Bay in Sydney, Australia, on the day after Christmas in 1908—and knocked the champion down within seconds of the opening bell (above right). Fourteen rounds later (above left), Burns was bruised and bloody and only moments away from losing his title to Jack Johnson. “[Burns] is the easiest fighter I ever met,” Johnson said. “I could have put him away quicker, but I wanted to punish him. I had my revenge.” (inset top: Collection of Ben Hawes; inset bottom: Gary Phillips Collection; Gary Phillips Collection)
Jack Johnson, the new heavyweight champion of the world, arrives in Vancouver (top) with Hattie McClay, February 3, 1909. Reporters besieged him. When they heard him express admiration for Napoleon, whose climb to world fame from obscure beginnings he liked to compare to his own, a photographer asked Johnson and McClay to pose as Napoleon and Josephine. They happily complied. (top: Antiquities of the Prize Ring; bottom: Library of Congress;)
Johnson struck this heroic attitude for a Chicago photographer not long after his return from Australia in 1909. The small boy may be his worshipful nephew, Gus Rhodes, who would grow up to become his confidant and traveling companion, sparring partner and eager publicist. (Pugilistica.com Boxing Memorabilia, Dave Bergin)
“I always take a chance on my pleasures,” Jack Johnson once said. Speed and women topped his list. Above, a Philadelphia policeman writes out a speeding ticket for the champion—one of scores issued to him over the years, sometimes because he was really going too fast, sometimes because white officers couldn’t bear to see a black man behind the wheel of his own costly car. Next to him is his manager, George Little, the Chicago brothel-keeper who made it possible for him to meet Belle Schreiber (above), the prostitute who became the next “Mrs. Jack Johnson” and then his nemesis. (Corbis; National Archives at College Park)
In October 1909, the sometimes frantic search for a “white hope,” capable of winning back the heavyweight title for the white race, settled upon the middleweight champion, Stanley Ketchel, whom Johnson normally outweighed by more than twenty-five pounds. To make Ketchel seem a plausible challenger his handlers had him meet the press (above) wearing an oversized, padded coat and specially made boots. The fight itself ended predictably (above): Ketchel lay unconscious for several minutes. Among the anxious ringsiders, the lone black spectator (just above the referee’s head) seems quietly pleased by the outcome. (Corbis; Brown Brothers)
Christmas 1909: Johnson embraces his mother, Tiny Johnson, and Hattie McClay in his South Side Chicago home. George Little is at the left; the children are the champion’s niece and nephew, Ada and Gus Rhodes. This holiday idyll would end with the arrival of Etta Duryea (above). A sophisticated but troubled Long Island divorcée, she would be festooned with furs and jewelry by the champion; in this formal 1912 portrait, diamonds wink from nearly every finger. (Brown Brothers; Boston Public Library, Print Department)
Jack Johnson takes time out from training at the Seal Rock House in San Francisco in 1910. He had never seen his holding of the heavyweight title as “a racial triumph,” he said, “but there were those who were to take this view … and almost immediately a great hue and cry went up because a colored man was holding the championship. The hunt for a white hope began, not only with great earnestness and intentness, but with ill-concealed bitterness. I regretted this phase of the hunt.” (Gary Phillips Collection)
Public pressure and the lure of big money eventually persuaded former champion James J. Jeffries to emerge from retirement and try to restore the title to the white race. Johnson signed for their fight at the Albany Hotel in New York City in December 1909 (top), surrounded by boxing insiders (including Jeffries, to his left, with fingers spread) who were nearly unanimous in their desire to see him beaten. The fight was scheduled for Reno, Nevada, where the relaxed picture above was taken. Etta Duryea nestles in the arms of her lover; at left is the champion’s sometime trainer, Sig Hart. (top: Culver Pictures; bottom: Nevada Historical Society)
Showdown at Reno, July 4, 1910: Billy Jordan introduces Jim Jeffries to the crowd (top) while Johnson waits in his corner (above). The novelist Jack London called them “the man of iron” and the “man of summer temperament.” Tens of millions waited anxiously for news of the Battle of the Century, but the fight itself was anticlimactic. Jeffries was unable to catch the younger champion and collapsed in the fifteenth round. “And, as of old,” London wrote, “it was play for Johnson.” (Nevada Historical Society)
“Not since the gladiatorial days of Rome,” wrote the Indianapolis Freeman, “has there been a scene enacted as that which greeted Johnson’s return from Reno.” Johnson shakes hands with admirers from his private railroad car (above left) somewhere en route to Chicago; next to him is his longtime trainer, Barney Furey. Johnson’s jubilant Chicago neighbors (above) welcome the champion back to his mother’s home; Johnson is somewhere in the crowd beneath the American flag. F. Fox’s cartoon (inset above right) appeared in the Chicago Evening News. (inset above left: David Schaye; Chicago Historical Society; inset above right: Culver Pictures)
Everywhere they went, Jack Johnson and Etta Duryea drew crowds. Here, in two never-before-published photographs taken in Ballston Spa, New York, on October 12, 1910, a local cameraman caught them as they set out together for the champion’s next theatrical engagement at Binghamton. “I felt that in Etta,” Johnson wrote, “I had found a love that would continue uninterrupted.” They were legally married the following February. (Craig Hamilton, JO Sports, Inc; John Liffmann Collection)
The champion’s marriage to nineteen-year-old Lucille Cameron (above) on December 3, 1912, just weeks after Etta Johnson committed suicide, enraged much of the white public—and alienated many blacks, as well. He was already under federal indictment for having violated the Mann Act (above). After he was found guilty the following spring and sentenced to a year in prison, he and his new bride fled the country for France, where they were photographed (above) in a Paris park. (National Archives at College Park; Bill Loughman Collection; Collection of Ben Hawes)
On April 5, 1915, Johnson faced the biggest of the white hopes, Jess Willard (top), in Havana, Cuba. For the first twenty rounds Johnson more than held his own against his bigger, younger challenger. But in round 26, heat, age, and exhaustion—and a hard right hand by Willard—combined to knock him out. The photograph above, in which Johnson appears to be shading his eyes from the sun, helped foster the myth he had thrown the fight. (top: Antiquities of the Prize Ring; Getty Images; Library of Congress)
After Jack Johnson lost his championship to Jess Willard in 1915, his reputation declined abroad just as it had back home. His 1916 fight in Barcelona with the Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan was advertised (above) as if it were the real thing, but it was really a one-sided farce. By 1920 he was reduced to running a saloon in Tijuana, Mexico, and (above) putting on strongman shows and exhibitions against nonentities for small crowds in Mexican border towns. (Kevin Smith; Corbis; John Liffmann Collection)
Johnson ended seven years of exile on July 20, 1920, when he shook hands with sheriff John H. Cline of Los Angeles County, stepped across the Mexican border onto U.S. soil, and surrendered to federal officers. He served his sentence in Leavenworth where, at a “boxfest” on May 28, 1921, he entertained his fellow inmates by easily outfighting a journeyman named Joe Boykin. (Brown Brothers; inset bottom right: Gary Phillips Collection)
In December 1932, Jack Johnson and his third wife, Irene Pineau Johnson, take a turn around the deck of the liner taking them to France. A divorcée from Peoria, Illinois, Irene Pineau Johnson would remain loyal to her second husband through the last nineteen ye
ars of his life. “As a husband,” she wrote, “Mr. Johnson is everything that he could possibly be.” (Brown Brothers)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2006
Copyright © 2004 by The American Lives II Project, LLC
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2004.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: A. P. Watt Ltd: “If” from Rudyard Kipling’s Verse Definitive Edition by Rudyard Kipling. Reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. Doubleday: Excerpts from His Eye Is on the Sparrow by Ethel Waters with Charles Samuels. Copyright 1951 by Ethel Waters and Charles Samuels. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. James Haskins: Excerpts from Bricktop by Bricktop with James Haskins, copyright 1983, used with permission of James Haskins. London Publishing Co.: Excerpts from “Johnson, Craftiest Boxer” by Nat Fleischer from The Ring (August 1946). Reprinted by permission of London Publishing Co.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ward, Geoffrey C.
Unforgivable blackness: the rise and fall of Jack Johnson / by Geoffrey C. Ward.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Johnson, Jack, 1878–1946. 2. Boxers (Sports)—United States—Biography.
I. Title: Rise and fall of Jack Johnson. II. Title.
GV1196.J64W37 2004
796.83’092—dc22
[B] 2004048524
eISBN: 978-0-307-49237-1
www.vintagebooks.com
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