Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  No part of Galveston Island was more racially mixed than the Twelfth Ward, in which Johnson grew up. Its most important citizen was Norris Wright Cuney, who, as the son of a Texas planter and his slave mistress, was regarded as black, not white. At a time when Negro political power was eroding all over the South, Galveston’s “sable statesman” managed to hold on to his for some fourteen years. As alderman, labor organizer, collector of customs for the district of Texas, Republican National Committeeman, and leader of the racially mixed “Black and Tan” faction of the state Republican Party, he was at the time of his death in 1896 perhaps the most powerful Negro officeholder in the country—and a constant reminder to neighbors like young Jack Johnson that a black man need not limit his horizons.*

  The public school Johnson and his brothers and sisters attended was segregated, but the streets and alleys through which they raced once school was out were not. “From the time I was old enough to play on the Galveston docks I played with a gang of WHITE boys,” Johnson recalled.

  We had a great gang, too, and every kid in Galveston looked up to the 11th Street and Avenue K gang. That was us. My best pal and one of the best friends I have now is Leo Posner, a white boy who was the head of our gang down there. So you see, as I grew up, the white boys were my friends and my pals. I ate with them, played with them and slept at their homes. Their mothers gave me cookies, and I ate at their tables. No one ever taught me that white men were superior to me, and when I started fighting I fought just as enthusiastically AGAINST them as I once had fought on Leo Posner’s side.†

  Fighting of any kind had seemed alien to Johnson as a small boy. He avoided quarrels, he recalled, ran home rather than face neighborhood bullies, and depended on his older sisters to protect him until he was twelve.

  It was in that year … when I first discovered that I could fight just a little bit. While going home from school one day, I fell into a heated argument with Willie Morris, one of my school mates. We had just reached my home, and I noticed [a neighborhood woman whom the children called] Grandmother Gilmore standing in the front yard. As I looked in Grandmother Gilmore’s direction Willie struck me in the jaw. Now at that time Willie was much larger than I, and his unexpected blow to my jaw rather stunned me for a few seconds, and upon getting my bearings my first impulse was to run, and perhaps I would have had it not been for Grandma Gilmore. She had witnessed Willie strike me and when she saw that I did not show fight, she called out to me, “Arthur, if you do not whip Willie, I shall whip you.” Now this assertion from Grandmother Gilmore made a different aspect upon the whole thing, it caused me to lose all thought of retreat. At once I figured that I’d much rather give Willie a whipping than receive a whipping myself … so immediately I sailed into Willie and whipped him. This was my first fight and I won it by in-fighting and clinching. I clinched Willie and in the breakaway I struck him in the eye which ended the fight.*

  Johnson told this story countless times, the details shifting with his mood. Sometimes he remembered his first opponent as Jakey Morris, not Willie. Tiny Johnson insisted that it had been she, not Grandmother Gilmore, who had forced her son to stand up for himself. Inconsistencies like those never bothered Johnson when telling a good story about himself, and disentangling real events from imagined ones before the newspapers began to mark his path is made doubly difficult by the obvious joy he took over the years in arranging and rearranging his past to suit his sense of who and what he had become. He was an inexhaustible tender of his own legend, a teller of tall tales in the frontier tradition of his native state. It is impossible now to know for certain what happened to him when during his early years—or even whether some of what he described with such relish ever happened at all.

  Norris Wright Cuney had seen to it that the black students of Galveston had their own high school, but Johnson did not attend it. Instead, like most Negro adolescents of his time and place, he went to work. Galveston may have been more cosmopolitan than other southern cities, and Cuney’s organizing skills had won for its dockworkers wages much higher than those earned by most black people in the region. But opportunities for young black men remained severely limited; as late as 1930, eight out of ten of the city’s Negro wage earners would still be stevedores. Johnson worked the Galveston docks long and hard enough to know they were not for him; he hated the work so much, in fact, that he would sometimes later claim he had never done it at all. He’d been a clerk on the docks, he claimed, never a stevedore.*

  He seems to have tried everything else, too: sweeping out a barbershop, working as a porter in a gambling parlor and as a baker’s assistant (he would pride himself all his life on his skill at making cakes and biscuits). He hoboed to Dallas, as well, and spent several months there. After working first at the racetrack, exercising horses, he found a job as apprentice to a man who painted carriages. His parents were pleased. They thought he’d discovered a useful trade. Johnson thought the work tedious. But, he later wrote, “as luck would have it,” Walter Lewis, the shop owner, turned out to be “a great lover of boxing.”

  He had in his shop a stock of gloves and nothing gave him more pleasure, after a day’s work, than to watch two or three rounds of sparring between friends. He didn’t know much and I knew even less; the science of boxing was still Greek to me. Nevertheless, I learned to hit strong and hard.

  It’s thanks to Lewis that I became a boxer.

  “Jack,” he said to me, “why don’t you put yourself in the ring? You have the height and reach; you are stronger than any boy your age. If you train seriously you can become a terrific fighter.”

  At sixteen or so, Johnson left home again and this time may have made it all the way to Manhattan. He and his friends had all read about Steve Brodie, an Irish immigrant who became famous in 1886 when he claimed to have survived a leap from the brand-new Brooklyn Bridge. Somehow, without help or permission from anyone, the young Johnson determined to go and meet him. He stowed away on the Nueces, a Mallory Line cotton steamer bound for New York. He was soon discovered, he later recalled, but rather than put him ashore, the captain set him to work shoveling coal and peeling potatoes for the duration of the voyage.*

  I didn’t have a nickel. As the ship docked [in New York] I went on deck and, standing in the crowd of passengers, with my longest face and my saddest eyes, I announced that I was a worthless colored boy without friends, family, or money, and was about to jump overboard. I walked to the rail and told everybody to keep away from me. I had allowed my old cap to fall on deck. As I turned … to try my bluff at the fatal plunge, a woman threw a dollar in my cap. A shower of money followed.

  Johnson went ashore and began asking strangers how he could find his hero. Eventually he discovered that Brodie ran a saloon on the Bowery.

  I got there just as fast as my legs could carry me. I sneaked in past the swinging doors and went right up to the bar. I asked, “Where’s Mister Brodie?” and the men drinking must have chuckled to themselves at the thin colored youngster who was so serious in his quest. Well, they kidded the life out of me. One would wink at the other and then point out a man and say, “That’s Steve Brodie over there.” I’d go over and ask him if he was Steve Brodie and he’d get the wink from someone else and point out somebody else. It seemed that everyone in that saloon was Steve Brodie, and I don’t know to this day if I ever met him.

  Whether Johnson really traveled all that way to meet his hero or only wished he had, the youth he described in the story had many of the characteristics he would display as a grown man: independence, restlessness, an ability to improvise, to attract attention, and to get around rules intended to tie him down.

  Instead of making his way back to Galveston right away, Johnson said, he moved on to Boston, the adopted home of another of his idols. Joe Walcott was a short but hard-hitting welterweight from the West Indies who fought out of the Massachusetts capital as the “Barbados Demon.” “I went to Boston to find Joe Walcott,” Johnson said. “They had cheated me out of one celebrity but
I vowed that when I got back to Galveston I’d tell Leo Posner and the rest of them that I had at least talked to Walcott.” He got a job exercising horses at a stable. On his days off, he remembered, he and the other stable boys made their way to Boston Common, where they liked to “annoy the Salvation Army band” while waiting for a glimpse of their hero. Walcott evidently took a liking to the lanky teenager from Texas and sometimes allowed him to carry his gear to and from the gym. “Sonny,” Walcott told him before he went home again to Galveston, “[boxing’s] a great game if you don’t forget to pull in your chin.”*

  Sports were now constantly on Johnson’s mind. He was big for his age—six feet tall and still growing at sixteen—with powerful arms and shoulders, and so fast on his feet, one old Avenue K friend claimed, that he could jump twelve feet backward from a standing start.

  The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision had merely legitimized Jim Crow laws already firmly in place in the South and much of the rest of the country as well, and doors of opportunity for Negroes were closing in sports, just as they were in other areas of American life. White professional baseball players had already forced their black counterparts off the field. Under the rules of the newly established Jockey Club, the licenses held by the black jockeys who had once dominated American racetracks—fourteen of the fifteen horses at the starting line for the first Kentucky Derby in 1875 had Negro riders—would no longer be renewed. Even the League of American Wheelmen had banned black bicyclists from its ranks.

  But despite the odds, there were still black sports stars for young Johnson to dream of emulating. He venerated the jockey Isaac Murphy, who won at least a third of all the races in which he rode and may have been the greatest rider in U.S. track history. Johnson lost a job at a Galveston livery stable when he exhausted one of the horses in his charge, racing with his friends in unauthorized imitation of his idol. When he finally realized he was simply too big to be a jockey, he turned to bicycle racing, seeking to follow in the tracks of Marshall “Major” Taylor, the Indiana-born “colored wonder” who had begun breaking records in the face of jeering crowds and sabotage from white competitors. Johnson entered a five-mile race at Galveston, he remembered, fell rounding a curve, and injured his leg. A week or so in bed convinced him that he should abandon bicycling, too.

  Meanwhile, he found still another job, cleaning a gym run by a Germanborn heavyweight named Herman Bernau. Somehow Johnson saved up enough money to buy himself two pairs of gloves, and he began carrying them with him everywhere, challenging other members of his gang to spar with him. Even then he was fast and hard to hit, one of them remembered, and he already displayed the brash, taunting style he would later make famous. “He could predict every blow,” one early victim remembered. “He’d tell you he was going to hit you in the eye, and he would. He’d say he was going to hit you in the mouth and he would.”

  His growing skill stood him in good stead in a bare-fisted street fight with a man he remembered as “grown and toughened” named Davie Pierson. He and Pierson had been intent on a game of craps when the police descended. Johnson got caught. Later the police picked up Pierson, too, and he accused Johnson of having turned him in. Johnson denied it. When the two were released from jail, they met on the dock, where a large crowd gathered to see them settle things. Johnson easily beat the bigger, older man. Afterward, he remembered, “people went around asking one another, ‘Did you see what L’il Arthur did?’” and he began to think he might be good enough to make some money in the ring.

  He got his first chance to see if he could in the summer of 1895, against another dockworker named John “Must Have It” Lee. “It was arranged for us to fight at Josie’s Beer Garden at the east end of the island near the beach,” he remembered. He was careful not to tell his mother about it for fear she’d try to stop him, she remembered, but when she noticed a steady stream of men filing past her house and asked what all the commotion was about, someone said, “Why, Jack’s going to fight out to the beach.”

  “Fight!” she replied. “What’s that boy doing fighting and people goin’ out to the beach to see him? And, gracious, they told me they paid people money to fight. I never knew there was any money in this fightin’ business ’cept to have to pay it to the police court for a fine.”

  The crowd formed a circle on the beach, Johnson remembered, and “we were stripped ready for battle when the police came along and chased us.” He and Lee put their clothes back on and stalked across town to the other end of the island as the referee and fight crowd straggled along behind. There they marked out another ring in the sand and started over. The sun was fierce. No one had remembered to bring anything to quench the fighters’ thirst. Finally somebody filled a bucket with warm, brackish water from a nearby pool and brought it to them. It stank, but they drank it anyway, then went right back at each other.

  Johnson won the fight and the winner’s purse of a dollar fifty—then had to hand over twenty-five cents of it to pay the referee. Still, it was more than he could have earned in the same amount of time on the docks, and he’d enjoyed the excitement and applause. When he came home that evening, his mother remembered, she asked him what he’d been doing. He told her not to worry. He was going to make arrangements to become a fighter, he said; he would give her all the money he earned, and one day it would be “nothin’ at all for me to drop a hundred thousand dollars in your lap ’most any time you want it.”

  When Bob Thompson, a big barnstorming professional, turned up in town a few weeks later, promising twenty-five dollars to anyone who survived four rounds with him, Johnson stepped up to the challenge. He made it through the four rounds, he remembered, but “it was the hardest earned money of my life.” He was so banged up after this contest that it was two weeks before he was willing to be seen in public again long enough to spend it.*

  “We are in the midst of a growing menace,” Charles A. Dana, the editor of the New York Sun, warned his readers in 1895, the year of Johnson’s first professional fight. “The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy.” Dana had in mind the recent successes of three Negro boxing masters then tearing their way through the lighter weight classes: George Dixon, known to his admirers as “Little Chocolate,” who had won the bantamweight title in 1890 and the featherweight title in 1891; lightweight Joe Gans, a former oyster shucker and master boxer from Baltimore who had run up thirty-one straight victories by the end of 1895;* and Johnson’s friend Joe Walcott, who had recently knocked out the lightweight champion of Australia and seemed on his way to a world title of his own. “If the Negro is capable of developing such prowess in those [lighter] divisions of boxing,” Dana asked, “what is going to stop him from making the same progress in the heavyweight ranks?”

  Only white men were meant to reign over the heavyweights. John L. Sullivan—the first heavyweight champion of the gloved era and the man most responsible for transforming the fight game from an illicit backroom pastime into a major American sport—had said so. Near the end of his career, in 1892, he explicitly stated the exclusionist policy he had informally followed since its beginning in 1878: he was prepared to defend his title against “all … fighters—first come, first served—who are white,” he said. “I will not fight a negro. I never have and never shall.”

  Sullivan was the most celebrated American of his era, better known around the world than any president, and his climb from the immigrant streets of Boston held many meanings for his admirers: the triumph of the individual, the fulfillment of the immigrant dream, even American ascendancy over England, the traditional home of heavyweight champions. One sportswriter likened Sullivan’s fist to “the clapper of some great bell that … boomed the brazen message of America’s glory as a fighting nation from one end of the earth to the other.” Laboring men and white-collar workers alike envied him his strength and independence, admired his courage, and made allowances for his excesses. Sulliv
an’s mustached portrait hung everywhere men gathered; small boys followed him from saloon to saloon; their fathers read about his feats in the pink pages of the National Police Gazette; and between bouts people seemed willing to pay to see him do almost anything, including declaim poetry and pose motionless in tights as the “Dying Gladiator” and “Hercules at Rest.” For three of his ten years as champion he abandoned the ring entirely in favor of a cross-country tour playing a virtuous blacksmith in Honest Hearts and Willing Hands, a melodrama written especially for him. (“Mr. Sullivan,” wrote one careful critic, “was quite as good as the play.”) And he later starred briefly as Simon Legree in a drastically rewritten version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which the part of Mrs. Stowe’s harsh overseer had been rewritten so that Sullivan could hold on to the audience’s sympathy while pummeling Uncle Tom.

  His boxing life began one evening in 1878, the year Jack Johnson was born, when Sullivan and some friends attended a variety show at the Dudley Opera House in Boston. As part of the program, a young Irish boxer named Jack Scannell swaggered onstage and offered to take on anyone in the audience in what was billed as a three-round “exhibition” to keep the police from closing the place down. Sullivan was just nineteen, a part-time ditchdigger working on the city sewers, but he shed his coat, rolled up his sleeves, climbed onto the stage, and put on gloves. When Scannell thumped him on the back of the head, Sullivan got mad and knocked him into the piano.