Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  * Randy Roberts, Johnson’s most scholarly biographer, calls the story of Johnson’s youthful flight to New York and Boston “universally unbelieved,” but the wealth of detail in the many different versions of it the champion provided over the years convinces me that it or something like it really did occur. Part of the problem may lie with Johnson’s poor memory for dates; again and again he has caused his chroniclers confusion by placing otherwise verifiable events in the wrong year or the wrong sequence. In In the Ring and Out, for example, he claims that he took off for New York in 1890, when he was twelve, but he could not possibly have heard of Joe Walcott then since Walcott had yet to fight his first professional bout. Walcott did not become nationally known until late 1893, when he knocked out Jack Hall, the lightweight champion of Australia, so I have assumed Johnson did not undertake his long journey till after that.

  * Many years later, when Johnson was heavyweight champion and Bob Thompson was a street sweeper in Los Angeles, a reporter asked Thompson about their fight. “He was just a club fighter then,” he recalled, “and didn’t know enough about boxing to meet a man of my experience. He weighed just 156 pounds that night … but that nigger surely had a punch like the hind leg of a mule.” (Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1913.)

  * Gans would go on to win both the lightweight and welterweight titles. He fought 159 times with just eight losses, at least two of which—1900 bouts with Frank Erne and Terry McGovern—were almost surely fakes forced upon him by his manager. Known as the Old Master, he was so good that the ranks soon filled with boxers eager to cash in on his success, including “Allentown Joe Gans,” “Baby Joe Gans,” “Cyclone Joe Gans,” “Dago Joe Gans,” “Italian Joe Gans,” “Michigan Joe Gans,” “Panama Joe Gans,” and four different hopefuls who fought as “Young Joe Gans.”

  * There had been black heavyweights in America since slavery days. William Richmond, a free black from Staten Island, and Tom Molineaux, a Virginia slave, both made their way to England and fought for the title in the early nineteenth century.

  † Sullivan evidently never regretted any of this. In 1911, when Jim Flynn signed to fight Jack Johnson for a second time, Sullivan was still calling for interracial bouts to be banned. “I believe it is degrading for a white man to box a negro,” he told a newspaperman. “Let negroes meet negroes and whites meet whites…. I would never box a negro no matter how great the inducements. I shudder when I think how near I was to being persuaded to meet Godfrey. My better judgment prevailed. [Jake] Kilrain met Godfrey and beat him. In all my experience I saw only two fights in which a white and a negro fought and I don’t want to see another.”

  * Four days later, the Olympic Athletic Club, under whose auspices the Triple Event had been organized, barred interracial contests to ensure that no white New Orleanian would have to endure such sights again. (Ashe, A Hard Road to Glory, p. 23.)

  * Johnson was not always so successful at eluding the authorities during his hoboing years. “Hard-boiled train crews did not seem enthusiastic over having me as a passenger,” he wrote, “and on countless occasions I was chased from boxcars, gondolas and blinds. Brakemen impressed me with their earnestness by brandishing clubs with which they threatened to break numerous bones…. Train crews were not my only enemies…. If I ventured into the streets of some of the smaller towns where a stranger was quickly discovered, police officers and constables manifested deep concern in me. In fact, they were generally so deeply interested that they often insisted that I remain a guest of their town. On these occasions, I was introduced to the town judge, who pried into my personal affairs and asked me embarrassing questions. Usually … I was instructed to hasten out of town, which was just exactly what I wished to do, and what I was trying to do when the police interfered.” (Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out, pp. 37–38.)

  * He was surely familiar with such spectacles, and it has been suggested that he took part in them as a boy in Galveston. Battles royal were common in all southern cities, and Johnson’s hometown was no exception. But he himself said the contest at Springfield was “my first Battle Royal.” What is clear is that he had no special objection to making money from them. They were a fact of life in the rough world in which he chose to earn his living. As heavyweight champion he would cheerfully referee a battle royal at a Broadway theater in New York on December 16, 1909. Thirteen black amateurs went at one another for a cash prize and the amusement of the white crowd. “In this laughable melee,” one reporter wrote, “Johnson scored a knockout for one of the principals foolishly made a swipe at the champion (perhaps the poor fellow was color blind and couldn’t tell one from the other) and as he did, Jack let loose a vicious uppercut and ‘Mr. Fresh’ was sent clean out of the ring. The poor fellow, scared almost to death that he had dared to take such a liberty with the world’s champion, wisely slunk to his dressing room.”

  * Years later, an eyewitness gave a slightly different account of the same event: “Jack was the last to enter the ring and directly as he did he landed one of his every-man-for-himself opponents a wallop on the jaw, dropping him as if shot. Two blacks then sailed in after Johnson, who danced out of distance and before his opponents knew what had happened they were on the floor because they foolishly permitted their respective jaws to come into contact with Jack’s right mitt. The other blacks … crawled out of the ring.” (George Siler, quoted in an undated article by Dick Howell in The Knockout magazine.)

  * Smith was the model for Thomas Eakins’ 1899 painting Between Rounds. He left boxing in 1901 and later played the bass horn in a Salvation Army band.

  * The fight yielded the earliest-known newspaper story to mention Jack Johnson. “The long, rangy colored man from Springfield,” reported the Chicago Tribune on May 6, 1899, “looking something like [former heavyweight champion Bob] Fitzsimmons, showed up well at the start, but weakened at the steady and ponderous attack of Klondike.” In his Prison Memoir, Johnson summarized the fight this way: “For three rounds I fought him to a stand-still and the other three rounds he fought me until I wanted to keep still.” Other accounts say the bout ended in the fourth or fifth, not the sixth round, but the result was the same.

  * In later years, Curley would insist that wrestlers from his stable work between engagements as servants in his Great Neck, New York, home. He rarely bothered to learn their names, shouting, “Wrestler! Bring us a cup of coffee!” when visitors came to call. (Pegler, “Are Wrestlers People?”)

  † Jack Curley’s version of events was often at least as self-serving as Jack Johnson’s, but in his Prison Memoir, Johnson offers at least a hint of corroboration for this story: he said he received no money for his first fight with Klondike.

  ‡ This was one of Johnson’s favorite stories, and the weather got worse with each telling until it all seemed to have taken place in the depths of winter. But Johnson worked for Childs in May, so I have adopted his 1923 version, when he said only that it was raining when Childs threw him out into the street.

  * I can find no official record of this fight but see no reason to doubt it took place. The promoter Alfred Lippe said he’d made the match and that Johnson’s opponent was Charles Brooks. Johnson would knock out a fighter listed as “Charley Brooks” in Galveston in April of 1900. He often fought opponents more than once. (Cleveland Advocate, March 1, 1919.)

  * Johnson told this story at least twice, to a newspaperman in the summer of 1910 and again in his Prison Memoir. Though the records may be incomplete, I have been unable to find any Conroy victories under Johnson’s tutelage. Perhaps Johnson paid for his train ticket by betting against his protégé. It would not have been out of character.

  † According to his first French autobiography, Johnson considered a shift in careers at about this time. He got himself elected president of the Twelfth Ward Republican Club. (He didn’t get many white votes, he said, but he didn’t need them; most Texas Republicans were black.) Johnson loved the speech making and the applause, and when it came time to pick a countywide chairman, he
decided to run for that office, too, or so he later claimed. He had a bitter rival whose name Johnson recalled only as “Deep Six.” When the two appeared side by side before the convention and his opponent reached for his revolver, Johnson knocked him out. A fistfight then broke out on the floor, and the delegates ran for the doors. After that, Johnson said, he decided to return to the ring: the “political struggle was too complicated and too wearying” to suit him.

  I’ve been unable to locate any documentation for this story, and at first glance it might seem farfetched. But Johnson did later dabble in politics as a stump speaker, and Texas Republican politics could be explosive. When the state party met in 1896 to nominate delegates to the national convention, for example, the conflict between Norris Wright Cuney’s Black and Tan faction and the Lily Whites, who wanted to “separate the races in primaries as they are in schools, churches, and railroads,” ended in precisely the kind of confrontation Johnson described: “Nature’s weapons,” one newspaper reported, “bludgeons, bottles, pistols and knives all figured in. Tables were smashed and chairs broken, while oaths and groans blended.” (Quoted in Hales, A Southern Family, p. 90.)

  * McCormick battled—and was beaten by—some of the best of his day, Jack Johnson, Tom Sharkey, Billy Stift, and Sandy Ferguson among them. On March 5, 1905, John L. Sullivan lurched out of retirement and took on the 200-pound McCormick in what was intended to be a four-round “exhibition” at Smith’s Opera House in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sullivan was fifty and weighed 273 pounds, but at 1:23 of the second round he hit McCormick with a right hand that put the younger man out for five minutes. (Isenberg, John L. Sullivan, p. 352.)

  CHAPTER TWO

  ____________________________________________

  THE GOOD MAN

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 8, 1900, a great hurricane swept northwestward across the Gulf of Mexico, hit Galveston, and tore it apart. It was the worst natural disaster in American history. More than six thousand people died—drowned, crushed by tree limbs and collapsing buildings, or ripped apart by shards of slate blown off roofs at better than 150 miles an hour.

  When the sun rose the next morning, Jack Johnson remembered, he felt lucky to be “one of the few residents of Galveston who did not lose a member of his family.” But two thirds of the city’s structures had been reduced to flinders—including the little house at 808 Broadway of which Henry and Tiny Johnson had been so proud. Like roughly ten thousand of their fellow citizens, the Johnsons ended up homeless, seeking whatever shelter they could find in a muddy landscape littered with dead horses, cattle, and human beings.

  Johnson would later write that in the hours following the storm he muscled boats away from profiteers who dared demand money before they would go to anyone’s aid and “saved many lives” of people clinging to roofs and tree limbs.* And he may have served on the largely black crews that labored in Galveston’s streets for weeks thereafter, handkerchiefs over their mouths, digging the dead from the wreckage, cremating the corpses, or ferrying them out to sea. Deputized whites with guns kept them at it when the heat and stench grew too bad. Their only rewards were hot meals and enough liquor to dull their senses.

  Johnson’s family eventually found a new home, in the alley behind West Point Baptist Church in the 3000 block of Avenue M, and Johnson himself was soon back in the ring. In December 1900, the Police Gazette ran an advertisement:

  I have a good man named Jack Johnson. He has fought some good men and has beaten them all. He has … been defeated only once…. Klondike got a decision over him in Chicago about a year ago, and since then he has beaten George Lawler, 15 rounds; John Heyman,* 6 rounds; drawn with Klondike 20 rounds, and has beaten a score of others. I would like to match him with some good man, Tommy Swift, Billy Stift or Klondike preferred, before any club offering the purse or for the gate receipts. Johnson is a colored man, twenty-two years old, weighs 168 pounds in trim, and is anxious to fight some good man.

  It was signed “A. Busch” of Dallas, Texas. Busch’s name does not appear again in the Johnson story, but he does hold one distinction: he was the first white man to go on record claiming to be in charge of Jack Johnson.

  Most black fighters believed they had no choice but to defer to their managers, turning over to them the bulk of their winnings, sometimes following their orders to throw fights or pull punches or carry opponents in order to remain profitable. Johnson was never averse to a little creative prearrangement if there was money in it, but he always insisted on controlling his own destiny. “I am my own manager,” he would tell the press when he was champion. “I always have been.” No one knows how many white men believed themselves his boss over the years. Nor has anyone ever produced a complete tally of the lawsuits against him filed by those who learned they’d been wrong.

  The Chicago promoter Paddy Carroll saw Busch’s ad that winter. He was in Memphis, running the Phoenix Athletic Club for a local politician named Pat Kernan. He sent a wire to Jack Curley, asking him to arrange for Johnson and Klondike to come to Memphis and face each other for a third time. Both men “had progressed rapidly since their comic affair in Chicago,” Curley remembered. Certainly, Johnson had. He closed Klondike’s left eye with a right hand early on, battered him badly enough that he tried to quit in the seventh and did quit in the fourteenth. “The crowd was so incensed,” Curley said, “that it chased [Klondike] out of the ring through an exit that led to Kernan’s saloon for Negroes next door and down a cobbled street that led to the Mississippi River.”

  “Oh, say,” Johnson remembered, “what a lacing I gave that Mr. Klondike.”

  I was 22 years old and I received a thousand bucks for that fight, some dough for a youngster, eh? Well, I knocked Klondike out … and believe me Klondike will never forget that fight…. After the fight some of my friends gave a grand ball in my honor and it was some ball. We danced the slow drag, the Cuban drag, and a dance called “Coon’s Girl Molly,” which is what is known now as the Shimmy, and, Oh boy, but I did dance.

  Johnson stayed on in Memphis for a time, enjoying the bawdy delights of Beale Street and winning so many battles royal that finally no one in town would climb into the ring with him. “No, I don’t want any more of him,” one battered victim said; “he hits too hard.” He signed for a rematch with Jim Scanlon, too, but the chief of police canceled it at the last moment on the ground that “no white boxer should meet a negro in Memphis.” In February 1901, Johnson found himself back home again in Galveston.

  Jack Curley was still working for Paddy Carroll that month when a burly Texan turned up at his Chicago office. The stranger had a problem back in Galveston, he said. “We’ve got a big, fresh Negro down there by the name of Jack Johnson who has won some fights and is bragging too much. We’re tired of listening to him and we want to see him licked, and I thought maybe Carroll could send somebody down there to do it.”

  Curley suggested a journeyman named Jack Beauscholte.

  “No,” the stranger said. “I hate to admit it, but this Negro can fight some and he’s too good for Beauscholte.”

  Curley then suggested Joe Choynski.

  Like Jack Johnson, Joseph Bartlett Choynski was a sports pioneer, the first Jewish American ever to win an international reputation as an athlete. The son of a Polish immigrant editor and poet, be began his career at fourteen, battling Irish boys from the streets of his native San Francisco. His detractors called him “Chrysanthemum Joe” for his blond pompadour and for the allegedly effete life he led outside the ring—he collected antiques, neither drank nor smoke, and was altogether too well-spoken to suit most sports-writers—and he never weighed more than 175 pounds. But he was both a brilliant boxer and a hard puncher who fought five future heavyweight champions and did well enough against them that not one dared face him after they had won their titles. Jim Corbett—who was so battle-weary after knocking Choynski out in the twenty-seventh round of their contest aboard a barge anchored off Benicia, California, that he had to be told he’d won—never f
orgot Choynski’s power. “Little Joe was the hardest hitter I ever tangled with,” he said many years later. “To this day I can’t figure out how a runt like him could hit so damned hard.” James J. Jeffries agreed. He managed to hold Choynski to a twenty-round draw, but not before he was hit with a left hook so powerful it drove a tooth through his upper lip; between rounds, one of his seconds had to cut it loose with a penknife.

  Choynski’s best days were behind him by 1901—writers called him the “old warhorse”—but Jack Curley thought him just the man to go to Galveston and take Jack Johnson down a peg. “He lives right out here in La Grange and I can get him on the telephone in a minute,” he told his visitor. “But you’ll have to pay him $1,500 or $2,000 to get him to go down there.”

  The Texan agreed.

  Years later, Choynski himself took up the story. He was not unknown in Galveston.

  I had whipped a big fellow named Herman Bernau down there in three rounds [in 1897, and] when my name was mentioned, Johnson, who had seen me fight, declared I was just too small. Well, I got the match, anyway … and Bernau, the same man whom I had beaten, [was to] act as the referee. [He was also the same man whose gym young Jack Jackson had swept out.]

  I went down to Galveston in the guise of a boxing teacher …[The] management advertised that I was in Galveston for the purpose of giving demonstrations of physical culture and boxing.

  The old veteran and the eager newcomer met on the evening of February 25, 1901, in Harmony Hall, a ramshackle survivor of the hurricane. Cold, wet air blew through its battered walls all evening, so cold and so wet that Choynski would remember the place as roofless. The house was full. A black minstrel quartet performed from the ring. Then, according to the Galveston Daily News, “two colored boys, who had each been deprived by accident of a leg, gave a fistic event.” Finally, a club official told the crowd it was about to see “an exhibition of the manly art to the extent of 20 rounds.”