Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Frank Carillo promised the court that his client would pay whatever he legitimately owed. But Johnson saw no reason to move out of the white part of town. No district would ever be forbidden to him. A couple of weeks later, he fired Carillo, charging that his ex-manager had made off with his thousand-dollar purse from the Russell fight. Carillo countered that Johnson now had an inflated sense of his own importance, that “Mrs. Johnson” was putting absurd notions into his head.*

  Zeke Abrams,† a well-known Los Angeles bookmaker and poolroom operator, snapped Johnson up and arranged with Tom McCarey for a February 3 match at Hazard’s Pavilion with Denver Ed Martin. Martin, who held the “colored heavyweight championship,” outweighed Johnson by twenty pounds, stood half a head taller, and possessed many of the same defensive skills but not the same punching power.* The two men circled each other for ten rounds, probing for weaknesses and finding few, displaying what the San Francisco Examiner called “the magnificent footwork of Martin and the impregnable blocking ability of Johnson.” There was so little action, one newspaper noted, that some in the sellout crowd of four thousand began shouting, “Fake! Fake!” Then, in the eleventh round, Johnson pinned Martin in the corner and hit him with a right hand to the side of the neck that sent him sprawling through the ropes.

  Four thousand yelling, screeching sports stood on their chairs … and raised a din that almost lifted the iron roof…. The noise … would have made a boiler shop in full blast sound like a tin whistle. Four thousand throats bellowed out a volume of whistles, cheers, yells and screeches so overpowering that it was impossible to hear yourself speak, and eight thousand eyes were centered on the wobbling, staggering form of Martin, rolling on the floor of the ring and trying to recover himself. He did it, but it was only gameness that saved him.

  Martin made it to his feet but went down twice more before the bell rang. Somehow he managed to clear his head between rounds—and to stay away from Johnson for nine more.†

  The referee awarded Johnson the decision. He was now the “colored heavyweight champion of the world,” the loftiest height to which any black heavyweight could then realistically aspire.* But Jack Johnson saw no reason to endorse that kind of realism. He would not be satisfied until he forced Jim Jeffries to get into the ring with him.

  * Randy Roberts disbelieves this story and he may well be right. There is no proof one way or the other. But if Johnson did exaggerate the part he played somewhat, there may be an explanation beyond his own robust ego. In the storm’s aftermath, the contribution to Galveston’s recovery made by its Negro citizens had been overshadowed by widespread, lurid, and almost entirely false newspaper stories of looting by bands of black “ghouls” who were said to have rifled pockets for cash and sawed off fingers to get at rings. As many as seventy-five blacks were supposed to have been shot by whites deputized to protect the dead. The real number of looters killed seems to have been eight—and no one knows to what race they belonged—but the stories were widely believed, in the North as well as in the South. Johnson, like the other black citizens of his hometown, must have resented that fact. Perhaps by playing up his own role, he may in part have been trying to redress that balance. (I am grateful to the architectural historian Ellen Beasley for suggesting this explanation.)

  * I have been unable to find any other record of Johnson’s battle with John Heyman.

  * The two men would fight three more times, and Johnson would do only marginally better; all three bouts ended in a draw. Later, he would say that Griffin had been the cause of the “greatest punishment I ever received in the ring.”

  † Johnson’s supporting cast in this story expanded with the telling. In his 1931 article, “How I Whipped Mr. Jeffries,” it included the cartoonist Tad Dorgan and “several other fellows.”

  * Johnson’s early hero Jim Corbett had lost his title to Fitzsimmons in 1897.

  † Jeffries appeared in vaudeville after he retired. An old friend and hotel keeper named Billy Considine took several friends to see him on opening night in Detroit, spending fifteen dollars for a box and twice as much for a big floral good-luck horseshoe for Jeffries’ dressing room. The next night, Jeffries dropped in at his friend’s saloon to say thank you—and spent a total of twenty-five cents. (“ ‘Cheap Skates,’ The Ring Does Not Escape Them,” unsourced 1907 newspaper article from the Antiquities of the Prize Ring archives.)

  * In the boxing world, ethnicity has always been malleable. Kid Carter, whose real name was Edward Blazwick, was born in Austria to Croatian parents, but because of his yellow hair he began boxing in Brooklyn billed as “Young Olsen, the Gangling Swede.” Presumably, his subsequent name change had something to do with his borough’s relatively small Scandinavian fan base. He was a featherweight at first, but ended up battling heavyweights and had knockout victories over two of the best fighters of his time, Joe Walcott and Joe Choynski.

  * This wasn’t literally true. His first fight with Klondike had made the Chicago Tribune, and the Choynski-Johnson imbroglio in Galveston had received considerable national coverage. But this was the first newspaper story that Johnson himself had deliberately inspired, and the memory of it clearly pleased him.

  † Tom McCarey was the father of the Hollywood directors Leo and Ray McCarey.

  ‡ He may have been given his nickname, “Uncle Tom,” because of his alleged closeness to so many black fighters.

  § His real name was Charles, but his mother had always called him “Jack Sprat” when he was a boy, and the first name stuck.

  * The champion had remained true to his pledge never to risk his title against a black contender. But on September 17, 1901, at Hazard’s Pavilion, he had fought an exhibition with Griffin, whom he called “the colored boy with whom I had my first fight,” in order to show “those who remembered that bout … the difference between the Jeffries of the boiler works and the one of that day.” He promised to knock Griffin out in four rounds but was out of shape and, though he scored several knockdowns and won all four rounds, he couldn’t quite put him away. (Fullerton, Two Fisted Jeff, p. 192.)

  † The two preliminaries also pitted black fighters against white ones.

  * Jim Jeffries, who chased Everett for three rounds before knocking him out in 1898, told his chronicler Hugh Fullerton that Everett was “one of the most dangerous-looking and least dangerous fighters in the world” and “the only man in my career who ever faced me that did not show gameness and courage.” That same year, Everett had quit rather than face further punishment by Frank Childs in one fight, and in his next tried to strangle Joe Choynski. When he was disqualified for this sign of excessive zeal, he first went after the referee and then battled the police sent in to subdue him.

  * Johnson told many tales over the years about why he was physically under par for this important fight. In one, a British Indian army veteran had introduced him to a drink he called a “Maharaja’s peg”—brandy and soda in a large glass—and he had drunk glass after glass when he should have been training.

  * After the fight, the police detained Carillo briefly for carrying a concealed weapon (Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1903). Years later, Johnson would suggest that his relatively poor showing against Gardner had been the result of a drug administered by his manager, but Carillo’s willingness to wave a pistol around in the interest of a Johnson victory makes nonsense of that version of events.

  * Johnson’s friend and fellow Texan Andrew “Rube” Foster, the pitcher-manager and impresario of black baseball, once explained that when he found himself in a tight spot on the diamond he did precisely the same thing—with very similar results: “The real test comes when you are pitching with men on bases. Do not worry. Try to appear jolly and unconcerned. I have smiled often with the bases full with two strikes and three balls on the batter. This seems to unnerve. In other instances, where the batter appears anxious to hit, waste a little time on him and when you think he realizes his position and everybody is yelling to him to hit it out, waste a few balls and try hi
s nerve; the majority of times you will win out by drawing him into hitting a wide one.” (Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, Baseball: An Illustrated History, p. 87.)

  * It is impossible to know which “Mrs. Johnson” this was. But Jack Johnson needed no one’s help in insisting that he be treated precisely as any other “pure-blooded” American was treated.

  † Everybody in Los Angeles sporting circles seemed to know Johnson’s new manager, but apparently no one was sure how to spell his name: he is variously “Zick Abram,” “Zeke Abraham,” and “Zick Abrams” in the newspapers.

  * The treatment Ed Martin routinely received at white hands is vivid evidence of what black boxers struggled against throughout their careers. In 1900, two years before his fight with Johnson, Martin attended a Tom Sharkey fight and afterward challenged him from ringside as white fighters then routinely did. Sharkey dismissed him out of hand: “Gentlemen … I have never barred nobody outside of a nigger. I will not fight no nigger. I did not get my reputation fighting niggers and I will not fight a nigger. Outside of niggers I will fight any man living.”

  That same year, Martin featured in an early Edison studio film called Ruhlin Boxing with “Denver” Ed Martin in which he was made to play the foil to the less talented white contender, Gus Ruhlin. The Edison catalog describes the film as follows: “Here we present Ruhlin in a lively bout with the dusky well known ‘Denver’ Ed Martin. The bout is very lively from start to finish, and is ended up with a little piece of comedy by Ruhlin presenting Martin with a live chicken, which he receives in a joyful manner.” (Streible, Fight Pictures, p. 316.)

  † Tom McCarey loved the art and science of boxing and many years later declared this the best bout he’d ever seen: “It was a marvelous exhibition. [It] involved everything that went with boxing—speed, footwork, feinting, slipping of blows, parrying, counter-punching, science, skill, courage and hitting. I have never seen anything like it before or since.” (Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1935.)

  * Johnson was also making big money now, a fact not lost on Frank Carillo, still smarting from having been fired and eager for revenge. The next morning he had his former meal ticket arrested for “embezzling” his watch. The case never came to court.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ____________________________________________

  THE SPORT

  LOOKING BACK MANY YEARS AFTER Johnson left the ring, Harry B. Smith of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that he believed him to have been the greatest defensive heavyweight he’d ever seen. But, he added, what he and his fellow reporters had liked most about Johnson was that from the first he had been “a good showman, who knew how to help the fight writer make news.”

  As a boxer, he had been inspiring headlines for a year or so before the Jack Jeffries and Denver Ed Martin fights. Other black fighters had received similar coverage in the sporting press over the years, but Johnson now began to attract the kind of celebrity coverage that had always been reserved for white sports stars. Much of it reeked of a kind of racial stereotyping that would astonish a later generation, but everything about Johnson—his highly developed sense of style inside and outside the ring; his bold self-confidence, and what few details reporters had gleaned about his domestic life—had begun to interest newspaper readers. He was becoming what he had always wanted to be: the center of attention, set apart.

  It all can be said to have begun a week or so after the February 3, 1903, Martin fight when a Los Angeles Times reporter and his friend happened to be standing at the corner of Second and Spring Streets when they spotted Johnson sauntering toward them. He was a “towering figure clad in a waistcoat of green,” the reporter wrote.

  The clothes that garmented the strolling colossus spoke emphatically. In place of wrinkles in his trousers there were orderly creases, fresh from the tailor’s iron. An inch from the boots these creases stopped, allowing the stylish pantaloons to break smartly and set trimly on the kid-covered instep. The boots gleamed—not with the vulgar shine of blacking, but with the lustrous gloss of $7 patent leather, polished to the point of refraction. Stetson’s latest block adorned the towering one’s head, and against the ebon darkness of the figure’s Abyssinian neck shone the whiteness of newly-laundered linen. The high, modish collar found fashionable complement in a scarf of ermine silk, knotted with perfect neatness and adorned with a diamond pin. From the magnificent shoulders fell in faultless lines a double-breasted sack [suit], unbuttoned to show the vest of olive green. Afternoon gloves of pearl-gray suede were carried nonchalantly by a hand that bore on one of its chocolate-hued fingers a flashing gem of rather more carats than one. The other hand swung languorously a cane of nobby choice.

  “Now, I wonder who is that dead-swell coon?” asked the writer’s friend.

  “Jack Johnson,” the newspaperman answered. “Don’t he cut a dash?

  Swellest coon on the Coast….”

  “Why, that doesn’t look like the stripped nigger I saw at Hazard’s…. This fellow looks like an African millionaire.”

  Johnson stopped to talk. His bout with Martin had earned $4,200. Johnson’s share was $1,260 (a little over $25,000 in modern terms). What had he done with all that money?

  Johnson was happy to explain.

  Well, I’ve got about $200 of it left. I was “mortgaged” for about $500 by the time the fight came off—training expenses, mostly. Then, I always like the very finest clothes and I generally wear them. So I bought some new togs. And I put a few hundred in diamonds and I gave ’em to my wife. I like diamonds and so does she.* Then, if you’re in my profession you’ve always got to have your hand in your pocket when you meet the crowd in the bar—and all that sort of thing counts way up, you know. A hundred a week won’t near last a first-class boxing man.

  Most first-class boxing men—and second- and third-class ones as well—belonged to the special free-spending world of the “sport.” So did pimps and gamblers, vaudevillians and saloon keepers, and the women who lived in the “sporting houses” they frequented.

  The word “sport” had many meanings in Jack Johnson’s time. As a verb, it meant to enjoy oneself, to wager, and to display or flaunt. As a noun, it described someone “game for any excitement, particularly excitement that involved gambling or women.” All of it fit Johnson to a tee.

  Sports flourished on the margins of big-city life. Their world revolved around betting and good times and the elusive promise of easy money. But because the individual appetite for those things crossed all the lines of race and class that divided Americans from one another, the sporting world blended black with white, rich with poor, in ways encountered in no other segment of society.

  Attention-getting outfits had always been part of that world.* By the fall, one newspaper would report, Johnson had twenty-one “tasty” suits in his hotel-room closet, and changed clothes twice a day with the help of a maid whose only duty was to keep his clothes at all times “ready for occupancy.”† When it came to fashion, the paper continued, “Beau Brummel might have been a preliminary but Jack Johnson is a main event.”

  Jewelry, too, was part of the picture. Sports, wrote a woman who had known a great many of them, always wore “diamond rings with matching stickpins—the genuine articles,” and “tight-fitting, slick-looking suits to go with their diamonds. Sometimes they had to make do with just the suits. In that era, diamonds weren’t just a girl’s best friend, they were a man’s, too. A sporting man’s diamond spent as much time in a pawn shop as on him.” Johnson became famous for the diamonds that winked from his fingers, his tie, and his cuffs; at some point early in his moneymaking years he added to his overall dazzle by having several of his front teeth capped with gold.

  A sport moved always at a deliberate pace; the longer it took to move down the street, the more time bystanders had to admire him. New Orleans sports, the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton remembered, cultivated a “very mosey walk.” Jack Johnson moseyed, too. He wouldn’t be hurried outside the ring—or inside it, for that matter
.

  A good deal of cash was required to keep him and his female companions looking sharp, and as he told the Times reporter, he was always on the lookout for ways to make more of it.

  There ain’t much money in my profession nowadays unless you get to take a big purse, like $10,000 or so. I’ve been in California a year now, and I’ve fought on the average of once every two months and I haven’t been licked yet. But I’ve only made about $8,000 in that year and I’ve only got a couple hundred cash to my name. I’m going to try mighty hard to cut a clean thousand out of my next fight… and if I do you bet I’ll sock it away. I’m going to bet $500 on myself for one thing. Then I want to go home to my folks in Galveston, and rest up a month, and then get a go with Jeffries. I think I have the right to meet him next, and it can’t be too soon to suit.

  Jack Johnson had yet to beat a top contender, but he was already publicly challenging Jeffries for the title.

  Johnson’s next bout was scheduled for February 27 in Los Angeles against another rising black heavyweight. Sam McVey (or Mac Vea, accounts differ) was discovered harvesting beets in Oxnard, California, by a local blacksmith, Billy Roche. McVey was only seventeen years old and had fewer defensive skills than the other prominent black heavyweights of his day, but he hit at least as hard as any of them; every one of his first seven fights had ended in a knockout. To sell tickets, Johnson professed to be worried. He’d rather fight Denver Ed Martin twice than the “Oxnard Wonder” once, he assured a roomful of gullible reporters, because “you never know what that nigger is going to do.” In fact, he knew there was nothing the inexperienced, one-dimensional young fighter could do to him. Johnson won every round, outboxed and outhustled McVey, and knocked him down three times. The fans loved it, all but the Oxnard contingent, which lost some fifteen thousand dollars betting on their man.