Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Johnson headed east soon after the McVey bout. In Boston, he beat Sandy Ferguson, a local favorite whose fans called him the “Stubborn Child” for his immovable bulk, and he made his Philadelphia debut at the Washington Sporting Club on May 11 against a black boxer named Joe Butler. Local law required bouts to go no longer than six rounds. Since no official decisions were rendered if the boxers went the distance, a premium was put on fast-paced slugging, and it was not easy for a counterpuncher like Johnson to make an impression. He managed it nonetheless. After two rounds that were so sedate the crowd began to boo, Butler made the fatal mistake of rushing Johnson. A “short and merry mix-up” followed, according to the Police Gazette, and then “one or two short jolts made Butler forget he had arms, and a right hand … to the jaw sent him down for the count and several seconds more than that. The crowd, a big one, stood on its feet and cheered the colored stranger from the West.”*

  Johnson did not return to Los Angeles that summer. Events in the city having nothing to do with him directly—but that hinted at the risks he ran every time he faced a white opponent—accounted for his absence from the scene of his first triumphs. On the night of June 9, Tom McCarey presented another card of racially mixed bouts and things went badly wrong. It was a hot night, and Hazard’s Pavilion was packed with what the Los Angeles Times called “the worst-acting gang of rowdies that ever jammed under the big roof.” The preliminaries were unusually savage. In one, the paper continued,

  an awkward clodhopper of a white man got a severe beating…. [His] front teeth were gone, and it gave him the effect of a continual toothless smile which was ghastly through the blood…. This white boy isn’t much of a prize fighter but he is strongly endowed with the commercial instinct. He climbed back into the ring and told the crowd that a white man never gets a square deal against a “nigger” here.

  The white crowd rained coins into the ring out of sympathy, and the main event did not improve their mood.

  Johnson’s old friend the white San Francisco welterweight Harry Foley was outgunned by the black Los Angeles middleweight Billy Woods, who battered him mercilessly for three rounds, knocking him down again and again with the left hand that had earned him the nickname “Mule Kick.” “The white man hadn’t any chance whatever,” said the Times. “It was a sickening thing to see. He was so slender and so pale and he looked so afraid as he stood against the lithe, crouched black body, with the bullet head … and the little pig eyes gleaming and glittering with a hard cruel light.” (Woods was in fact light-skinned.) In the fourth, the desperate Foley grabbed at Woods, who half-punched and half-threw him to the canvas. This time he stayed there, gasping, apparently unable to get enough air. The referee counted him out and then, after Foley’s seconds shouted that he’d been choked, suddenly reversed himself and declared the white man the winner on a foul.

  Woods erupted. He ran around the ring, cursing and waving his bloody gloves in the air, then rushed at the referee. A policeman stepped in, ready to club him if he got too close, and Woods’ seconds managed to manhandle their fighter back to his corner before any more punches were thrown. But by then the crowd was out of control:

  The place became a horrible, howling pandemonium. Men screaming like enraged animals ran from their seats and stamped about the ring…. A black-haired young man, scarcely more than a boy, with his eyes dilated and his breath coming in pants, plunged through the throng to the ringside and you could hear his voice screaming above all the rest, “Kill the nigger! Kill the——nigger!”

  Only the police prevented the crowd from getting at Woods and his terrified cornermen.

  Fearing that another such evening might spark a full-scale riot, Tom McCarey promised the next day that his Century Athletic Club would stage no more “speckled” bouts: for the foreseeable future, blacks would fight only blacks and whites only whites in Los Angeles. That meant no big money-making matches for Jack Johnson, who had already fought all the good Negro heavyweights on the West Coast, and so he made Philadelphia his unofficial headquarters off and on that summer of 1903.

  At some point while living there, he remembered, he met Etta Reynolds and Clara Kerr. “Both were colored girls and during my stay … I enjoyed their companionship and included them in my affairs as sources of great happiness.” Nothing more is known about Reynolds, who seems to have disappeared quickly from Johnson’s life, but Clara Kerr was a sporting woman working out of a North Philadelphia whorehouse when Johnson met her. “A great attachment grew up between us,” he remembered, and “I was able to set up a splendidly furnished suite of rooms where we lived gaily and happily.” A single photograph of them together survives: Johnson is dressed in a handsomely cut suit, straw hat, and spats, and holds a pair of formal gloves in his big hand; Clara Kerr, a smile lighting up her broad face, wears an elegant dress and a vast circular hat, and clings possessively to his arm and shoulder. They would keep company for much of the next two years.

  In late June, Johnson joined the entourage of his old friend and mentor Joe Walcott as he barnstormed through the West defending his welterweight title. He was with Walcott in Portland, Oregon, on June 28, when he defeated Mysterious Billy Smith,* and again in Butte, Montana, acting as chief second when Walcott knocked out Mose LaFontise on July 4. Johnson and Walcott went out drinking after the fight; after a while it seemed to them a good idea to wander out to the Montana Coursing Club in the early morning hours and release two greyhounds into the enclosure in which the rabbits were held until race time. At least one rabbit was torn apart. A watchman caught the intruders. The club owners charged both men with malicious mischief. Each was fined a dollar plus eight dollars in costs and ordered to move on.

  Three weeks later, Johnson was back in Philadelphia to fight Sandy Ferguson again, this time at the Pennsylvania Art Club. “That Ferguson stayed the six rounds appeared to be solely due to Johnson’s gentlemanly forbearance,” said the Philadelphia Inquirer. “If he had turned himself loose for a continuous performance there was every reason for believing that there would have been nothing to the bout.” Johnson merely displayed “the smile that wouldn’t come off” when Ferguson’s light jab reached him and, at the start of the fifth round, asked Ferguson, “Where would you like this?” and then slammed a short right into his body. But no real damage was done by either man. “The black seemed to content himself by suggesting to the spectators what he might do if he felt inclined that way, without actually trying to do it.” That complaint—that Johnson refused to extend himself against opponents he could effortlessly outpoint—would be echoed again and again throughout his career.

  By late September, Johnson was back in Bakersfield, living with Clara Kerr, getting ready for a rematch with Sam McVey at Hazard’s Pavilion, and cooperating with local reporters, who continued both to sing his praises and to savage him.† He was the “black [Bob] Fitzsimmons,” said the Los Angeles Times on October 1, “a bright piece of work. If all colored men were as sharp, financially and otherwise, as he, there would be no need of any Booker Washingtons.” Three days later, the same paper published a grotesque “biography” of Johnson:

  TEXAS WATERMELON PICKANINNY MAKES BIG DENTS

  About twenty-five years ago one bright, sunny southern morning there was a dull, solid-sounding thud heard and felt throughout the State of Texas. A close examination of the face of the commonwealth revealed a large dent on the back bay shore of Galveston which was finally determined to be the place where the stork had severed connection with a wooly little black pick-aninny. The baby set up the characteristic roar and its mammy took care of it. Mammy’s name was Johnsing, and the first act was to visit the little African M.E. church and give the boy a name. After discussing the customary George Washington Johnson, Benjamin Franklin Johnson, and Napoleon Bonaparte Johnson, the parents finally compromised on Jonathan Arthur Johnson, and like the little fellow’s hands in the melon patch, the name “stuck.”

  After eight more paragraphs of this kind of thing, the author offered ins
tances of what he called “Johnson’s philosophy,” authentic quotes rendered in Uncle Remus dialect—and here turned back into the informal kind of English Johnson actually spoke.

  “Having a good time is all right, but it don’t buy you nothin’ in the ring.”

  “They say too many cooks spoils the broth, but I’ve found the more managers I have, the merrier.”

  “I’ve learned that in the fightin’ business like some other businesses, a man can make more money for awhile by jobbin’ fellas, but has to move too often to make it real pleasant.”

  “I find a man can’t have too many friends in my business, ’fore he’s goin’ to have more or less enemies whether he wants them or not. Friends is a good thing to have until you want money, and sometimes even then.”

  So many men planned to go to the rematch with McVey, the Times continued, that women looking to attend a society ball that evening worried they would have to dance with one another: one asked her beau if he was coming, and he replied that “the dance never was given that could keep him from the fight.”

  As Johnson had predicted to the Los Angeles Herald, there was “nothing but Johnson” to the contest on October 27. “Sam McVey was hammered last night,” the Times reported the next morning, “until his face looked like a goat had chewed it.”

  Jack Johnson pounded him wherever he pleased, but he might as well have pounded a street car fender. It lasted the limit….

  Only the last gong saved the referee, Charley Eyton, who was completely exhausted with wrenching apart the great dripping, struggling black carcasses.

  Some of the credit for the victory must go to Johnson’s bathrobe, which was the most amazing garment ever aired in public. It was covered with roses. He looked like a colonial wall paper design spread on a stormy night.

  The Johnson-McVey rematch made more than twice as much money as any fight ever before held in Los Angeles: $7,600. Johnson took home $2,796, plus more than $600 he’d won by betting on himself. Other winners gave him gifts in gratitude. T. C. Lynch, a gambler who was then one of his two managers of record, handed him a hundred-dollar bill as a sort of tip. A big winner named Will Tufts presented him with a fine shotgun with which to shoot rabbits around Bakersfield, and two brothers who helped run the Hoffman Café gave him a bag containing $35 in nickels, which he delighted in handing out to newsboys on Spring Street.

  News of how well he was doing brought his angry, envious ex-manager Frank Carillo out of the woodwork once again. A court officer had turned up in Johnson’s dressing room before the bout with an order garnisheeing his earnings until he agreed to pay Carillo $297 he insisted the fighter owed him. Johnson and Zeke Abrams, who had evidently seen it all coming, had hastily drawn up and signed a dubious “contract” purporting to show, as the Los Angeles Times said, that “Johnson … has to fight wherever and whoever Zeke tells him and not get a bean out of it.” Carillo couldn’t seize Johnson’s assets if Johnson and Abrams could show the boxer had never had any. Carillo took them to court, where, as a reporter for the Times took notes, Carillo’s profoundly skeptical attorney cross-examined Abrams about the unusual agreement he claimed to have made with his fighter.

  “Aren’t you having a pretty good thing of it managing Johnson?” he asked Abrams.

  Zeke replied cheerfully, “Me? I got simply a puddin’. I’d like to have about four of him.”

  “What did Johnson get out of the receipts?”

  “He ain’t gettin’ nothing.”

  “If he don’t get any money, how does he live?”

  Zeke waved his hand carelessly. “Oh, he’s a witty fellow, you know: [he] lives off his wits and his white friends.”

  “I suppose you pay his board, don’t you?”

  “Me? Aw, no. He lives around his white friends.”

  “I understand he rides around in swell carriages.”

  “That’s right,” said Zeke sadly. “It’s more ’n his manager can do….”

  “Isn’t he kind of—kind of extravagant?”

  “You bet your sweet life. He got $3,500 from me in San Francisco.”

  “What did he do with that?”

  Zeke almost sobbed out the answer: “Bought his wife a sealskin coat.”

  “I just wanted to know how he spends his money.”

  “He shoots craps. He is the only Texas nigger I ever seen that would bet on anything. He’s a high-roller.”

  The courtroom laughed. Johnson grinned, too—he knew when it was in his interest to play the role of naïve bruiser—and walked away a winner once again.

  Johnson’s second one-sided defeat of Sam McVey had made him the logical contender for Jeffries’ title, at least so far as the sporting editor of the Los Angeles Times was concerned.

  The color line gag does not go now. It is “pay or play” in the fighting business. Johnson has met all comers in his class; has defeated each and every one. Now he stands ready to box for the world’s championship. He is a man who would wear that honor with decent grace if it fell on his shoulders…. The public, through the daily newspapers, demands a fight for the championship in behalf of Jack Johnson. Jeffries must heed the call. He wants one hard fight … to show he is in that exalted position by ability as well as by the kindness of nature. Johnson is the man who will give him a chance to show the best that is in him. If he can beat the negro, Jeff need never fight again.

  When they meet, the world will see a battle before which the gladiatory combats of ancient Rome pale into childish insignificance. And meet they some day will. It is up to Jeffries to say when.

  But Jeffries continued to say “never,” and Johnson soon found himself listlessly plowing old ground. His heart was often not in it. He beat Sandy Ferguson again in a lackluster performance at Sunny Jim Coffroth’s open-air Mission Street Arena at Colma, twelve miles by streetcar from San Francisco. Afterward, told that Jeffries had once again said he’d never fight a Negro, Johnson snorted, “I waive the color line myself.” He fought Ferguson a third time in Philadelphia and beat Claude Brooks, who fought as Black Bill, there as well.

  In San Francisco on April 22, 1904, he faced Sam McVey for a third time. “Johnson improved to some extent on his showing with Sandy Ferguson at Colma, but still left the crowd wondering what was the matter with him,” wrote W. W. Naughton, the seasoned sporting editor of the San Francisco Examiner and one of the most influential boxing writers in the country.

  He is cleverness personified, but the fighting spirit seems to flare in flashes with him. He loafs along, grinning and at peace with himself and the other fellow while his seconds are bawling themselves red in the face in their attempts to get him to go in and mix it.

  He showed before last night’s fight was ten minutes old that he had McVey thoroughly at his mercy, yet he played with the beet field warrior as a cat plays with a mouse.

  In a moment of absolute silence, someone shouted from the gallery, “Gentlemen, cease that brutality.” Johnson laughed, and so did the crowd. But as the rounds ticked by, the fans grew more and more restive. They had hoped to see some blood.

  [Johnson’s] tactics were such that the gallery became frantic with chagrin and disgust. It hooted the fighters at the finish of every round from the thirteenth to the nineteenth, and, in the belief that it was to be deprived of the privilege of witnessing a knockout, it became insulting and sarcastic.

  … The crowd made up its mind that the Oxnard heavyweight hadn’t one chance in a thousand and began to “boo” Johnson for hanging back.

  What one newspaper called Johnson’s “detachment” so enraged some fans near his corner that between rounds they began flipping lighted matches onto his back. Finally, with just thirty seconds to go in the last round, Johnson mounted a furious assault, sending McVey reeling back toward the ropes. As he bounced off them again, Johnson caught him with a perfect right hand.*

  A gang of Oxnard fans who had again bet on their favorite and lost stormed up the aisle, shaking their fists at Johnson and shouting, “Kill that
nigger!” As they stepped up into the ring, he hurled the contents of his spit bucket at them, then vaulted out the other side, fled up the aisle “at ten yards per second,” he remembered, and escaped into the night. He took refuge in an Oakland sporting house until things calmed down.

  The national sporting press took a more favorable view of Johnson’s style than had Naughton and the San Francisco fans. Said the Police Gazette:

  By beating Sam McVey again the other night, Jack Johnson, the dusky hero of a score of fights, has placed himself in a position to legitimately claim a fight with Jim Jeffries. There does not appear to be a ringman in all the wide area where pugilism holds sway with sufficient inches and heft to meet the world’s champion [other] than Johnson.

  The Milwaukee Free Press agreed and called for a “piebald match for the world’s greatest pugilistic prize.” But Jeffries wouldn’t hear of it.

  With no one else to fight in California, Johnson headed east with Clara Kerr. They spent some time in Chicago, the city Johnson would eventually make his base of operations. There he fought Frank Childs for a third time on June 2. It was an uneventful contest—“too much on the brotherly love order to suit the spectators,” one newspaper said* —but Johnson still looked impressive enough to George Siler, the veteran referee and Chicago Tribune sports editor who had first discerned Johnson’s potential in the battle royal back in Springfield, Illinois, for him to declare “the big black boy … the finest looking heavyweight since Jeffries came into the picture. The Boilermaker undoubtedly knows his business when he draws the color line. He probably has Jack Johnson in mind.”

  That summer, Johnson and Clara Kerr set up housekeeping in Philadelphia, where he earned a little extra cash playing several games as first baseman with the all-black Philadelphia Giants, backing up his friend and fellow Texan, the pitcher Andrew “Rube” Foster.