* Neither the police nor New York bystanders were always so friendly. A week later, Johnson was arrested for speeding away from the theater. He tried to explain in court: “I have to go up Seventh Avenue and through Forty-third Street to dodge the hoodlums who call at me ‘nigger’ and ‘coon’ and throw stones at me. The police told me to go fast and get away as soon as I could to prevent congestion of traffic. I have never run down or injured anyone, but I don’t want to be struck by stones.” The judge fined him fifteen dollars. (New York Times, July 21, 1910.)
* The Exchange was Kenna’s headquarters for thirty years. “Politics is business,” he once told a European visitor. “This is where we make voters. They drink 12,000 glasses of beer a week in my place.” To make sure they kept up that brisk pace, the bartender had instructions never to turn off the water tap. “The sound of running water,” Kenna explained, “makes ’em thirsty.” (Lindberg, Chicago by Gaslight, p. 116.)
* In the midst of the controversy, Hugh McIntosh reported to the readers of Boxing on the impact the Johnson–Burns films had had on nonwhite British subjects throughout the empire the year before. In South Africa, he said, the “Kaffirs” had cheered every blow struck by Johnson and after each showing “congregated together in great numbers around the streets, discussing with great energy and excitement the various points of the contest they had seen.” This “unrest” so alarmed the authorities that McIntosh had thought it best to stop showing the films altogether. When he heard that similar enthusiasm for Johnson had been shown by Indians and Ceylonese, McIntosh said, he consulted an “authority on Anglo-Indian affairs,” who told him not to be concerned. “Physically,” he said, “the Hindus and Cinghalese are small and weak, by reason of their enervating climate, and while a section of them are active in treachery, matters physical do not disturb them much.”
McIntosh offered no opinion on whether or not the Johnson–Jeffries films should be shown in the United States. “The coloured mind is very susceptible to influence,” he assured his readers, “and only time will tell whether the pictures will influence them for good or evil.”
In the end, the British found the Johnson–Jeffries films far more inflammatory than those of Johnson–Burns, and they were barred from large parts of the empire, this time including India and Ceylon. The American occupiers of the Philippines followed suit: the Municipal Board of Manila banned the films “in fear of the effect on the Filipinos.” (McIntosh, “Pride of the Blacks.”)
* On September 30, according to the Chicago Defender (October 1, 1910), “Professor Page,” principal of the black public school in Moundsville, Virginia, “shortened by one hour the afternoon of school … for the purpose of taking his pupils to witness the Jeffries–Johnson fight pictures. The white people are threatening to tar and feather Prof. Page. Great excitement is now prevailing among the lower class whites and better elements of both classes are doing all in their power to avert a clash.”
† Some well-to-do whites made their own arrangements to see the films. The millionaire sportsman Joseph E. Widener invited one hundred guests to dinner at his Newport mansion, then showed the Reno film, accompanied by a live appearance by McClellan’s Colored Singers.
* In an advertisement in the New York Age, the American Cinephone Company also sold the recording of “the unconquerable Jack Johnson” separately from the film. With each pair of disks came “a letter from Johnson in facsimile, certifying to the authenticity of the record and commending it to his friends…. You hear Jack Johnson’s own voice telling how he won the big fight. Price $2.50.” (Brooks, Lost Sounds, p. 244.)
† There was even sporadic talk of a rematch with Jim Jeffries. Tex Rickard, always eager for another big payday, mused aloud that Jeffries might do better the second time around because he would feel less “pressure.” When a reporter was sent out to Jeffries’ home to get a response, the former champion wouldn’t even come to the door.
* In an uncharacteristically deferential moment, Johnson later claimed he’d never made any offer. “I know my place as a colored man,” he told the Chicago Tribune on August 6, 1910, “and I do not intend to make enemies among the white people by doing anything as foolish as buying a house at Brooklyn Heights.” Besides, he said, he was too “patriotic” to want to live anywhere but Chicago.
† The prospect of Jack Johnson’s occupying a home in Brooklyn Heights had been seen by local whites as a threat to neighborhood property values. The black-owned Chicago Defender (December 3, 1910) saw neighborhood improvement in his purchase of Turner Hall from allegedly lawless whites: “Although numerous cutting scrapes, murders, etc., have been committed there by whites, the way the place is run has become obnoxious to the neighborhood; the hallways and alleyways have been abused by the patrons of this hall to such an extent that complaints have been made time and again. We are glad that Mr. Johnson contemplates securing the building and thereby putting a better class of citizens in it in future.”
* According to the writer Larry Neal, the morning after Joe Louis beat former heavyweight champion Primo Carnera in 1935, an exultant black man entered an Evansville, Indiana, diner, ordered his breakfast using this ancient formula, and was slapped and then shot to death by the white man behind the counter. (Neal, “Uncle Rufus.”)
* It was not the first time she’d asked Sutton for help. The previous year she’d hidden in his hotel for several days after a customer accused her of stealing his wallet.
* Ketchel’s manager, Willus Britt, had died unexpectedly just twelve days after Ketchel’s fight with Johnson. The fighter was devastated, and Britt’s successor, the sometime playwright and full-time alcoholic Wilson Mizner, was unable or unwilling to control him. “Steve, my boy,” he is supposed to have told his charge, “all I can do for you is improve your mind. Your morals are the same as mine already.”
Soon, newspapers were running stories about Ketchel’s “dissipating”—drinking, dancing, driving too fast, and spending too much time in the company of what one newspaper called the “almond-eyed celestials” of San Francisco’s Chinatown. He fought five more times, including a newspaper decision over the great Sam Langford, but not long after visiting Reno for the Johnson–Jeffries fight, even he began to realize that he was slipping and left the ring to get himself back into shape on a friend’s Missouri ranch. There, under murky circumstances never fully explained, he was shot to death by a ranch hand named Walter Dipley. Dipley and his companion, Goldie Smith, were jailed for the crime. Ketchel was just twenty-four. Told he had died, Wilson Mizner said it wasn’t possible. “Start counting over the dear boy,” he said, “and he’ll get up.” (Milwaukee Free Press, November 19, 1909; Gilmore, “An Ozarks Melodrama”; Edward Dean Sullivan, The Fabulous Wilson Mizner, p. 216.)
* According to the special correspondent for Boxing (November 12, 1910), Johnson and Oldfield had quietly driven the track together several days earlier in order to be sure they got some compelling if inauthentic footage, “going through the motions of an automobile race behind a touring car that had a moving-picture machine mounted in its tonneau.”
* Oldfield remained close to Jim Jeffries, and upon returning from a hunting trip with him in the Sierras in June of 1911, he announced to the world that the ex-champion now believed he’d been poisoned before the fight in Reno. Johnson hadn’t really beaten him after all. Jeffries himself would make the same charge in Two-Fisted Jeff, his as-told-to autobiography, published in 1929, also claiming he was still feeling the effects of the mysterious potion seventeen years after it was administered. Almost no one believed him.
* Johnson made a still more impassioned appeal to a group of black churchwomen gathered in Quinn Chapel during the same campaign. “The black race is the greatest race ever,” he said, according to the Chicago Tribune on April 1, 1910. “In every walk of life there is a black man coming out winner—black ministers, black school teachers and black bicycle riders. Yes, and other people. We want to stick together like that other great race, the Jews. They’
ve all flocked together and stuck…. If we stick together as a race we can elect Mr. Wright…. Every other race, east or west, is against you and me. The odds are against us, but we can win if we stick together. Now ladies, go home to your sweethearts and husbands as a personal favor to me, and see they find out what it means to elect a man like Mr. Wright—what an honor to the race.”
Johnson so enjoyed campaigning that he seriously considered running for alderman himself.
* This was rhetorical overkill. Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and daughter were both present when Washington dined with the president.
* Like so many of the cases lodged against him, this one does not seem ever to have reached the courts.
* Gerard would eventually win, however, and Johnson would be fined $3,489. He was in exile overseas when the judgment came down, and it is unclear whether he ever paid it. (Washington Post, January 31, 1915.)
* George Little never regained his status in the First Ward after his fifteen months at Jack Johnson’s side. By 1912, he had been banished from Chicago and was running a workingman’s saloon in Lancaster, Ohio.
* According to the veteran trainer-manager Dan Morgan, the most promising entrant seemed to be a young Englishman named Fred McKay. He was big, and in the first round of his bout with a club fighter named Sailor White, he looked good and moved fast as well. Every manager and trainer in the club edged toward his corner, dreaming of the big money they could make matching him against Johnson. In the second round Sailor White hit him on the jaw and knocked him cold. “You should have seen the boys melt away,” Morgan remembered. “He had to carry his own bucket to the dressing room when he came to.” (Lardner, White Hopes, pp. 32–33.)
CHAPTER NINE
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THE BLACK MAN GARBED IN BLACK
ON JUNE 5, 1911, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Johnson set sail for England. With them went a Negro chauffeur named Charles Brown and two sparring partners, Monte Cutler and Walter Monahan, as well as a pair of racing cars, twenty trunks, and a small safe containing Johnson’s cash and his wife’s jewels.
“There was consternation at the offices of the North German Lloyd Steamship company,” the New York Times reported, “when it was discovered that the chief engineer’s room on the Kronprinz Wilhelm … had been booked by an outside agency for ‘Mr. John Johnson and wife.’”
“Is it the colored pugilist?” an officer was asked.
“We are afraid it is” was the reply.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Do? We can’t do anything, the passage is booked and the money is paid.”
Barron Wilkins came to see the Johnsons off. So did many other friends and several reporters, including one working for the Washington Post. The Johnsons’ cabin was filled with flowers.
Mrs. Johnson was not visible at first. Over in the corner was a well-equipped jewelry establishment. Mr. Johnson moved it and this revealed the background of the store as his white wife. On her left hand reclined a small carload of diamonds. Her shirt waist front was littered with similar decorations, but the fingers of her right hand were almost bare. Even to be liberal one could hardly say she had more than $8,000 there. While her protector exuded conversation she daintily picked at $8 worth of toast and coffee. She was not feeling chipper.
“If you had paid a large sum of money for a nice stateroom on the upper deck of the Kronprinz Wilhelm,” the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin asked on June 6:
and then had figured on having a nice neighborly party in the large cabin that you did not feel you could afford and suddenly were confronted with Jack Johnson and his wife beating it to the dining room when the gong sounded for dinner, wouldn’t it make you wish some white hope was on board to make him eat in his stateroom?
What the New York Times called “the delicate question” as to whether the Johnsons—who had paid $750 for their first-class passage—would be permitted to dine alongside their fellow passengers was finally resolved by the chief steward, who set up a small table for them in the dining saloon at the foot of the companionway leading from the promenade.
In the end, stormy seas kept the Johnsons in their stateroom at most mealtimes. But they did take arm-in-arm walks on deck, and Johnson was amiable even when asked the most intrusive questions.
Why did he wear a ruby on one hand and an emerald on the other?
“I always dress port and starboard when at sea,” he explained with a grin. “Because in the night when I’m out on deck and it’s dark, people can see the lights and tell whether I’m coming or going.”
Scores of passengers turned out each morning to watch him spar in the ship’s gymnasium: “No race prejudice came to hinder the curious from watching him at work,” wrote one shipboard correspondent. “All of those on board took a chance on losing caste and race supremacy by taking in the show.” And the champion generously bought drinks for everyone who would drink with him. “I wish we’d seen more of him,” said one man described as a “Canadian millionaire.” “He is unobtrusive and his intelligent conversations are worth listening to.”*
Johnson met the British press at Plymouth wearing a crisply cut brown suit, brown gloves, and gleaming patent leather boots, one of twenty new outfits he’d had specially tailored in Chicago at a cost of $3,480—roughly $64,000 in today’s terms—so that he could look his best in London during the festivities surrounding the coronation of King George V.
He looked forward to the kind of mostly warm British reception he had received during the days when he was pursuing Tommy Burns. Everything he and Etta did in London made news. Reporters followed them to their fashionable rented flat near Shaftesbury Avenue, and pursued the champion’s car to “Messrs Hamilton, the well-known jewelers in the Strand,” where Johnson startled the clerk by stripping off all his jewels, flinging them on the counter “like so many lumps of coal,” so that they could be cleaned and polished, then hurrying off again without even waiting for a receipt.
Throngs gathered outside the Johnsons’ flat every day. British boxing writer Trevor Wignall called on Johnson there and never forgot two things about his visit: the “crowds of women obstructing the passage-way” in hopes of getting inside, and his remarkable conversation with the champion once he’d pushed his way through them.
It ranged from politics to astronomy and it ended with Johnson requesting me to strike him with all my might in the stomach. This came about as the result of a paragraph he had read in one of the newspapers [alluding] to an alleged weakness in his mid-section…. He requested me to judge for myself by punching him. I did so: striking his stomach was like hitting a piece of corrugated iron.
A writer for Boxing came away impressed as well. Although Johnson was “a big slate-coloured mass of humanity,” he was otherwise very different from the man portrayed by “negro-haters,” a “merry, unaffected, shrewd and likeable man” who offered his “views on life in a carefully reasoned, philosophic fashion which affords instant proof that there is not only plenty of brain inside that shaven skull of his but that that brain has also undergone careful cultivation.” Johnson was a fine swimmer, an expert driver, and a skilled musician who played classical duets with his wife, a “most excellent pianist”; Il Trovatore was his favorite opera, and he never let a day go by without listening to the Miserere on the gramophone that went with him everywhere.
And when the Johnson’s took their special sixty-dollar grandstand seats in Piccadilly for the coronation procession on June 23, cheering Londoners gathered around to gawk and cheer. “It got me, it was so grand,” Johnson told a reporter after the royal procession had passed. His only regret, he said, was that the king hadn’t fought for his crown “instead of just happening to be born in a palace.”
A few days later, one newspaper reported, the Johnsons strolled into the Trocadero restaurant for lunch and found Jim Jeffries and his wife, also in London for the coronation, already seated there.
The fighters saw each other, but Jeffries gl
ared stonily in the other direction and refused to recognize Johnson. The noise of the gay restaurant immediately ceased. Johnson avoided a scene. His wife scintillating with diamonds, he passed Jeffries and took a table at the farther end of the room. Jeffries appeared highly uncomfortable and hurriedly finished his meal and departed, leaving Johnson laughing over his wine.
On the afternoon of July 4, the British press was invited to the Oxford Music Hall to see the champion spar onstage. He had just signed with a British promoter named James White to fight Britain’s best heavyweight, an Indian Army veteran named “Bombardier” Billy Wells, whom the Police Gazette accurately described as “a good second-rater.” The bout was scheduled for October 2 at the Empress Theater at Earl’s Court. Once Johnson had beaten Wells, he said, he planned to undertake a tour of British overseas outposts—India, the Straits Settlements, Australia—organized by his old associate Hugh McIntosh. While he was about it, he added, he would “polish off all the white trash and niggers … lying around loose,” including Sam McVey and Sam Langford. Then, with no further worlds to conquer, he would retire.
The idea behind the performance before the press, according to the London Times, was “to break [in] Johnson lightly, so as not to frighten the enormous numbers of ‘the Fancy’ who had assembled to inspect the terror of their profession.” First, an orchestra played while films of the champion’s training camp at Reno flickered on a vast screen, “swift, beguiling, pictures of Johnson, in various stages of domesticity, feeding chickens and playing with a baby.” Then the screen was rolled up to reveal Johnson in the flesh, sparring with Monte Cutler against a sylvan backdrop. The Times continued:
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