Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Chicago politicians who had once sought Johnson’s company now hurried to disentangle themselves from him. “I hope Johnson gets his block knocked off in Australia,” said Mayor Carter Harrison, Jr. “That’s the quickest way to get rid of him.” Alderman A. R. Tearny of the Third Ward, stakeholder for the second Jim Flynn fight, now refused to help Johnson raise bail for Lucille. “I will never have relations, even of a business nature, with Johnson again,” he told the press. Alderman Ellis Geiger of the Twenty-first Ward said that Johnson had “brought burning shame to the fair name of Chicago” and vowed to push a resolution through that evening’s city council meeting calling on the mayor to close down the Café de Champion as a “disorderly resort.”

  As the aldermen took turns denouncing him at City Hall Johnson was defending himself before one hundred well-to-do black businessmen and professionals gathered at the Appomattox Club at 3441 Wabash Avenue. He’d been invited to appear there by Beauregard F. Moseley, the attorney who’d been happy enough a few weeks earlier to take out-of-town associates to Johnson’s café for an evening of champagne and entertainment but who had now helped draft a formal resolution beseeching white citizens not to “hold the race guilty or responsible for the charges made against an individual of said race.” Many of those present had stood and cheered Johnson at the late Bob Motts’ black-tie testimonial dinner after the Jeffries fight. He had said then that he feared “the colored people of the world” would one day desert him. It now seemed to be happening. Moseley asked him if he’d like to say a word or two in his own defense before the resolution was officially adopted.

  “Yes,” he said, “I should like to do that.”

  There was only scattered applause as he rose to speak. Johnson’s customary smile was missing. He spoke slowly and with great earnestness.

  First I want to say that nothing ever is said of the white man who waylays the little colored girl when she goes to market. Nobody has anything to say about that. But when the Negro does something that is not nearly so serious there is a great hue and cry.

  I want to say that I never made any statement attributed to me to the effect that I could get any white woman I wanted. I can lay my hand upon the Bible and swear that I never made such a statement. My father was a Christian and my mother is a Christian, and I know what it means to swear by the Bible. I want to say that I never said anything of the sort about any woman of any color.

  I have been quoted falsely. The newspapers and the public have taken advantage of me because of my color. If I were a white man not a line of this would have reached the newspaper.

  But I do want to say that I am not a slave and that I have the right to choose who my mate shall be without the dictation of any man. I have eyes and I have a heart and when they fail to tell me who I shall have as mine I want to be put away in a lunatic asylum.

  So long as I do not interfere with any other man’s wife, I shall claim the right to select the woman of my own choice. Nobody else can do that for me. That is where the trouble lies.

  On Tuesday afternoon, October 22, Lucille Cameron was brought to the Federal Building under armed guard to appear before the grand jury. “Tell all you know,” her mother said as they passed each other in the corridor. “There still is a chance for you if you only give up the nigger.”

  Mrs. Cameron-Falconet and the government still hoped that Lucille would turn on the man she continued to insist she loved. She would not. She admitted that she had been a prostitute before she left Milwaukee. It had been her idea to come to the city and pursue her profession, no one else’s. Neither Johnson nor any one else had had anything to do with it. After about an hour on the stand, she collapsed in tears and had to be carried out of the grand jury room. A physician was called.

  After she was back on her feet, federal agents escorted her back to Rockford. They would keep her behind bars, hoping further reflection might lead her to change her mind. But the attempt to build a Mann Act case around

  Lucille Cameron had collapsed. “It has been established beyond doubt that the Cameron girl was in the city of Chicago for at least three months prior to the time she met Johnson,” agent Lins admitted to his superiors, “and the possibility that he aided in any way in her transportation from Minneapolis to Chicago is very remote.”

  Harry A. Parkin, the Assistant U.S. District Attorney in Chicago, was not satisfied. He was determined to get Jack Johnson, one way or another. There were plenty of people prepared to testify that the champion frequented prostitutes; despite Johnson’s frantic effort to pay them off and send them out of town, the Bureau of Investigation had twenty-two such witnesses on call. The problem was, there was as yet no proof he’d taken any of his women across state lines. Parkin was sure such proof could be found and asked the bureau to mount an all-out effort to “secure evidence [of] illegal transportation by Johnson of any other women for an immoral purpose.” U.S. Attorney General Wickersham and A. Bruce Bielaski, the acting chief of the Bureau of Investigation in Washington, both pledged their full cooperation. They, too, now felt that the public would never be satisfied until Jack Johnson was behind bars.

  On October 28, Mayor Harrison ordered Johnson to halt all music and entertainment at his café. The champion pleaded with the chief of police to have him reconsider. Without entertainment, he would have to close the business that was the center of his life outside the ring. “He cried,” the chief said afterward, “whined like a baby, when I told him there was nothing doing.” That same day, according to the Chicago Tribune, a deranged man turned up with a pistol at the Federal Building, threatening to “blow the nigger’s brains out.” The police told him Johnson wasn’t there. No one bothered even to take his name.

  Two days later, the authorities put Johnson out of business altogether by refusing to renew his liquor license. To get it back, he would be required to prove he was of good moral character, “and that,” the mayor said, “he’ll have a deuce of a time doing if half the reports about him are true.” That night, the police refused to allow any customers through the doors. Hundreds stood outside, listening to the orchestra play one last time for the champion and his valet. The next morning, November 1, men from the Heilman Brewing Company seized the chairs and tables and gold-rimmed spittoons of which Johnson had been so proud. Then the police moved in, hauling out the liquor that was left and nailing shut the doors and windows.

  “There are plenty of white gentlemen running saloons right now in this city,” the Broad Ax protested,

  who are ten thousand times worse in every way than Jack Johnson. Their places are the headquarters for thieves, murderers, … and every other kind of violators of the laws of deceny and morality…. Some of [these white gentlemen] who have never been accused of conducting Sunday saloons … are warm political associates of Mayor Harrison.

  The champion tried to appear unruffled at the closing. He thought he might take a vacation, he said. “I’ll take my car and go traveling somewhere until the trial comes up, but I don’t think there ever will be a trial.” He was doing all he could to make sure there wasn’t one, focusing his charm on the federal agents assigned to his case to find out what they were up to, hiring detectives to track down potential witnesses and offer them money to leave town until things died down.

  In the midst of Johnson’s troubles, a flamboyant promoter came to call. Richard Klegin was just twenty-three years old and barely five feet tall, but by taking Sam McVey and four other black boxers to Paris in 1911 he’d begun to build a reputation for himself as an international impresario.* He was now acting as the American representative of George Thomas, an expatriate American living in St. Petersburg. Thomas was a black onetime valet and waiter from Georgia who had saved his money, moved overseas in 1890, opened a restaurant in Berlin, and then made himself rich as a showman in Russia, running a chain of theaters as well as a glass-enclosed amusement park called the Aquarium. Thomas had sent along a check for five thousand dollars plus three round-trip tickets to Russia that could be Johnson’s
if he agreed to fight McVey there in January. The champion’s friends urged him to accept the offer and leave right away, before he faced more legal difficulties. He told the press he couldn’t do it while Lucille was behind bars for no fault of her own. But he had also been warned by District Attorney Wilkerson that he could not leave the country until his smuggling case came to court.

  Then the Chicago office of the Bureau of Investigation got the tip it had been looking for. An anonymous letter, written by a man whose motive, he said, was to “send this nigger to jail for the balance of his life,” urged the government to look for a former inmate of the Everleigh Club who had traveled all over the country with Johnson and called herself “Belle Gifford” and “Mrs. Jacques Allen.” Agents turned to their contacts in the Chicago underworld. James Duffy, an “ex-post office safe-cracker and all around crook,” pointed them toward Johnson’s still-angry ex-manager, George Little, and a smalltime vaudevillian named Mortie Heyman, from whom he said Johnson had stolen the woman in question. A brothel keeper named Ollie Davis said he’d heard she was working out of a whorehouse in the nation’s capital.

  Martin Lins immediately wired Washington:

  BELLE BAKER, ALIAS BELLE GIFFORD, ALIAS BELLE ALLEN, FORMERLY INMATE EVERLEIGH CLUB, CHICAGO, SAID TO HAVE BEEN ILLEGALLY TRANSPORTED BY JACK JOHNSON, NOW SAID TO BE INMATE SOME SPORTING HOUSE WASHINGTON, D.C. DURING ONE TRIP WAS PHOTOGRAPHED WITH JOHNSON IN BOSTON. PICTURE APPEARED PAPERS THERE ENTITLED JACK JOHNSON AND HIS PRETTY WHITE WIFE.

  Agents tracked Belle Schreiber to Grace Sinclair’s “resort” at 1229 D Street in Washington. She proved eager to talk. She hadn’t seen the champion since early 1911, when he had lied to her about his marriage and her relationship with him had forced her onto the street for the last time, and she remained bitter. Her memory of where and when they’d gone together seemed encyclopedic—and she had bills and receipts to back up much of what she said. Most of their travels had taken place before the Mann Act went into effect in June of 1910, but prosecutors thought a case could be built around events in mid-October of that year, when Johnson had paid Belle’s rail fare from Pittsburgh to Chicago and then set her up as a madam at the Ridgewood Apartments. Lins told Bielaski that everyone in the Chicago office was “very much pleased with the prospects of making a case against Johnson with the evidence you have furnished us.”

  To corroborate and amplify Belle’s version of events, federal agents quietly fanned out across the country, interviewing prostitutes, chauffeurs, waiters, bellhops, Pullman porters, ex-managers, former sparring partners, looking for something—anything—that could be used to bolster their case that the champion had broken federal law with Belle Schreiber.

  Meanwhile, on the afternoon of November 7, agents brought Belle to Chicago to tell her story to the federal grand jury. Everything was cloaked in secrecy, Lins explained, “in view of the fact that Johnson is possessed of large means and will leave no stone unturned in his efforts to make away with any possible witness.” Lucille Cameron was paraded along one corridor to confuse the reporters who haunted the Federal Building and to throw off the track any informants who might be working for Johnson, while Belle Schreiber was hustled down another and slipped unseen into the grand jury room.

  There, for four hours, she poured out her memories of couplings and beatings and constant travel with the champion. When she was finished, she was hurried back out of the building, then escorted into a taxi and onto a night train to Manhattan, where she was to be hidden away inside the Waverley Home, an institution run by the New York Probation Association. No one had recognized her.

  Even before she’d boarded her train, the grand jury voted to issue seven Mann Act indictments against Jack Johnson, charging him with transporting her on October 15, 1910, from Pittsburgh to Chicago for the purpose of prostitution and debauchery and in violation of the “peace and dignity of the … United States.” Within minutes, federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis issued a bench warrant for the champion’s immediate arrest. Bail was set at an unprecedented thirty thousand dollars.

  Special Agent Meyer and a party of U.S. marshals and city detectives found the champion with several friends in room 21 of the Hotel Vendome, the same hotel where he had agreed to help Belle Schreiber find the flat that was now at the heart of the case against him. They broke down the door, prepared for a struggle. There was none. Johnson had been expecting them, though he had not known who would be testifying against him or what they’d say he’d done.

  He went along willingly enough to the Federal Building. But once he got to Assistant District Attorney Harry Parkin’s office, he was indignant. “I think you ought to give me a fair and square deal,” he told Parkin. “Why didn’t you arrest me earlier, so I could get a bondsman? I can give $50,000 cash if necessary. I’m easy to find.”

  “We’ll give you a square deal, Jack,” Parkin answered. “You’ll get all the chance you are entitled to. No more and no less—just the same as anybody else.”

  But he wasn’t being treated as anybody else would have been—had they been white. And he had expected better from Parkin. He and Charles DeWoody had been his guests for dinner at the Café de Champion, after all; he had even raced automobiles with them on Michigan Avenue in the early morning hours. Clearly, his attempts to win friends—and influence—among federal officials had failed.

  Parkin permitted Johnson to place calls to a lawyer, Edwin Day, and to Sol Lewinsohn, the shady bondsman who had brought Parkin and DeWoody and their party to his café just a few months earlier. But when they were slow to turn up, Parkin ordered the champion handcuffed for the trip to jail.

  Johnson’s eyes filled with tears. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “I won’t run away.” They did it anyway. The first set of cuffs they tried was too small. A second pair fit. But before he and his escorts left for the lockup, the lawyer and bondsman appeared, further phone calls were made, and Judge Landis permitted Tiny Johnson to sign a temporary bond against her house so the champion could go home for the night. “I knew the Schreiber girl well,” Johnson told the reporters waiting outside. “But I never transported her anywhere.” He still believed the government had no case, and at his home he handed Lewinsohn thirty thousand dollars in cash to protect him against loss in negotiating an acceptable bond.

  The next morning, Johnson appeared before Judge Landis for a bail hearing. Landis was only in his mid-forties, but already had the white mane and the flair for self-promotion that would one day characterize him as the first commissioner of baseball. He was no respecter of persons—he had won fame for hauling John D. Rockefeller himself into court to testify, then levying a huge fine against Standard Oil that was swiftly overturned by a higher court—and he had no time at all for a black man accused of dallying with white women. When he learned that neither of the men Lewinsohn had arranged to underwrite Johnson’s bond actually owned the property they said they owned, he was enraged. The whole thing, he bellowed, had been “a brazen attempt to put over a dirty deal on the court that would have degraded the old police courts of Chicago in their worst days.” He dressed down Lewinsohn, threw one of the would-be guarantors out of his courtroom and threatened to have him arrested if he came anywhere near it again, then had the other jailed for contempt for lying to him.

  Johnson was accompanied to court by a well-respected Chicago trial attorney, Benjamin Bachrach.* Bachrach offered to put up $65,000—$50,000 in real estate and $15,000 in cash—and Johnson could be heard whispering in his new lawyer’s ear to “tell the judge I’ll give more if he wants to take it.” The government said cash wouldn’t do. Johnson was rumored to be on his way to Russia. Landis agreed. “I will not accept a cash bond,” he said. “There is a human cry in this case.” Nor would he accept surety from anyone who was indemnified against loss if the prisoner fled. Johnson would have to go to jail.

  Reporters and photographers were waiting on the sidewalk in front of the Cook County Jail that evening as Johnson and his escorts pulled up. When th
e champion got down from the car, they could see that he was handcuffed to Deputy Marshal Edward Northrup. A photographer named Edwin A. Wiegel stepped forward to get a flash picture. Johnson cursed, raised his cane with his free hand, and brought it smashing down on Wiegel’s camera. “Please don’t, Jack,” pleaded Northrup, who was being pulled along “like a palm leaf fan.” “Please be a gentleman.”

  Johnson calmed down. Two diamond watch charms and a jeweled Swiss watch were taken from him for safekeeping. Someone stole a watch fob with his jeweled initials on it. He was stripped and searched. The county jail was strictly segregated, but it amused Johnson’s jailers to lead him to cell number 508, in the middle of the white section. There were some 530 white prisoners in the lockup. Many cursed him as soon as he was spotted. Then they began to chant in unison, “Hang Johnson! Hang Johnson!”

  When there was a brief pause, and someone called him a black bastard, Johnson shot back, “I’ll give $50 for the chance to slug that one.”

  He took it as long as he could, then called for a doctor, saying he felt ill. Guards took him to the infirmary for the night. The physician looked him over and pronounced him in perfect health. “The only thing wrong with Johnson is cold feet,” he said. The jailers had evidently had their fun. When morning came, they locked him in a new cell in the Negro tier. His cell mate was a cook named John Brown, accused of stabbing a friend to death aboard a lake steamer.

  Johnson called for candles, cigars, and a case of champagne to make his stay more pleasant.