Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  A grand jury investigation began. Johnson’s mother, his sister Jennie, and a former woman detective were all deposed. Each yielded potentially explosive evidence against the authorities. Tiny Johnson told of the five thousand dollars her son had been forced to pay to Mrs. Cameron-Falconet and claimed twenty thousand more had been handed along to state and federal officials through Lewinsohn. Jennie Rhodes said that her brother had paid ten thousand dollars to State’s Attorney Wayman to the same end; she also insisted she’d been present when Lewinsohn and her brother gave Parkin five thousand dollars and then had watched him count it out. Mrs. M. Evalyn Knitzinger, who had once worked for Wayman as a private investigator, said she’d personally carried bribe money from Wayman to DeWoody, and that afterward her boss had ordered her a drink in a restaurant, saying, “Have one on Jack Johnson.” In addition, she swore she’d overheard Johnson’s own attorney, Benjamin Bachrach, say, “We’ll fleece that nigger before we get through with him.”

  In the end, the grand jury did not believe the two black women or their white friend. No one was indicted.*

  Meanwhile, Johnson’s prospects overseas seemed more and more bleak. When he tried returning to the stage in England, the town councils of Hanley, Wolverhampton, and Swansea all called for his appearances to be canceled. And when the National Sporting Club once again asked him to fight Sam Langford for three thousand pounds—the same sum he’d rejected five years before—his contemptuous turndown further antagonized British boxing fans:

  I must say that the offer which you have made me is absolutely ridiculous to my thinking. I have defeated Langford, and not only that, Langford has been beaten four times in the last two years. He was beaten by Sam McVey in Australia; he was also defeated by Joe Jeannette on two different occasions in New York City, and not so long ago he was defeated by Gunboat Smith in his own home-town, Boston, and the only thing I can get out of the fight is money, because there will be no glory in defeating Langford as I have already done the trick….

  I am very proud that I have made all my matches—I myself—and being a true champion I do not see where the NSC has a right to dictate to me how much I shall receive for my appearance and boxing ability. If they do not want to give my price, which is [thirty thousand dollars]—win, lose, or draw—they can call things off on receipt of this letter. I won my title on those conditions, and any time that I shall do battle it will be under those conditions and none other.

  I am boxing a man now, and I am getting my price. I don’t care what the public thinks.

  “The tone which Jack Johnson has taken in communicating with the National Sporting Club,” said the London Times, “is such as to preclude the possibility of his making a public reappearance in England.”

  In late February, he wrote a very different sort of letter to the sporting editor of the Chicago Defender. His arm had healed, and he was eager to make good on his promise to face Frank Moran.

  Paris

  Dear Sir:

  Permit me to inform the public once and for all time that my match with Frank Moran is on and will take place the last week in June as now scheduled.

  The whole world wants to see a white man champion. I have signed to fight a white man, and because I refused a ridiculously small price to meet Langford the proposed promoters and Langford’s manager tried to create the impression that I would never fight again. Langford or his agent never would induce anyone with real money to back him against me. That’s the reason for his soreness.

  I am the same John Arthur Johnson, undisputed champion of the world, and after Moran I will fight the white man who stands out, be he “Gunboat” Smith, “Battling” Levinsky, Jess Willard or Georges Carpentier.

  I refuse no one when I get my price. Moran’s backers met my terms, and all the others have the same chance as Moran. I understand that “Gunboat” Smith defeated Langford. Here’s the gunner’s chance to get a crack at my title.*

  The public wants a white man to be my successor. I am ready to fight ’em all and bar no one, at $30,000 apiece.

  Yours truly,

  JACK JOHNSON

  World’s Heavyweight Champion

  It was a brave letter but misleading. Johnson was fighting Frank Moran for a percentage of the purse, not the thirty thousand dollars his pride always dictated he demand. He and Moran’s manager, Dan McKetrick, had spent a week wrangling about it back in January. “Stop your kidding, Jack,” McKetrick told him. “You ought to be glad to get a chance to fight a white man for the best purse you can get.” No one was willing to put up that kind of money any longer. If he didn’t defend his title soon, it would surely be stripped from him. Johnson gave in, but he didn’t want anyone to know he had backed down, so cameras were set up at the Restaurant Dauphine in the Bois de Boulogne to film McKetrick handing Johnson a check for thirty thousand dollars, plus five thousand for expenses. The money was said to have been provided by “three American millionaires” who happened to be in Paris. The worthless check was torn up afterward. Johnson himself had to borrow thirty-five hundred dollars to help promote the bout.

  According to Henri Wolf, a Frenchman whom Johnson hired as his secretary, the champion was now living “like a rajah” at Asnières, surrounded by retainers and falling more and more deeply into debt each day. Advertising the bout was proving far more costly than he’d expected, and the French Boxing Federation refused to declare the upcoming bout in Paris a title contest until a new, clandestine contract was drawn up awarding one third of the proceeds to Theodore Vienne, its none-too-scrupulous director. (Johnson and Moran were to divide the rest, 90–10.)*

  If Moran managed to land a knockout blow, said the Washington Post on February 25, it would be worth a million dollars to him, would “lift the white man’s burden, would cause as big a stir as the blows Admiral Dewey delivered in Manila Bay, which won for Uncle Sam the Philippine Islands.” Rhetoric like that bewildered the French and amused Jack Johnson. “Basically,” he told a reporter, “the Americans are already dancing around my scalp. They think I’m finished, used-up. Don’t worry, they won’t get my scalp yet.”

  Johnson had reason to be confident. Frank Moran was a brash, red-haired Irish-American who had studied dentistry in his hometown and so was sometimes billed as the “Pittsburgh Dentist.” He’d served four years in the Navy—part of the time aboard the presidential yacht Mayflower—and learned his brawling style battling other sailors. He was big and had a powerful right hand he called his “Mary Ann,” but he threw it on what a British writer called the principle of “I-don’t-know-where-you’re-going-to-land-but-I’m-hoping for-the-best.” Johnson always enjoyed beating and bewildering that kind of opponent. “If it is true that American children are praying for Moran’s victory,” said the London Times, “they had better pray very hard.”

  Johnson barely bothered to train. He slept late, and when the press asked why they hadn’t seen him out doing roadwork in the early mornings, he explained that he’d done it all before dawn. When some began to doubt that story, he had himself driven to a spot near a café where he knew sportswriters liked to drink and raced past it on foot, with Gus Rhodes panting along behind, pretending to have exhausted himself trying to keep up with the tireless champion.

  Johnson was sure he would retain his title in a fair fight, but as the contest grew closer he began to worry that the title might be stolen from him. He didn’t like it that McKetrick was both the promoter for the fight and his opponent’s manager; he was also concerned that Georges Carpentier was to referee under French rules that barred hitting on the break. That was the moment when Johnson’s uppercuts traditionally did some of their most damaging work. He went to McKetrick with what he believed was a non-negotiable demand: he would go through with the fight, he said, only if Moran would promise to go down in the eighth round. In exchange, he’d give the challenger 40 percent, not 10.

  McKetrick appeared to agree but refused to sign anything. Henri Wolf got wind of Johnson’s scheme and asked McKetrick how he coul
d even consider such a thing. Moran’s manager told him the end justified the means; if it took a false promise of surrender for his man to get at Jack Johnson, he was happy to make the gesture.

  But Johnson wasn’t to be put off with winks and nods. He wanted to be certain that Moran was on board. McKetrick did his best to duck him, but on the morning of the fight, the champion cornered him at Tod Sloan’s bar. Johnson was waving a document he’d had typed up on official fight stationery.

  MATCH JOHNSON-MORAN POUR LE CHAMPIONNAT DU MONDE

  June 27th, 1914

  I hereby agree to divide receipts of my contest with Frank Moran on June 27th on a basis of forty percent to Moran and sixty percent to me provided that Frank Moran loses inside of eight rounds.

  The champion signed it with a flourish, then added, “After fight must return this receipt!” and handed it to McKetrick as evidence of his good faith. The two men shook hands as if they’d made a deal. That evening, McKetrick and Vienne, still anxious that Johnson might not fight, had policemen posted outside his dressing room with instructions to seize him and take him to the French border should he balk. They weren’t needed. Johnson thought he had a sure thing.

  Meanwhile, a big, fashionable crowd was filing into the vast covered Parisian cycle track called the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The sixteen-foot ring was roofed with a canopy of purple silk, hung to disguise row upon row of electrical tubes. Meant to provide proper lighting for the movie cameras, the London Times reported, they also “threw a greenish tint over everything … and made everything and everybody look ghastly.” The Times continued: “Here—but for the presence of an occasional tweed suit and the preponderance of men in the audience—one might have fancied that it was the first night of a new play instead of a boxing match. There were scores of women, almost all in evening dress in many vivid hues and much bejeweled.” Colette was there. So was Mistinguette, the music hall performer who was thought by some to have had more than a purely aesthetic interest in Johnson. “It might have been a night at the opera,” wrote the British boxing writer Fred Dartnell.

  Boxing had become something more than a sport or an entertainment. It was La Mode. One’s brain registered strange impressions. Some were agreeable, some otherwise. Nearby was an Eastern prince, a coffee-coloured elegant, with wonderful pearls. On either side of him sat a radiant white woman with her hair dyed a kind of emerald gold. Next to me was a handsome middle-aged American lady with her two daughters. All three were painfully anxious that Moran should win.

  As Johnson prepared to answer the opening bell, he whispered to McKetrick, “Everything O.K, Dan?” meaning was Moran going to live up to his part of the bargain and collapse on schedule in the eighth?

  All Moran’s manager would say was “Get on with the fight.”

  In the first round, one writer noted that Johnson seemed “awfully serious” and “unusually aggressive.” By the end of the second, the champion realized he’d been had. “Those are pretty wise guys,” he told one of his seconds. “That boy is trying some.”

  His red-haired challenger was trying. But he was only rarely able to land. A big-time sport named George Considine was assigned the hopeless task of getting Johnson’s goat. “Come on! Come on!” Considine shouted. “You don’t know how to lead. Never did.”

  “Hush now, Jim Corbett,” Johnson said, remembering how Corbett had tried to rattle him in Reno.

  “Poor old man!” Considine yelled back. Johnson smiled and thumped Moran three times.

  Lucille shouted encouragement: “Hit him, Daddy! Come along Papa!” Johnson talked to Moran, too. “You don’t know anything about fighting,” he told his opponent, drawing blood from his nose, then shifting smoothly out of range.

  As Carpentier separated the two men in the tenth, Johnson seemed to forget the French rules and threw a stiff left jab that staggered Moran and opened an old cut over his eye. Blood began to trickle down Moran’s face. The crowd roared its disapproval. A ringside judge shouted through a megaphone that Johnson had fouled Moran. A second transgression would mean disqualification. Johnson was not apologetic. “How do you feel now, Frank?” he asked.

  Two rounds later, the challenger managed to land a left hand on Johnson’s neck. Johnson stepped back, grinning and pounding his gloves together. “My sincere congratulations, Frank,” he said. In the fifteenth, he stood in the middle of the ring for nearly a minute, pivoting slowly while Moran circled him without daring to throw a punch. Both men seemed tired at the end of the twentieth and final round, but Johnson was the clear winner.

  The correspondent for the New York Times called it “positively the poorest bout ever staged as a championship contest.” But in his story for the Defender the ever-loyal Gus Rhodes declared it “the finest fistic encounter ever witnessed since glove fighting was inaugurated in 1892.” And the newspaper’s headlines echoed Rhodes’ enthusiasm.

  WORLD ACCLAIMS

  JACK JOHNSON

  KING OF PRIZE FIGHTERS

  CHAMPION’S VICTORY OVER FRANK MORAN OF PITTSBURGH

  IN PARIS, FRANCE, FOREVER SETS AT REST ANY DOUBT

  AS TO HIS ABILITY—SPEED AND POWER OF JOHNSON

  ASTONISHES FIGHT FOLLOWERS AND OUTCOME OF 20-ROUND

  BATTLE NEVER IN DOUBT—IN A CLASS OF HIS OWN—

  PICTURES MAY NOT BE SHOWN IN UNITED STATES

  MORAN WAS GAME, DID HIS BEST BUT WAS NO

  MATCH FOR JOHNSON

  BOASTED “WHITE HOPE” IS PUNCHED AT WILL AND

  ANGLO-SAXON SUPREMACY IN HEAVYWEIGHT CLASS RECEIVES

  CRUSHING BLOW AS CRAFTY CHAMPION

  PLAYS WITH HIM LIKE A CAT WITH A MOUSE—IN FINE

  CONDITION—ALL SORTS OF EXCUSES OFFERED

  MORAN DROWNS IN BLACK SEA

  When the news reached Chicago’s South Side, Johnson fans celebrated in the streets. Tiny Johnson sent her son a congratulatory telegram and invited the neighbors in for Sunday dinner.

  After the fight, Johnson had to content himself with secondhand accounts of the celebrations back home. Neither he nor Frank Moran would collect a sou for their efforts in the ring. A vengeful Dan McKetrick was responsible. “I’m as bitter a man as there is in the world,” he told the writer John Lardner many years later, and it was his own fighter, not Jack Johnson, who was the target of his wrath. Between the time Moran signed for his fight with Johnson in January and the June fight itself, he’d undertaken a vaudeville tour in the United States, just as Jim Jeffries had done before the Reno battle. When he got back to Paris, he had a new manager with him, Ike Dorgan, brother of the cartoonist, Tad. McKetrick, fearing that his potential champion was about to be stolen from him, demanded that Moran sign an exclusive contract. He refused. After serving in the Navy, he had taken a vow never to sign another legal document. Instead, he said, he would put his trust in the good faith of those with whom he dealt. McKetrick, who put his trust in no one, was furious and took a bizarre revenge. Claiming that Moran owed him $1,462 in monies advanced him for training, he hired Lucien Cerf, a French attorney, and had him impound all the profits the moment the fight was over, not to be distributed until he and Moran and Johnson had all signed a release—and McKetrick vowed not to sign until he and Moran had a contract. The attorney deposited the money—some $34,000, of which Johnson was supposed to get $14,400—in the Bank of France. Then, disaster: Lucien Cerf, who had joined the French army, was killed early in World War One. The paperwork was lost. The bank said it had no record of the deposit. No one ever collected.*

  Johnson’s creditors moved in. Not for the first time, he and his party hastily packed up and moved on, this time all the way to St. Petersburg. He had been invited there again by the expatriate black American impresario, George Thomas, to be his headliner for the season.

  Johnson, Lucille, and Gus Rhodes arrived in the Russian capital on July 1, 1914. They enjoyed themselves among the czarist officers and courtiers who dined and drank at Thomas’ glass-roofed Aquarium. But once again Johnson’s timing was off, and this t
ime it was not his fault. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1. The Great War had begun. The police told Johnson and his party to leave the country right away. “They invoked the five-and-ten law,” Johnson remembered. “That means five minutes to pack, and ten minutes to get out of town.”

  We have only Johnson’s extravagant memories of their flight across Europe. They lost most of their fourteen trunks while changing trains at Warsaw, he said. Soldiers and refugees were everywhere. In Berlin, Gus Rhodes managed to bribe their way onto a train crowded with refugees bound for the Belgian border. From there, they carried their remaining baggage three miles on foot to catch a train for Paris. The French capital was “in chaos,” Johnson recalled, filled with Americans and Britons desperate to get to the English Channel and escape to England.

  “I met Jack Johnson on the boulevard,” one of them remembered. “His face was wreathed in smiles. Crowds surrounded him urging him to fight for France.” He sometimes said he would. He had applied to become a French citizen, after all, and Gus Rhodes wired the Defender that Johnson had actually accepted a colonelcy in the French army. Lester A. Walton, the editor of the New York Age, was thrilled to hear it. The French were about to send black troops against the Germans, he wrote, “the first time such a thing has been done since the Moors of Northern Africa were driven out of Spain after ruling it quite eight hundred years. If it should do so we shall expect none of them to fight more bravely under the Tri-Color than JOHN ARTHUR JOHNSON, the Champion Prize-Fighter of the World.”