|
photo by Diane Raines Ward
 |
Geoffrey Ward,
author of
Unforgivable
Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson
__________________________________________________________
Jack Johnson was the first black heavyweight champion in history, the celebrated
-- and most reviled -- African American of his age. Prizewinning biographer
Geoffrey Ward tells Johnson's story in Unforgivable Blackness, which
reveals a far more complex and compelling life than the newspaper headlines
he inspired could ever convey.
Johnson battled his way from obscurity to the top of the heavyweight ranks
and in 1908 won the greatest prize in American sports -- one that had always
been the private preserve of white boxers. At a time when whites ran
everything in America, he took orders from no one and resolved to live as
if color did not exist. While most blacks struggled just to survive,
he reveled in his riches and his fame. And at a time when the mere
suspicion that a black man had flirted with a white woman could cost him
his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever he pleased. Because
he did so the federal government set out to destroy him, and he was forced
to endure a year of prison and seven years of exile. To most whites
(and to some African Americans as well) he was seen as a perpetual threat
-- profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the natural
order of things.#
Ward's book serves as the companion to the Ken Burns PBS documentary,
Unforgivable Blackness. He joins us in a conversation about
the life of Johnson in a November 15, 2004 interview.
Editors Note: Some of the photographs, quotations and songs within
the interview may be objectionable to contemporary readers. It is important
to remember the times and the context in which they were made. They are included
to help illustrate the complexities of the culture in which these boxers
performed.
Throughout this interview, songs evocative of the era in which
Jack Johnson lived are available for sampling. Many of the samples
are entire songs and may take a minute or so -- with a high speed connection
-- before they begin playing. We wish to thank
Tim
Brooks, author of Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth
of the Recording Industry, 1890 - 1919, for providing the
music.
__________________________________________________________
"At a time when whites ran everything in America, he took orders from
no one and resolved to live always as if color did not exist. While most
Negroes struggled merely to survive, he reveled in his riches and his fame.
And at a time when the mere suspicion that a black man had flirted with a
white woman could cost him his life, he insisted on sleeping with whomever
he pleased. Most whites (and some Negroes as well) saw him as a perpetual
threat -- profligate, arrogant, amoral, a dark menace, and a danger to the
natural order of things."
- Geoffrey Ward
*
- Listen to Jack Johnson speak
on Runnin'
Down the Title Holder , a 1924 recording
__________________________________________________________
JJM
I was struck by how your book is such a stark reminder of how
racist our world was one hundred years ago -- on all levels -- from the
statements and actions of the era's top political leaders, down to those
of the most common man.
GW I have been writing American history of
one kind or another for about thirty years, and I thought I had a pretty
good intellectual understanding of that fact. After doing the research for
this book, I realized that I had no idea how pervasive it was. Racism pervades
every story written about Jack Johnson. News stories, ostensibly favorable
stories, and critical stories are all written from a racist slant.
| JJM And it is only two generations removed
from many of us. As much as we would like to believe that all of this is
behind us, a mere two generations ago the Mississippi governor James Vardaman
said of Johnson, "Personally, I took no other interest in the Johnson-Burns
fight than to wish that any white man fighting a Negro for money might get
a knockout of sufficient proportion to cause him to continue on to eternal
rest." Sure, this was the governor of Mississippi, but it is still shocking.
GW Yes, you would expect that from the governor
of Mississippi, but you wouldn't expect racist coverage from the New York
Times, or the Los Angeles Times, or the San Francisco
Chronicle. Their comments weren't as insane as that, but they were pretty
crazy.
JJM I am curious about how you and Ken Burns work
together. Did you decide to do the book on Jack Johnson before a decision
was made to do a film on his life?
GW No, we started the documentary, and we
had originally planned to do a companion volume that was mostly pictorial,
the way we had done in the past. But once we got started on this, it occurred
to both of us that since Johnson's life was such a rich tale, a full-scale,
scholarly, footnoted biography needed to be written. So, we launched into
it.
JJM
What resources did you use for the book?
GW There are no real "Johnson Papers" or
anything of that kind. It is not like writing about Roosevelt, for example,
where you have a library of stuff to go to. I was very lucky because I located
in Leavenworth Prison part of an incomplete autobiography he had written,
which describes all his big, successful fights in very vivid, personal detail.
So I was able to use all of that in the book, which has never been seen before.
But most of the resources I used are from thousands and thousands of newspaper
accounts. He was very widely covered. |
Jack Johnson
"We are in the midst of a growing menace. The black man is rapidly
forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs.
We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy."
- Charles A. Dana, New York Sun editor, 1895, in an example
of the racism of the era
_____
The
Laughing Song, a 1902 recording by George W. Johnson,
America's first black recording artist |
Downtown Galveston, Texas, c. 1900
*
Galveston, following the September 8, 1900 hurricane that claimed
thousands of lives
"...Galveston was different from most southern communities. It
was a seaport and, like its rivals, Mobile and New Orleans, took a more relaxed
view of racial separation than did the inland towns and cities of the South.
All sorts of people came and went at the waterfront. 'You had
all walks of life, races, creeds, colors...in here,' a longtime resident
remembered. 'We were segregated but it wasn't as bad as other places
in the state of Texas...That was a unique thing about Galveston. Negroes
and Caucasian people were poor and lived in the same neighborhood, ate the
same food, suffered the same problems.'"
- Geoffrey Ward
_____
My
Little Zulu Babe, a 1901 recording by Bert Williams and
Bert Walker |
JJM Did you find that his autobiography
was at all reliable?
GW Well, it is less unreliable -- which I
realize is a funny way to put it -- than other scholars have thought. I found
lots of evidence for some of his tallest tales, and that interested me quite
a lot. He was a Texan and a sort of frontier-style storyteller. He embroidered
stories about himself, but I don't think he invented very many of them, which
just made the stories better and better as the days went by.
JJM Is there any way of knowing how
his early days in Galveston, Texas shaped his view of the world?
GW The great mystery about him is how on
earth anyone like him "happened" in the turn of the twentieth century, because
it was such a ghastly world for a black person. During his entire life, he
never gave in to Jim Crow anything -- he simply wouldn't submit to the system.
That of course is the question you want to have answered, which is how on
earth somebody got like that? There is no full-scale answer, but he
did once say that while he was raised in the Jim Crow South -- in Galveston
-- his neighborhood was very integrated. It was like a lot of neighborhoods
in New Orleans. Very poor people of all colors were living together in that
neighborhood, and he was never really trained to believe that the white kids
he played with were any better than he was. It is not really an explanation,
but it may have something to do with how he was. In the end, he is basically
inexplicable, the way a Louis Armstrong is inexplicable, or an Abraham Lincoln
is inexplicable. You just can't account for them.
JJM Concerning this you wrote, "Facts about
Johnson's ancestry are hard to come by, and he was himself a cheerful fabulist
when it came to retelling his own life. But the first thing he wanted people
to understand about him was that because his enslaved forebears had arrived
in America long 'before the United States was dreamed of,' he was himself
a 'pure-blooded American.' And because he knew that that was what he was,
he saw no reason ever to accept any limitations on himself to which other
Americans were not also subject."
GW Yes, that is what he wanted everyone to
believe about him, and with that, he had this American sense that if you
have enough courage, and if you have enough superior skill, that ought to
be enough to win you success. He acted on that all of his life. |
| JJM What inspired him to begin boxing?
GW I think he was looking around for something
to do. He knew he had extraordinary athletic ability, and he didn't want
to work on the docks in Galveston. He always had the sense that he was set
apart and special. He tried various sports -- he even tried being a jockey,
but he was six feet tall, so that didn't really play out too well for him.
He tried to be a bicycle racer, and he was a good enough ball player to at
times play first base with Rube Foster's teams in the forerunner to the Negro
Leagues. But, boxing was available to him and close to home. He began by
engaging in informal fights on the beach in Galveston, and then hoboed around
the country, where he started to see that he was better than other people
at it.
JJM When was his boxing potential recognized?
GW There were two important fights. In one,
an aging pro named Joe Choynski knocked Johnson out in Galveston, but because
both men were arrested afterwards the fight made headlines and his name became
known. The other fight was in 1901 against heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries'
younger brother Jack, who was as tall and strong and a good deal more handsome
than his brother, but without the skills. They let Johnson fight him because
they thought Johnson would be easy to beat. This was a major mistake. Johnson
not only beat him, he beat him in spectacular style. He wore pink tights
into the ring, which nobody else had ever seen in boxing -- he was a trendsetter
from the beginning. When he got in the ring, he handed the promoter an envelope
and asked him not to open it. He proceeded to toy with the younger Jeffries
for four rounds while he talked to people in the audience. He would lean
over and compliment the promoter on the slick tie he was wearing, all the
while holding his opponent off at arm's length. As the fifth round began,
he leaned down to tell the promoter to open the envelope. Inside was a note
from Johnson predicting he would knock Jeffries out in the fifth round. As
soon as Johnson saw that the promoter had read it, he proceeded to knock
him out.
JJM Yes, he predicted every blow.
GW That is quite a debut.
JJM Was this brashness -- which I guess could
be called "trash-talking" today -- all that uncommon then?
GW
It was called "mouth fighting" in those days, and he was a master
of it. Other people may have been good at it, but he was the best.
JJM You wrote, "Being the heavyweight champion
of the world was, as the writer Gerald Early has said, something like being
the 'Emperor of Masculinity.'"
GW Yes, it was a symbol of masculine power,
and it was thought that the champion was the most powerful man in the world.
In a world run by whites, that person almost by definition had to be white
man…
JJM And they did everything they could to
keep blacks from contending… |
Johnson in a Galveston jail with boxing opponent Joe Choynski,
1901
*
Johnson, early 1900's
"He could predict every blow. He'd tell you he was going to hit
you in the eye, and he would. He'd say he was going to hit you in the mouth,
and he would."
- An early ring victim of Johnson's
_____
Nobody,
a 1906 recording by Bert Williams |
DE BIG COON AM A-COMIN'
- Sydney (Australia) Truth headline
*
Fourteenth round, Johnson v. Tommy Burns
"As soon as the crowd spotted him (Johnson) in his hooded robe,
the old shouts of 'coon' and 'nigger' began. 'All the hatred of twenty thousand
whites for all the negroes in the world,' the Bulletin called it.
Australians had come not to see a fight, it continued, 'so much as to witness
a black aspirant for the championship of the world beaten to his knees and
counted out.'"
- Geoffrey Ward on the Burns/Johnson fight in Australia
_____
"The whole truth of the matter is that Burns does not want to fight
me. It is he and not me who has a yellow streak."
- Jack Johnson
_____
Jerusalem
Mornin', a 1909 recording by Polk Miller's Old South
Quartet |
GW
They simply refused to let them contend. They could fight each
other or they could fight white contenders, but they couldn't ever fight
the champion. It took Johnson five or six years to finally chase down a champion
who was willing to give him a shot at it. He did that because he was given
an offer he simply couldn't refuse. He was paid thirty thousand dollars,
which no one before had ever come close to being paid.
JJM This is Tommy Burns you are talking
about…
GW Yes. The fight was held in Australia,
and Johnson made quick work of him.
JJM The racist reaction by the Australians
to Johnson's victory was somewhat surprising to me...
GW That kind of white racism was international.
The rulers of the British Empire were terribly worried that if Johnson beat
Burns, the blacks and Indians and Ceylonese would rise up, and somehow their
empire would crumble. The films showing Johnson beating up Tommy Burns and
Jim Jeffries were barred from being seen within much of the Empire.
JJM Did Burns fear Johnson as a fighter at
all?
GW Yes, I think he knew he was going to lose.
Burns actually wasn't very big, and he had pretty much beaten everybody he
could make any money off of. Before the fight, he said he was probably going
to get beaten. Of course, that was when he was being realistic. The rest
of the time he thought that since he was a white man, he was going to win,
that Johnson would become afraid and run away, and that he couldn't stand
being hit in the stomach. There were all kinds of crazy racist theories. |
| JJM There were many issues within Johnson's
life that may have proved uncomfortable for him. How was his private life
reported on prior to the Burns fight?
GW Johnson assumed that he was a great fighter,
that he should be honored as a great fighter, and nothing else mattered.
His private life was very colorful. He had many women companions, some of
whom were white, but that created very little stir until he became champion.
When he came back from Australia, he had a white woman with him -- whom he
introduced as his wife -- and that made news all over the country. From then
on, he was a target not only of people who didn't want him to fight, but
of people who wanted to tear the title away from him, and who even wanted
to kill him.
JJM
Why do you suppose he chose to pursue white women?
GW I don't think
he chose to pursue them, I think they probably pursued him. He gave various
explanations at various times in his life -- that black women didn't pamper
him the way that he wanted, for example -- but I don't think anybody knows
why people have preferences of that kind.
JJM You quote him as telling sportswriter
John Lardner, "I didn't court white women because I thought I was too good
for the others like they said. It was just that they always treated me better.
I never had a colored girl that didn't two-time me."
GW Well, I am sure that isn't true. That
explanation is too simple -- in fact, all the explanations are too simple.
I think he had white women companions so he could flaunt them in front of
the white world, but I think that was only part of the reason. He was very
fond of those women, and he married three of them.
JJM So here you had a black man who was now the
"Emperor of Masculinity," and who was also marrying white women. Clearly
he was a threat to white society…
GW Yes, in the crude terms of the times,
not only could he beat white men, he could take their women. People were
terribly upset about that. |
Hattie McClay with Johnson, February, 1909
*
Etta Duryea with Johnson, 1910
*
Lucille Cameron with Johnson, Paris, c. 1913
"There have been countless women in my life. They have participated
in my triumphs and suffered with me in my moments of disappointment. They
have inspired me to attainment and they have balked me; they have caused
me joy and they have heaped misery upon me; they have been faithful to the
utmost and they have been faithless; they have praised and loved me and they
have hated and denounced me. Always, a woman has swayed me - sometimes many
have demanded my attention at the same moment."
- Jack Johnson, in his 1927 autobiography
|
Johnson with boy who may be his nephew, following the 1909 Burns
fight
"White people often point to the writings of Booker T. Washington
as the best example of a desirable attitude on the part of the colored
population. I have never been able to agree with the point of view of Washington,
because he has to my mind not been altogether frank in the statement of the
problems or courageous in his solution to them…I have found no better
way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with people of other races as
if prejudice did not exist."
- Jack Johnson
_____
A
Little Christmas Basket/Howdy Honey Howdy, a 1913 recording
by Edward Sterling Wright reading the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar
|
JJM You wrote, "In two decades as a
contender and champion, Jack Johnson would never once enter the ring against
a white opponent in front of a crowd that was anything but overwhelmingly
hostile, and as the years passed and his fame and notoriety grew, the curses
and racial taunts he'd been hearing since he faced Jim Scanlon back in Galveston
would sometimes be supplemented by threats to murder him." How did he deal
with the pressure?
GW The pressure never seemed to bother him
in the ring. As the years went by, and after he won the title, I think the
criticism and the hostility and the threats did begin to tell on him. He
drank pretty heavily throughout his life, and while it is impossible to know
exactly what the cause of that was, it very likely had to do with the pressure
he was under. But it never bothered him in the ring, and it never bothered
him when he was dealing with the press. He was always Jack Johnson.
JJM How did white Americans respond to Johnson's
victory over Burns?
GW They had to admit that he beat them. It
was after they discovered he had white female companions that the real clamor
grew to find a white man who could restore the title to what they saw as
its rightful owner.
JJM Following the Burns fight, the previous
heavyweight champion, Jim Jeffries, claimed that since he retired from the
ring as champion, he never really lost the title.
GW Yes, that is what he claimed -- that since
he retired rather than fight Johnson, and since Johnson had only beaten people
Jeffries never fought before, he was still really the champion. It was probably
just a ploy to get the lion's share of the purse. It was a ridiculous argument,
of course. If you give something up, you have given it up. As Johnson said,
an ex-mayor is no longer mayor. |
| JJM The writer Jack London reported
on the Burns fight for the New York Herald, and concluded his story
by saying, "But one thing remains. Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa
farm and remove that smile from Johnson's face. Jeff, it's up to you."
GW London was a complicated guy of his period.
He was a Socialist, but his sense of brotherhood didn't extend to black people.
In some ways he wasn't a virulent racist the way some of the other people
wrote about it were, but he was a fancy enough writer that the idea of finding
somebody to "remove that smile" from Johnson's face caught on.
JJM Was Jeffries' interest in returning to
the ring motivated primarily by money, or was it because he wanted to restore
the crown to whites?
GW The story is that he felt a racial duty
to do it. I am sure to some extent that is true, but I think what is much
more important is that he made a great deal of money. He also made a lot
of money getting ready for the fight -- he did a vaudeville tour for more
than a year, during which time he went around the country training in public,
on stage, and people paid to see it. He made more money doing that than he
made in the ring. Then he was offered a lot of money for the fight. So, I
think his return was very largely a financial decision.
JJM Their fight was sold primarily as a racial
contest…
GW Yes, it was called the "Battle of the
Century," and the "Race War." It was supposed to decide who was going to
be in charge: blacks or whites. Johnson was just amused by it. To him
it was just a fight. He had fought white guys and he had fought black guys,
and he had beaten both, so why should Jeffries be any different? But this
fight, for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with boxing in the ring,
became a huge global event.
JJM Jeffries said "I realize full well what
depends on me. That portion of the white race that has been looking to me
to defend its athletic superiority may feel assured that I am fit to do my
very best. I will win as quickly as I can." Did he really believe that he
could beat Johnson?
GW I don't know for sure, but by the time
of the fight he knew he couldn't. He didn't really train right. For example,
he had mostly old friends train with him, many of whom were the same age
he was -- and he was older than Johnson. He realized he was far too slow
for Johnson. The night before the fight he couldn't sleep at all, and it
probably wasn't because he was excited. It was because he had this awful
sense that Johnson was going to beat him, and how much worse it was going
to be after having said all those things about him. Jeffries is not a sympathetic
guy, but you can sort of understand how he got put into the position he was
in. He too was a victim of ludicrous racism. All racism is ludicrous, of
course, but this was especially awful. |
Jim Jeffries being introduced to the crowd, July 4, 1910
"Even in the churches they were sermonizing that I was a skunk
for not defending the white race's honor."
- Jim Jeffries
*
Johnson fighting James Jeffries, 1910
"No crowd is ever big-hearted enough, or 'sporting enough' to regard
an encounter between white and black with a purely sporting interest."
- writer Bohun Lynch
|
"In October 1909, the sometimes frantic search for a 'white hope'
capable of winning back the heavyweight title for the white race, settled
upon the middleweight champion, Stanley Ketchel, whom Johnson normally outweighed
by more than twenty-five pounds. To make Ketchel seem a plausible
challenger his handlers had him meet the press (left) wearing an oversized,
padded coat and specially made boots."
- Geoffrey Ward
*
"The fight itself ended predictably. Ketchel lay unconscious
for several minutes."
- Geoffrey Ward
_____
Little
David/Shout All Over, a 1909 recording by the Fisk Jubiliee
Singers
|
JJM An example of this racism is something
the former California governor, J.N. Gillette, told a reporter: "Anyone with
the least sense knows that whites in this country won't allow Johnson or
any other Negro to win the world's championship from Jeffries. Johnson knows
that." He went on to say, "He's no fool. He knows that in order
to win that fight, he would have to whip every white man at the ringside,
so he has agreed to lay down for the money." Is there any truth to
that?
GW No. He may have been offered money to
lie down, as he was in most fights. In this case he certainly didn't take
it. The boxing game was even gamier then than it is now, and there were lots
of deals and agreements to carry fights for a certain length of time, which
was pretty standard for those days. But he really wanted to win this fight.
JJM
The revenues generated by the film of the fights was an interesting
aspect of your book. The film rights were such a large part of the fighter's
income stream.
GW It was like pay-per-view is today.
JJM If a fight only went one or two rounds,
there probably wouldn't be much interest in it, therefore this system did
encourage boxers to think about making a fight last longer than necessary.
GW That's right.
JJM These bouts were often scheduled for
forty-five rounds. How long were the rounds?
GW Three minutes each. It was a very rough
game. In the bare-knuckle days, they used to go seventy or eighty rounds.
JJM
You wrote of Johnson, "His style was elegant, refined, distinctive,
savored by connoisseurs of the art and science of the sport but not calculated
to appeal to those fans who had paid to see a brawl." That reminds me of
Muhammad Ali's boxing style. What kind of style did these fighters have to
utilize in order to go for forty-five rounds? Did they pretty much stand
toe to toe?
GW No, they didn't stand toe to toe, and
there was a great deal of wrestling in them. Before bare-knuckle fights were
stopped in 1892, a reason fights would go on for so many rounds is because
the fighters could wrestle. There was endless throwing of people down, and
there were remnants of that in bouts after that. They did very little breaking
up of the two fighters, so the guys would stand in the ring and push each
other around a lot of the time. Nobody was ever on their toes the way Muhammad
was. |
| JJM Can you describe Johnson's relationship
with the black community following his defeat of Jeffries?
GW That was the height of his romance with
the black community. They saw him as a symbol of defiance. It was the only
arena in the world, really, in which black people were winning, and he was
winning on an international scale. People identified with him enormously.
But there were already some middle class, church-going people in particular
who worried that his private life -- his white wives and flamboyant lifestyle
-- would tarnish the reputation of their race.
JJM Yes, you wrote that "Johnson proved not
only that he could beat a white man, but that he could take their women that
they believed were theirs alone as well." I have to believe that was a concern
for everybody.
GW Yes.
JJM
Johnson's interests included the opera, he loved history, and he raced
automobiles. Did the complexity of his interests further antagonize whites?
GW All of that was presented by the press
in a jokey way, as if people were saying, "You wont believe this. Not only
is this guy prominent and has white wives, but he claims to be an inventor."
His claims about being an inventor seemed to be the height of absurdity to
writers at the time, but he truly was an inventor. When I wrote the script
for the film, I found one patent that he had, and by the time I wrote the
manuscript for the book, I had found three. He was an extraordinary man.
JJM One of the inventions he was working on
was a flying machine?
GW Well, he claimed he was working on a flying
machine, but I can't prove that. He also claimed that he was trying to find
a cure for tuberculosis. But I do know that he had three patents for devices
-- two of them having to do with cars. One was an improved automobile wrench,
and one was an anti-auto-theft device. The third was some kind of a steam
winch that lifted very heavy equipment. |
Johnson en route to Chicago aboard his private railroad car, following
his defeat of Jim Jeffries, 1910
"The black man, were he of white skin, doubtless would be the most
popular champion we ever had. He has all the manners to make him such,
and is so accommodating and polite all the time that people who know him
well get to like him immediately. No matter what the request Johnson
is willing to go out of his way to grant it. Especially is he willing
to pose for amateur photographers along the way and laughs and jokes continuously
during the process...He is naturally that sort of way. He is sunny
Jack, for sure."
- Ed Smith, Chicago American, aboard the train with Johnson
from Chicago to Reno
_____
Il Trovatore was Johnson's favorite opera
Il
Trovatore: Scene 2: Che piu t'arresti? |
Belle Schreiber, the woman who testified against Johnson
"...the private life he'd created for himself, the enemies he'd
made along the way, and his own unwillingness to let anything or anyone interfere
with his pleasures all had begun to work against him."
- Geoffrey Ward
_____
Swing
Along, a 1914 recording by Will Marion Cook's Afro-American
Folk Song Singers |
JJM Following his defeat of Jeffries, the Feds basically
wanted Johnson gone. How did they use the Mann Act for this purpose?
GW They misapplied the Mann Act, which was
originally intended to stop commercial traffic in prostitution. They got
him because he paid the railroad ticket for a girlfriend to move from Pittsburgh
to Chicago. Under some pressure from the Feds, she was willing to testify
against him.
JJM Was this testimony agreed to because of
some jealousy she felt?
GW It was partly out of jealousy, yes, but
it may also have been that the Feds told her she would have trouble if she
didn't testify, and I suspect that is what happened. So, he was basically
railroaded into prison.
JJM Yes, and he was left with the choice of
going to prison for a period of time or getting the hell out of Dodge.
GW That's right, which was the option that
he chose.
JJM He made his way into Montreal. Who assisted
him in getting there?
GW Like all the things in his life, there
are five or six explanations. In one, he claimed to have paid local, state,
and federal officials in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars
to be allowed to get out of town. Another story is that the great baseball
pitcher Rube Foster -- who later founded the Negro Leagues -- managed to
smuggle him aboard a railroad train with the rest of the members of his team,
and then fled to Canada. |
| JJM
From there he made his way to Europe.
GW Yes, he made it there and was out of the
country for seven years, during which time he lost his title in Cuba to Jess
Willard.
JJM How was Willard chosen to fight Johnson?
GW There was a desperate search for another
"great white hope," and when Jeffries failed, they tried all kinds of people.
When they realized they couldn't find anybody skillful enough to beat him,
they instead looked for the biggest guys they could find. There were all
sorts of giants who were supposed to be able to challenge him, but most of
them couldn't fight at all. They found Willard in Kansas and determined that
he could fight some -- and he was enormous.
JJM There was also some doubt, which you seem
to have put to rest in your book, about whether Johnson lay down for this
fight with Willard in Cuba in order to come back to the country without having
to go to prison.
GW The reason for the doubt is that Johnson
claimed he'd thrown the fight. He said he'd had a deal with the promoters
to get him pardoned, and would be allowed to come back into the United States
once he had given up his title. There really isn't any evidence for that
at all. If you see the fight you can see that it isn't true. He won twenty
rounds, then he ran out of gas. He was fighting a bigger, younger guy in
one-hundred-fifteen degree heat, and he was overweight and out of shape.
He simply got caught by a good right hand.
JJM What did he do in the years immediately
following his loss to Willard?
GW He toured Europe. During World War I,
he was on the periphery of things. He staged exhibitions in small towns,
as well as in bull rings in Spain. He tried all sorts of schemes to make
money. Among many other things, he was a hustler. He always had four or five
new schemes for how to remain famous and make some money.
JJM He claimed to have been an undercover
agent…
GW Yes, he claimed to have been a spy during
World War I, but that is not true. He took a very dim view of the war. He
tried to get into the Army, promising that if they let him back into the
country and leave him alone, he would serve in the United States forces.
Since nobody could guarantee that, he didn't go into the Army. |
Jess Willard
*
Johnson v. Willard, April 5, 1915, Havana, Cuba
"I have no complaint to make excepting this. While I was
champion…I made a great many enemies most of whom hated me for no other
reason than that I am a Negro. These persons have gotten vindication in my
defeat and I hope they obtain full enjoyment out of it."
- Jack Johnson, following his defeat to Jess Willard
_____
Good
News, a 1914 recording by The Tuskegee Institute Singers
|
photo
University
Libraries of Notre Dame
Joe Louis
"Once the hero of his race, he is now the most despised man in
it. Jack Johnson felt the full brunt of his own people's disapproval of him.
Johnson attempted to make a speech, but such a salvo of boos greeted him,
he stood in embarrassment for five minutes, while the crowd refused to give
him a chance to talk."
- Pittsburgh Courier, after Johnson was introduced at a charity
boxing show in Harlem |
JJM
He resented Joe Louis' success, even to the point of attempting
to train his white challengers. That couldn't have helped his standing in
the black community at all.
GW No, it did not. He was not popular toward
the end of his life. It was twenty-two years before another black man got
a shot at the title, and that was Joe Louis. Johnson wanted to be Louis'
trainer, but failed to do get the job. He got more annoyed because Louis'
managers let it be known that they'd told Louis not to act like Johnson.
In a way, he became the anti-Jack Johnson; Louis was forbidden to be photographed
with white women, he was forbidden to smile in the ring -- let alone talk
-- all of which greatly annoyed Johnson, who saw himself as a pioneer.
JJM Louis felt he had to change his persona
because of the actions of Johnson before him…
GW Yes, he did. He had to be a sort of denatured
version of himself. |
| JJM I am sure that the issue around his
being married to white women was a great contributor to Johnson's demise.
Turn the clock back one hundred years, when black men were lynched for merely
looking at white women the "wrong way," and among this society lived Johnson,
exuding self-confidence and flaunting these "taboo" relationships. I have
to believe that made his life a lot harder than it may have been otherwise.
GW Absolutely. There is no question about
that. But he simply refused to live his life circumscribed by anybody. Black
and white people alike asked him all his life, "Just who do you think you
are?" His answer was always, "Jack Johnson." It was the only answer he thought
he had to give.
JJM The recent review of your book in the New
York Times posed an interesting question of you. I will preface the question
with this quote of Johnson's. "I only hope the colored people in the world
would not be like the French. History tells us that when Napoleon was winning
all of his victories, the French were with him. But when he lost, the people
turned against him. When Jack Johnson meets defeat, I want the colored people
to like and love me the same way as when I was the champion." Did the life
Johnson led ultimately leave the black community more inspired than embarrassed
and enraged?
GW That is a tough question. The first thing
I have to say is that I don't think anybody knows what the "black community"
thinks about anything, because the black community is just as various and
complex and richly diverse as any other community.
Johnson was certainly a hero to young men of his generation. He became an
embarrassment later. When Joe Louis won the title while "behaving himself,"
that pleased that generation. After that, Johnson was largely forgotten.
When you think about the fact that he was the best known black man on Earth
in his lifetime and that he then became supplanted by other people says something
about people's memories. I think white people are embarrassed by the story,
and I think some black people were embarrassed by Jack Johnson. I am hoping
that the book does at least a little to restore his memory. He was something. |
Johnson and nineteen-year-old bride Lucille Cameron, 1912
"…Booker Washington still saw himself as an arbiter of black
behavior and Jack Johnson's conduct frankly alarmed him: the champion seemed
the antithesis of everything Washington had always said a black man should
be: he was free-spending, not thrifty; brash instead of humble; defiant in
the face of white laws and customs intended to hamper his movement and limit
his choices."
- Geoffrey Ward
_____
Ev'rybody's
Crazy 'Bout the Doggone Blues, But I'm Happy, a 1918 recording by Wilbur
Sweatman
|
JJM Well, congratulations on the work. It
was a great read, and a wonderful reminder about what an amazing American
Johnson was.
GW Yes, that is what I think he is. He was
a great American type. He symbolizes Meritocracy, and was a symbol
of the American ego. When he wanted something, he went out and got it.
JJM He stood up for so many things. As you
said earlier, he looked at himself as an American above all, and he based
his relationships not on race but on the quality of them. It is hard enough
to do that now, let alone one hundred years ago, when Booker T. Washington
was saying this was not the way black men should behave now.
GW Yes, Washington dismissed him as all brawn
and no brains. But Washington was envious. Johnson's fame was far greater
than his own. Jack Johnson was an international figure. I don't think there
had been an international black figure before him, and for quite some time
there wasn't one after him.
JJM James Weldon Johnson said of him, "Johnson
fought a great fight, and it must be remembered that it was the fight of
one lone black man against the world…"
GW Yes, that is it. You can't say it any
better than that.
__________________________________________________________
"I loved him because of his courage. He faced the world unafraid. There
wasn't anybody or anything he feared."
- Johnson's last wife, Irene Pineau Johnson
_____
St.
Louis Blues, a 1922 recording by W.C. Handy's Memphis
Blues Band
*
"Alas, poor Johnson," a poem by Walt Mason published in the May 14, 1915
Los Angeles Times following Johnson's loss to Jess Willard
__________
|
Alas, poor Johnson, badly whipped,
And of his wreaths and honors stripped;
When he appeared in yonder ring
He was that ring's unconquered king;
And when he left it, sick and sore,
He was a has been, nothing more,
And all the country felt relief
When Brother Johnsing came to grief;
No words encouraging he heard;
No breasts with sympathy were stirred,
But all were glad to see him slump
Before Jess Willard's cultured thump,
And e'en the men of his own race
Exulted in his loss of place.
'Twas not because his skin was brown
That men rejoiced when he came down.
But Johnsing, since he gained his fame,
Seemed destitute of sense of shame,
And laughed with foul, unholy glee,
At all the claims of decency.
An outcast from his native land,
And by most other countries banned,
He'll skulk, since from the height he's hurled
Along the edges of the world,
A blot on every decent scene,
A leper with the sign, "Unclean."
A man all morals can't defy
And with that sort of thing get by;
And when he falls as fall he must,
Rejoicing follows long disgust.
|
Unforgivable
Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson
by
Geoffrey C. Ward
About Geoffrey Ward
JJM Who was your childhood hero?
GW Franklin Roosevelt.
JJM Any particular reason?
GW Yes, I had polio when I was a kid, and
I grew up in a Democratic household. That combination made him be my hero,
and I ended up being his biographer.
*
Geoffrey C. Ward won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1989. With
Ken Burns, he is coauthor of The Civil War and Jazz. He lives
in New York City.
__________
Unforgivable
Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson
Score by
Wynton Marsalis
What Have You Done?
High Society
Weary Blues
__________
A selection of photos
(used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House,
Inc.)
Jack Johnson, 1901, age twenty-three |
In a Galveston, Texas jail with fellow boxer Joe Choynski, 1901.
They were incarcerated for taking part in an illegal prizefight |
Johnson with Clara Kerr, 1904, with whom he lived -- unmarried --
in a white Bakersfield, California neighborhood |
Round fourteen versus champion Tommy Burns, Sydney Australia, December
26, 1908 |
Arriving in Vancouver, B.C. as the new heavyweight champion of the
world, with Hattie McClay, February 3, 1909 |
Johnson watching over a fallen and unconscious Stanley Ketchel,
1909 |
Johnson and former champion Jim Jeffries (to Johnson's left) at New
York's Albany Hotel, 1909, agreeing to title fight |
Johnson with Etta Duryea, Reno, c. 1910 |
Johnson, in his corner, prior to the July 4, 1910, Reno, Nevada fight
with Jim Jeffries |
Johnson aboard his private train following his defeat of Jeffries,
1910 |
Johnson and Etta Duryea, Ballston Spa, New York, 1910 |
Johnson with Etta Duryea |
Belle Schreiber, a prostitute Johnson met in 1907, and who claimed
to be "Mrs. Jack Johnson."
She would eventually testify against Johnson, claiming he transported
her across state lines. |
November 8, 1912 Chicago American headline announcing Johnson's
incarceration |
Johnson marrying Lucille Cameron, December 3, 1912 |
Johnson with Cameron while in exile, Paris, c. 1913 |
Jess Willard, the "great white hope" from Kansas who defeated Johnson
on April 5, 1915 in Havana, Cuba |
Johnson versus Willard, April 5, 1915 |
Johnson on the canvas, appearing to be shielding his eyes from the
sun, which fostered the myth that he had thrown the fight |
Poster announcing 1916 Barcelona fight with Arthur Craven |
At a Leavenworth Prison "boxfest," May 28, 1921 |
Johnson with his third wife, Irene Pineau Johnson, 1932
She wrote of Johnson, "As a husband, Mr. Johnson is everything that
he could possibly be." |
Geoffrey Ward products at Amazon.com
Jack Johnson products at Amazon.com
_______________________________
This interview took place on November 15, 2004
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890 - 1919 author Tim Brooks.
_______________________________
Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
# Text from publisher.
|
