Beyond the Ring: Searching for Boxing Legend Jack Johnson

Beyond the Ring: Searching for Boxing Legend Jack Johnson

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

By Geoffrey C. Ward (Knopf, $26.95)

Boxing is physical entrepreneurship for the dead-broke, an arena where one's fists are the equivalent of venture capital. Measured by that standard, Arthur John Johnson ranks on the order of Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. Known as Jack Johnson, he has come down to us cloaked in his most noted honorific: First Black Heavyweight Champion. We know him as the ebony-colored lightning rod for controversy who pummeled Tommy Burns into submission, not as the quick-witted intellectual who collected classical music recordings and played the bass viola.

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Geoffrey Ward's thorough, detailed and engaging new biography, does much to sift through the layers of myth and bring to light a man whose championship caliber extended beyond the squared circle.

Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, Johnson matriculated through the ranks of illicit and semi-legal brawls before gaining the "Colored Heavyweight Championship" in 1903. Under ordinary circumstances in the bleak stretches of the early 20th century, the Colored Championship would've been the career zenith for a Black fighter. Johnson saw it as merely the preface to his unfolding epic. At the time, the Heavyweight Championship was invested with a degree of cultural importance that is all but gone now. Few outside boxing's core audience could name the (four) current champions, but a century ago Jack Johnson's quest appeared to be almost as quixotic as the presidential quests in 1984 and 1988 of the man who shares his initials.

As a rising contender, he virtually stalked successive heavyweight champions Jim Jeffries, Marvin Hart and Burns before baiting Burns into giving him a title bout in 1908. For years the rhetoric of White supremacy provided champions with a convenient rationale for avoiding the imminent threat posed by Johnson. When he finally got his chance, Johnson carried the champion, doling out brutal punishment in small increments until the fight was finally stopped because Burns was being beaten so badly. It was Johnson's way of issuing a consequence for being made to wait so long for the opportunity.

The public immediately began clamoring for Jim Jeffries - retired for five years at that point - to return to the ring and reclaim the title for the White race. Moreover, Johnson had all but demolished Jefferies' younger brother when they fought years earlier. When Johnson and Jeffries met in Reno, Nev., the following year, the former champion entered the ring with the support of literally millions of White Americans, a retinue of former heavyweight champions and the novelist Jack London. No matter. Johnson reduced the former champion's face to bloody abstraction, pounding him into semi-consciousness and declaring the he "could have fought for two hours longer."

While Johnson's standing as a Black titan became a source of race pride, the boxer himself became a source of consternation - at least among the respectable Negroes of the era. (Booker T. Washington criticized his flamboyant lifestyle, and local Blacks cancelled a parade in his honor after discovering that he had married a White woman.)

As Ward points out, the new champion was nothing if not an individual.

"No law or custom, no person white or black, male or female could keep him from whatever he wanted. He was in the great American tradition of self-invented men, and no one admired his handiwork more than he did," he writes. "All his life whites and blacks alike would ask him, 'Just who do you think you are?' The answer, of course, was always 'Jack Johnson' - and that would prove to be more than enough for turn-of-the-century America to handle."

Ward argues that Johnson's ways - taunting his White opponents before leaving them crumpled on the canvas, marrying three successive White women - were intended less as a social statement than a personal one: He would live his life precisely as he chose irrespective of the consequences. On that level, Johnson refused to play the role of humble Negro ambassador to White America - a role he derisively ascribed to Joe Louis - not out of political sentiment, but because that simply was not who he was.

Predictably, his ring success brought with it a cavalcade of shifty managers and questionable admirers (at one point he took to traveling the country with three White women, each of whom was fighting - literally - for his undivided attention). Etta Duryea, whom he married in 1910, was all but disowned by her family for crossing the racial line. That fact, combined with Johnson's serial infidelity and abusive behavior, likely factored in her suicide just two years later.

With typical insouciance toward controversy, he began appearing publicly with another White woman, 19-year-old Lucille Cameron just two weeks after Duryea's funeral. Cameron's mother charged that the young woman had been kidnapped by the heavyweight champion. (Johnson's alleged $5,000 payment to the mother resolved the conflict, but by that time there was a public clamor that he be charged with violating the 1910 Mann Act, which forbade the transportation of women across state lines for "immoral" purposes.) Belle Schreiber, a sometime prostitute who had been one of the three women vying for his affections, testified against him, which led to Johnson's conviction. He was sentenced to one year and one day in the penitentiary and fined $1,000.

Given two weeks to file an appeal, Johnson escaped to Canada with his nephew. Eventually, Johnson made his way across Europe, where he fought increasingly unimportant bouts against journeyman non-contenders. By the time of his loss to Jess Willard, who was younger, stronger and better conditioned than the then-37-year-old Johnson, the heavyweight belt had become an ironic distinction. That Johnson returned to the United States and died in a car accident after angrily speeding away from a restaurant that offered only Jim Crow accommodations to Blacks, was a bitter postscript to the life of a man who sought to live beyond the provincial borders of race.

Ward, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1989 and is coauthor with Ken Bums of companion books to Jazz and The Civil War, has written a biography that is not flawless. (His statement, for instance, that the race riots following Johnson's defeat of Jim Jeffries were unmatched until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. vastly underestimates the racial horrors of the four intervening decades.) But such misstatements are uncommon in Unforgivable Blackness, a companion to Burns's documentary on Johnson. And, importantly, the book presents Johnson as the product of a vital culture of early Black pugilists - not as a lone fistic anomaly.

This rendering of Johnson is complex, layered and insightful, and an indelible reminder that in racial America even extraordinary individuals have rarely been able to exist as precisely that.

William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jan/Feb 2005
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