“People will forgive you anything but success,” we say, while Jack Johnson might have said in his day, “People will forgive you anything but the wrong colour.” It was in 1908 when he became the first black boxing champion of the world in the prestigious heavyweight division, and so enraged white Americans that they immediately began to look for a “white hope”, or one who would wipe the “golden smile” off his face, as the charred writer Jack London described it when he publicly called on the white boxer Jim Jeffries to get back in the ring and put things right. For Jack Johnson really needed to be put in his place: not only did he masterfully beat white men in the ring, he even had the audacity to pose in public with white women! Not to mention his binge drinking, his visits to brothels and the questionable business deals he was involved in.
If his skin had been light in colour, he would have been revered as a boxer who showed extraordinary talent, unprecedented strength and astonishing speed in the ring, but then it would probably not have been written of him that he was so unique that “no law or regulation, no human being, white or black, man or woman, could long prevent him from getting what he wanted”.
The Adventures of Little Jack
His determination and courage, which often bordered on recklessness, were either instilled in him from the cradle or inadvertently instilled in him when he was growing up in a family of former slaves, in which only four of the eight children survived their childhood. It was only natural that he would leave school before he had a good grip on the books, and indeed he did, at the age of twelve. Yet he was later said to be surprisingly intelligent, quite polished and extremely verbal.
He was always good at storytelling, but at 12 he wasn’t looking for a way to get from his home in Galveston, Texas, to New York City so he could tell the story of his adventure, he just set his mind on meeting Steve Brodie, who became famous overnight after jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886 and surviving.
Eight-year-old Jack was apparently charmed enough to hide on a train four years later because he didn’t have the money for a ticket, hoping he had reached his destination when he finally dared to come out. He realised that New York was much, much further away and boarded a boat as a stowaway.
Now he was indeed sailing towards his destination, but he was discovered and had to peel potatoes all the way to recoup his expenses, and the cook physically abused him so much that he finally ran on board and tried to jump over the rail. The passengers took pity on him, but they raised money for his ticket so that he could see the Statue of Liberty alive and well.
For the first time in a big city, he stopped strangers and asked them where he could find Steve Brodie. He was the target of people’s ridicule and anger, but “the disappointment only strengthened my resolve”. Eventually, of course, he met Steve Brodie and supposedly became his friend.
He wandered a little further into Boston and cleaned stables, then returned home at the age of 13 and faced a new adventure: he started earning money in a shipyard. But it was not only the work that was hard, it was also the struggle for existence, and he had to use his fists to fend off the antics of his older colleagues. Boxing became a handy self-defence skill, and as a sport it was banned in many American states at the time.
He’s a good beater, people said, and his outraged parents were relieved when he moved to Dallas and started painting carriages. But as chance would have it, his boss was an amateur boxer, and he boxed a little with him and a little with other guys until he realised he was really good. “Easy money,” he thought, when he earned his first $25 from a fight and chose boxing as his profession.
The colour of his skin was not a barrier, although in 1895, in those very days, the eminent journalist Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, wrote: “We are in the midst of a growing menace. The black man is rapidly breaking into the front ranks of sport, golden in the field of fist-fighting. We are in the midst of a black rise toward white supremacy.”
It was politically correct to speak publicly about the legitimacy of white supremacy over black supremacy in America at that time, but Jack was not politically correct in life, although it did not escape him that black boxers were allowed into the ring but not to play for laurels.
But at 17, they were still out of reach, as he realised when he lost his first serious fight. He was knocked to the ground by the white-white pro John Klondike Haynes, but at least Jack earned enough to bounce back to horse racing and promptly lost the money.
White I love you
At the age of 20, he had fought so many fights he could not count them, but not so many that he ran out of energy for his other favourite sport – chasing women. “My luck was a little bit shaky those days, but we were committed and very happy,” he said of his relationship with Mary Austin, when he still believed in love at the age of 20.
Although there are no official records of their marriage, he represented her everywhere as his wife, at least until 1901, when she left him after a dispute. By then he was already considered the most promising young boxer, having brought Klondike to his knees in a rematch the previous year.
He proved that he could go high from one fight to the next. Each was in a different city, of course, but he was constantly travelling, and in between he turned into a brothel, like the one in Philadelphia in 1903, where he met Clara Kerr and fell in love with her endlessly. He didn’t mind that she was a prostitute. It didn’t bother him with women in the future, but it hit him hard in 1906, when Clara blew him off with a friend of his.
“I was paralysed. For the second time, the woman I loved deeply had left me,” he wrote in his autobiography in 1927. He became discouraged, started drinking and gambling, and in between he searched tirelessly for Clara. He tracked her down in Tucson with her lover, accused her of stealing his clothes and jewellery, then forgot all about it when she offered to return home with him.
She didn’t stay long. When the money dried up, so did she, and he thought: the two women I loved were both black. They both left me, so any black woman will break my heart. The solution? I will only love white women!
He overlooked the technicality that it was 1907 and in America, unions between a black man and a white woman were something that could cost you your life, and in Australia that same year he got involved with 20-year-old Alma Lola Toy.
A scandal erupts. She made good use of it by selling the story to a newspaper, and he broke the ice with her. From then on, he was only seen in public with white women, for the pleasures of the flesh, and he could never get enough of them, and he was no stranger to black women either.
“There have been endless women in my life. They have shared in my victories and suffered with me in my disappointments. They have inspired my successes and broken me. They have brought me joy and they have brought me sorrow. They have been extremely faithful and they have been unfaithful. They have worshipped me and loved me and hated me and betrayed me. I was always intrigued by a woman – sometimes several women demanded my attention at the same moment,” he wrote in his autobiography.
The title will be mine!
But from 1906 onwards, his attention was focused on one goal: winning the world heavyweight boxing title. Strong, fast and technically proficient, he was enough, the only problem was that he was the wrong colour for the challenge. The heavyweight division was considered prestigious and it was unthinkable that a black boxer would dominate it. The easiest way to guard against the risk of the title falling into the wrong hands was to give black boxers no chance at all of winning the title.
But Jack was one of those who just needed a boost from the obstacles, and he travelled across America and Europe, boxing everyone he had to and finally getting the heavyweight champion Tommy Burns to accept him as a challenger.
He has always been diplomatic, and he is now. He agreed to get $5,000 for the fight, and Burns took $30,000. And he agreed that Burns’s manager would judge them, however strange that was. But he had a trump card up his sleeve, and he had never let him down before:
“I exhausted my opponent, let him tire, hit him with my left hand as he approached me, and then continued or finished with a low blow to the chin. I lasted longer that way, and I got out of the ring without bruising,” he later explained how he let his opponents torture themselves a little before knocking them down with a knockout.
Tommy Burns was no exception. “I decided to stretch his sentence as far as I could”, he later admitted that he had played with Burns quite a bit that 28 December 1908 in Sydney. He had just enough to keep Burns on his feet, but he did not want to knock him down and shorten his torment.
Who knows how much longer he would have continued to be mistreated if a police inspector hadn’t jumped into the ring in the 14th round and announced that enough was enough. The fight was over, but the referee had to announce: Jack Johnson is the new world heavyweight boxing champion.
Racist light-skinned Americans went mad with horror, black Americans with happiness, even though it was also bitter with a teaspoon of wormwood. In Johnson’s hometown, the champagne reception was cancelled because he wanted to attend it with a white woman known in the prostitution world as Hattie McClay, known to the locals as Anna Peterson.
Because of his lifestyle, she travelled a lot with him, and she travelled comfortably because Jack was already earning well, but she could not, for example, stay with him in a hotel of her choice in British Columbia because they did not rent rooms to mixed couples.
But she didn’t have time to adjust to this kind of trouble, because in March 1909 she had already been replaced by Bella Schreiber, whom Jack met in a brothel, but the Everleigh Club was reserved for whites and he was only allowed to enter it because his manager was a debt collector and they were there to collect money.
He wasn’t allowed to touch the women in the brothel, but he persuaded five of them to go for a drive in his shiny new sports car, even though they all lost their jobs. The move paid off, however, for 23-year-old Bella Schreiber, who had come to Chicago three years earlier and found that prostitution was far more ephemeral than the ghostly secretarial jobs her father, a Milwaukee policeman, had sent her to Chicago to do.
Unhappy wife number 1
She pushed Hattie out and travelled with him at Jack’s expense, getting “a little pocket money”. By October 1909 she had settled into a comfortable life, when she was replaced by Etta Duryea. The glamorous 28-year-old was, exceptionally, not a prostitute but an educated upper-class woman who divorced Jack, even though she had separated from her husband two years earlier.
Slim and exquisitely dressed, with big dark eyes and a lovely sad smile, she was not sad, but depressed, and being in Jack’s company was unfortunately not very healing.
He was no stranger to a monogamous relationship, and Hattie and Bella were not so willing to give up his generosity so easily, even though they were far from being his only “friends”. Etta also found it difficult to bear the hostility of those around her and her husband’s violent nature, especially when jealousy fuelled her.
In December 1910, when he suspected she was having an affair with the chauffeur, he hired a detective and had her pursued. On Christmas Day 1910, he beat her so badly that she had to be admitted to hospital. The media reported it, but the couple stayed together anyway, because Etta had “fallen off the tram”.
In January 1911, they secretly married, retired to Pittsburgh and settled down. Jack finally broke with Hattie and Bella: the former paid $500 then, or $12,500 today, to return his letters and telegrams, the latter helped open the brothel, paid her rent for the first few months and furnished it completely, and two years later heard that she was working for others again.
But the lull did not last long. In January 1912, Etta’s father died. The public found out about the marriage and the pressure from the neighbourhood intensified. She had almost no people to lean on. She slipped deeper and deeper. Twice she tried to commit suicide and twice she was rescued.
On 11 September 1912, Jack wanted to send her to his friends in Las Vegas to recuperate. Just then she changed her mind and decided not to go because she was feeling unwell. Her husband ran to the train station to get his ticket money back and returned to his nightclub, the Café de Champion, above which they lived.
By then, his wife was already in hospital. Earlier, she had called the maids to have a lie down together, and when they left, she shot herself. She died during the operation.
Revenge on the self-loathing “nigger”
She hadn’t even been dead a month when Jack appeared in public with a new white woman, only this time it was Lucille Cameron, a blonde 18-year-old prostitute he met at his club, who was hanging from his elbow. The public was upset, and her mother even more so, when she reported Johnson, 34, for kidnapping her child.
“Jack Johnson has hypnotic powers. He used it on my little girl. I’d rather see my daughter spend the rest of her life in an insane asylum than be this nigger’s plaything,” she explained to reporters.
The faces of the forerunners of today’s FBI lit up – they had finally found something to step on the toes of this self-important “nigger” who has miraculously avoided being lynched, murdered or attacked by white supremacists time and time again.
Now they have the chance to screw him legally. In 1910, the Mann Act, or the law protecting girls from prostitution and pimps, was passed, but it was written so loosely that any “immoral” act, such as adultery, became a criminal offence.
On 18 October 1912, Jack Johnson was arrested for smuggling a prostitute called Lucille Cameron across the border, only bad luck was that Lucille refused to cooperate. Instead of accusing him, she said that she had been a prostitute before they met and that she had come to Chicago alone. The charges were dropped, and the couple sailed happily away from the registrar’s office. They married on 4 December 1912, less than three months after Etta’s suicide.
The public went crazy. The Governor of North Carolina publicly called for lynching: “There is only one punishment – and it must be swift – when a black man lays his hand on a white woman.” His wish went unheeded, but the resentment of white America continued to burn, after the flame was fanned two years ago when Jack defeated their “white hope” in the ring.
On 28 December 1908, Jack had not yet taken off the gloves to beat Tommy Burns and become the new heavyweight boxing champion of the world, when white Americans were already looking for a hero to match him. The exasperated Burns looked in Europe for a candidate, others in America, but however they turned, their “white hope” always appeared in the form of Jim Jeffries.
No way, said the 35-year-old Jeffries, a former world champion who retired in 1904 without wanting to box Johnson or any other black boxer. When they had pressed him and his white conscience long enough, he stepped into the ring on 4 July 1910 for a fight called the Fight of the Century.
“A champion in his day, one of the greatest fighters in the history of boxing, was tricked into fighting for the title again just to satisfy envy, hatred and prejudice,” Johnson wrote much later about the time Jeffries furiously accused the previous champion, Tommy Burns, of why he had boxed the black Johnson in the first place.
Now some 22,000 people came to Reno, Nevada, and they were all shouting, but few in support of Johnson. “If a black man wins, thousands upon thousands of his ignorant brethren will misunderstand that victory, as if they are allowed to demand much more than physical parity with their white neighbours,” wrote the New York Times. The hostile environment did not, however, confuse Jack for a moment.
“I had barely hit Jeff before I knew I was his master. From the start, the fight was mine. He fought in his usual style and I think with a lot of his former enthusiasm, speed and stamina. If I hadn’t been well prepared and if I had just a trace of drugs in me, I would never have been able to stand under the hot sun for 15 rounds and take the punishment I was going to give him,” Johnson later argued.
When Jeffries went down after a knockdown in the 15th round, many claimed that Johnson only won because Jeffries was in bad shape. He admitted: “I couldn’t hit him. No, I couldn’t come close to him in a hundred years.” He still took home $192,066. Jack Johnson earned 145,600. Racism paid off, at least for the chosen ones. The people paid dearly.
“Until the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. 48 years later, no event had sparked such all-encompassing racial violence,” observers wrote years after the riots that erupted as black Americans celebrated victory and were attacked by whites. At least 26 people died and hundreds were injured. Most were black.
Days of self-reliance
Jack Johnson has now received definitive confirmation that he is indeed the unbeatable champion, but dark clouds were already gathering. Half of them he summoned himself when he gave in completely to self-promotion.
He walked around in tailor-made suits and floor-length fur coats. His smile was literally golden, as Jack London described it, because he had gold teeth made to match his gold-handled walking stick.
He flaunted rubies, emeralds and diamonds, and they glittered on his women too, except that only the official wives got to keep the jewellery, and he put it on a dish for his female companions to sparkle at his side. His women lacked nothing materially.
For example, when he toured the village halls of England with a theatre show in which he performed when he wasn’t fighting duels, his first wife Etta was staying in a luxury London hotel. She had a chauffeur and a limousine in royal blue, worth $18,000 then or $445,000 today.
Jack was always crazy about cars. He would drive to the nightclub he opened in Chicago in a racing car, always painted so brightly that it was impossible to miss. While sipping champagne, he is said to have sniffed a domesticated leopard.
Since beating Jeffries, he has been training less and less and drinking more and more. He started gambling compulsively and reportedly became suicidal himself. He hung out with gangsters, although no one knew what he was getting himself into, and above all, he evaded his challengers as the champions had once evaded him.
The drug that had once lifted him into the highest stupor was now dragging him down. It was called mindfulness. He was almost addicted to it. He would invite journalists, male of course, into the bathroom while he lay naked in the bathtub and offer them to touch his muscular body.
The rooms where he trained were almost an open house, welcoming everyone who wanted to see him. But when they left, “Johnson dropped his smile, forgot his wit and began to fight the forces that told him he had to get fit. He is a very different man when he is not showing off to the crowds, to the followers, to the curious, to the champion-worshippers who create an atmosphere that makes this black man, when the atmosphere disappears, in a state similar to that of a lamp when you pour oil on it. Johnson lives for applause. Without it, he fades into nothingness.”
So wrote one of the New York Herald’s reporters, without mentioning that boxing was primarily a profitable activity for Johnson. He did not sell fights, but even as world champion he easily agreed to a deal where he would stall a fight a bit before knocking his opponent down because, for example, he was being filmed and they wanted a certain number of rounds for a certain fee. He also went to the bookmakers and fight organisers for the money.
It was clear to him from the start that boxing is a circus. He was great at playing the public, but in recent years he somehow could not understand that the media no longer worked in his favour when they published his every transgression. And after 1910, so many of them that even black Americans denounced him, saying that his lifestyle was making them look bad. So he did not have many allies when, in 1913, at the age of 35, he found himself before a judge again.
The victory of prejudice
In October 1912, the charge that he had pimped out his second wife, Lucille Cameron, was dropped, and Assistant District Attorney Parkin’s determination to step on Johnson’s toes grew. He tasked the predecessors of today’s FBI to pull out all the stops to find “proof of Johnson’s illegal smuggling of any woman for immoral reasons”.
Without Johnson having any idea about it, the state agents scattered around, looking for something, anything, to prove that he had violated the Mann Act. They soon got help. An anonymous caller told them to find a prostitute named Bella Gifford or Jaques Allen. They had to work a little harder, only to find Bella Schreiber, Johnson’s former companion, in a public house.
She had not forgotten that he had dismissed her, albeit with a new brothel, but she quickly made up places and dates that incriminated him. For example, he smuggled her out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Chicago, Illinios, on 15 October 1910, to have fun with her and to prostitute herself.
The prosecution was very grateful to her. Agents quickly fanned out, questioning prostitutes, chauffeurs, waiters, train attendants, Jack’s former managers, his training partners and anyone who could tell them anything to corroborate Bella’s story.
On 7 November 1912, he was arrested and charged under the Mann Act. The judge set bail at $30,000. Someone else posted it and he landed himself in jail. Lawyers worked for a week to get them out.
It was already clear how the judge saw the case. The Mann Act was written in such a way that the verdict depended entirely on the judge’s interpretation, and that judge was a racist.
On 7 May 1913, the White Jury took only two hours to find the heavyweight boxing champion of the world guilty on all counts of the indictment. On 4 June 1913, the judge sentenced him to a year and a day in prison and a fine. This time, bribes to all sorts of people were not effective in the fight against prejudice.
Jack complained and was free until the end, or would have been if he hadn’t left behind his nightclub, his real estate and the life he knew and fled to Montreal, where Lucille was waiting for him. Three days later, they sailed for Europe and Jack Johnson, the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, was officially a fugitive from the law.
He has not been able to make a new home in Europe. World War I broke out and the opportunities for duels became fewer and fewer, and his status as a fugitive made it difficult for him to find work earlier.
The money slowly ran out and he and Lucille set off for South America. There, ambitious fight promoters found Jack and challenged him: in Havana, Cuba, to box against a younger Jess Willard. The fight would last 45 rounds, or until one of them went down. Johnson agreed.
On 5 April 1915, the two adversaries met under a hot sun and in an atmosphere heated to 40.5 degrees Celsius. Even though Johnson was already 37 years old, most people were betting on him. He was also pretty confident of victory, but he hadn’t exactly tired himself out with training. Jess Willard did.
Now he held up well in the desperate heat, so well in fact that he knocked his opponent down in the 26th round. Jack Johnson lost his world heavyweight title. After five years, he finally got back into white hands.
Now the whites have made no more mistakes. It took 7 years for the next black boxer to get a chance to compete for a boxing title, and another 15 years before he was allowed to fight for a heavyweight title – it was 1937 then.
I want to go home
After the fight, Jack Johnson explained how he had made a deal with the US government to forget about his prison sentence in exchange for defeat. Perhaps he did, but nothing came of the deal and he and Lucille went first to Spain and then to Mexico.
By the spring of 1920, Johnson had had enough of life as a refugee. He wanted to return home, even if it meant going to prison first. On 20 July 1920, he crossed the Mexican-American border and surrendered to the authorities.
He was taken to Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. He wasn’t hurt. The warden was a fan of his, and even though he was white, they treated him well and even made him head of the prison sports department. He was still in his prison garb, having already played a few exhibition bouts.
In July 1921, he left prison in style. He walked in front of the cameras waiting for him “in a straw hat, a tailored grey suit, a soft white shirt, a lively polka-dot tie and shiny leather shoes”. He was welcomed by three bands, who entertained him and the hundreds of people who greeted him.
At 43 years old, he is by no means done with boxing, even though he never got the chance to fight for a title again. He has more or less been left with exhibition appearances and some training if someone paid him to take part.
After a while, he started drinking again. He moved from the ring to the stage and performed in a burlesque show. Four years after he returned from prison, Lucille left him. It was reportedly only then that she learned of the infidelity of her husband of 16 years, who had also been romantically linked to German spy Mata Hari and sex symbol Mae West.
Lucille hadn’t yet taken well to singing when Jack had a new wife. The white-haired Irene Pineau was a fan, but when the position of Jack Johnson’s wife became vacant, she quickly divorced, applied and won the position in 1925.
“I loved him for his courage. He faced the world without fear. There was no one and nothing to be afraid of,” she said at the funeral, explaining what she loved about a man who lived to die on the back of old fame, even though it was often to his detriment.
For example, when he saw the potential in the young boxer Joe Louis. He wanted to help him, but his white manager rushed him out, and in 1934, when the young boxer turned professional, he had him sign a contract which also said that he must never be photographed with a white woman, that he must never go to a nightclub alone, that he must never take part in a rigged fight, that he must never take pleasure in defeating his opponent, that he must “live clean and fight clean” …
Despite the interference of white managers, the two men became friends and Jack Johnson was in the audience when Joe Louis became the second black heavyweight boxing champion in 1937, 22 years after Johnson lost the title.
In the old days, the days of glory and luxury were but a distant memory. He also made his money by taking part in a circus, in which he himself was one of the acts, but he never lost his uprightness and steadfastness. On 6 October 1946, when a restaurant in South Carolina refused to serve him, he stormed out, got in his car and drove off. He crashed and died at the age of 68, just as he had lived – fast, wild and unconventional.
