Were he alive, Jack Johnson would be shaking his shaved head and grinning his wolfish, imperturbable grin.
The object of Johnson`s outward amusement and deep, burning anger would be the living anachronism posing as a New Hampshire state senator.
”Well, it just seems to me that each race should keep themselves pure,” John Parker Hale Chandler Jr., a Republican, said recently. ”If we have too much race-mixing, it`s going to wipe out the white race. We`re far outnumbered by the blacks, browns and yellows.”
Thus did the ignorant dogma of an elected official cut through the years, shocking many, taking them back to a time when white racism was freewheeling and barbarous.
Chandler was born just three years after Jack Johnson defeated Tommy Burns in 1908 to become the first black heavyweight champion. White supremacists could not forgive Johnson, but blacks swelled with pride, and America was never the same. Perhaps no single sporting event has had as far-reaching an impact.
Chandler`s remarks provided a sobering context to ”Papa Jack” (The Free Press, 1983), as well-written and scholarly a boxing book as has been done.
Author Randy Roberts draws a critical and balanced portrait of the man who loomed as large over his era as Muhammad Ali has over ours. He also illuminates with chilling clarity the strain of white racism that was proudly flaunted then, and has come down to us in the form of fringe hate groups and
”respectable” foot-in-mouth bigots such as Chandler.
”Certainly there was no other famous black American of his day who so utterly resisted racial barriers, no other who so openly assaulted white middle-class attitudes,” wrote Roberts of Johnson.
Johnson`s KO of Burns, debunking white superiority in the most ”manly”
of sports, earned him half of his notoriety. The rest stemmed from his consorting with and marriages to white women.
For these transgressions, Johnson paid dearly. Outwardly, he was composed, urbane and hail-fellow-well-met. But he was not a happy man. He was isolated, self-centered, prone to brooding and violent outbursts, usually directed at women.
Johnson was not as he was portrayed-heroic, honest, passionate, intelligent and a moral force for his generation-by James Earl Jones in the hit play and movie, ”The Great White Hope,” Roberts points out. He was not the hero young black radicals were looking for in the 1960s. He was too scarred.
”It is only in his private world that one glimpses Johnson`s otherwise invisible scars, the marks caused by humiliation and degradation and painful abuse,” Roberts wrote. ”It was always nigger this and nigger that and the world champion`s a nigger in the newspapers and at every fight.”
Born Arthur John Johnson in 1878, son of a Galveston, Tex., laborer, he belonged to the first generation of American blacks to be born free. But many white Americans, and Southerners in particular, viewed emancipation as a mere legality.
Slender, well-muscled and quick, Johnson proved an able streetfighter as a youth. By his late teens, he called himself a boxer. Prizefighting was a nascent sport, illegal in some states, vilified by reformers, followed by millions of admiring men.
Although blacks fought whites for championships in the lighter divisions, the symbolic importance of the heavyweight title was such that many whites did not want to give a black man a chance at proving his equality.
John L. Sullivan, the first heavyweight king, issued his famous challenge to contenders in 1892, saying: ”In this challenge, I include all fighters-first come, first served-who are white. I will not fight a Negro. I never have and I never shall.”
White sportsmen of the era considered black fighters skilled, but docile and lacking in heart.
Johnson built his early reputation by beating the best black fighters. Yet by 1905, public interest in boxing had so diminished, because of attacks by progressive reformers who considered it corrupt and immoral, that promoters turned to rare white-black heavyweight matches to stimulate business.
Champion Jim Jeffries retired rather than face a black opponent. Marvin Hart, who defeated Johnson in a 1905 bout, succeeded him, and a Canadian, Tommy Burns, succeeded Hart. Burns agreed to forgo the championship color barrier for a $30,000 guarantee by Australian promoter Hugh McIntosh. The bout was arranged to take place in Sydney.
An editorial in Sydney`s Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News captured the racial temper of Australian boxing fans: ”Citizens who never prayed before are supplicating Providence to give the white man a strong right arm with which to belt the coon into oblivion.”
Johnson`s easy victory enraged whites, and created in America the call for a White Hope, the foremost candidate being the retired Jeffries. Wrote Jack London in The New York Herald: ”But one thing now remains. Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson`s face. Jeff, it`s up to you. The White Man must be rescued.”
And when Jeffries failed, in 1910, racial violence flared throughout the country, with blacks victimized in most cases.
Johnson`s personal life merely compounded white outrage against him.
”Starting in 1909, the American public began to see the Bad Nigger in Jack Johnson,” Roberts wrote. ”They saw his flashy clothes and brightly colored fast automobiles. They saw the way in which he challenged white authority in his numerous brushes with the law. They heard stories of his night life, the lurid tales of his weeklong drunks and parties. Tales of his sexual bouts also were told, and his shaved head came to symbolize the sexual virility of the black male. But most shocking of all were the times he appeared in public with white women.”
White public opinion ultimately manifested itself in the prosecution of Johnson under the White Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act. The conviction, even on the letter of the dubious law, was a travesty.
When Johnson proceeded to marry Lucille Cameron, a white prostitute with whom he allegedly had violated the Mann Act, the country virtually erupted in a paroxysm of racial indignation.
South Carolina Gov. Cole Blease, addressing a conference of governors:
”If we cannot protect our white women from black fiends, where is our boasted civilization?”
Georgia Rep. Seaborn A. Roddenberry: ”Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit.”
Rather than knuckle to white authority, Johnson fled the country and lived in exile for seven years, losing his title to Jess Willard in Havana in 1915.
Broke, and caught in a dangerous political situation in Mexico in 1920, Johnson returned to the U.S. and served his one-year sentence. He preached, performed on stage and worked small boxing jobs until he died in a car accident in Raleigh, N.C., in 1946. He is buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.
Ring magazine recently rated Johnson the second-greatest heavyweight of all time, behind Ali, calling him ”a true innovator in the art of modern boxing methods.”
But Johnson`s historical impact transcended the ring, to the dismay of the John Chandlers of the world.
”His message, when he was in a serious mood, was that color meant nothing,” wrote Roberts.
”He did not counsel racial harmony as much as total color blindness. Usually, he used his own life as a single text. The Bible, he said, reads,
`Thou shalt take unto thyself a wife.` ”It doesn`t say what kind of wife. Chinese or white or green or black or any other kind. I took unto myself a wife, just as the Bible told me to.” Book closed. Sermon finished. Man, he believed, was not bound by race, class or culture. And though his life showed the fallacy of this doctrine, he believed it.”
