Fight of the Century

Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the Struggle for Racial Equality

Thomas R. Hietala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317470625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: Business

This is a revealing look at the history of race relations in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century portrayed through the lives and times of the first two African-American heavyweight boxing champions, Jack Johnson and Joe Louis. Incorporating extensive research into the black press of the time, the author explores how the public careers and private lives of these two sports figures both define and explain vital national issues from the early 1900s to the late 1940s.

1

“A Retribution Seeks”

White Repression and Black Redemption

The night is darkest near the dawn,

The voice of nature speaks;

The blood that’s from the Negroes drawn

A retribution seeks.¹

—Lizelia A. J. Moorer, “Retribution,” 1907

Of all the annual picnics celebrated on the Fourth of July by Ruby Berkley Goodwin’s family and kin in DuQuoin, Illinois, the one in 1910 seemed the most memorable to her. Ample food—fried chicken, barbecued ribs, sweet corn and tomatoes, potato salad, cakes and pies—lively conversation, and a sing-along generally marked the yearly summer festival. But 1910, when Halley’s Comet streaked across the sky, turned out to be a year like no other for blacks in DuQuoin and across the nation. In body the relatives gathered for their traditional rite of summer; in spirit, however, they dwelled two time zones away in Reno, Nevada. “Today … the grownups all seemed preoccupied,” Goodwin recalled. “If a question was asked, it had to be repeated two or three times.” One question, however, always received “a quick reply”—the adults knew what time it was out West. Usually good for three or four drumsticks, two slices of lemon pie, and a bad case of indigestion, Uncle Charlie could not eat. The tension that sapped his appetite even “made itself felt among the children.”

What “preoccupied” Ruby’s kin was a distant event that should have had little relevance to their daily lives as respected African Americans in a racially and ethnically mixed coal-mining town. “Black was a mark of distinction,” Ruby learned from her elders, “not of condemnation.” Still, Ruby’s relatives knew that most blacks in the nation did not enjoy the familiarity and tolerance that prevailed in DuQuoin. The recent race riot in Springfield, a mere 150 miles to the north, had served as a vivid reminder of the volatility of race relations. Only two years after the Springfield horror, racial tensions again threatened to wreak destruction and bloodshed across the land. Just one spark might ignite an interracial conflagration, and this Fourth of July might provide that spark.

Like an estranged couple seeking a quick divorce, James Jeffries and Jack Johnson ventured to Reno in 1910 to contest custody of the heavyweight title. Jeffries had retired undefeated in 1904. The son of former slaves, Johnson had defeated Tommy Bums to win the crown in 1908. Several prominent whites, including former champion Jim Corbett and writer Jack London, however, persuaded Jeffries to try to recapture the crown for their race. They viewed Johnson as a usurper, a king without legitimacy. Some 10,000 fans and 300 reporters (virtually all white) ventured to Reno to watch “the battle of the century” between the black champion and “the great white hope.”

Ruby’s father Braxton had once watched Johnson defeat six opponents in a battle royal. Johnson had entered the event to enhance his prospects for becoming the first black heavyweight champion. After his victory Johnson mingled with Braxton and other black fans. “If I ever get a chance at Jeffries,” he advised them, “you put every penny you can get on me. I’ll bring home the bacon.” Now with Jeffries and Johnson about to fight for the title, blacks in DuQuoin found few whites willing to wager on the white hope. “But there was more at stake than just a few dollars,” Goodwin explained. “The fate of an entire race hung in the balance. Today, one lone black man had the power to make us a race of champions.”

The mood at the picnic also pervaded the pool hall where Braxton supplemented his miner’s wages by tending a lunch counter. Ruby’s mother sent her and her sister to see if their father could leave to join the family for dinner. “When we reached the pool hall all the tables were idle,” Ruby recalled. “Dad and all the men stood on the sidewalk near the door.” Pondering Johnson’s chances, one fellow favored him in a fair contest. “A white man is the biggest coward on the face of the earth,” he proclaimed. “In the South it takes two or three hundred of ’em to lynch one unarmed nigger.” When asked if he had sold his food and could leave, Braxton replied, “I ain’t sold nothing. Nobody’s got any appetite. Everybody’s waiting to see how the fight comes out.” When Ruby quizzed her father about the match, he called Johnson “a clever boxer” who was “shifty and hard to hit.” Conceding that Jeffries was “strong as a bull” with “a mean wallop,” Braxton predicted, “My boy will win.” The two girls repeated their father’s assurance when they returned to the picnic. Uncle Tobe, “a soft-spoken, mild-mannered little fellow,” agreed. “I believe if they let ’em stand up there toe to toe and fight it out … Johnson will win,” he observed. “A black man is as good as a white man any day.” Others joined the refrain. “The white man knows you’re as good as, if not better than he is,” grandma declared. “He just don’t want you to find it out.”²

Rights and Opportunity—for Whites Only?

Jack Johnson’s fate mattered to black Americans because, over the past generation, the national government, the states, most whites, and even a few prominent blacks had retreated from the ideals of equality and justice that had emerged during Radical Reconstruction. By the time Jack Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1878, for example, President Rutherford Hayes had terminated the federal army’s role in the South, removing troops who had protected the ex-slaves and restoring home rule to former masters and their political allies. Without the federal sword and shield and the watchful eye of Freedman’s Bureau agents, former slaves were at the mercy of southern whites determined to remove any vestige of power or influence from federal bureaucrats, “carpetbaggers,” “scalawags,” and blacks who sought basic rights and economic opportunity. By the time Johnson fought Jeffries, southern legislatures, with the complicity of every branch of the federal government, had relegated blacks to a status not far removed from their previous subordination as slaves. Deprived of the vote, abandoned by the courts, denied equal education, shunted to inferior facilities, and confined to menial jobs, black Americans paid dearly for the reconciliation of Cavalier and Yankee. Completion of the transcontinental railroad, the conquest of the Plains Indians, the Compromise of 1876, and the successful war against Spain in 1898 symbolized national reunification and marked the emergence of the United States as a global power. Such rapid progress, however—like the levers for advancement, comfort, and convenience in the Deep South—seemed to be “for whites only.”

The opening decades of the new century seemed an inauspicious time for Jack Johnson to win the title. In the summer of 1906, for example, tensions between black troops and white police and civilians in Brownsville, Texas, came to a climax with a deadly shoot-out involving black soldiers and armed white civilians. In September white mobs in Atlanta terrorized blacks during a riot of unusual scope and severity. “Atlanta’s was a horrible butchery of innocents absolutely without cause,” editor Harry Smith wrote in the Cleveland Gazette, “for which a just God will surely punish her.” The savagery in Atlanta that caused the deaths of eighteen blacks and one white (and perhaps more) was, Smith contended, “a natural outcome” of Hoke Smith’s recent race-baiting gubernatorial campaign. W.E.B. DuBois, a professor at Atlanta University, noted that the riot revealed blacks to be “a mobbed and mocked and murdered people” without refuge, for neither North nor South granted safety or sustenance to African Americans. He implored God to “show us the way and point us the path” in “a godless land!”³

Ben Davis, editor of the Atlanta Independent, lost hope for any real advancement for the black American in Atlanta or elsewhere in Dixie. “The trend of legislation in the South is to degrade him and confine his possibilities,” he objected in 1907. “In politics he is disfranchised; in transportation, hauled about like cattle; and in education, outrageously discriminated against. He is excluded from every industry where the supply of white labor will admit it.” Even though Davis had echoed Booker T. Washington’s view that blacks had brighter prospects in the South than the North, he, like Washington, failed to persuade southern whites to provide even minimal safety and opportunity to blacks. “The white man believes that he is the South,” Davis grumbled, “and the ten millions of the Negroes among them are no part or parcel of it, and have no rights under the law that deserve protection.” But “the Negro is as much a part of the South,” he insisted, “as the South is a part of the nation.”⁴

Such exhortations failed to convince southern whites to change their ways. Caught in a tangled web of sharecropping, tenantry, debt, and convict-lease labor, former slaves and their offspring realized that whites in Dixie intended to maintain their antebellum monopoly over wealth, power, and privilege. These conditions inspired a protest song popular among rural southern blacks at this time:

Well, it makes no difference how you make out your time.

White man sho’ to bring a nigger out behin’ …

Lemme tell you, white man, lemme tell you, honey,

Nigger makes de cotton, white folks gets de money.⁵

Davis denounced “the little peanut politicians” who resorted to “prejudice and cheap demagogy” to win office. “The reign of lynching, night riding, murder and arson that is now sweeping over this country … is directly traceable to the Southern politician’s propaganda of race hatred and prejudice,” Davis complained. “The seat[ing] of these men in congress and the governor’s office” had “cost the South millions of wealth and countless treasures in life, sorrow and character.”

Davis was correct in noting the increase in prejudice and violence. In Nashville in 1907, for example, “a white brute … without provocation” assaulted two black women walking to work. “He hacked up their faces with a large knife until the sidewalk was covered with blood and they were faint with weakness,” the Nashville Globe reported. Yet neither the white police nor the white press showed much interest in the vicious attack. “Had the perpetrator been black and the victims white,” the Globe complained, “he would have been apprehended before his tracks were cold.” Police made no arrests in the case. The white newspapers “with all their facilities for gathering news could not learn anything about this assault,” the Globe noted, but “if a Negro steals a rotten egg they have it before he cracks the shell.” J.C. Battle, the Globe editor, considered local police an even greater menace to blacks than white brutes and biased reporters. He hinted that “their annual target practice” had begun when a white officer shot a black man and claimed “self-defense … the same old tale.”

In a harrowing incident that year, Frank Mills, distraught over the sudden death of his wife, ventured out after midnight to summon an undertaker. A policeman confronted and beat him for no reason. “I cannot go out on the streets to make preparation to bury my dead wife,” Mills grieved to a reporter, “without being assaulted by an officer of the law.” A month later, the Globe noted, a patrolman shot and killed a black man for “purloining a ham.” The thief, the officer insisted, had attacked him with an iron bar. Battle countered that the man died from a bullet in his back. Nashville’s police, Battle maintained, shot blacks “on the smallest pretext” for “the most petty offenses.” They acted like “armed terrorists” shielded behind their badges.

Thomas Heflin, an Alabama congressman, made national news when he confronted a group of blacks drinking liquor on a Washington, DC streetcar in early 1909. Determined to eject the blacks from the car, Heflin drew his revolver and fired twice, hitting a black passenger in the head and a white passenger in the leg. Heflin had demonstrated his fitness for the Nashville police force, J.C. Battle wryly observed, where “the accepted theory” held that an officer “always shoots in the air at a man who is advancing upon him—even when the ball enters the back of the victim.” Heflin did not leave Congress to join the Nashville squad, but he did want to separate blacks from whites on district streetcars. He introduced bills in 1909 and 1911 calling upon transit firms to provide segregated coaches. Perhaps separation would protect innocent commuters from Heflin’s errant shots whatever their color.⁶

By the time Johnson rose to prominence, some black Americans had become so discouraged by their prospects that they embraced the panacea advocated by many white racists—emigration to Africa. Less drastic but still telling, others formed all-black towns in Boley, Oklahoma, Allensworth, California, and elsewhere to escape the ravages of racism. These migrants had good reason to flee from whites. In 1901, when Johnson fought his first important professional fight, for example, lynch mobs took the lives of 107 black men. Denied due process of law, these victims died horrible deaths that often turned into public spectacles. By the time Johnson fought Jeffries in 1910, white vigilantes had lynched some 2,275 black citizens—making racial murder a crucial component in the enforcement of a caste system that placed little value on African American lives.

The lesson was not lost on Jack Johnson. In late 1909 he bought a spacious home for his mother and siblings at 3344 Wabash Avenue in the heart of black Chicago. Like millions of other southern blacks, the Johnsons joined the great exodus from the South to the burgeoning industrial and commercial cities of the North. In addition to their light satchels of meager belongings, these migrants brought vivid memories of racial injustice, dreams of a better tomorrow, and cultural resources including fervent religion, spirituals, folk tales, and the soulful lyrics, notes, and rhythm of the blues. Pushed by deep disappointments and pulled by high expectations, black migrants left what DuBois labeled a land of “blood” for a land of “greed.” This exodus changed American society, culture, and politics in irreversible ways.

This vast migration of poor blacks and a massive influx of impoverished immigrants from southern and eastern Europe alarmed whites with older and deeper roots in northern soil. Even well-established blacks in northern cities worried that this flood of newcomers would create insurmountable problems in the congested urban centers stretching from New York City to Chicago. Intense competition for jobs and housing augmented racial, religious, and ethnic tensions. Ghettos confined blacks to congested and deteriorating neighborhoods while raising anxieties among nearby whites. Even smaller cities such as Wichita, Springfield, Illinois, and Denver faced new problems because of rising racism and nativism. “In America this seems to be the age of discrimination,” editor W.N. Miller lamented in the Wichita Searchlight in 1907. While Japanese immigrants met growing disdain and proscription in California, Miller noted, blacks in Kansas encountered new efforts to impose jim crow. The Wichita school board instituted segregated classrooms in the fall of 1906, for example, just two weeks before the Atlanta riot. This policy, Miller complained, amounted to “penning the colored children off” like “wild animals.” Miller grew even more apprehensive as whites denied jobs to blacks that had previously been open to all and sought racial separation in many public facilities. “It does not take a prophet or the son of a prophet,” he warned in 1907, “to see that in Wichita the color line is being more closely drawn between the whites and colored people.” By 1908 “colorphobia” had so infused the city “that her cemetery association has established a line for burying the dead.” An undertaker had recently called a cemetery worker to prepare a burial site for a deceased infant without specifying the child’s race, Miller explained. When the black parents and minister arrived for the interment, a sexton told them they must wait for a new grave to be dug because the plot just prepared lay in the “white” section. “American prejudice,” Miller sighed, “goes even to the grave.”⁷

The Springfield Massacre

In Springfield, Illinois, job competition and an alleged rape of a white woman by a black man triggered a savage antiblack pogrom in August 1908. A Nashville Globe headline described the scene: REIGN OF TERROR IN SPRINGFIELD—ILLINOIS CAPITAL IN HANDS OF A RAVING MOB—INNOCENT NEGROES LYNCHED AND SHOT TO DEATH. In Springfield, however, blacks retaliated—some consolation to Harry Smith of the Cleveland Gazette. “Our people of that city fought the mobs most creditably,” he noted, “killing and wounding a number of the white brutes.” If white police would not protect all citizens, then blacks must protect themselves. “Every Afro-American home should possess at least one Winchester and plenty of ammunition,” Smith counseled. “In times of peace prepare for the mob!”⁸

From a black business convention, Booker T. Washington pleaded for an end to the rampant violence. “Within the past 60 days 25 Negroes have been lynched in different parts of the United States,” he observed. “Of this number, only four were even charged with criminal assault upon women.” Washington had no desire to shield actual criminals from prosecution. “No legal punishment is too severe for the brute that assaults a woman,” he advised, but “there is no way of distinguishing the innocent from the guilty except by due process of law. That is what courts are for.” He recommended two steps to halt lynching. “All people at all times and all places” deserved “a fair trial,” he noted, and “all good citizens” should work together to rid their cities of “the idle, vicious, and gambling element.” Ben Davis urged “the press and the pulpit” to denounce the wanton racial violence. “Mob law anywhere is without reason or excuse,” he stated, “uncalled for and barbarous without regard to section.” He wanted the death penalty imposed on mob murderers who routinely killed blacks but evaded prosecution or conviction. Editor Thomas Fortune of the New York Age complained in late 1908 that every single white in Springfield charged “with riotous conduct and murder” had been acquitted.

To Ida B. Wells, the whites’ excuses for the Springfield massacre sounded both familiar and false. In 1892, for example, Wells had defended the character of three black lynching victims in Memphis. Their sole offense, she protested, had been their able management of a popular grocery store that competed with a rival business owned by a white merchant. Wary of reports that sex crimes had provoked the Memphis lynchings, Wells investigated the victims’ lives and reached a different conclusion. “Of the [e]ight Negroes lynched since last issue of Free Speech,” she announced, “three were charged with killing white men and five with raping white women. Nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women.” Besides, some white women freely consorted with black men, she added, just as white men crossed the color line for intimacy with black women. Her refutation of racist clichés infuriated whites. Like others who preferred flight to a terribly lops...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: “Many Thousand Gone”
• 1. “A Retribution Seeks”: White Repression and Black Redemption
• 2. “A Tempest of Dispraise”: From Black Hope to Black Burden
• 3. “Under the White Man’s Menace”: Divisive Wars at Home and Abroad
• 4. “Outcasts Asylumed”: Exile’s Return and Legacy
• 5. “Don’t You Fall Now”: A New Race Ambassador Emerges
• 6. “No Other Dream, No Land But This”: Black Americans and the Enemy Within
• 7. “Another World Be Bom”: In Search of Victory at Home and Abroad
• 8. “The Harder They Fall”: A Champion’s Life and Legend
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author