SYMHC Classics: Jack Johnson

This 2012 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina discusses how during Jack Johnson's time, the heavyweight championship was unofficially a whites-only title. Despite discrimination, Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion, but some questioned his legitimacy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We have a two parter on Eugene Jack
Bullard coming up on the podcast, and in it we
mentioned Jack Johnson, so we're bringing out our episode on
him as a Saturday classic. Just a heads up. Toward
the end of this episode, there is a brief discussion
of intimate partner violence and of someone dying by suicide.

(00:22):
Also as an update to this episode, in Johnson was
convicted of violating the Man Act that was passed during
a moral panic around the idea of white slavery, and
we talked about that law more in our episode on
Grace Humiston's This law was grounded in racism and xenophobia
and it round up criminalizing various types of consensual sexual activity,

(00:44):
which is really what happened here and more on Johnson's conviction.
As part of this episode, President Donald Trump posthumously pardoned
Johnson on and just as a random note, since previous
host Sarah and Bablina mentioned doing this episode for Black
History Months, we try to cover Black history and other
history that's usually put into a particular month year round,

(01:07):
so folks do not need to save their Black History
topic suggestions for February. Send those in whenever they occur
to you at any point, Yes, so enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah

(01:30):
Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chalk Reboarding, and we are of
course covering Black History Month for February and today. It's
pretty hard to imagine professional sports in the United States
were once segregated, perhaps especially a sport like boxing, where
some of the biggest names guys like Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis,
George Foreman, the recently departed Joe Frasier are African American,

(01:53):
But at the turn of the twentieth century, the idea
that there could be a black heavyweight champion was impossible.
And surprisingly, the issue wasn't just about a white man
fighting a black man and the physical contact that that
would necessitate, which, unfortunately, in the context of segregation that
kind of makes sense, where sharing a water fountain or

(02:16):
sharing a waiting room was considered not okay. It's gonna
figure my extension that something is physical as boxing where
you're gonna swap sweat and blood and embrace in the
ring would also not be okay. But black and white
boxers did fight each other. Exhibition matches weren't uncommon, and
just as the white Major League Baseball players would barnstorm

(02:38):
with their Negro League counterparts decades before integration, boxers of
different races would fight at pretty much all levels, except
at the highest level, the heavyweight championship. For several reasons,
which will discuss some more. The heavyweight title was considered
so prestigious, so honorable, it couldn't be sullied by a
black contender in some people's opinion, let alone a black champion.

(03:03):
So it took Texas born Jack Johnson. We're not talking
about the singer, of course, we're talking about the boxer
to break that color line. And to do it, he
had to be not only a powerful fighter, but really
dogged in his pursuit of the fight, trying to get
somebody to actually fight him. He hounded his potential opponents,

(03:23):
knowing that eventually the honor of defending that title, which
was so such an important thing in the boxing world,
plus of course the purse money that would come with
defending it, would eventually make it worthwhile for a white
champion to step into the ring and fight with a
black man. So first We're gonna give you a little
bit about Jack Johnson's background before we get to the fighting,

(03:46):
the really exciting part. John Arthur Johnson or Jack, was
born March thirty one, eight seventy eight, in Galaston, Texas.
His parents were former slaves who educated all six of
their kids, working as a school janitor and a laundress.
And though Jack only had five years of schooling, he
became a voracious student of history, with a particular fondness

(04:08):
for Napoleon. And he also played bass fiddle, loved classical music,
and invented stuff he invented. He had a patent on
a wrench. I think we should have put him in
our earlier podcast on Unlikely Invented. Unlikely Inventors would have
been a good one. So as a kid, Johnson started
fighting in battle royals, which were these really horrible sounding

(04:29):
underground fights. But from that sort of inauspicious start, Johnson
worked his way up, moved up to fights with actual purses,
and started riding the rails to barnstorm around the country
and also helping more experienced boxers train as a as
a sparring partner. And as we already mentioned, blacks did
fight whites it just wasn't for that top spot. In fact,

(04:52):
much of Johnson's defensive expertise he could seemingly swat away
punches very easily, and that came from practicing and training
with Joe choin Ski after the two were jailed together
for boxing in the first place. And just a note
for you here, just a little side note at the
turning contact boxing context for you guys. Exactly around the
turn of the century, boxing was a popular sport with

(05:15):
all classes of people, but it was still a sport
that was considered kind of a lista even illegal in
many places. Despite the gloves rules and timed rounds, and
with new techniques picked up from Joe, plus his naturally
powerful punch and his six foot one and a half
inch frame, Johnson moved on to bigger cities and he

(05:36):
eventually made up to one thousand dollars per fight. He
was becoming a contender, but one who would never be
allowed or so a lot of people thought to fight
the heavyweight champion, But why why wasn't he allowed? And
we're gonna talk about that some, but at first I
really want to recommend there's a fantastic Ken Burns documentary
on Jack Johnson called unforgivable blackness, and for me, it

(05:59):
really helped explain the racial politics behind boxing at the time.
It's easy to find a lot of biographical information on Johnson,
but it helped put some of that into context for me.
So even though boxing was an illicit sport, I mean,
people would campaign against its violence, the heavyweight championship was
really kind of an upstanding position. It was well respected

(06:23):
and John L. Sullivan, who was called the Boston strong Boy,
had a lot to do with the respect for that position.
He was the first gloved heavyweight champion and really became
a huge celebrity, kind of a sports hero, long before
sports heroes really existed, and he made the title something

(06:43):
that was actually important to the general audience, almost a
byeword for the strongest man in the world. And he
even bragged that he could beat anyone in the world, except,
of course, it was understood African Americans, who he just
would not fight. He refused to fight black boxers, drawing
a color line after he became the heavyweight champion. Since

(07:06):
the heavyweight title represented more than just physical prowess or
boxing expertise, it represented physical superiority to all other men
and so it had this really weighty social significance to it,
and Sullivan's precedent continued with later heavyweight champs all the
way through Jim Jeffries, the boiler Maker, who had made

(07:29):
his early name fighting some of the best black boxers
of the day. And Jeffreys was kind of the ultimate
boxing specimen of that era, who was hairy chested, he
once drank a case of whiskey in two days, and
he kept a bear as a pet. But even though
up and coming jack Johnson was winning against all other
major black boxers of the time, clinching the unofficial Negro

(07:50):
heavyweight Championship, Jeffries wouldn't fight him. They instead engaged in
a kind of battle of words and intimidation. After knocking
out Jim Jeffrey's brother Jack in an l a fight,
Johnson told the spectator champ that he could beat him too,
egging him on really, and then in a San Francisco saloon, Jefferies,
after Jackson had again said why don't you fight me,

(08:12):
Jefferies offered Jackson two dollars on the bar to fight
him completely alone in the seller You know this really
sketchy sounding scenario. Johnson refused, that he was only going
to fight him if it was a real fight. Finally, though,
in nineteen o five, the undefeated Jefferies decided that he

(08:32):
was going to retire from boxing, retire and become an
alfalfa farmer. And of course, though retiring like that, he
needed to um crown a new champion, a new heavyweight champion,
and so he refereed about between two white contenders and
name the winner the new heavyweight champion. Johnson obviously was

(09:03):
really mad that this had happened this way. He hadn't
gotten his chance to fight the undisputed champion, and so
he started still just going after the title anyway he could,
going after the new title holders. Eventually, that title holder
was Tommy Burns, who was a Canadian born Noah Brusso,

(09:23):
and Burns, like his predecessors, wouldn't fight Johnson either though,
so it seemed like it was going to be a
losing battle. Yeah, but Johnson wouldn't relent. He followed Burns
around the world, challenging him everywhere he went, and eventually
it started to get embarrassing for Burns, even though in
some twisted logic, Burns would call Johnson yellow even though

(09:45):
he was the one where he don't get that I
don't either, So he said what he thought would be
an insurmountable barrier between him and Johnson, Burns said he
wouldn't break the color line for less than thirty thous dollars.
So he thought, Okay, surely nobody's going to go for that.
But sure enough somebody did agree to pay that much.
In the fall of nineteen o eight, Australian Hugh known

(10:07):
as Huge Deal McIntosh agreed to put up the money
and put on the fight. So Burns accepted the thirty
thousand dollars. Johnson, by the way, only got five thousand,
and their fight took place the day after Christmas nineteen
o eight in Sydney, Australia. So we're gonna give you
a brief play by play of how the fight went down.
It started amid huge cheers for Burns and jeers for Johnson,

(10:30):
even though and you can see this in the footage,
he was still blowing the crowd kisses quite kindly. Johnson
had Burns on the floor within seconds, and even though
Burns started to call Johnson racial slurs, Johnson really had
a more effective way to um anger or embarrass his opponent.

(10:51):
He would point at spots on his own body, like
on his side or on his stomach, just point at
it with his glove, urging Burns to punch him there.
And when Burns, after clearly a second of hesitation, like
what on earth is going on here, would really punch him,
Johnson wouldn't even flinch or react, I mean, really kind
of stuff to psych him out. Johnson, meanwhile, would hug Burns,

(11:13):
holding him up to keep him fighting when he was
starting to get tired. By the fourteenth round, it was
clear that Johnson was going to be the winner. Police
stopped the fight and the cameras. You can see a
freeze frame the last the last second of the cameras rolling,
and then Johnson was declared winner. They stopped the cameras
because they didn't want to see They didn't want everybody

(11:36):
to see Johnson defeating this white guy. But it didn't
matter if people saw it or not. At thirty years old,
Johnson was the new heavyweight champion. So now it's time
to start talking a little bit about Johnson's personal life,
because it's what everyone else was doing at the time anyway,
And if you've studied the Harlem Renaissance, Red w E,
DWO Boys, or even listen to our Mark Scarvey podcast

(11:57):
You've Heard of the New Negro. A Mike Walsh article
in The Smithsonian does a lot to put that era
of the New Negro into context. It came after a
dark post reconstruction era where Jim Crow laws codified segregation
and lynchings really increased. And by the turn of the century, though,
with the Great Migration providing African Americans with new opportunities

(12:19):
in industrial work up north, things seemed to be looking
up a little bit. The idea of the New Negro developed.
They were born free, ready for opportunity, and not content
to just hang back and wait. So Johnson was the
epitome of that New Negro. He dressed immaculately, he lived finely,
and he spoke freely. But for many African Americans, and

(12:41):
certainly for many white Americans, he took things a little
bit too far. He drank heavily, he raced and crashed
fast cars. He had gold crowns. He got into arguments
with the owners of the vaudeville theaters that he'd moonlight in.
Most seriously, though, he dated white women who he would
often meet at Chicago's fancy is Bordello. When the news

(13:01):
that the new champion, Johnson, was traveling around with a
white companion, his hometown of Galveston canceled the big parade
they had planned for him. So that was the big issue,
and it's important to keep that one in mind as
we go forward. But there was another issue going on
for Johnson, to one that was actually pertinent to boxing.
Since the old champion, Jim Jefferies, had retired undefeated to

(13:24):
his elf Alfa farm, some people began questioning whether Johnson
was really a legitimate champion at all. Had really bothered
folks when they're there when there were the white champions
in between, but was bothering them now? So Johnson answered
that he would fight Jeffreys or anyone else who wanted
to fight him, and almost immediately the search to find

(13:45):
that anyone who was considered or called the great white
hope started, so seriously, anyone who was white could be
a challenger. They'd come from the fields, from circuses, and
if they finally got to Johnson, he'd steamrolled them. And
after running out of white hopes, Johnson took on his
pal and drinking Buddy Stanley Ketchell the white and middleweight

(14:07):
champion of the world, and according to the Burns documentary,
fight promoters dressed Ketchell up for photos and high healed
cowboy boots and a bulky coat to make him look
more comparable to Johnson. They also had each fighter promised something,
so Ketchell promised that he wouldn't try to actually win
and in the process wind up getting really badly hurt.
It was much smaller, and Johnson promised that he wouldn't

(14:30):
knock out Ketchell. Broken promises all around. However, things did
not go according to Plant what they did. For a
little bit. For the first part of the fight, it
seemed like everybody was happy. It was gonna turn out
to be a great movie. The boxers could make a
lot of money off of it. Everybody would be good.
But in the twelfth round, Ketchell really started trying to win,

(14:51):
and he knocked down Johnson as soon as he was up.
There was obviously a huge mistake. As soon as he
was up, Johnson knocked out Ketchell in the process, knocking
out all of his front teeth. At the route, which
is I'm looking at to Blina is cringing right now.
It's maybe one of the more disturbing physical parts of

(15:13):
this podcast, Getting your teeth Knocked Out. Eventually, though, after
all of these defeats of the Great White Hopes the
defeat of Ketchel, it was clear that there was only
one legitimate contender out there for Johnson. That was, of course,
Jim Jefferies. Even though now he was thirty four, he
was nearly three hundred pounds and he was seriously enjoying

(15:35):
his alfalfa farming, he was enjoying retirement. He however, had
to be the Great White Hope, and eventually Jeffreys agreed
to come out of retirement and fight us Marshall. Text
Rickard won the rights to promote what promised to be
the fight of the century, and it was sent for
July four so each fighter would be paid fifty thou dollars,

(15:58):
which is about one point six million dollars today for
film rights, plus as signing bonus of ten thousand dollars,
and plus the winner would receive two thirds of a
one and one thousand dollar purse. The governor of California
ended up banning the match, though, and after that Record
moved it to Reno, Nevada, where price fighting was legal. Basically,

(16:18):
still kind of a wild Westish area. I guess seemed
like prize fighting was a civilized pursuit with all of
its rules and gloves and people not usually getting killed.
The only condition of the sudden venue switch was that
the governor of Nevada had records swear that the fight
wasn't stacked, So Ricord did a lot to try to
make sure that the fight was secure. He placed deputies

(16:40):
at the arena's entrances who confiscated firearms from the crowd
of twenty thousand. Celebrities and attendance included former champ John L.
Sullivan and novelist slash sports commentator Jack London. There were
even mock fights set up around the country with reenactors
recreating the fight blow for blow. Really was the fight
of the century at the point, but don't forget for

(17:01):
a minute that the whole thing was largely about race.
The Smithsonian article Dablina mentioned has a quote from The
New York Times on the eve of the fight that read,
if the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his
ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to
much more than physical equality with their white neighbors. Pretty

(17:23):
serious stuff. So despite Jeffrey's rush training, though in a
massive sudden weight loss he lost about a hundred pounds,
he was still favored over Johnson ten to four. But
Johnson wasn't worried. He was quoted as saying he felt
like a kid on Christmas morning on the on the
eve of the fight. This was, after all, what he
had been waiting for, you know, not just achieving the championship,

(17:47):
but defending it from any further claims. So now we're
going to give you a little rundown of this particular fight.
Jefferies refused to shake hands with Johnson right off the bat,
and his corner man, former champ gentleman Jim Corbett, whose
defensive style Johnson had actually emulated, started a stream of
racial slurs that lasted the entire match. According to an

(18:10):
Ebony article by Lauren Bennett Jr. Johnson later remembered quote,
I sensed that most of the great audience was hostile
to me. But despite the sun and the jeering mob,
and the occasional thought that there might be a gunman
somewhere in that vast array of humanity, I was cool
and perfectly at ease. I never had any doubt of
the outcome, and if you watch the footage, it really

(18:41):
looks that way too. You can watch this uh this
match online and see the two fighters basically locked in
an embrace, with Johnson just lobbing one undercut after another
at Jeffreys. This is the part that stood out to
me the most. Jeffrey's head just bounces around every time
he gets hit by Johnson. In the second round, Johnson

(19:03):
told him, don't rush, Jim. I can do this all day.
He asked Jeffries, how do you feel, Jim, how do
you like it? Does it hurt? And by the end
of the fourteenth round, Jefferies just looked horrifying. His nose
was broken and gushing blood, his eyes were swollen, even
his legs are all stained with more blood. He looks really,

(19:24):
really bad. In the fifteenth round, he was knocked down
and then knocked down again, falling over the lower ropes
that time, and at that point the crowd started to
cry for Jefferies not to be knocked out. They didn't
want to see their formerly undefeated champion get knocked out
by Johnson. So the fight was ended with Johnson declared

(19:44):
the winner, and again If you see the footage, it
shows Johnson's cornermen quickly forming this defensive circle around him,
surrounding him to protect him from the furious crowd around
the country to some people were celebrating, some or not
African Americans came out to celebrate, but race riots began

(20:04):
pretty quickly, and up to twenty six people died as
a result of these race riots over a boxing match.
But Jeffries at least concedes defeat really graciously. He later says, quote,
Jack Johnson was better than I ever was, and tells
his friends that he couldn't have even beaten him in
his prime, so kind of putting an end to any

(20:25):
purizing that, well, maybe if Jeffreys had been younger and
in better shape, things would have been different. So Johnson,
now the undisputed champ, was unbeatable, except when it came
to his private life, that is, which began to fall
apart pretty quickly. He started drinking heavily, and he threatened
to commit suicide. He was also treated for nervous exhaustion

(20:45):
and was arrested for speeding. He established the color line
of his own too, no longer fighting black contenders since
he considered them harder fights for not as much money.
He also beat his wealthy girlfriend at a durya badly
enough for her to be sent to the hospital, and
after that they married. But her sad life living upstairs

(21:05):
from his black and tan Chicago club Cafe d Champion,
isolated from both black and white communities, drove her to
commit suicide in September nineteen twelve, and Johnson was really
inconsolable after that. But within only a month or so
he had paired up with a nineteen year old white
prostitute named Lucille Cameron Um and drove with her across

(21:30):
state lines. And so for all those people out there
who were ready for Jack Johnson to just go away
and stop causing so much trouble, finally this was a
way to eliminate him. So backing up a little bit,
in nineteen ten, Congress had passed the Man Act, which
was originally established to ban the transport of women across

(21:54):
state lines for immoral purposes. It was supposed to be
something to stop human trafficking, but the Justice to Partment
used it to attack Johnson. It was never meant to
be something for two consenting adults traveling together to be
you know punished with this was just their opportunity, it was,
so Johnson was arrested October eighteenth, nineteen twelve. He was

(22:15):
released on bail, and in the intervening months he married Lucile,
the woman who he had been traveling with, and she
had already refused to testify against him, So with that
turn of events, without her testimony, the case against Johnson
was really worthless. So the Bureau of Investigation got involved
in the whole thing, trying to find any evidence that

(22:36):
Johnson had broken the Man Act at some earlier point. Eventually,
they connected with a former white bordello girlfriend of Johnson's
who agreed to testify she had cross state lines with him,
even though they had done so before the Man Act
even existed, and Johnson has found guilty. He sentenced to

(22:57):
one year and one day in federal prison. But while
he was out on bond pending appeal, Johnson just skipped down,
very likely disguised as a member of a Negro League
baseball team. He then fled to Montreal, rendezvous with Lucille,
and they took off together for Europe, where the reception
was kind of icy, yeah, especially considering he had been

(23:18):
quite well received in Europe earlier, but after this bad press,
after this conviction, people weren't fit friendly to him anymore.
Johnson defended threats to his title abroad, but he soon
found it impossible to earn a living as a boxer
in the middle of a war, so he began looking
for a bigger payday, and back home, folks were still
looking for a great white hope, a new one, because

(23:40):
Johnson was, after all, still the heavyweight champion. Finally, on
April fifth, nineteen fifteen, Johnson met with Kansas native Jess Willard,
a six ft six twenty seven year old who had
killed an opponent once with a punch. Since they couldn't
fight in the US due to Johnson's conviction, they fought
in nearby Havana, Cuba. So Johnson he by this point

(24:02):
thirty seven years old, maybe not in the best shape anymore,
and kind of taking things a little bit too lightly.
He didn't train like his trainers wanted him to. By
the twentie round of this fight with Jess Willard, which
is happening in a hundred and five degree heat too,
Johnson was clearly getting tired, and by the twenty five

(24:22):
round he asked his cornerman to see that his wife
got out safely, and I told him I'm probably not
going to make it much longer. And then finally in
the round he lost to a knockout punch, another really
famous freeze frame image of Johnson lying there on the
ground with his arms thrown up over his head. So
after losing the title, finally his earning power was just

(24:46):
completely slashed, and Johnson went back to Europe toured a
little bit more. When the US entered the war, he
offered to volunteer for U S service in exchange for
a pardon that didn't happen. He traveled on to Mexico,
and then finally in nineteen twenty, he was ready to
go home. After seven years on the run, He surrendered
at the US border and spent a year in leaven

(25:09):
Worth Prison. It wasn't a horrible prison situation, considering he
acted as a trustee, he trained other prisoners. He even
staged a few exhibition matches while he was there, and
probably my favorite detail of his prison experience, he listed
his profession as pugilist chauffeur, which, in case it wasn't

(25:33):
clear earlier, Johnson really liked fast cars. And driving, so
that was clearly important to him just right after boxing,
and Johnson did keep boxing, but the Havana fight really
was the end of the major part of his career.
The new batch of heavyweights again wouldn't agree to cross
that color line, so there wasn't a black heavyweight champ
until Joe Lewis in thirty seven, and he was deliberately

(25:55):
set up by his managers as a clean, living, decent man,
in other words, not a Jack Johnson, And that reminded
me a little bit of an episode from a couple
of years ago Katie and I did on Satchel Page,
where Jackie Robinson was very much set up as an
alternate to Satchel Page, who had this flamboyant public personality,
you know, a real jokester. He would entertain the crowds.

(26:18):
Jackie Robinson was, you know, somebody who could keep his
head down and go play Major League baseball. So that
reminded me a bit of that. But Johnson just did
this huge range of activities. In addition to his occasional boxing.
He ran a Harlem club called Cafe Deluxe, which eventually
became the Cotton Club. He appeared in Aida. He married

(26:41):
his third wife. He even preached all sorts of stuff
going on with him. In the spring of six while
returning from a tour of Texas, Johnson lost control of
a speeding sports car near Raleigh and he crashed into
a telephone pole. So he died at age sixty eight,
and his record, according to encycloped the Britannica was one

(27:02):
fourteen bouts, winning eighty forty five of those by knockouts.
And there was also a type of French artillery shell
called the Jack John Jack Johnson that was named after him.
To memoirs he wrote, and of course a Broadway play
that was based on his life called The Great White Hope.
It starred James Earl Jones, and apparently Muhammad Ali was

(27:26):
a repeat viewer of this play. He'd go back and
really found a lot of comparisons to his own life
in the way he was sometimes treated. Um. Jack Johnson
was also an original inductee into the International Boxing Hall
of Fame in nineteen nine, along with a few other
names we've mentioned in this podcast. Um, but I think

(27:48):
it's probably only appropriate for a man who, in addition
to um, you know, being a great fighter, was known
for some of his fantastic quotes and having the perfect
response to sometimes difficult situations. Ending the podcast with a
quote of his own, he apparently told a newspaper reporter,
you know, these newspaper reporters loved covering every aspect of

(28:11):
Johnson's life. Whatever you write about me, just please remember
that I'm a man and a good one. Well, I
think that says at all he was. He definitely had
some unsavory sides to his personality into his life, but
he was unapologetic for who he was, and he wanted
to live as professional boxers did at the time and

(28:32):
everything that came with that, which was kind of being
a bad boy. It seemed um and that didn't really
fit with the time he was living in. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
address or a Facebook U r L or something similar

(28:55):
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Our current email address is History Podcast at I Heart
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(29:15):
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