Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight (5 page)

Such was the symbolic importance of the heavyweight championship on the nation’s collective consciousness then and for many generations to come.

For some urban blacks, according to historian Lawrence Levine, “the very extent of white anger and frustration made Johnson’s victory even sweeter.” A popular street song sprang up, which seemed to thumb its nose at white resentment:

The Yankees hold the play

The white man pulls the trigger

But it makes no difference what the white man say

The world champion’s still a nigger

A
half-century later, Muhammad Ali would delight in writing similarly defiant doggerel and playfully reciting it for his critics in response to the establishment’s backlash against him.

No longer content to seek out a white hope who would “send Johnson back to the jungle,” the media, the clergy, and the politicians—alarmed at the waning credibility of white supremacy—decided something had to be done to curb this dangerous trend. In those pre-television days, Americans would flock to movie theaters in large numbers to see replays of championship fights. This is where the promoters made their real money from boxing. Overnight, there was a nationwide campaign to boycott or ban fight films.

The so-called forces of decency, wrote Jaher, “sought to spare American youth the spectacle of mayhem in the ring, destroy a corrupt and commercialized sport, prevent Negroes from harboring delusions of superiority and Caucasians from further humiliation, avoid racial strife, and make interracial bouts unprofitable, if not impossible.”

The boycott was successful but its proponents weren’t content to stop there. They persuaded Congress to debate a bill prohibiting the inter-state transportation of fight films—which would, in effect, prevent their screening—so whites couldn’t witness the blow to their race. Johnson wasn’t cowed by the campaign of hatred levelled against him. “I’m black and they’ll never let me forget it. Sure I’m black and I’ll never let them forget it,” he said defiantly. On the floor of Congress, Georgia Representative Seaborn Roddenberry called the Johnson-Jeffries fight “the grossest instance of base fraud and bogus effort at a fair fight between a Caucasian brute and African piped beast. No man descended from the old Saxon race can look upon that kind of a contest without abhorrence and disgust.” The bill passed in 1912.

Johnson’s behavior in the ring had already infuriated white America. But it was his actions outside the ring that would prove his undoing. After the Jeffries fight, reaction calmed down somewhat and some newspapers even seemed to gain a grudging respect for the champion. In his autobiography, Johnson described the atmosphere. “The bitterness which had actuated some of those interested in boxing had subsided,” he wrote. “Some of my greatest enemies were silenced and many who had been almost venomous toward me grew a little more restrained.”

The truce, however, was short-lived. An uncontrollable wave of hostility was sparked in 1911 when Johnson took his substantial ring earnings and opened up an integrated night club in Chicago’s red-light district. Visitors to the club were greeted by a giant painting of Johnson embracing the white woman he had married a few months earlier.

This violation of America’s most sacred taboo set off a new round of vilification against the champion. Fresh from his successful crusade to ban fight films, Georgia Congressman Roddenberry proposed a bill forbidding interracial marriages. He predicted that if other blacks followed the habits of Johnson it could lead to a race conflict bloodier than the Civil War. Such unions, he raged on the floor of Congress, “make a white girl a slave of an African brute and encourage the vicious element of the Negro race, which results in the descendants of our Anglo-Saxon fathers and mothers having mixed blood descended from the far-off orangutan shores of Africa.”

The news that Johnson had married a white woman caused many other blacks to reevaluate their admiration of him. The influential black writer Booker T. Washington wrote, “Jack Johnson has harmed rather than helped the race. I wish to say emphatically that his actions do not meet my approval and I’m sure they don’t meet the approval of the colored race.” Historian Jeffrey Sammons examined the paradox of the champion’s impact on American blacks. “While Jack Johnson was clearly a source of pride to many blacks, and to some an alter ego, a man many blacks wished they could be—reckless, independent, bold and superior in the face of whites—to other blacks he was a source of embarrassment and resentment,” wrote Sammons. “Many middle class, upwardly mobile blacks tended to accuse their less-refined, less-reserved, and less-cultured brethren of casting aspersions on their race…Johnson, in many ways, represented the ‘bad nigger’ whites were so willing to parade as an example of why blacks must be kept in their place… but while ambivalence best characterized the black community’s opinion of Johnson, most whites viewed him as a menace to the established social order and to Anglo-Saxon civilization, and they were intent upon his destruction as a powerful symbol.”

Like Muhammad Ali many years later, Johnson’s troubles began with a lengthy investigation by the Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI. In 1913, the agency announced an eleven-count indictment against him. The charges ranged from aiding prostitution and debauchery to unlawful sexual intercourse and sodomy. He was arrested under the Mann Act, which prohibited a man from crossing a state line with a woman other than his wife for the purposes of sex. His wife had committed suicide a year earlier, and he had frequently traveled between Chicago and Pittsburgh with a woman named Belle Schreiber.

However, it was clear that the indictment and arrest were designed to persecute the man who had become a thorn in the side of white America. The trial sparked a frenzy of hatred for Johnson. A crowd of one thousand gathered outside the courthouse in Chicago, chanting, “Kill him! Lynch him!” These cries were especially troubling, considering that during Johnson’s reign as heavyweight champion, 354 blacks were lynched in America, 89 for supposed offenses against white women.

The theme of miscegenation had captured the imagination of white Americans who had always harbored secret fears that black men only wanted to sleep with their women. Sordid comic books circulated with such titles as
Jack Johnson and His Girls
and
Black Ape Splitting the White Princess.
The nation’s press, clergy, and politicians demanded he be sent to prison. Despite no concrete evidence against him, it took an all-white jury less than an hour to convict the despised boxer.

In sentencing Johnson to one year in prison and a $1,000 fine, Judge George Carpenter made it clear he intended to send a message to the black community. “This defendant is one of the best known men of his race. His example is far reaching and the court is bound to consider the position he occupies among his people,” he declared.

Before he could serve time, Johnson escaped through Canada and made his way to Europe. America was finally rid of its embarrassing reminder of racial equality. Two years later, a broke Johnson agreed to fight the new white hope Jess Willard in Havana, Cuba. Dispirited and out of shape, Johnson was knocked out in the twenty-sixth round. White America breathed a collective sigh of relief. “The great mass of our white citizenship simply rejoiced at the outcome of the fight,” editorialized the
Chicago Tribune.
“It is a point of pride with the ascendant race not to concede supremacy in anything, not even to a gorilla.”

Jack Johnson would never again set foot in the ring, but his legacy would live on. Jeffrey Sammons argues that Johnson left an indelible mark on the sport and the larger society. “Those who believed that his removal from his position of influence would ease racial tensions and deter black aspirations were mistaken. Johnson was a forerunner of, and a critical ingredient in, a new social movement. Jack Johnson foreshadowed, and in some ways helped to create, the ‘New Negro’—a more militant black who was disillusioned with southern segregation, northern discrimination, and the undelivered promises of the American creed.”

But if Johnson’s influence had an impact on American society, it would be less discernible in the ring, where it took another twenty years for a black boxer to fight again for the heavyweight title; it would be fifty years before another boxer would have the same searing impact on the collective American psyche.

If Jack Johnson was the “bad nigger” in an age of strident racism, theorizes historian Frederic Jaher, then Joe Louis was “a credit to his race” in a time of patronizing tolerance.

For twenty years after Jack Johnson was put back in his place, the boxing establishment made damn sure there would be no repeat of the spectre of Little Arthur. Once again, it employed the tactic that first created the color barrier in the pre-Johnson era. Champions simply refused to fight a black challenger.

Following the First World War, a charismatic young boxer named Jack Dempsey beat Jess Willard to win the championship. At the behest of Tex Rickard—the promoter who created the atmosphere leading to the Jack Johnson race riots—the new champion immediately vowed never to step into the ring with a Negro. To this day, there is a debate whether Dempsey was a genuine racist or whether he was simply afraid of losing his title. This fear was well-founded. The leading challengers were unquestionably blacks such as Harry Wills, while the crop of white contenders was mediocre at best.

In 1923, a black Senegalese boxer known as Battling Siki defeated Georges Carpentier for the light heavyweight championship in a match fought in France. When news of Siki’s victory reached the United States, one editor called it “a distinct jolt to the foundation of the world as it is today.” Still haunted by the Jack Johnson era, American newspapers issued dire warnings to the French people about the danger of allowing such fights on French soil. The
Springfield Republican
warned France that its rule over African colonies depended on prestige, not force, and the victory of a black boxer might make the colonial subjects “lose their attitudes of respectful admiration for white men.”

Afraid that Siki would come to America and challenge Dempsey for the heavyweight title, the media fabricated stories—a la Johnson—of Siki’s playboy exploits and “savage” ways. Speculation about Siki’s challenge was silenced with his murder in 1925, but another black boxer, Harry Wills, had since built up an impressive record and was considered the most formidable contender for Dempsey’s title.

The prestigious boxing magazine
Ring
took up Wills’s cause, arguing the black challenger deserved a title bout. Chief among its arguments was that Wills was no Jack Johnson. The articulate and humble Wills did everything he could to erase the memory of the first black champion. He publicly labelled “the talk about the menace of colored supremacy as all bunk,” prompting
Ring
editor Nat Fleischer to call him “a credit to the game and to the race.”

Still, Dempsey held the line and refused to fight Wills or any other Negro. But the public was getting fed up with the mediocre white opponents served up to challenge Dempsey and there was a growing chorus of calls for a Wills title bout. Sensitive to the changing mood, the New York State Athletic Commission ruled that Dempsey would have to face Wills for the heavyweight championship. The ruling raised alarm in many circles and set off a series of behind-the-scenes maneuvers—eventually successful—designed to reverse the decision, setting the scene for a match between Dempsey and Gene Tunney instead.

A committee, under the leadership of the liberal Colonel John Phelan, still had to issue each fighter a license. Phelan declared that Dempsey’s license would be withheld until he agreed to fight Wills. It appeared the color barrier was about to fall. But Dempsey had vowed “never to step into the ring with a Negro,” and he was determined to keep his word. He simply moved the Tunney fight to Pennsylvania where, to little consolation for Wills, Dempsey lost his title. The new champion was no more willing to entertain a black challenger, and another decade would pass before the man would emerge who was destined to change the face of boxing forever.