Jack Johnson America’s First Black Sports Superstar

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Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it. This phrase was already popular in Jack Johnson’s day, but it’s doubtful that he paid attention. After all, he never listened to anyone else’s advice. It didn’t matter that Jack Johnson was a Black man in America during a time when that fact subjected him to rampant racism and discrimination. It didn’t matter that people insulted him or caricatured him in newspapers. It didn’t even matter that high-ranking officials threatened to lock him up or even have him killed. None of that mattered because Jack Johnson was determined to get what he wanted, and nothing and nobody was going to stand in his way. And he got it.

Johnson reached the pinnacle of the sporting world for his era, becoming, for better or worse, the most famous Black man in America for two decades. His championship brought with it great wealth and influence, both of which he enjoyed to the fullest. Then, just as suddenly as he had gotten it, he lost it all, the victim of bigotry combined with his own hubris. Through it all, one thing became increasingly clear to everyone around him: Jack Johnson was incapable of conforming to other people’s demands and expectations. At all times, he was unapologetically himself, and that eventually cost him everything.

Arthur John Johnson was born on March 31, 1878, in Galveston, Texas. The year before, Union troops had left the South, ending Reconstruction and leaving freed slaves at the mercy of their former masters. The civil rights of Black people were steadily eroded through the enactment of a series of Black codes or Jim Crow laws that ensured that whites would always be in a perpetual position of power over Blacks. However, segregation was not as strictly enforced in Galveston as it was in other places in the former Confederacy. A small island off the coast of mainland Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston was one of the few cities that the South didn’t strictly segregate. At the end of the 19th century, poor people from both races lived side by side. As a result, young Jack Johnson ran with a group of friends that included several white boys.

Johnson believed that he was destined for great things from an early age. His mother, an ex-slave known as Tiny Johnson, continually told him that he could do anything he wanted if he wanted it badly enough. Right now, what he wanted was to do anything but end up as a stevedore on the Galveston docks. At 16, he was already a giant, six feet tall—six inches taller than the average American of the day. Like many teenage boys, his thoughts soon turned to sports. He quickly discovered that he was too big to be a horse jockey, and even for a thrill-seeker like him, bicycle racing was just too dangerous. So he settled on boxing.

Professional boxing had risen from illicit slugfests held in saloon basements to one of the most popular sports in America in the 1890s. Most historians consider 1892 to be the beginning of the modern era in prizefighting, when Gentleman Jim Corbett knocked out James L. Sullivan, the last of the bare-knuckle champions, to become world heavyweight champion. Boxing matches were still illegal or heavily regulated in many parts of the country, but every year it became more popular. There was something almost primal in its popularity; at its core, it was still a desire to see two men beat each other bloody, like Roman gladiators or medieval jousting matches.

Jack Johnson got his start in boxing by squaring off against fellow Galveston dock workers. He was still young and unschooled in the art of boxing, but he could hit hard and was fast on his feet, which was enough to pile up a string of victories over local opponents. He also rode the rails around the country, working in gyms as a sparring partner for professional boxers and always looking for his big break. That break came in 1902 when he faced off against a white heavyweight named Jack Jeffries in Los Angeles. Jeffries’ older brother was the legendary James J. Jeffries, the undefeated heavyweight champion. Jim Jeffries was in his brother’s corner during the match but could do nothing to prevent the absolute beating that Jack Johnson gave him. Jack Jeffries’ in-ring career was over, but Jack Johnson’s was just taking off.

He rattled off a series of victories over both Black and white opponents over the following years, earning more and more notoriety and money with every match. What made Jack Johnson such a box office draw was not only his obvious skill as a boxer—he was a master of what is today called the science of boxing, not only out-hitting but also out-thinking his opponents—but also his capacity for showmanship, both inside the ring and out. He was flashy, wearing brightly colored clothes and carrying himself with a kind of cocky self-assuredness that was rarely seen in Black men in America at the time. In the ring, he laughed and taunted his opponents, giving off a carefree appearance to lure them into making a mistake, which he then brutally punished them for. He knew when he fought against white opponents that most people were rooting against him, and he didn’t care. As long as he kept getting paid, he was perfectly happy to play the role of the heel all the way to the bank.

But no matter how good he was, no matter how many victories he had, he couldn’t convince Jim Jeffries to fight him for the world heavyweight championship. The only reason everyone knew was that Johnson was Black. While there was no official rule saying that a Black man was forbidden from challenging for the title, an unspoken gentleman’s agreement dictated that no white champion should ever risk his belt against a Black opponent. Jeffries said that he would sooner retire than fight a Black man for the title, which is what he ended up doing in 1905 when no more suitable white challengers appeared to face him. The championship ended up in the hands of Tommy Burns, a Canadian-born fighter who claimed he would fight anyone, Blacks included, provided the money was right. But for two years, he found excuses not to meet Johnson in the ring, at one point traveling overseas to box in Europe. Johnson followed, chasing him literally around the world. Finally, an Australian promoter agreed to pay Burns a guaranteed thirty thousand dollars to fight Johnson in Sydney, meeting the champion’s obscene demand. By contrast, Johnson would be paid just five thousand dollars, but the prize he was after was worth far more to him: a shot at the title.

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December 26, 1908, was quite literally Boxing Day in Sydney, Australia, as Jack Johnson faced off against both Tommy Burns and a very hostile white crowd for the world heavyweight championship. In the weeks leading up to the bout, Australian newspapers had whipped the public up into a frenzy, proclaiming Burns, who up to this point had been relatively unpopular, as the champion of the white race, facing off against a relentlessly caricatured Jack Johnson. His quotes were deliberately distorted in print to make him sound like an uneducated, barely literate man who spoke in a stereotyped minstrel dialect. Cartoons were drawn of him that compared him unfavorably to a gorilla or a chimpanzee, and some of the tamer slurs that were used against him are uncomfortable to mention here.

But it didn’t bother Jack Johnson, though, as he proceeded to beat Burns bloody. The police stopped the fight after it became clear that Burns was going to get hurt. The victory and championship belonged to Johnson. The crowd left in stunned silence, some weeping as if a family member had died. Johnson, though, was exultant, and so were the majority of Black Americans. White Americans, on the other hand, clamored for Johnson to be knocked off his pedestal and for the title to be restored to its rightful place. The only white man thought to be capable of besting Johnson was Jim Jeffries, who had so famously refused to fight him during his reign as champion. Initially, Jeffries was reluctant; he’d been retired for years now and was overweight and out of shape. But the lure of a big payday, as well as the repeated admonishments for him to restore the honor of the white man, soon proved too tempting to resist.

For most of the year, the hype surrounding the fight between Jeffries and Johnson built into an absolute frenzy. It was being billed as the fight of the century, the largest and wealthiest sporting event the country had ever seen. The two men were fighting for the lion’s share of a one hundred thousand dollar purse, an unheard-of figure at a time when the average American worker made between five hundred dollars and a thousand dollars in an entire year. Much more money was there to be gained from sales of silent films of the fight and from promotional opportunities, as well as a lot of gambling. For Johnson, this was a chance to prove once and for all that he was the greatest boxer in the world. He personally didn’t view the fight in racial terms; he wasn’t fighting on behalf of the Black race; he was fighting on behalf of Jack Johnson. But most people didn’t feel that way, especially not white people. To them, Jim Jeffries was the great white hope, their champion to defeat. They hated Jack Johnson and all that he stood for, which primarily consisted of giving a Black eye to their worldview that whites were inherently superior to Blacks in all respects.

Originally, the fight was supposed to take place in San Francisco. However, pressure was put on the governor of California by an influential congressman who wanted to stop the fight from taking place. They threatened to award the 1915 World Fair to New Orleans instead of San Francisco if the fight went ahead, a potential loss of millions of dollars for the city and the state. So the event was moved across the state line to the sleepy city of Reno, Nevada, whose governor was more than happy to receive them. Reno was a relatively small desert town of about 10,000 residents, far from the casino mecca that it is today, and it was utterly unprepared for the storm that descended upon it. As the match approached, train after train pulled in carrying fight spectators, and roads were clogged with traffic as those with cars drove them into town. Reno quickly ran out of everything: food, liquor, beds for lodging. Both fighters had set up camp in and around Reno, a magnet for fans and reporters alike. Over 20,000 people gathered at a hastily constructed stadium on the 4th of July, 1910, to watch the spectacle unfold. Thousands more, unable to get a ticket, milled around outside. Across the country, people gathered—30,000 at Times Square in New York, thousands more outside the offices of the San Francisco Examiner, which had arranged for a reenactment of the fight to be played out in a mock ring above the street. They were all waiting for updates to come in via telegraph; commercial radio was still a decade away.

For all the pre-match hype, the fight itself would probably have been a little disappointing to a neutral observer. Just like the Burns fight 18 months earlier, Jack Johnson dominated his opponent, who was outclassed from the start. Jeffries was simply too old, too slow, too out of shape. In the 15th round, after beating Jeffries to a bloody pulp, Johnson knocked him down twice. The third time he went down, his seconds threw in the towel. Once again, white fans were in mourning, and Black fans were overjoyed, and Jack Johnson was triumphant.

White America had disliked Jack Johnson before the fight with Jim Jeffries, but they really began to hate him afterward. Not only was he a Black man better than any white boxer they put up against him, but he was arrogant about it too. He knew how good he was, and he wasn’t afraid to tell everyone around him what his skill was compared to his white opponents. His behavior outside the ring raised objections from not only whites but some Blacks as well. Jack Johnson didn’t object to racial segregation so much as he pretended that it didn’t apply to him personally. He saw no reason why he shouldn’t be treated as the celebrity he knew he was. Wherever he went, nothing would keep him from his pleasures, which primarily consisted of four things: drinking, gambling, driving fast cars, and women. This didn’t make him any different from any other celebrity or star athlete of the period. Babe Ruth, who would come to be America’s most famous man a decade later, engaged in all of these behaviors, but people cheered for him anyway. But a Black man behaving this way was unacceptable to most people, and what was most shocking of all was that the women he carried on with tended to be white. Miscegenation, or the mixing of the races, was one of white America’s greatest fears about Black people. Interracial marriage was officially outlawed in 30 states in 1910, and it was almost unheard of in the states where it wasn’t against the law. Hundreds of Black men throughout the South were lynched in the first decade of the 20th century, many of them because of accusations that they’d been too familiar with white women. When it did happen, it was kept a secret. Jack Johnson, by contrast, was open about his affairs with white women.

In February 1911, he legally married Etta Durea, a debutante from a well-to-do Long Island family that turned up their noses. But her new husband, Etta, became increasingly depressed after news leaked of their marriage. She felt isolated as her family disowned her, and her friends wanted nothing to do with her. What was worse, Jack seemed utterly incapable or simply unwilling to be faithful to her, and on at least one occasion, he was known to have hit her. She tried multiple times to take her own life, causing her husband to fear for her safety. Despite precautions taken to protect her, she shot herself in their Chicago home on September 11, 1912. Jack Johnson definitely appears to have been grief-stricken at the death of his wife, but it certainly didn’t appear that way when a month after the funeral, Johnson started going out with Lucille Cameron, a girl he had met that summer in the Chicago nightclub, the Café Champion. They had probably been sleeping together for months, but now Johnson made the relationship public, stating that he intended to marry her.

Everything started going wrong after that. Lucille’s mother, unwilling to believe that her 18-year-old daughter had been a prostitute or that she’d willingly fallen in love with the 34-year-old Johnson, went to the police, claiming that Lucille had been kidnapped and was being held against her will. The salacious newspaper stories went around claiming Johnson was some kind of crazed sex fiend capable of hypnotizing hapless white girls so that they would sleep with him. The public was outraged and demanded Johnson be arrested. When Lucille refused to support the charges against Johnson, she was jailed and had a sanity hearing because obviously, a white woman would have to be insane to believe herself in love with a Black man.

The federal prosecutors stepped in, hoping to charge Johnson with violations under the Mann Act. This law, passed in 1910, was also known as the White Slavery Act, making it illegal to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. The purpose of the act was to combat interstate prostitution, which many believed was exclusively stocked by young white women forced into it by shady characters, often immigrants or so-called colored people. The moral panic resulted in the closing down of many vice districts in cities across the country and would eventually result in the prohibition of all alcohol in 1920. But the definition of immoral purposes was so vague that it could be applied to almost anything that people disapproved of, like consensual sex between Black men and white women. All they needed was one woman to corroborate that Jack Johnson had paid to transport her across a state line and then engaged in immorality with her. They found it in Belle Schreiber, one of Johnson’s many former jilted lovers, who was perfectly happy to hang her ex-boyfriend out to dry. Hell hath no fury indeed. Despite the fact that the case against him wouldn’t have stood up under scrutiny in a legitimate legal setting, it should surprise no one that an all-white jury convicted Johnson of all the charges against him and sentenced him to a year and a day in prison.

Johnson, defiant at the end, instead chose to flee the country alongside his new wife, Lucille. Jack Johnson was in exile, but he was still world heavyweight champion. He took full advantage of that, living the high life in Europe and making money as he had been for years in America, arranging exhibitions and performing in vaudeville shows. He also successfully defended his title belt four times before being matched up against the latest great white hope, Jess Willard, in Havana in 1915. Johnson was still as skillful as ever, but the years had caught up to him, and he was no longer interested in training seriously the way he used to. Twenty rounds into the fight against Willard, Johnson started to get tired. He was absorbing blows that he would have blocked earlier in his career. In the 26th round, he collapsed, knocked out for the first time since 1901. His reign was over, but his exile wasn’t. While Willard returned to the United States, where the celebration of his victory over Johnson could be best described as grotesque, Johnson crisscrossed the Atlantic between Europe and South America, eking out an increasingly meager living now that World War I was raging and he no longer held the title of champion.

In 1920, after seven years as