The Great White Hopes (33 page)

Jack London, the writer whose racist diatribe after the Burns–Johnson fight had helped to start the whole White Hope campaign, died at the age of 40, probably by his own hand. He had become the highest-paid writer in the world and had lost all interest in both boxing and the class struggle.

But it was the boxers who truly epitomised the White Hope campaign. Their heyday was a short one and when it was over most of them were discarded and ignored. Many of them went back to labouring, mining, vagrancy or whatever else they had been doing before they had been plucked from obscurity to strut before the screaming crowds. Only a few of them managed to hang on to their ring earnings.

Yet even the least-educated and most self-absorbed former White Hopes knew that for a brief hour they had been involved in a crazy, often sordid, but absorbing period of boxing history. The feelings of them all were summed up by the very first White Hope to enter the ring with champion Jack Johnson, back in 1909. Victor McLaglen’s finest hour came many years after he had left the fight game behind him, when, at the age of 49, he had been presented with the Best Actor Oscar at the 1935 Hollywood ceremonies.

The award was to prove a professional lifeline to the former soldier of fortune, but he never regarded it very highly. ‘Acting never appealed to me, and I was dabbling in it solely as a means of making money,’ he observed. The bishop’s son had better things to remember. Towards the end of his long and rather incredible life, he once went on record as saying rather wistfully, ‘The only thing which ever thrilled me was boxing.’

EPILOGUE

T
he reign of Jack Johnson left one significant legacy to the sporting world. For more than twenty years after he lost his title no black fighter was allowed to compete for the World Heavyweight Championship, until Joe Louis won the crown on 22 June 1937.

There had been black world champions at the lighter weights before the advent of Jack Johnson and there were to be many more after he had left the fistic scene. But for over two decades no black athlete was allowed to fight for boxing’s supreme prize – the heavyweight title.

There were certainly black contenders worthy of a championship bout – George Godfrey, Harry Wills and Larry Gaines among them – but they were all frozen out by the promoters running the sport. Gaines was an outstanding Canadian heavyweight who actually beat two future world champions, Max Schmeling and Primo Carnera, before they won their titles. For a short time in Paris he was managed by a young would-be writer called Ernest Hemingway. Gaines became so embittered by his ostracism that he called his biography
The Impossible Dream,
writing, ‘Like every man who ever laced on gloves, I dreamed of becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. But, for me, it was always the impossible dream, the unreachable star. The politics of the day were against it. The bar was up.’

Few white men wanted another Jack Johnson to claim equality in or out of the ring. Tex Rickard, who was to become the world’s leading promoter between 1919 and 1929, set his face against employing black heavyweights. The riots after the Johnson–James J. Jeffries bout, which he had promoted in 1910, had convinced him that he wanted no further part in mixed-race matches.

Jess Willard, the successful White Hope who had dethroned Jack Johnson, lost his title in three rounds to the dynamic former hobo Jack Dempsey in 1919. The day after he had won the championship Dempsey made it plain that he, too, would observe a colour bar. The
New York Times
of 5 July 1919 stated, ‘Jack Dempsey announced today that he would draw the colour line. He will pay no attention to Negro challengers, but will defend his title against any white heavyweights as the occasion demands.’

Some years after boxing had been legalised in New York State in 1920, the Boxing Commission insisted that Jack Dempsey should defend his title against the black Harry Wills. Promoter Rickard at first stalled, and then he refused, threatening to take his moneyspinning operations out of the state. To make his point, in 1926 he matched Dempsey against the white challenger Gene Tunney in Philadelphia.

Those black heavyweights who followed in Johnson’s footsteps either had to ‘throw’ fights to white opponents or were forced to revert to the same poorly paid chitlin’-circuit matches against one another, which had characterised the careers of Sam Langford, Sam McVey and the other great black fighters of Jack Johnson’s era.

The situation was no better in Great Britain. The National Sporting Club, which effectively controlled big-time boxing in the country, had been mortified when Johnson had reneged on his promise to fight Sam Langford at the club. His portrait was taken down from the wall and Johnson himself was refused admittance to the club when he later revisited London.

Even more important from the point of view of British and Commonwealth black heavyweights, the NSC refused to let them fight for British titles, which the club controlled through its system of Lonsdale belts, at any weights. ‘Peggy’ Bettinson, who ran the club, declared, ‘We have no prejudice against the fighting Negro, but we would not run the risk of having to suffer another Jack Johnson.’

In 1929, when the British Boxing Board of Control took over the administration of boxing in Great Britain, it retained the colour bar, its secretary stating, ‘It is only right that a small country such as ours should have championships restricted to boxers of white parents – otherwise we might be faced with a situation where all our British titles are held by coloured Empire fighters.’ Black boxers from the Commonwealth were allowed to fight only for British Empire titles.

In France, too, in 1922, there was a furore when a black Senegalese boxer called Louis Phal, who fought under the name of Battling Siki, knocked out the national hero Georges Carpentier in six rounds in Paris. An effort was made to save Carpentier’s world light-heavyweight title for the whites by disqualifying Siki for alleged rough fighting, but this caused such an uproar that the result was rescinded and the black fighter was allowed to keep his newly won championship.

However, when a proposal was put forward to match Siki against the British heavyweight champion in London in the same year, the Home Office stepped in and forbade the bout from taking place. The
Sporting Chronicle
of 10 November 1922 passed on the official government line, saying that white men should not fight coloured boxers because their temperaments were incompatible, and that under the prevailing conditions in the British Empire it was against the national interest for whites to fight blacks in case passions should be aroused.

Ironically, in 1923 Siki then fought a six-round exhibition contest in Quebec with the ex-champion Jack Johnson, who was in the throes of an unsuccessful comeback. By this time Johnson himself was on the chitlin’ circuit and was finally taking on other black boxers for peanuts. Battling Siki made his home in New York, neglected his training and in 1925 was murdered in a street brawl.

It was not until 1934, when a sensational young black amateur heavyweight called Joe Louis Barrow, whose ring name was Joe Louis, turned professional, that the thoughts of the white establishment began to turn to the prospect of a black fighter challenging for the world title.

Louis was carefully handled by an all-black team. His managers were John Roxborough and Julian Black, while he was trained by the former lightweight Jack Blackburn. At first the latter refused to coach Louis, saying that it would be a waste of time even trying to bring a black heavyweight along. Blackburn had sparred with Jack Johnson in his heyday and had not enjoyed the experience. He believed that the champion’s behaviour had ruined the chances of any other black heavyweight being given an opportunity. It was not until Blackburn was offered $35 a week that he joined the entourage.

Louis’s first professional bouts were so sensational that even white promoters began to take an interest in him. Veteran Jimmy Johnston, who briefly had taken over promoting boxing at Madison Square Garden after the death of Tex Rickard, contacted Louis’s managers and offered to get him fights in New York, as long as Louis realised that as a black boxer he would occasionally have to lose bouts to order.

John Roxborough refused the offer. The manager believed that Louis’s fighting record would take him into the big time, as long as the heavyweight’s behaviour allayed the fears of white spectators. To that end, Roxborough concentrated on building up Louis’s reputation as quiet, introverted and non-threatening, except in the ring. As a public-relations exercise he even issued a list of rules, which he claimed Joe Louis would adhere to at all times. His fighter would never: have his picture taken with white women; enter a nightclub alone; participate in soft or fixed fights; denigrate or gloat over an opponent. But he would always remain impassive before the cameras; live and box in a clean manner.

Joe Louis’s backers also took good care to keep him away from Jack Johnson and the emotional luggage that the former champion brought with him. The self-absorbed Johnson had never been regarded as a leader of the advance of black rights, even at the peak of his fame, and years later when he tried to approach Louis at the latter’s training camp the former champion was turned away.

Roxborough’s careful guidance worked. Louis won fight after fight, with only one loss on the way to his championship bid. On 22 June 1937, Joe Louis won the Heavyweight Boxing Championship of the World by knocking out the holder James J. Braddock in eight rounds in Chicago. He retained the crown for thirteen years, until his defeat by another black fighter, Ezzard Charles, on 27 September 1950.

Joe Louis’s long reign as champion was untroubled by scandal. The uncontroversial black fighter’s shy, deadpan disposition and willingness to fight all challengers won the hearts of boxing followers everywhere and paved the way for the many black heavyweight champions who followed him. Before Louis, there had only been one black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. Since his retirement from the ring, almost thirty black heavyweights have won one version or another of the world heavyweight title, and no other White Hope campaign has ever been launched.

In Great Britain matters took longer to adjust. It was not until 1947 that the British Boxing Board of Control withdrew its colour ban, following a statement by the colonial secretary of the then Socialist government, representing the views of a country in which black and white citizens had fought side by side throughout the Second World War, that he regarded the bar as completely unjustified.

In the following year Dick Turpin, the son of a father from British Guiana (now Guyana) and an English mother, who had served in the war in the British Army, won the British middleweight title by outpointing Vince Hawkins over fifteen rounds at the Aston Villa football ground. For the rest of the century he was followed by dozens of British-born black fighters who went on to win British and in some cases world championships.

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