About Me
Jack Johnson was born in Galveston, Texas as the second child and first son of Henry and Tina "Tiny" Johnson, former slaves and faithful Methodists, who both worked blue-collar jobs to earn enough to raise six children (the Johnsons had nine children, five of whom lived to adulthood, and an adopted son) and taught them how to read and write. Jack Johnson had five years of formal education.He was later kicked out of church when he stated that God did not exist and that the church was a domination over people's lives.Johnson fought his first bout, a 16-round victory, at age 15. He turned professional around 1897, fighting in private clubs and making more money then he had ever seen. In 1901, Joe Choynski, the small Jewish heavyweight, came to Galveston to train Jack Johnson. Choynski, an experienced boxer, knocked Johnson out in round three, and the two were arrested for "engaging in an illegal contest" and put in jail for 23 days. (Although boxing was one of the three most popular sports in America at the time, along with baseball and horse-racing, the practice was officially illegal in most states, including Texas.) Choynski began training Johnson in jail but did not get arrested.Johnson's fighting style was very distinctive. He developed a more patient approach than was customary in that day: playing defensively, waiting for a mistake, and then capitalizing on it. Johnson always began a bout cautiously, slowly building up over the rounds into a more aggressive fighter. He often fought to punish his opponents rather than knock them out, endlessly avoiding their blows and striking with swift counters. He always gave the impression of having much more to offer and, if pushed, he could punch quite powerfully.Johnson's style was very effective, but it was criticized in the white press as being cowardly and devious. In contrast, World Heavyweight Champion "Gentleman" Jim Corbett, who was white, had used many of the same techniques a decade earlier, and was praised by the white press as "the cleverest man in boxing."By 1902, Johnson had won at least 50 fights against both white and black opponents. Johnson won his first title on February 3, 1903, beating "Denver" Ed Martin over 20 rounds for the World Colored Heavyweight Championship. His efforts to win the full title were thwarted as World Heavyweight Champion James J. Jeffries refused to face him. Blacks could box whites in other arenas, but the heavyweight championship was such a respected and coveted position in America that blacks were not deemed worthy to compete for it. Johnson was, however, able to fight former champion Bob Fitzsimmons in July 1907, and knocked him out in two rounds.He eventually won the World Heavyweight Title on December 26, 1908, when he fought the Canadian world champion Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, after following him all over the world, taunting him in the press for a match. The fight lasted fourteen rounds before being stopped by the police. The title was awarded to Johnson on a referee's decision as a T.K.O, but he had severely beaten the champion. During the fight, Johnson had mocked both Burns and his ringside crew. Every time Burns was about to go down, Johnson would hold him up again, punishing him more. The camera was stopped just as Johnson was finishing off Burns, so as not to show Burns' defeat.After Johnson's victory over Burns, racial animosity among whites ran so deep that even a socialist like Jack London called out for a "Great White Hope" to take the title away from Johnson — who was crudely caricatured as a subhuman "ape" — and return it to where it supposedly belonged, with the "superior" white race. As title holder, Johnson thus had to face a series of fighters billed by boxing promoters as "great white hopes", often in exhibition matches. In 1909 he beat Victor McLaglen, Frank Moran, Tony Ross, Al Kaufman, and the middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel. The match with Ketchel was keenly fought by both men until the 12th and last round, when Ketchel threw a right to Johnson's head, knocking him down. Slowly regaining his feet, Johnson threw a straight to Ketchel's jaw, knocking him out, along with several of his teeth. His fight with "Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien was a disappointing one for Johnson: though scaling 205 pounds to O'Brien's 161, he could only achieve a six-round draw with the great middleweight.Johnson was an early example of the celebrity athlete, appearing regularly in the press and later on radio and in motion pictures. He earned considerable sums endorsing various products, including patent medicines, and indulged several expensive hobbies such as automobile racing and tailored clothing, as well as purchasing jewelry and furs for his wives.Once, when he was pulled over for a $50 speeding ticket (a large sum at the time), he gave the officer a $100 bill, telling him to keep the change as he was going to make his return trip at the same speed.Johnson was also interested in opera (his favorite being Il Trovatore) and in history — he was an admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte, believing him to have risen from a similar origin as himself.Johnson flouted conventions regarding the social and economic "place" of African Americans in American society. As a black man, he broke a powerful taboo in consorting with white women, and would verbally taunt men (both white and black) inside and outside the ring. Johnson was not shy about his affection for white women, nor modest about his physical prowess, both in and out of the ring. Asked the secret of his staying power by a reporter who had watched a succession of women parade into, and out of, the champion's hotel room, Johnson supposedly said, "Eat jellied eels and think distant thoughts."Johnson married Etta Duryea in late 1910 or early 1911. She committed suicide in September of 1911, and Johnson quickly remarried, to Lucille Cameron. Both women were white, a fact that caused considerable controversy at the time. After Johnson married Cameron, two ministers in the South recommended that Johnson be lynched. The couple fled via Canada to France soon after their marriage to escape criminal charges in the U.S.Johnson continued fighting, but age was catching up with him. After two losses in 1928 he participated only in exhibition bouts.Johnson died in a car crash near Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1946, aged 68, just one year before Jackie Robinson broke the "color line" in Major League Baseball. He was buried next to Etta Duryea at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. His grave is unmarked, but a stone that bears only the name "Johnson" stands above the plots of him and two of his wives.Johnson was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1954, and is on the roster of both the International Boxing Hall of Fame and the World Boxing Hall of Fame. In 2005, the United States National Film Preservation Board deemed the film of the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight "historically significant" and put it in the National Film Registry.Johnson's story is the basis of the play and subsequent 1970 movie, The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones as Johnson (known as Jack Jefferson in the movie), and Jane Alexander as his love interest. In 2005, filmmaker Ken Burns produced a 2-part documentary about Johnson's life, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, based on the 2004 nonfiction book of the same name by Geoffrey C. Ward.Johnson's skill as a fighter and the money that it brought made it impossible for him to be ignored by the white establishment. In a time in which African-Americans enjoyed few civil rights and in which lynching was an accepted extra-legal means of social coercion in many parts of the United States, his success and defiant behavior were a serious threat to the racist status quo. In the short term, the boxing world reacted against Johnson's legacy. Joe Louis, later, was not able to box for the heavyweight title until he proved he could "act white," and was warned against gloating over fallen opponents or having his picture taken with a white woman.But Johnson foreshadowed, in many ways, perhaps the most famous boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali. In fact, Ali often spoke of how he was influenced by Jack Johnson. He identified with him because he felt white America ostracized him in the same manner because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. In his autobiography, Ali relates how he and Joe Frazier agreed that Johnson and Joe Louis were the greatest boxers of old. This page is dedicated to the memory of John Arthur Johnson (March 31, 1878 – June 10, 1946)
