Juneteenth – I’ve got a Name
By James Blears
Juneteenth celebrates an ongoing struggle for equality, freedom, decency, human rights and fundamental humanity, which continues to this very day.
Juneteenth is a US Federal Holiday, commemorating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. The name is derived from combining June and nineteenth. It marks the anniversary of the order of Major General Gordon Granger on June 19th, 1865, proclaiming freedom for slaves in Texas.
Sadly, a legal proclamation didn’t soften, ameliorate, or change the hardened hearts of many racists, who were determined to deny black people opportunity and equality. Their narrow definition of fair was confined to skin deep complexion.
Since then, up to now and moving forward, the road has been long and hard, strewn with spewed bile and the verbal spittle of illogical and demented hatred, stoked by illogical fear. But where there´s a challenge, there are always incredibly brave men and women who are prepared to stand up and face it, no matter how daunting the odds. The power of belief! A spark of hope represents a flickering beacon, whose expanding glow generates an irresistible conflagration, sweeping like a wildfire across cultures, in the battle for hearts and minds…and ultimately souls.
Thank God for the pioneers of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. In the sport of Boxing, Jack Johnson: “The Galveston Giant,” stands out as a colossus, and the World Boxing Council also took a vitally important and progressive stance in the fight against racism, which has proved so crucially and historically important.
Jack Johnson’s life ended as it had begun. As a child in the port city of Galveston, he quickly learned the hard way, that black people weren’t allowed to stroll on the sidewalk. They had to walk in the gutter. To refuse this indignity was to invite a severe beating or even a lynching.
After becoming the first ever black heavyweight champion of the world, and later being imprisoned on a racist trumped up charge, one fateful day in 1946, Jack sped away from a diner in North Carolina. He´d been denied service and a seat at the table, because of the color of his skin. Metaphorically blinded by the pervasive injustice, Jack´s lost control of his high performance car and collided with a telegraph pole. He was critically injured, needing urgent, prompt medical attention. But, he died on the way to a hospital twenty five miles away. It was the only one in that region which would treat black people. There were other hospitals which were much closer, but they enforced the color bar. Far and away the absolute worst!
Years earlier Jack Johnson had to serve ten months in Leavenworth State Penitentiary, not for violating the absurd so called Mann Act, for which an all- white jury convicted him of transporting a white woman over State lines for immoral purposes. The person in question was Lucile Cameron, who he later married. It was much more to do with his jaunty, cocky defiance and adamant refusal to be humble and tow the line. No sir, to yes sir!!!
Once handed a fifty dollars speeding ticket by a traffic cop, Jack cheekily, audaciously and tongue in cheek gave the Officer a one hundred dollars bill, telling him to keep the change… because he fully intended to do the same speed on the return journey. What a sparkling, parking, mischievous, effervescent sense of humor, tinged with the piquant needle defiance. While the cop was furiously jealous that a black man could have earned such a magnificent, shiny roadster.
Black people back then were expected to know their place and be subservient, showing deference. Jack simply wouldn’t stand for it, much less kneel! He couldn’t and he wouldn´t cow tow! For that there was to be a terrible ongoing price to pay. And paid it was!
Jack who was decades ahead of his time, blessed and honed with brilliantly consummate boxing skills, finally got his opportunity on December 26th, 1908, to challenge Canadian Tommy Burns for the heavyweight title. The fight had to be in held at Sydney Stadium, Australia, such was the groundswell racism fury and furor from some quarters back in the USA.
The Police intervened to stop the one sided drubbing after fourteen rounds. Jack paid tribute to the ex- champion who had failed in his twelfth defense saying: “He made it possible for a black man to become world champion. He was beaten, but he was brave.” Paradoxically Tommy Burns` real name was Noah Brousseau. One of thirteen children, his origin was Italian, which was also frowned upon at the time. As being Italian nettled powerful racists, he changed his name, to sound as Scottish as a thistle.
The quest for a so called Great While Hope was on! Former champion James Jeffries was persuaded to come out of retirement in order to put impudent Jack firmly in his place. It spectacularly backfired. One July 4th 1910, in Reno Nevada, “Papa Jack” mauled brave Jim for fifteen rounds, knocking him down three times, before “The Boiler Maker´s” simmering corner called it quits.
Years later Jim candidly conceded: “I could never have whipped Jack at my best. I couldn’t have hit him. I couldn`t have reached him in a thousand years!”
Nationwide race riots officially resulting in twenty deaths was the horrendous residue of this bitter cud of racism. Unofficially, especially in the deep then sweltering south, more than two hundred black people perished. Many were lynched by mobs. No one faced justice for these crimes.
An ageing out of shape Jack finally lost the title to Jess Willard “The Pottawatomie Giant” on April 5th 1915 on a scorching day at the Oriental Park Havana. In a bout scheduled for forty five rounds, Jack was KO`d in 1.26 of round twenty five.
It took twenty two long years for another black man to be permitted to fight for Sport`s Richest prize, but inevitably there were strangling strings accordingly attached.
Champion James J Braddock’s Manager Joe Gould insisted that Joe Louis would only be allowed to fight Jimmy, if he paid ten percent of all future promotion profits for the next ten years. That eventually added up to more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars!
The powers that be, weren’t prepared to tolerate another strident, strutting champion. Joe had to agree to: Never have his photo taken with a white woman, never gloat over a fallen opponent, never engage in fixed fights as well as live and fight clean.
Joe successfully defended his hard won title twenty five times. It’s a record that has yet to be equaled. During the war he signed up for the Armed Forces and served with magnificent distinction. He donated one of his purses to the Army Benevolent Fund and another to the Navy Benevolent Fund, keeping just a dollar a time for himself. But the IRS taxed him on the full amount.
This started his lingering tax problems and forced him to come out of retirement to pay them their twenty pieces of silver, which they then increased with accruing interest! To their eternal shame, the miserly Tax Authorities hounded him for years, making his life an utter misery. Yet again, those in power wanted to put him in his place, reduce him and return him to poverty. Cast him aside and discard him back to from whence he came and out of which he’d climbed. Snakes and ladders and serpents!
Back then journalist Jimmy Cannon refereed to boxing of that era as: “The red light district of sports.” He also stated: “Joe Louis is a credit to his race. The human race!
Without Joe Louis there could never have been Sugar Ray Robinson or Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, or Floyd Mayweather. Prior to this, back in Jack Johnson`s day, many white fighters and their management teams etched, hedged, cowered and hid behind the color bar-line. So, black fighters had to fight each other dozens of times, just to put bread on the table. Jack broke that heinous mold and later Joe Louis was able to develop further and farther progress, as an enabling factor for up and coming generations.
It took until 2018, for Jack Johnson and his family to finally gain a Posthumous Presidential Pardon signed by President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Proudly present on that day were: World Boxing Council President Mauricio Sulaiman, Lennox Lewis, Deontay Wilder, Sylvester Stallone and Jack´s Great, Great Niece Linda Haywood.
She said: “The last thing you want is to die with your name tarnished. I’m overwhelmed by this, which has been such a long time in the coming. My family can go forward, knowing that the pain and the shame have been replaced by vindication.”
Mauricio said: “Thank you President Trump for taking this step. It is a great day for sport and the world!”
The World Boxing Council has always been unequivocal in its stance against racism. The very first action of Jose Sulaiman after he became President of the WBC on December 5th, 1975, was to ban South Africa, in the struggle to overcome appalling apartheid.
As the son of Parents from Syria and Lebanon, Mexico born Jose had experienced racism first hand as a child. He determined to combat it wherever and whenever he found it. This was further reinforced by a trip to South Africa, where as a boxing commissioner, he witnessed a black man being horrendously insulted on a train.
South Africa’s President Nelson Mandela who had been imprisoned for twenty seven years and was instrumental in consigning apartheid to the dust heap of dictatorships, invited the World Boxing Council to hold its thirty sixth Convention in Johannesburg in 1998. The WBC donated one hundred thousand dollars to help build two boxing gyms to help provide renewed impetus for the sport there.
At the Convention Inauguration President Nelson Mandela said: “We are especially pleased and proud to welcome you here in the fifth year of our freedom. It gives us a chance to acknowledge the WBC’S role in adding strength to the struggle for liberation, bringing the considerable force of the WBC and its boxers to the World Campaign to isolate the apartheid regime.
“I wanted to be present on the WBC’s first visit to this country, so we could say on behalf of all South Africans, for your contribution to ending apartheid and for your engagement in the reconstruction of our society…thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”
Each and every one of us has a name, our very own honor, our pride, and our veritable word. Beautifully encapsulated in the hauntingly evocative Jim Croce song: “I got a name.”
On Juneteenth Day, let us remember with deepest gratitude the monumental struggle and the sacrifice it’s taken to get this far, and fully understand it´s still not over. We yet have a way to go.
Jack Johnson speaks to us from beyond the grave saying: “Don’t let your dreams remain dreams.”
And… “We are all related. We are all Family.”
WE REMEMBER with deepest gratitude the monumental struggle and the sacrifice it’s taken to get this far, and fully understand it’s still not over. We yet have a way to go.
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