Jack Johnson, Galveston, and the Pummeling of White Supremacy
Was there something about Galveston that gave Jack Johnson the strength to bloody the nose of Jim Crow?
"As I grew up, the white boys were my friends and my pals. I ate with them, played with them and slept at their homes. Their mothers gave me cookies, and I ate at their tables. No one ever taught me that white men were superior to me."
So recalled the planet’s first Black heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson of his childhood in the Galveston, Texas of the late Victorian era. Like few other Black men of that age, Johnson certainly did not act as if he was ever taught White men were superior to him. Not only did he defeat one “Great White Hope” after another in the ring, but by dating and marrying White women, he openly flouted the entire psychosexual bedrock on which Jim Crow was constructed at the very source, shaking White supremacy to its core.
Was Galveston as Johnson remembered it — a haven from the worst of the South’s (and America’s as a whole) violent Jim Crow suppression and paranoia? Could a Jack Johnson have come from anywhere else at that time?
We’ll get to those questions in a moment, but first a bit more on Johnson and his profound effect on not just American society but the notion of White superiority worldwide.
Not only did Johnson directly inspire the Great White Hope concept — meaning that somewhere on earth, there had to be one White man who could defeat this “uppity” Black man (only there wasn’t — not for a long while) — but many film historians believe that the 1933 blockbuster / eternal cultural touchstone King Kong was an allegory for Johnson’s life: huge and powerful black “savage” with an insatiable lust for pale white women…who meets his demise as he attempts to summit the White man’s most prominent phallic symbol of the era…Sometimes an Empire State Building is not an Empire State Building and a giant Black gorilla is just a giant Black gorilla.
I once had a long conversation with the Fifth Ward mystic / artist Motapa, who expressed gratitude that it was Johnson’s “gorilla spirit” that first conquered the white man’s prejudices, as opposed to the “hyena spirit” he attributed to Muhammad Ali.
Motapa believed Ali’s nature was ill-suited to Johnson’s times. I wish I could remember more of what he said all those years ago, but somewhere I have that whole talk — conducted over my dining room table on a weekday afternoon — on tape. I guess I should donate it to his archive at UT.
Speaking of Ali and Johnson, here is the former’s fervent and eloquent and beautiful appreciation of the latter, how Johnson, alone, without the support of Black Panthers, Malcolm X, MOVE, Huey Newton or anyone else, was able to do whatsoever he pleased in 1909, a time when “white folks lynched Negroes every weekend.”:
“White people would send him letters saying, ‘Nigger, if you knock this White man out, we’ll kill you.’ He’d say, ‘Well you better just kill my Black butt, ‘cause I’m gonna knock this White man cold. And he’d knock out that White man cold! …He was bad when you think about it. I know I’m bad, but he was crazy!”
Was it Galveston that enabled Johnson to be that bad, crazy man?
Possibly.
While the official histories of and promotional materials about most Southern cities invariably claim that race relations there were more harmonious there than elsewhere in the Jim Crow days, there is some reason to believe that this was actually true in Galveston.
Yes, on June 19, 1865, Texas slaves learned of their freedom on the first Juneteenth, but that was hardly what you would call a local initiative, and all of those histories were written by White people. In the case of Galveston, on the other hand, it’s not hard to find accounts attesting to Galveston’s relative harmony from Black people who endured Jim Crow.
“The best in the South,” one elderly gentleman told the Houston Chronicle in 2004.
"Nobody's going to believe it," agreed the Reverend James Thomas, born circa 1930. “But most of us (blacks and whites) got along. That's the way it was."
Thomas, who grew up on Avenue M and pastored the Market Street Missionary Baptist Church for many years, echoed Johnson’s reminiscences of a childhood that was something akin to colorblind. He said that as children, the White and Black kids of the island would meet regularly to play football, albeit only informal games unsanctioned by the state.
Thomas, and others, went on to state that leaving the island was perilous.
In those days, Highway 3, the Old Galveston road pre-Interstate 45, was a division street. At least in northern Galveston County — places like Kemah, San Leon, Bacliff and Seabrook — “sundown town” conditions prevailed. Blacks were allowed to live only in towns like Dickinson. Even west of Highway 3, Thomas recalled that towns like LaMarque, Alvin, and Hitchcock were dangerously racist.
In the same article, Galveston native Izola Collins, also born in 1930, said race relations in Galveston worsened over her lifetime, even as they slightly improved on the mainland.
As a small child, Collins, a retired music teacher when she spoke to the Chronicle, recalled that she and her family rode streetcars side-by-side with Whites, but eventually they were forced to the rear.
“We were integrated before we were segregated,” she said.
She also recalled that there were different standards in the vicinity of her home — where Black, White, and Hispanic kids played as equals — and downtown, where those same Hispanic and White kids she played with would refuse to acknowledge their playmate.
Per the Chron:
"They wouldn't speak to me," said Collins, who has written an untitled book about black history in Galveston, which she is shopping to publishers. "I never really understood that then."
(That book, Island of Color: Where Juneteenth Started has since been published.)
Thayer Evans, the Chronicle reporter, also spoke to LeRoy Hoskins. Born in rural Burleson County in 1916, Hoskins moved to Galveston after dropping out of Prairie View because he was broke. Intending to stay in Galveston only as long as it took to save up cash enough to finish his degree, Hoskins never left. On his admittance to the International Longshoremen's Association No. 851, he found a job that kept him busy, fed, prosperous, and happy until his retirement in 1982.
The Galveston ILA was integrated. Through his involvement in the union, Hoskins traveled the US and the world.
Per the Chron:
"There was a big difference between Galveston and other places," said Hoskins, who has been to Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. "We couldn't go some places elsewhere, but that never bothered me much, because I knew I could do as I pleased when I got back in Galveston."
Hoskins said that Galveston had Black cops on the police force even in the 1930s, and they were free to arrest anybody, not just other Blacks. "And people respected them," he said. "What we had was so remarkable that people don't believe you (now). It was just super," he added. (Hoskins’ son Robert Emmett Hoskins went on to become an Eagle Scout, student body president at the segregated Central High School, and later an attorney.)
Ultimately, Hoskins owed his union job to Norris Wright Cuney, the son of a White plantation owner and a slave woman. Regarded in his lifetime as the most important Black leader in Texas, and among the most powerful nationally, Cuney was also a very effective labor leader at home in Galveston. In the 1890s, he won Galveston’s Blacks the rights to work at lucrative jobs on the docks at a time when this was very rare, thereby enabling them to escape into the actual working class and rise above truly menial labor.
According to more recent Galveston-born civil rights leader Kelton Sams, Cuney was one reason that Galveston differed from other Southern cities. Sams also cited the alliance of Black people with Galveston’s prominent and powerful Jewish community: for most of its history, Galveston has been ruled by a trio of families: the WASP Sealy and Moody families, and the Jewish Kempners, who thereby comprised about 33 percent of the city’s clout. And there were lesser, though still powerful, eminentos among Galveston’s Jews, a people Sams knew as allies.
Jews also held plenty of clout in Southern cities like New Orleans and especially Charleston, America’s most Jewish city until the 1830s, and while I may well be missing something, I’ve yet to come across narratives of Black natives of either of those cities wherein they are described as “the best in the South.”
Which is not to say all was perfect in Galveston. Through the 1910s and ‘20s, the principal movers and shakers behind the city's Mardi Gras celebrations called themselves the Kotton Karnival Kids. Within the city limits, Blacks were confined to a sliver of beach surrounding a few blocks of 25th Street. Schools and hospitals were segregated, and as with everywhere else in America, Sunday mornings were the most segregated time of the week.
In the Reverend Thomas’s obituary, his struggle to desegregate various Galveston institutions sounded little different than those I’ve read about in Houston, Nashville, or anywhere else: racists threatened to kill him and burned crosses on his lawn during his fight to integrate local schools. On his return from the Navy after World War II, he was disgusted to find that German prisoners of war interned in Galveston had more privileges than he, a native of the city and not then nor ever having been a cog in Hitler’s war machine, was allowed to enjoy. He had to fight to become Galveston’s first Black mailman and later mail clerk, and he and Sams knew very well that Galveston’s lunch counters and restaurants did not integrate themselves.
Still, given the size of the city and its large Black population, that there was only one lynching of a Black man recorded in Galveston’s history, and not a single racial disturbance rising to the level of a riot, is somewhat remarkable. Along with the testimony of the likes of Thomas, Collins, Hoskins, Sams and Johnson who themselves endured Jim Crow, in Galveston and elsewhere, there is every reason to believe that Galveston was one city where things, while hardly ideal, weren’t as terrible as they were everywhere else; markedly better, even.
So what, aside from the efforts of Cuney and the Kempner family, made Galveston different?
Most obviously, Galveston was a city, and the evils of both slavery and Jim Crow tended to be ameliorated in urban areas. Then as now, city folk had a more liberal sensibility, and the work was not so brutal — far better it was to be a domestic servant, wagon driver, cook, or saloon slave rather than a cane cutter on the lower Brazos or a cotton picker on the upper, working from sun to sun, can to can’t.
It was also a numbers game. Many of the worst aspects of slavery and Jim Crow arose from White paranoia over slave uprisings, and those fears reached their peaks in areas were Whites were outnumbered, as they were often in plantation regions. In Brazoria County, adjacent to Galveston County, slaves numbered upwards of seventy percent of the population, whereas prior to the urban exodus following the Civil War, Blacks tended to be at most a quarter of the population of most Southern cities. (That such an exodus took place at all strongly suggests that city life was far preferable to country living for ex-slaves.)
And yet the mere fact of Galveston’s urbanity fails to account for how we have Black people claiming it to have been an improvement over Houston and all the other cities they experienced in Jim Crow America.
Though she has not written specifically about race in Galveston, in books like Galveston Seawall Chronicles, Galveston’s Red Light District, and The Maceos and the Free State of Galveston, local author Kimber Fountain has spent years now wondering what makes the place tick, how and why it has come to be so different from Houston, 50 miles and a world away up I-45.
Fountain believes there are some not so obvious factors to one plain fact: that fact being, Galveston is on an island. New Orleans is not. Neither is Charleston, or Savannah, or Houston, or any other American city in the lower 48. And she says that islands create a “psychology of isolation” where they believe themselves free of the dictates of the mainland, even if that mainland is just a couple of miles across a bay. Sicily and southern Italy are very different. The English regard the island they share with Wales and Scotland as something very much distinct from Europe. Galvestonians at times claim they live “near Texas” and not in it.
So you have a place in Jim Crow America that is urban and also regarding itself as a distinct from the mainstream based on its island status.
Town planning might have also played a factor. Fountain points out that Galveston was designed as a “walking town,” which in her usage means something more than the obvious -- a nice town in which to walk, which Galveston very much is, and within Texas and much of the South, a rarity. But, Fountain says, the term also denotes a certain egalitarianism resulting from the street grid.
“There was no specific delineation between the classes,” she told me recently. “The rich people didn’t wall themselves away in their little rich neighborhoods. In order to get to their homes, they had to walk past a good number of shacks.”
She believes this bred a sort of trans-class camaraderie. “There was an empathy there, and by the same token, the poor had to walk the homes of the wealthy, and they were never looked on or shamed.”
And it’s still much the same today. Fountain says Galveston’s residential streets remain a hodgepodge. “There are no neighborhoods in Galveston,” she says, meaning distinct areas with exclusively similar housing. “Well, maybe two or three in some of the more modern areas. Even today, you can see a half-million dollar Victorian right next to a shotgun house.”
Indeed you can.
In one of the more striking examples of this phenomenon, there stands a humble 1903 shotgun at 808 Broadway.
Rebuilt by his parents after the 1900 Great Storm, this was home of Jack Johnson. Five short hodgepodged blocks of Broadway from this house there looms Bishop’s Palace, one of the most opulent and ornate residences in this hemisphere.
Perhaps given that he grew up so near that mansion, and was treated as an equal by playmates who likely lived in homes that more resembled Bishop’s Palace than his own humble shotgun down the street, Jack Johnson came to dream big, more immensely than that mansion even, more than even the grandest buildings on The Strand, bigger than Galveston, Texas, and America. His was a dream that in due time would change the world, and it all started right there on Broadway in Galveston.
Take it away, maestro…
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loved the Jack Johnson clip so much, too--he was light on his feet and very erudite.
I always heard that it was the Kempners in particular who kept integration of the lunchcounters from becoming a big deal by suppressing newspaper coverage. I know for a fact the Kempners paid for their servants' children to attend Prarieview A& M and they received pensions as well.