August 07, 2010|By Don Markus, The Baltimore Sun
At a time when a fellow Baltimorean named George Ruth was barely in knickers, Joe Gans was the biggest star in town. Along with Cardinal James Gibbons — the Cardinal Gibbons — Gans was one of the most famous people in the country. Maybe even the world.
Boxing fans knew Gans, who died a century ago Tuesday, as the world's first African-American champion, but he was more than that. Those in Baltimore knew Gans as the proprietor of the city's hottest nightclub who tooled around the cobblestone streets in Henry Ford's newfangled automobile.
With the money he earned from his 42-round title bout in 1906 against Oscar Matthew "Battling" Nelson in Goldfield, Nev., Gans opened a hotel named after the gold mining boomtown. Inside was what was believed to be the first integrated black-and-tan club in the country, a place where Gans gave a 20-year-old local musician named Eubie Blake a job playing piano. Blake later wrote a tribute to Gans called "The Goldfield Rag."
When he died of tuberculosis in August 1910, thousands of his friends and fans gathered at his mother's house on Argyle Avenue and followed the horse-drawn hearse holding Gans' casket to the church where he was memorialized and eventually to Mount Auburn Cemetery, where he was buried. Gans was just 35.
The 100th anniversary of Gans' death will be marked in his hometown this week. It will be the first time in 50 years that Gans has been recognized, in this case with a permanent reminder of his place in history.
After a two-year crusade by local actor Kevin Grace, who first heard about Gans while working on a Washington movie set, Gans will be celebrated with a ceremony Sunday at the Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center, memorial services at the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church and Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the naming of a Baltimore street in his honor.
"He should be as synonymous to Baltimore as Muhammad Ali is to Louisville," Grace said.
In a congressional resolution last week honoring Gans, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin spoke of the fighter's accomplishments in and out of the ring.
"Gans' achievements became a beacon of hope for the African-American community," Cardin said. "The prominent preacher and civil rights leader Francis J. Grimke once remarked that the great Booker T. Washington had done much for African-Americans, but he 'never did one-tenth to place the black man in the front rank as a gentleman as has been done by Joe Gans.'"
But Gans is mostly forgotten, even in his hometown. When Colleen Aycock was researching her book about Gans at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, she would ask people on the street outside whether they had heard of him. None of them had. They knew about other famous Baltimoreans such as Ruth and Billie Holliday, as well as other African-Americans who became world champions.
"Everyone knows Tex Rickard, the father of Madison Square Garden and all of his million-dollar gates, but his first great 'Fight of the Century' was with Joe Gans," said Aycock, who learned about Gans from her father, a boxer himself, and co-wrote a biography that was published in 2008. " Jack Johnson was so impressed with the grandeur of the Goldfield, located at East Lexington and Colvin streets, that he started his own club that became the Cotton Club."
Marvin McDowell, a former fighter who runs Umar Boxing on North Avenue, said Gans was overshadowed because his career and life weren't as controversial as Johnson's and that lightweights have never received the same attention as their heavyweight counterparts. That Gans died young also played into his being forgotten.
"He sort of slipped under the radar," McDowell said. "He was a quiet guy, not like a Jack Johnson, but he was one of the greatest African-American boxers that ever put the gloves on. He wasn't only the first African-American boxing champion, he was the first African-American champion in any sport."
Even Carolyn Butler, one of two surviving great-great-granddaughters, was unaware of the man in the picture that had been taped to her refrigerator for years.
"He wasn't a blood relative," Butler said of Gans, who married her great-great-grandmother Florence Desmond but didn't have any children with her. "He's still part of my family. It's an interesting story, and he was the first to do a lot of things."
Boxing analyst and historian Al Bernstein said Gans "didn't get the recognition almost from the get-go. … He never achieved that legendary status that he should have." Bernstein said the passage of time has made Gans' career "more of a folklore kind of thing."
'Hit like a mule'
