Jacobs Beach: The Mob, the Garden and the Golden Age of Boxing. Kevin Mitchell J.

1915. He was also the first black man to earn a doctorate from Harvard (he would ease Truman's father's path into that institution) and a man whose ego was hardly prepared for Alberta's sharp tongue. When he came calling one day and complained he'd only asked for “half a cup of tea,” Alberta handed him back the full cup and reminded him she was a busy woman. “It saves me a trip back to the teapot,” she said. “Take it or leave it.”

      His father's grandmother, whose full name Truman never knew, was a part black, part Seminole Indian—and, like Joe's grandparents, a slave. So young Truman needed no history lessons in the oppression of blacks, or how to strive to rise above that oppression. His father, an independent and strident thinker, left academe to become a leading figure in the insurance business, in Atlanta and later Columbus. If you were looking for a pattern, there might be one in how the son, like the father, drifted from advocacy and intellectualism toward the convenience of pragmatic moneymaking.

      Truman attended integrated schools in Columbus but recalls in his autobiography, “We were distant from the other kids; I had no white friends at school.” He played on the school football team but he and the only other black player dined separately. There was even a black YMCA in town. Segregation thrived in all corners of the city named after the white man credited with discovering the country. So he moved to Chicago. It was a move that would have consequences beyond his immediate career.

      Gibson had also done his bit during World War II. He was as much of a groundbreaker for his race as was Jack Johnson, although in a more subtle way. He had an ego—for example, the use of the full, drawn-out moniker of Truman K. Gibson Jr.—but he had reason to be proud of his achievements. For all his later weaknesses, when he chose to do business with Jim Norris and his cohorts attached to the International Boxing Club, Gibson could go to his grave content with his contribution in tearing down Jim Crow prejudices in the armed forces before and during World War II, a time when bigotry was far more entrenched than now.

      He was a big barrel of contradictions, noble and weak, intelligent and—conveniently, perhaps—naive. He made the best of whatever situation he was in but failed to see that he could have avoided being in some tight corners in the first place had he not let circumstances drift. Truman Gibson might have been boxing's ultimate pragmatist.

      In the autumn of 1940, Gibson, one of his country's few prominent black lawyers, was summoned to Washington to act as an advocate for African-American soldiers. For five years he served as an assistant to Bill Hastie, the civilian aide to the secretary of war. He saw prejudice against black soldiers everywhere, who were “abused, assaulted and even murdered by white civilians in the south,” as he recalls in his autobiography.

      When he and his wife arrived in the capital from Chicago, they were angered to learn segregation was deeply embedded in the Washington white mindset, from top to bottom. Even store employees refused to let Mrs. Gibson try on a pair of shoes. But Gibson's time had come; there were stirrings of black awareness on Capitol Hill as President Roosevelt, repairing the damage left by Hoover, was gearing up for his third term and leaning on the black and liberal vote.

      Gibson marshalled black opinion makers in the media but felt powerless sometimes in trying to shift perceptions in society at large. As America stirred itself to fight fascism, at home its citizens were prepared to countenance all manner of segregation, from shoe shops in Washington to schools and buses in Alabama, and all the way through the military, where Negro-only units were still in place.

      Gibson wanted to change attitudes but came up against brick walls everywhere. “The army is not a sociological laboratory,” the chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, told Gibson when he pointed out the many anomalies he discovered. But Truman persisted. He listened and learned. And argued. He walked out on intransigent opponents to his initiatives. Gently, he twisted arms. He even succeeded in getting blacks into the Air Force, long considered a bastion of whiteness and privilege. It was a small victory, but a significant one.

      Gibson kept chipping away at the institutionalized racism in the military, like a pesky flyweight jabbing, jabbing, jabbing. His integrity and demeanor won him friends in the right places and, slowly, views moved in the direction of fairness and equality. It was not a tectonic shift, but its subtleties would be felt for longer than any single major eruption. Gibson demonstrated then in the halls of power the mental agility he was to bring to bear in that other bear pit, professional boxing.

      It was a curious battle to fight: striving to give his black brothers and sisters the right to go and be blown up for the country that denied them so many basic rights and freedoms. He received one letter from a black soldier at Camp Lee in Virginia that summarized the dilemma: “The prisoner of war gets much better treatment than we do, even when they go to the dispensary or hospital, and it is really a bearing down to our morale as we are supposed to be fighting for democracy. Yet we are treated worse than our enemies are. . . . If something isn't done quick, I am afraid a great disaster will surely come.”

      Fame in sports did not spare black servicemen from prejudice. Jackie Robinson, who, after the war, would become the first black player in Major League Baseball, did his basic training at Fort Riley in Kansas. Toward the end of his time there, he overheard a white officer call a black soldier “a stupid black nigger sonofabitch.” Robinson intervened, thinking his standing as a rising baseball star might carry some influence. “That goes for you too, nigger,” was the curt reaction. Robinson threw an angry right hand and knocked several of the officer's teeth out. Luckily for Robinson, Joe Louis, who had met Gibson in 1935, was by now also at Fort Riley. He informed his lawyer friend of the incident.

      As Gibson put Robinson's defense to the officer in charge of the investigation, Louis intervened in a way that those who knew him might have imagined was beyond his simple ways. “General, you have to do a lot of entertaining and I took the liberty of delivering a case of wine to your quarters,” the heavyweight champion of the world told him. “This is not any bribe or whatever, but I would like for my friend, Jackie Robinson, to finish his course.”

      Robinson graduated from the officer candidate school shortly afterward. However, he encountered more bigotry soon enough. On boarding a bus at another army camp in Texas, he was told, “Nigger, get to the back.” The combustible Robinson refused—and grabbed the driver's quickly drawn pistol, raking his mouth with it. Louis wanted Gibson to intervene again, but it wasn't necessary. Robinson had a result of sorts; he was honorably discharged.