B.C. platform for film

By Lori Holcomb

As a thundering freight train cut through blowing snow on Sunday morning, one could see the scene play out in the mind's elaborate theater.

"This area here would have been the loading dock, where the Battle Creek police would have been waiting for Jack Johnson's train to arrive," said Mike Salerno, pointing to a snow-covered aisle between the train tracks and the Community Action Agency, 175 Main St.

The weather was similar, almost blizzard-like, when the heavyweight boxing champion of the world was arrested at the Grand Trunk Railroad Depot at about 3:45 a.m. Jan. 14, 1913.

This little-known fact was discovered by the former Battle Creek resident while reading a biography about the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. An amateur filmmaker since childhood, the reels instantly began turning in Salerno's mind.

"I really like history a lot, especially when it's local history and involves someone famous," he said. "So when I heard that Jack Johnson had been to town ... I was kinda excited to tell other people."

Salerno, who now lives in Kalamazoo where he is a physical therapist, devoted his free time to researching the event. Using microfilms of old newspapers, photographs and century-old maps, phone books from Willard Library's Helen Warner Branch and equipment borrowed from AccessVision, Salerno put together a half-hour film titled "Jack Johnson's Battle Creek Visits."

The documentary begins with Johnson's background. Raised in Texas and known as "The Galveston Giant," he began boxing as a teenager. In 1908, Johnson defeated Tommy Burns to become the first black heavyweight champion of the world.

But Johnson's victories were greeted by fear and social upheaval by white America. Racial riots broke out across the country, eventually leading to a congressional act that banned dispensing films across state lines of Johnson badly beating James Jeffries, a white opponent and former world champion.

Even more threatening to whites, however, was the boxer's romantic relationships with white women, according to the PBS documentary, "Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson."

In 1913, a former white lover and Chicago harlot, Belle Schreiber, conspired with authorities to convict Johnson of violating the Mann Act, which prohibits interstate and foreign travel of women for "immoral purposes." The law was made during a time of social reform to prevent the trafficking of women for prostitution, but many historians, including Salerno, agree the charges against Johnson were largely a sham used to make the boxer pay for his success and lifestyle.

It is believed, Salerno said, that Johnson was on his way to Canada to escape his jail sentence when he was stopped in Battle Creek.

On the morning of Jan. 14, the Battle Creek Police Department was notified that Johnson would be passing through the city from Chicago and officers were ordered to stop the train and arrest him. The officer that took that call happened to be a childhood friend of Johnson's, Officer John W. Patterson.

Johnson and his wife were only in the city for a few hours that day before catching the afternoon trip out of the Central Michigan Railroad Depot (now Clara's on the River) to return to Chicago.

Salerno and his crew, consisting of cousin Christopher Douglas and friend Chris Fucile, when to painstaking efforts to capture scenes and intimate details of Johnson's stay in the Cereal City.

"The big thing you have to have to do this is patience," Fucile said. "We spent an hour just getting the lighting right for one interview and used only about 10 seconds of it."

The film also tells of several other, less eventful visits Johnson made to Battle Creek. It also incorporates numerous pictures of the city's heyday, with pictures of bustling streets, elegant theaters and flourishing downtown businesses.

"I look at that and think, 'What the heck happened to Battle Creek?'" said Douglas, a native of the city.

"Jack Johnson's Battle Creek Visits" will air at 7 p.m. Sundays, Feb. 15 through March 8 on AccessVision, channel 16.

http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20090120/NEWS01/901200308