The forgotten legacy of a black Hub boxing legend

Brian Wright O’Connor

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — There’s nothing left but memories and an audience of leaves scuttling along the cemetery path.

Sam Langford’s simple headstone gives no hint of the life left behind.

In 1906, the southpaw boxer from the Cambridge waterfront stood up to Jack Johnson in Chelsea, baiting the eventual world champion with quick feints, going inside to pepper the famous jaw with lightning jabs.

Just 5 feet 7 inches tall, Langford had the reach of a man a foot taller and hands like frozen roasts. When he stepped into the ring with Johnson at the age of 23, he had already fought professionally for seven years, a natural middleweight flattening heavyweights with numbing regularity.

Johnson, his career on the rise, had come to New England to pick up a few wins en route to his world title fight two years later. But Langford, seasoned in the harsh winters of his native Nova Scotia, aimed to thrash the undefeated 28-year-old and get a shot at the title himself.

And why not? Langford had fought all over the region, from Bangor to New Bedford, defeating as many as 20 opponents in a single year — black and white alike going down from the force of arms swung with whipsaw speed.

John Langford, the boxer’s nephew, was just 6 years old as he sat at ringside, watching the boxers battle it out in the Chelsea ring. Interviewed in 1986, he remembered with startling clarity the roar of the crowd and sound of the gloves hitting body and bone — cushioned hammers pounding into flesh.

“There was such screaming and shouting, men drinking and betting,” said Langford. “I’ll never forget it. Johnson tried to knock him over, but he just couldn’t do it. He almost got tipped himself. Sam was a hard nut and he was tough.”

When the bout with Johnson ended after 15 rounds, the Texas fighter could barely lift his arms. The referee did it for him, signaling a narrow victory by decision over a rival the champ would avoid for the rest of his career.

In 1908, Johnson defeated the Canadian Tommy Burns to become the world’s first black heavyweight champion. His “flashy” lifestyle of white paramours, fur coats, and fancy cars — touted by a baiting press corps — turned public opinion against him.

A generation would pass before black boxers had another shot at the world heavyweight title.

Some states, like Texas, even outlawed fights between blacks and whites in the wake of the Johnson scandals. Big-purse bouts dried up overseas as well. Gone were the days when Langford would travel to London, as he did in 1904, to flatten the English heavyweight champion, William “Iron” Hague, in front of a stunned crowed of white-faced, white-tied Englishmen.

That left Langford on the “chitlin’ circuit” for some 20 years after his Johnson bout, fighting many of the same opponents time and time again. Dubbed by sportswriters “The Boston Tar Baby,” Langford trekked from coast to coast, fighting in Mexico as well, for short money and shortened hopes.

By the time Langford retired in 1926, he had stepped into the ring some 650 times, scoring more knockouts than Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano and Jack Dempsey combined.

The pounding had taken its toll. A childhood accident in Nova Scotia had left him nearly blind in one eye. Boxing took the other. Drink stole his dignity. Living in a rooming house in Boston’s old Scollay Square, Langford earned saloon money from time to time with staged exhibition matches at the Old Howard Theater.

Press reports chronicled his decline. A 1931 story about a collision with a taxicab carried the headline, “Langford Knocked Out — By Auto.” Though married, his wife had left him years before, taking along their daughter.

Benefits held to help the struggling boxer provided him with a pension of $75 a month. By the time he died in 1956 in a North Cambridge rooming house, he was nearly forgotten, buried in an unmarked grave in Cambridge Cemetery.

A.J. Spears, the Cambridge funeral home owner, handled the arrangements when Langford died. Sitting in his Western Avenue office, he pulled out a worn ledger to read the details, entered in black ink reaching across the years.

“Samuel E. Langford,” he said, reading the spidery script. “Cause of death — malnutrition. Residence listed as 69 Howard Street — right around the corner. The funeral charged to Charlotte E. Wade. That, I remember, was his daughter.”

Sam’s family is now scattered. His daughter died in 1979, leaving two sons, Joseph Roberts and William Roberts, and three grandchildren. Sam’s brother Oscar, who moved with him to Cambridge from Nova Scotia when they were kids, has many descendants still living in the Riverside neighborhood of Cambridge, one of the oldest black communities in the country.

In 1986, a boxing enthusiast from St. Louis paid $804 out of his own pocket to have a headstone placed on Langford’s unmarked grave on Amaranth Path. In 1990, Langford was named to the International Boxing Hall of Fame.

Over 20 years ago, another Langford relative, Philip Langford of Roxbury, recalled meeting his uncle in 1932. Philip was 16 at the time. The sight of the broken-down and impoverished boxer left an impression “that will be engraved in my memory for the rest of my life,” he said.

“One thing I’ll never forget,” he added, “was those hands. He put his hand on my shoulder and it felt like a cement block. The skin was like rawhide, cracked and hard. He was a tough man who lived in a hard time.”