Remembering LA’s Dynamite Jackson, a Big Man Inside and Outside the Ropes

Dynamite Jackson wasn’t a great fighter, but he was good enough to win the California Heavyweight Title and he left a large footprint when he left the California boxing scene. With the passage of time, a footprint tends to fade away, obscured by layers of dust, but nowadays anyone who subscribes to a newspaper archives website can brush away some of the dust and the footprint becomes less opaque.

Dynamite Jackson was the first black person to become a licensed boxing referee in California and purportedly the first man of his color to hold this distinction anywhere west of the Mississippi. But let’s start at the beginning.

The man who was cloaked with the ring name Dynamite Jackson was born Ernest Bendy in Oklahoma City. At the age of 14 or thereabouts, he arrived in LA with his mother and was enrolled in the city’s predominantly non-white Jefferson High School. He was still attending classes there when he launched his pro career in 1927.

Jackson’s early opponents were a mixed bag of novices and veterans. When it came to black-on-black competitions, constraints were looser and promoters had few qualms about sending a true professional in against a man right off the street. Unlike in many other parts of the country, however, there was no formal opposition to mixed matches and Jackson had many white opponents.

H.C. Witwer reportedly tagged Bendy with his ring name. Witwer was a prolific author of pulp fiction. In the silent film age, many of his magazine stories were adapted into serials by Hollywood studios. In his boxing stories, he dressed his protagonists with fanciful names, e.g., One-Round O’Toole and the Chickasaw Bone Crusher.

Dynamite’s colorful manager Wirt Ross, a fast-talking Kentuckian who claimed to be a distant relative of the famous outlaw Jesse James, took it a step further. Ross told reporters that Jackson’s grandfather was a Sioux Indian who was at the Battle of Little Big Horn where General Custer was killed. “[Dynamite Jackson’s] veins run thick with the fighting blood of ancestors who roamed the plains with a tomahawk and a scalping knife, ready for action against man or beast,” said a 1931 story in the Los Angeles Times. (Wirt Ross managed two future world title-holders in Chalky Wright and the great Henry Armstrong, but sold off both, purportedly to satisfy gambling debts, before they became champions.)

Jackson was at his peak in June of 1931 when he defeated Jack Redman and Les Kennedy in 10-round bouts spaced three weeks apart at the Olympic Auditorium.

Redman, who was from Baton Rouge, was supposedly discovered by Jack Dempsey who proclaimed him “the greatest living negro heavyweight.” Dynamite won wire-to-wire, saddling Redman, reputedly 25-0-2 coming in, with his first defeat and avenging a loss to him the previous month in San Diego. Les Kennedy, a Long Beach (CA) stevedore by way of Butte, Montana, owned wins over such notables as John Lester Johnson and Meyer “KO” Christner. Dynamite dominated their fight which was stopped by the ring physician after four rounds with Kennedy a bloody mess. He and Kennedy had split two previous meetings.

The rubber match with Les Kennedy earned Dynamite Jackson the California Heavyweight Title as certified by the state athletic commission, but his reign didn’t last long. Three months later, the belt passed to Ace Hudkins who beat him decisively before an overflow crowd at the Olympic. Bleeding from cuts above both eyes, Dynamite rallied late, but too late to salvage a draw.

Ace Hudkins, the Nebraska Wildcat, was very good, arguably the best boxer produced by the Cornhusker State until the arrival of Terence Crawford. However, it did not redound well to Dynamite that he was fighting a much smaller man. Carrying 205 pounds on his six-foot-one frame, Jackson had a 31-and-a-half-pound weight advantage over the five-foot-nine Hudkins who was a lightweight when he first started out. A harsh defeat the following year to New Jersey journeyman Jim Braddock (yes, the future Cinderella Man) was another stain on his legacy. Per boxrec, Jackson concluded his career with a record of 51-14-2 (26 KOs).

California circa 1930 was a world apart from the rest of the country. With no major league sports franchises and no pari-mutuel horseracing, boxing got a big play in the sports section of the papers. When Jackson retired from boxing, he cashed in on his fame by going into the cocktail lounge business. In this regard, he was following a well-worn tradition. Back in the bare-knuckle age and beyond, the most celebrated boxers invariably became saloon-keepers. Jackson and his partners would eventually have two watering holes on Jazz-infused Central Avenue, the main ribbon of LA’s black belt, plus a package liquor store that bore his ring name.

To be a ring official in California, one had to pass a civil service exam. Jackson took the exam in 1946, reportedly passed it with flying colors, and would go on to judge hundreds of prizefights and referee dozens more. In 1957, he was one of six nominees for Southern California’s “Leading (Black) Citizen Award,” an annual award, sponsored by a distillery, given to “the person who has contributed the most in spirit and deed toward betterment of the community.” Dynamite was cited for his work with youth groups, particularly the Boy Scouts.

Dynamite Jackson, aka Ernest Bendy, passed away in 1967 at the UCLA Medical Center from complications of obesity. By then, he had lost his Central Avenue properties in a bitter dispute with his business partners and was selling real estate. The obits said he was 55 years old. One suspects that he may have been a bit older as that would have made him 15 years old when he launched his pro boxing career.

Regardless, he was quite an interesting personality during an interesting phase of West Coast boxing.

Arne K. Lang’s third boxing book, titled “George Dixon, Terry McGovern and the Culture of Boxing in America, 1890-1910,” rolled off the press in September of last year. Published by McFarland, the book can be ordered directly from the publisher or via Amazon.

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