Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  FIGURE 5. Australian artist Norman Lindsay painted Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns in action for the front page of the December 1908 issue of the Lone Hand. © H., C. & A. Glad.

  As the fight began Johnson goaded Burns, “Come on Tahmy…you've got to get it.”123 In the first round it took him just fifteen seconds to knock the white champion to the canvas. Johnson continued his wisecracking as he blasted Burns with powerful shots to the body and head. “Ah, poor little Tahmy,” he teased. “Don't you know how to fight, Tahmy? They said you were a champion.” When Burns attempted to defend his swollen face, Johnson simply laughed, “That's right, Tahmy, feint away.” Every so often Johnson even dropped his fists and stood up straight “in an attitude of indolent arrogance,” daring Burns to take his best shot.

  The subsequent rounds offered the increasingly dejected Australian crowd more of the same. During a particularly bad stretch of fighting in the third round, the spectators reprised their battle cry of “Good boy, Tommy; good boy, Tommy,” as if their voices could convey their collective strength to the ailing white champion.124 In the fourth round Burns called Johnson a “cur” and other choice names in a desperate attempt to get back into the fight. These epithets only served to inspire a more vicious attack from the black heavyweight. While Burns's condition deteriorated, his face bulging and eyes blackened, Johnson remained fresh, confident, and at ease.

  In the final rounds of the match Johnson kept up his physical and verbal assault. At times it looked as if Johnson were actually holding up Burns so that he could prolong his opponent's punishment in front of the Australian crowd. “Jewel won't know you when she gets you back from this fight,” Johnson taunted at the opening of the eighth round. In the ninth, he struck Burns repeatedly while shouting, “I'll teach you something.…Look at this, and this.…And this.”125 By the twelfth round it was obvious that the battered white fighter had absolutely no chance of winning, and many of the spectators began shouting for police intervention.

  Fearing that Burns was on the verge of being knocked out, the police inspector entered the ring to stop the match in the fourteenth round, and McIntosh declared Johnson the winner by points. Johnson became the first-ever black heavyweight champion of the world. With an exuberant mix of joy and bravado, he jumped up and shadowboxed for the moving picture cameras. One Australian sportswriter likened Johnson's impromptu celebration to “a triumphant war dance—like the dance after the battle, before the cannibal feast began.”126 It was as if Johnson's “way-back ancestors” were “calling aloud their exultation through the muscles of their descendant.” Johnson's body had become the public conduit for their longstanding grievances.

  Every postfight report described the white spectators' quiet dejection. “Johnson waved his hands to the crowd that did not cheer him,” one Australian journalist recounted. “A few straggling voices were raised but they were mere flecks of sound in an ocean of silence.”127 It took just twelve minutes for the stands to empty. Outside the stadium the “big crowd shook its head sadly, spat into the roadway, and silently dispersed. It hadn't a cheer in it.”128 Amid the hush one despondent fan muttered, “When a white man lowers himself to fight with a nigger it's time he got a licking.”129 An overwhelming sense of disappointment also permeated Melbourne, Wollongong, and Broken Hill, where throngs of the white fighter's supporters stopped traffic as they milled around outside newspaper headquarters and post offices in a state of shock.130 Intended as a public spectacle of white supremacy, the Burns-Johnson match had gone horribly awry.

  While the reaction of white Americans was predictably one of anger and disappointment, African American fans rejoiced at the news of Johnson's victory. As Lester Walton of the New York Age declared, “Every Negro, from the lad large enough to sell papers to the old man who is able to read the papers (if he can read) is happy to-day.”131 Some hoped that Johnson's display of skill and courage in the ring would help to redeem black people in the eyes of the world. “Every time Johnson knocked down Burns a bunch of prejudice fell,” Walton exclaimed, “and at the same time the white man's respect for the Negro race went up a notch.” Johnson's black supporters looked forward to his next fight against a white man. As Bert Williams told the Indianapolis Freeman, “If it is held outside the United States the colored people will migrate for a while to see it, but if it is held here it will bring together the largest single collection of colored sports ever assembled.”132 It was only natural for African Americans to assume a proud “peacock pose,” since a black man from Galveston was now the “champion over land and sea.”133

  For Johnson's black fans, his triumph was more than just cathartic. They grabbed this chance to challenge established ideas about white men's physical, and therefore geopolitical, supremacy. As one African American editorialist maintained, Johnson's pugilistic success had forced the “unwilling civilized world” to acknowledge “the physical prowess of the black race.”134 If blacks and whites could compete on equal terms, it would undoubtedly threaten the racial and imperial status quo. The editorialist warned, “Let a wise world remember that the Negro race has an untouched store of physical perfection in Africa, as among the Zulus.” Turning the disparaging discourses of black barbarism on their head, he argued that Johnson's victory proved that the “Negro's closeness to nature” was actually an asset rather than a draw-back. The black man's “inherited strength and endurance, his ability to endure pain and punishment, his resource and ever presence of mind, [and] his confidence and courage” all combined to make him “the physical superior of the white man.” J. Bernie Barbour, a well-known black composer and producer from Chicago, crafted an ode to the new champion titled “The Black Gladiator.” Barbour placed Johnson within the classical tradition of ancient warriors, calling him a “Black Spartacus” and a “Black Alexander.” For Barbour, Johnson was “A proof that all men are the same / In muscle sinew and in brain.”135 Contrary to popular belief, the black man possessed not only the physical ability but also the mental acuity and the strength of character to make him an important player in world politics.

  Johnson's victory, coupled with his black fans' newfound confidence, undoubtedly rattled white boxing fans on both sides of the Pacific. One African American journalist predicted that if the black race managed to maintain its hold on the world championship for at least a year or two, “a few thousand prejudiced ‘pugs’ and sports” would end up “as inmates of insane asylums.”136 White Americans had already become increasingly sensitive to the apparent “uppishness” of their black counterparts in the wake of the fight. Walton provided a few tongue-in-cheek rules for his African American readers to follow: “Don't accidently [sic] jostle a Caucasian in the street car or on the street. Don't talk about prize fighting in public. Don't speak to your white brother other than in a quiet inoffensive manner.” White Americans seemed to have little tolerance for any black assertions of “a spirit of manhood and independence.”137

  Back in Australia white sportsmen took out their frustrations on Johnson. Johnson complained to the Sydney Morning Herald, “Since I beat Burns…the people of New South Wales have suddenly taken a great dislike to me.…Burns is more popular here than I am, and all because he does what you Australians call the ‘penitent smoodge.’”138 Disgruntled white sports fans booed Johnson at postfight appearances and defaced his image in advertisements for the prizefight film. One reporter wrote, “Johnson's brown picture is invariably mud-bespattered or torn, and, wherever in reach, it is decked with such written legends as ‘The Black Cow,’ ‘The big black skite,’ and worse—far worse.”139 Some Australian vandals even used crayons to color in the black champion's so-called yellow streak.

  Burns's pictures bore “no signs of disfigurement.” Most white Australians remained loyal to their defeated hero, plastering his images with encouraging phrases like “Good old white man” and “You'll out him next time, Tommy.”140 As they sought to restore Burns's damaged reputation, the stock narrative of a courageous white man in the face of an overp
owering black brute began to emerge. Burns encouraged this view of the match in the press. “I did my best,” the white fighter reassured his fans. “I fought hard, but Johnson was too big, and his reach was too much for me.…I could do no more.”141 Australian reporters agreed. “However poor a showing Burns made as a boxer and hitter, he proved himself a man of extraordinary pluck and stamina,” one sports-writer claimed. “His capacity for taking punishment is something altogether remarkable. His gameness is beyond all question.”142 Absolved of his pugilistic sins, Burns maintained his popularity, and his exhibitions continued to draw large crowds at theaters throughout Australia and New Zealand.143

  The depth of Australia's racial partisanship surprised some. An editorialist for the Australasian declared, “In a population where the negro is not an ugly ever-present problem, as in the [United] States, it is impossible to concede that there was justification for the manifestation of this feeling.”144 Yet in making such a statement the writer conveniently overlooked his own nation's history of racial discrimination, from Aboriginal dispossession to immigration restrictions. Although one Melburnian accused her fellow citizens of being poor sports, she was careful to qualify her criticism. “I am not a sympathizer with coloured people,” she reassured the readers of Punch. “I hate them, and I should die of disgust if I had to sit in the same compartment of a tram or train with one.”145 Despite any protestations to the contrary, white Australians were certainly no strangers to the concept of racial segregation.

  The fallout of the Burns-Johnson fight made African Americans painfully aware of this fact, and it provoked discussions about the real stakes of the White Australia Policy. As a journalist for the Indianapolis Freeman observed, “While the [immigration restriction] act applies generally, it was brought about as a prohibition against the hordes of yellows and blacks that menace Australia on every side.”146 Even though relatively few African Americans traveled to the antipodes, this knowledge certainly helped to put their local problems of racial prejudice in a transnational perspective. “We,” the journalist avowed, “may take courage of the thought that the ‘colored’ people of America are not so bad off as a race when compared with what is issued out to ‘colored’ people anywhere—everywhere.” The white race's tendency to meddle with and steal from the darker races had created a global powder keg that threatened to explode. Western imperialism had effectively relegated people of color to the status of mere “nomads, fitting only as parasites on society—no real part of it.” The writer warned, “Dispossessed peoples wandering over the face of the earth, evicted by brute force will smoulder—but not always.” If whites continued to draw their own color line, he reasoned that blacks should be able to do the same in their own geographic domains. What was good for White Australia was good for Black Africa.

  White Australians worried that the match foreshadowed a disturbing future of interracial mixing and conflict on both a local and a global scale. For some, Johnson's victory called to mind the terrifying image of “a grinning savage with his foot on the neck of White Australia.”147 They also feared that Burns's humiliating loss at the hands of the African American heavyweight would be “told, sung, and cinematographed everywhere where there is a black skin,” thereby helping to promote widespread “unrest and sedition.”

  Johnson's victory could not have had more inauspicious timing. As a writer for Health & Strength noted, “We have at last a coloured champion at a white man's sport, following closely on the heels of a coloured race becoming recognized as one of the most formidable of the world's Powers.”148 The writer was undoubtedly referring to the rising fortunes of Japan in the Pacific region. Amid this geopolitical instability, the prizefight's significance could not be underestimated. “It was an ethnological study as well as a boxing contest,” one postfight report declared, “and the white man's burden was too great for Burns to carry.”149 Much like Japan's military defeat of Russia just a few years earlier, Johnson's triumph over Burns had put white degeneration on full display, not only in Australia but all around the globe.

  It certainly did not help that Johnson himself used his special access to the press to comment on the apparent decline of white world supremacy. As he told one Melburnian reporter, “While my people—the descendants of my ancestors in Africa—are increasing in numbers, the white man is decreasing all over the earth. Read the figures—those of your own country, of the United States, of England, of France, of all the white world.”150 Pointing to the burgeoning birth rates of “the colored peoples of India, Japan and China” and those of his “own race,” he challenged, “Do you think it is to go on forever, this domination of the millions of people of color by a handful of white folks? I think it is not.” He warned, “It may not come in my time or in yours, but the time will come when the black and yellow man will hold the earth, and the white man will be regarded just as the colored man is now.” Johnson was more than happy to play on the widespread fears of white race suicide.

  Given these political and demographic realities, some white Australians called for the maintenance of a strict color line separating whites from all nonwhites, whether they be the “brownish-yellow brothers / Up in China and Japan,” the “Hindoo and Afghan,” the “gentle Soudanese,” or even the “smiling picaninny.”151 Assumed to be pagans, polygamists, and cannibals, these “colored brethren” were supposedly unfit to live alongside civilized whites. Taking up the banner of the white man's burden in the wake of Burns's downfall, the Australian poet Tom Beasley declared:

  It is only right and proper,

  It is only just and fair,

  That our brethren, black and copper,

  Who are scattered here and there,

  Should receive our old belltopper

  And the thrippence we can spare.

  But they're nicely isolated

  In their islands oversea,

  And, as God has segregated

  Them with care from you and me,

  Let us keep them as they're rated

  By Eternity's decree.152

  White men were morally obligated to assist their colored subjects; however, to mingle with them went against God's divine plan.

  White Australian writers often couched this general fear of race mixing in sexual terms as a dangerous contamination of the white body politic. Henry Lawson, a nationalist author whose writings addressed themes of interracial conflict and the need to construct a White Australia, penned a passionate poem about the interracial fight's potentially negative effects. Lawson proclaimed, “For ‘money’ and ‘sporting’ madness—and here, in a land that was white! / You mated a black-man and white-man to stand up before you and fight.” Lawson cautioned:

  You paid and you cheered and you hooted, and this is your need of disgrace;

  It was not Burns that was beaten—for a nigger has smacked your face.

  Take heed—I am tired of writing—but O my people take heed.

  For the time may be near for the mating of the Black and the White to breed.153

  Lawson was not alone in his concerns. There was a sense that the Burns-Johnson prizefight had violated the boundaries of White Australia and that, with this violation, a race war inevitably would erupt. A clergyman from Bendigo prayed, “God grant that the defeat may not be the sullen and solemn prophecy that Australia is to be outclassed and finally vanquished by these dark-skinned people.”154 An ominous Punch cartoon depicted the African American champion's silhouette casting a shadow across the entire continent.155

  Johnson's pugilistic victory seemed to presage a despotic future of colored control beyond the ring. His supposedly unsportsmanlike conduct became a horrifying example of what would happen if political power ever fell into the hands of nonwhite men. Johnson had “gasconaded in anticipation of the contest,” “indulged in cheap, irritating airs during its progress,” and then, afterward, “exulted exuberantly over his beaten foe.” This behavior hardly represented “the bearing of a generous victor.” Alongside the political failure of black self
-determination in Haiti, Johnson's antics provided further proof that “the negro in the ascendant is not a very taking personality.”156

  White Australians poked fun at Johnson's unwarranted air of self-importance. Punch's boxing correspondent mockingly called him the “Champion of the Universe and All Dependencies.”157 Another caricature showed Johnson challenging the world to a host of contests, from riding to jumping to flirting to preaching.158 Although some sports-writers excused Johnson's bravado, they still believed that his blustering behavior confirmed that black men were simply unfit for self-rule. “Johnson's conduct cannot be judged by white standards,” argued one reporter. “He is great big, buck negro, very little removed by a thin veneer of civilisation from the fetish-worshipping savages of wildest Africa. He is not a white man in colour, thought, sentiment, or anything else.”159 Johnson's grandstanding had convinced many white Australians “how very necessary” it was “in a country like America to keep ‘the black trash’ under.”160 The well-known Australian adventurer and writer Randolph Bedford declared, “Blessings on the Immigration Restriction Act! I am forced to believe that much is to be said for Simon Legree.”161

  Yet Johnson clearly represented a new kind of negro, one much bolder than the brutal planter Legree's long-suffering slave Uncle Tom. Writing about a proposed production of Uncle Tom's Cabin that was to feature Johnson, one theater critic argued that the play would have to be “re-written to suit the principal's strength.” “To expect Johnson to sit and humbly suffer while Simon Legree flogs him, would be preposterous,” he contended. It would be “altogether too great a strain upon the public imagination.” The critic also suggested that Johnson be allowed to “arise in his might and ‘pass Legree out,’” for Johnson was neither hapless nor helpless like his predecessor Uncle Tom.162