Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Page 13
The calls for censorship were especially zealous in British colonies where nonwhites outnumbered whites. In Johannesburg, South Africa, the town clerk advised the agents and proprietors of local theaters against acquiring the rights to show the film since the town council planned to prohibit it, and the Germiston Municipality soon followed suit. By 9 July the minister of justice general, J. B. M. Hertzog, had ordered police forces throughout the Union to halt all exhibitions of the Jeffries-Johnson moving picture and to tear down any fight post-ers.67 An editorialist for Calcutta's Englishman argued that the film would “do no good” in India since the natives would interpret it as “a race struggle.”68 He not only called on U.S. authorities to “secure and destroy” the interracial fight film, but he also hoped that “a spirit of sanity, or indirect official influence” would prevent the importation and exhibition of the film in India.
In Kingston, Jamaica, white colonials worried about the disruptive effects of Johnson's recorded victory on the majority-black island. Two years earlier Johnson's defeat of Burns had emboldened many black Jamaicans, creating difficulties for the island's white policemen.69 Determined to prevent a repeat of this tense situation, several white colonials wrote to the Daily Gleaner protesting the newspaper's publicity of the Jeffries-Johnson match in “head-lines and pictures.”70 After the fight the prospect of its cinematographic exhibition generated even more condemnation in the Gleaner. “Can you think it will be good for the people of Kingston and Jamaica that moving pictures of the recent prize fight have been already noticed in the streets of Kingston?” a local clergyman asked. He argued that white Jamaicans should follow the lead of white Americans in calling for the prohibition of the moving picture.
Protesters in the white settler nations of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada also joined the movement. “The defeat of Jeffries is deeply felt in Australia, where racial prejudice is as strong, if not stronger than in America,” one reporter observed. “The antipathy of the cornstalk [native-born white Australian] to the Aboriginal is deep-rooted, and most white people hoped to see Tommy Burns's conqueror get the beating of his life.”71 Clergymen in Melbourne petitioned Prime Minister Andrew Fisher to bar the fight film's importation, while their counterparts in New Zealand waged a similar campaign.72 Canadians took some of the swiftest actions against the moving picture. Perhaps reports that the postfight race rioting in the United States had spilled over the border into Windsor, Ontario, causing clashes between local whites and blacks, had pushed them to join the protest.73 Out east, the United Baptist Association of New Brunswick passed a resolution asking the lieutenant governor to prohibit the film's exhibition in the province. In Montreal, Quebec, the owners of moving picture houses voluntarily refused to show the film. In Toronto, Ontario, the backlash against the Jeffries-Johnson cinematograph helped to usher in a new provincial law barring all prizefight pictures, with fines ranging from $50 to $300 or the alternative of three months in prison.74
Reports surfaced that the censorship movement had even reached Europe. Johnson's victory had apparently provoked “a campaign against negroes in Berlin.”75 In an effort to suppress any further “sensationalism,” a committee of concerned citizens demanded that German authorities ban the exhibition of the fight pictures and bar the “braggart Ethiopian” from boxing anywhere in the country. They also hoped to “put a stop to the employment of negroes as sideshow freaks outside of would-be fashionable cafes and restaurants.” Johnson was the target of broader frustrations over the recent influx of black entertainers who made the cakewalk, coon songs, and “nigger plays” all the rage in Berlin. In particular, the visiting black men's “disgraceful affairs” with “a certain class of white girls” had raised the ire of many Germans.76 Seizing on the Jeffries-Johnson film controversy, this citizen group endeavored to rid the capital of the supposedly degenerate influences of black performers and their art forms. The fight film remained a subject of intense litigation between Berlin's concessionaires and police authorities for more than a year.
This concerted white backlash against the Jeffries-Johnson moving picture produced some unintended consequences. In their outspoken efforts to control its distribution, the fight film's white opponents had only made it more enticing for nonwhite audiences. White officials were understandably afraid that global distribution networks and market forces would trump local governance, allowing the film to permeate the colonies. People of color also recognized this possibility. “Do not worry,” one African American reporter declared. “The Johnson-Jeffries fight pictures will be shown the world over. Public sentiment is one thing and the silver dollar is another.”77
A VICTORY FOR THE DARKER RACES
The commodification of mass culture was changing the geopolitical landscape, into one defined more by the color line than by national or imperial borders. While mass culture's expanding reach and accelerating speed was uniting whites from across the globe in the preservation of the racial and imperial status quo, it was also uniting nonwhites in opposition to Western control. A drawing in Melbourne's Punch magazine depicted this emerging racial geography. Titled, “Knocked Out! Two Ways of Looking at It,” it showed the defeated Jeffries lying face up in the ring while two anthropomorphized “worlds” looked on. The sad-faced “White World” gazed at his fallen hero, while his smiling black counterpart danced over Jeffries's body.78
Thanks to modern technology, news and images of Johnson's triumph streamed into nonwhite communities, where they took on a life of their own. A South African editorialist ironically observed, “The black and coloured races have been duly notified of the [Jeffries-Johnson] struggle by the agencies expressly invented by the civilized races for the dissemination of news, and the result will be a far greater injury to the white man's prestige than any defeat of the forces of a European Power by a barbarian horde.”79 He and many of his contemporaries believed that mass-marketed prizefights had the power to unsettle established racial scripts. Comparing the popularity of professional boxers with the legendary importance of medieval knights, he argued, “There is something more striking to the imagination in the ordeal by single combat than in the clash of arms of a multitude.…For this reason the knock-out blow given to Jeffries resounds throughout every region where the white man rules.” Disseminated through an increasingly transnational network of communications, Johnson's victory was inspiring a wave of colored dissension.
The interracial match threatened to shake even the most secluded areas of the colonial world, for people of color had developed their own webs of exchange that extended far beyond both the reach of conventional news sources and the watchful eye of white officials. The same South African editorialist feared that reports of Johnson's victory would “be conveyed by that mysterious ‘wireless’ in vogue among the aboriginal peoples of the earth to the darkest recesses of the jungles and the dreariest heights of hill fastnesses.” He predicted that in the United States, where the black was “a pariah,” the fight would simply “embitter a race hatred…already terrible in its intensity,” while in the Philippines, the match results would be “hailed with joy.” He also agonized over the fight's potential effects in India and Egypt, where “semi-educated students” were “developing into seditious agitators.” In southern Africa, exaggerated stories of Johnson's triumph would travel by word of mouth, “even in the most remote kraals of the interior.” The “white man's prestige” was at stake, and with it, one of the bases of Western dominance.
This editorialist's fears of racial upheaval were not misplaced. Johnson's defeat of Jeffries had energized his black fans in the United States. “Oh, you Jack Johnson! O you undisputed champion!” the Savannah Tribune lauded the African American heavyweight. “Like Alexander [the Great] of old, Jack Johnson must weep because he has no more worlds to conquer.”80 The Talladega College professor William Pickens challenged white Americans who claimed that Johnson's victory would “do the Negro race harm.”81 “How, I ask, in the name of heaven can it harm a race to show itself excel
lent?” Pickens asked. “It was a good deal better for Johnson to win and a few Negroes be killed in body for it,” he claimed, “than for Johnson to have lost and all Negroes to have been killed in spirit by the preachments of inferiority from the combined white press.”
Far from doing harm, the match seemed to be awakening African Americans' racial and political consciousness. Reverend G. E. Bevens of the Mount Olive African Methodist Church in Philadelphia predicted that Johnson's win would “increase the spirit of independence in the Negro race” and “make the colored man politically more independent.”82 Johnson's victory had also stirred up more general discussions about nonwhite peoples' right to self-determination. One African American reporter pointed to the negrophobic postfight riots as proof that the white race was “unfit for self-control—self-government—even in so simple an affair as sport.”83 Another compared Johnson's victory over Jeffries in the boxing ring to that of the Japanese over the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War. “Johnson followed the Japs in demonstrating that the white man's burden was unnecessarily assumed,” he declared. “Not only was Jeffries forced out of the ropes, but so also was race prejudice and domination.”84
Although some African American newspapers called for the prohibition of the Jeffries-Johnson moving picture, most condemned the hypocrisy of the white movement against it. “What a folly!” one headline shouted in the Washington Bee, while the Baltimore Afro-American called the proposed bans “childish” and inappropriate, especially in a civilized country that prided itself on being the “land of the free and home of the brave.”85 Other black writers criticized white complaints about the fight pictures' supposed brutality. After all, no white reformers had ever decried the potentially riotous effects of the theatrical adaptation of Thomas Dixon's Clansman, nor had they taken any action against the barbaric crime of lynching. A clever cartoon in the Chicago Defender even showed Uncle Sam throwing a fight film promoter in jail while he allowed white lynchers to run free.86 White Americans had evidently slipped into degeneracy. “They have made monkeys of themselves,” one black reporter argued, “and have permitted themselves to become the laughing stock of the world.”87
Yet white Americans were not alone in their hypocritical reaction to the Jeffries-Johnson moving picture. Leo Daniels, a black Canadian expatriate living in Glasgow, Scotland, bemoaned the “world-wide move” against the film.88 In a passionate letter to the Indianapolis Freeman he explored the twisted reasoning behind this widespread white backlash. “Our victories must not be kept before the youth of a white man's country; it's too humiliating,” he observed. “Had Jeffries won would this be so? No, they would have been used to cower these poor, simple, good-hearted natives to make them fear the power of the white man and make them feel their own insignificance before him.” Those who protested the film were simply out to preserve the global color line. After residing in Britain for many years, “mixing and mingling with all classes of men and women,” Daniels had come to one conclusion. “The black man must make his own way; no white man will do it for him, nor yet help him to do it,” he maintained, “because the united white press, the united white Christion [sic] civilization (?), and the united white state rulers are at one side in all things where a Negro's interest is at stake.” White solidarity was now the rule, not just in the case of the censorship movement, but in all aspects of life.
Despite this wall of white resistance, Daniels believed that Johnson's victory had the power to inspire and unify people of color, and, if properly harnessed, it could go a long way in reshaping the race's image on the world stage. As he explained, “Johnson has put the world to thinking; if there is a great muscular development and physical ability, there must also be great brain power somewhere.” Now that Johnson had “established world-wide fame for himself and the down-trodden race” in the boxing ring, others could go out and “do likewise in their art, profession, science or trades.” Given the sweeping efforts to suppress the Jeffries-Johnson film, black people needed to disseminate their own accounts of the fight's significance. “Publishers, give the world the history of this great battle in book form as it would have been shown on the screen,” Daniels urged. “Give the biography of the champion, also that of others of your good men, and let the world read. Let it go down into history. Give the comments of the sporting world's presses of the injustice shown in that country to an inoffensive people and your champion.” In an age of concerted white opposition, especially in the “yellow gutter papers” of the so-called civilized nations, Daniels argued that “colored journalists and the Afro-American press” were the “black man's hope.” They could no longer remain focused within “the confines of the race-hating hordes of America.” Instead, they could build on the momentum of Johnson's victory to sustain an alternative conversation about racial justice that stretched across international borders.
News of the fight had already spread to expatriate communities of black Americans, inspiring enthusiastic displays of racial solidarity. On the morning of the match the African American and Afro-Caribbean residents of Cuba's Isle of Pines (Isle of Youth) had flocked to saloons and other meeting places in the city of Santa Fe to await the results. Most were devoted Johnson fans. In the months before the fight they had even formed a club called the Jack Johnson Betting Pool, scraping together what little money they had in support of their black hero.89 When the first confirmed reports of Johnson's triumph arrived at 1:45 PM, they organized a public celebration. The boisterous party had lasted all night long. “Some were dancing, jumping and doing every funny stunt that they could think of,” a correspondent recounted. “Many toasts were said in honor of Jack Johnson, with many best wishes for our champion.”90
No wonder Cuban officials moved quickly to ban the fight film. Not only did Johnson's triumph inspire the raucous celebrations of African American and Afro-Caribbean expatriates, but the film also threatened to aggravate their homegrown problem of rising Afro-Cuban consciousness. It did not help that black and mixed-race Cubans had begun to mobilize, in 1908 forming the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), which demanded full equality for Afro-Cubans. Amid widespread rumors of a black conspiracy to gain control of Cuba, both the PIC and the Jeffries-Johnson fight film were outlawed in 1910.91
Regardless of the risks involved, Johnson's expanding fan base soon reached across the Pacific to the U.S. colony of the Philippines, where Filipinos embraced his racial triumph as their own, using it as a rallying cry for self-determination. Many were longtime fans of the black champion. Packed with laudatory tales of Johnson's exploits, African American newspapers like the Chicago Defender had long traveled to the archipelago via the black soldiers serving in the U.S. occupying forces. Thanks to the efforts of visiting U.S. pugilists and promoters, by 1910 boxing had also become a favorite Philippine pastime. It was especially popular among poor and working-class men in Manila, who used the sport to assert their masculinity at a moment when white Americans cast them as effeminate boys desperately in need of white tutelage. Catering to the growing demand for boxing reports, local newspapers provided front-page stories of the Jeffries-Johnson fight. The Manila Times even promised to post the fight results as soon as they arrived by telegraph from Reno.92
Hoping for their own chance to witness this historic match, Johnson's Filipino fans looked forward to the arrival of the moving picture. Fearing colonial unrest, Manila's Municipal Board banned its exhibition. The large numbers of muchachos, or male house servants, in the capital city, along with the recent rise of the Nacionalista Party for Philippine independence, likely influenced the council's decision.93 One Filipino writer declared, “The punches thrown in Reno by the black boxer Johnson have reverberated in Manila, wounding the delicate eardrums of our Municipal Council.” The reason for the ban was simple: “The victor is a black man. The vanquished is not.”94
Thanks to the numerous postfight reports, Filipino fans were well aware of the violent white American backlash against Johnson's victory. Pedro Quinto of the Renacimiento
Filipino argued that this backlash fit within a much longer history of white supremacy in the United States, dating back to the days of the founding fathers. “Even [George] Washington did not see in the black man anything other than a hunted slave in the African deserts and a trafficked object on the plantations of the new world,” Quinto explained. “If in those days the black was a man in the United States, he was certainly not considered and treated as a man.”95 Evidently, “the equality of men was not written for the unfortunate black man.” Instead, as Quinto emphasized, “The mere idea of a man of this [black] race raising his hand against a white man was considered a monstrosity, and it is the same even today.” With the U.S. forces still occupying the Philippines, the nationalist Quinto was not only commenting on the unfair treatment of African Americans but was also critiquing the lowly status of Filipinos under the regime of benevolent assimilation.
Whether or not the fight film ever made it to Manila, Quinto hoped that Johnson's resounding defeat of Jeffries would help to overturn the “tyranny” of white supremacy, thereby promoting “civilization” and “social justice” throughout the world. In Quinto's estimation, the African American champion had provided “a service to Humanity” by “showing how far effort and ‘training’ can take individuals and peoples.” The assumed inferiority of the darker races could no longer be taken for granted.