Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Page 14
In the British colony of India the native press also followed the match, with an eye to its subversive significance as an interracial contest. Worried about the potential fallout, British officials monitored the numerous postfight reports in Indian newspapers, especially since Johnson's victory came on the heels of a politically charged physical revival among native youths. British ideas of Indian men's supposedly weak and womanish bodies had pushed many to join in this revival, whether in the gym, on the field, or through military service. They believed that British rule had softened them and that therefore they must cultivate their bodies in order to throw off the yoke of submission. A writer for the Abhyudaya warned that Indian men were in danger of losing their physical strength, “the most essential element in the formation of a nation.”96 Amid these biopolitical discussions, many Indian journalists claimed Johnson's triumph as a powerful symbol of their own fitness for self-determination.
They shaped their postfight reports into parables of pride and resistance. A correspondent for the Arya Prákash provided eager readers with a graphic description of Jeffries's demise at the hands of Johnson: “The Negro got the better of his adversary and dealt one after another such heavy blows with his iron fist on the face of his white opponent that the latter's cheek bones were broken, blood gushed out copiously from his torn-up cheeks, one of his eyes got injured and finally he fell on the ground senseless and almost lifeless and was dragged out of the enclosure.” A writer for the Kesari argued that any attempts to ban the fight film would ultimately prove misguided from both a practical and moral standpoint. “If the prohibitions are made to make the world continue in the belief that coloured people are of a lower order in everything than the Whites, they will be of no avail. Already the whole world knows the result of the fight,” he declared. “The Whites should not delude themselves with the idea of such questionable prestige.”97
The sweeping efforts to ban the Jeffries-Johnson moving picture had only further exposed the global scope of white supremacy. “Even Englishmen cannot overcome their prejudices against black skin and are apt to think that the Black man is inferior to the White man in point of civilisation,” a reporter for the Gujaráti Punch argued. The censorship movement had laid bare the fundamental tensions between Christian pronouncements of “universal brotherhood” and the realities of imperialism and race prejudice. As another native writer sardonically suggested, rather than focusing on saving the heathens abroad, foreign missionary boards should “divert a great portion of their energies homeward to cure the maladies of racial animosity, colour mania, Negrophobia, &c.”98
What disturbed Indian commentators most was the rabid postfight violence against African Americans. “One cannot but read with pain the account of the recent riots all over the United States—the attacks on poor Negroes in the country by white men,” one writer expressed. The native press openly chastised white Americans, maintaining that black Americans were “entirely free from blame in the matter.”99 “What did the riots mean?” an editorialist for the Indian Spectator pondered. “They meant that the [white] Americans not only claimed superiority to the Negroes in every respect, even in physical strength, but they could not brook the idea of an individual Negro developing larger and tougher muscles than an American known for his strength.” This petty jealousy over a matter of physical strength simply exposed the white man's “depth of barbarism.”100
The violent repression of African Americans also spoke to the Indian subjects' own sense of frustration under British rule, for they still experienced daily rituals of humiliation and brutality. Several native writers noted that despite the continuing efforts of African Americans to uplift themselves, racial terror remained endemic in the United States. “Although slavery has been abolished in America Negroes are practically still treated as no better than slaves, as is evident from ‘lynching’ which is in vogue there,” one editorialist declared. “The white people labour under the conviction that Negroes have been created to serve them, the sole aim of their existence is to work as slaves to the Whites, and whatever be their other qualifications their colour alone is sufficient disability to deprive them of any better treatment.”101 Whether in India or in the United States, no attempt to educate or advance oneself seemed to offer people of color respite from assault and discrimination.
The Jeffries-Johnson prizefight and its bloody aftermath had undoubtedly “brought to the fore the worthlessness of the vaunted Western civilization.”102 Indian commentators argued that white barbarity was exemplified not only in the gratuitous violence of the sport of boxing but also in white men's unwillingness to accept defeat graciously. “There is nothing more inhuman than spitefully to commit outrages upon the black population from a false sense of injury. If this be civilization, away with it to the devil! And let the East rot in its uncivilized condition,” a writer for the Gujaráti declared.103 With or without the film, the news of Johnson's victory was beginning to crack through the armor of white supremacy the world over.
JEFFRIES-JOHNSON AND THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA
The expansion of commercial sporting culture was clearly helping to link local and global issues of race in the minds of regular people, both white and nonwhite. In the Union of South Africa a confluence of local, national, and transnational factors had intensified racial feelings in recent years, which made the Jeffries-Johnson fight seem like a matter of life and death for many white settlers. “To the average man in the street, it was not the question so much of a boxing contest—it was the colour element,” a white South African later recounted.104 In the days before the match Britons and Boers alike had gathered together to discuss the “upholding of the pride and prestige of the white race against the black, and the probable effect upon negroes the world over if the black man were victorious.” Through the fight and the ensuing controversy over its moving picture, they came to connect their own racial difficulties with the broader project of perpetrating white world supremacy.
Popularly known for having a “natural antipathy for negroes,” Jeffries achieved a special celebrity among white South African sports-men.105 Although most had never seen, let alone talked, to Jeffries in person, they embraced the white American boxer with an intimate sense of racial brotherhood. As a correspondent for Johannesburg's Sunday Times joked, South Africa seemed “to contain thousands of Mr. Jeffries's oldest and dearest friends.”106 In pubs all across the Rand he had encountered many men who “talked familiarly of ‘Jeff.’” “Some of them had known him when he was a little white-headed boy, scores of them had taught him how to spar, [and] dozens of them had trained him,” the writer wryly recounted. Still others claimed to have received “long cablegrams from him declaring he was in splendid condition and sure to win.” They wove the many newspaper and magazine reports of the white American champion into the very fabric of their personal life stories, intertwining his racial trials with their own. When Jeffries lost, they were understandably devastated.
As white South Africans joined the transnational campaign to suppress the Jeffries-Johnson fight film, their motivations were wrapped up in local contests over political rule. A few months before the interracial match the British and the Boers had worked through their differences to establish the Union of South Africa as a “white man's country,” effectively excluding native Africans, coloreds, and Indians from full citizenship rights.107 White settlers, a small minority of the population, not only feared for their physical safety but also feared the potential ungovernability of their new nation. The British had made a major concession to the Afrikaners by refusing to mandate black suffrage. This calculated maneuver to unite South Africa's whites left natives without the vote in the former Afrikaner colonies and with limited voting rights in the Cape. A decade earlier the British high commissioner Lord Alfred Milner had already outlined the philosophy undergirding this maneuver, writing, “The ultimate end is a self-governing white Community, supported by well-treated and justly-governed black labour from Cape Town to Zambesi.”108 People
of color were ancillary to the project of white nation building; they were there to work, but not to reap any of the Union's benefits.
Many white South Africans believed that it was their Darwinistic right to exercise this power, and they were not particularly concerned about the treatment of black laborers. For them, the establishment of the Union marked the end of a long “transition stage” from black to white control. An editorialist explained, “The struggle for mastery with the natives from the old Boer voortrekker days up to the last Natal rebellion [Bambatha Rebellion, 1906] has taught us one indelible lesson—that we have paid in blood for the dominance of the superior race…and that we are not to be cheated from what is due to us.”109 Johnson's irrefutable triumph over Jeffries undermined the validity of racial claims to political power by white settlers, who worried about the potential fallout of its cinematographic exhibition in theaters throughout the country.
On the same editorial pages that they discussed the negative consequences of Johnson's victory they acknowledged the insecurity of their control, especially “in the midst of a teeming aboriginal population.” “In South African life, the native is always with us,” declared the editor of the Times of Natal. “He is the dominant factor in our social problem.”110 It was difficult to reconcile the native's supposedly stunted evolution with the rapid march of Western modernity. “As an aboriginal there is much to admire in him,” the editor explained; “as a savage, with the rudiments of civilization badly planted in his brain, there is much to regret in him.” It was therefore the task of white officials “to strike the balance between the two conditions.” Inundated with numerous reports of postfight racial unrest in the United States, they feared that the specter of Johnson's triumph would upset this delicate balance, causing the natives to forget their subordinate position.
The rise of South Africa's mining industry and the nation's widening web of transatlantic connections had already disturbed this equilibrium. The discovery of diamonds and gold in the late nineteenth century had radically reshaped South African race relations. As the opening of the mines created an insatiable demand for cheap labor, native Africans found themselves relegated to the role of “hewers and drawers” in a society increasingly divided by race rather than civilization. The growing consolidation of the industry under the ownership of large foreign corporations had even forced formerly independent white miners into wage work. Not only did they experience declining economic opportunities, but they found themselves in competition with black laborers—the same laborers who had worked for them in the early days of the mining boom.111
This industrial revolution also triggered the large-scale migration of nonwhite men into urban spaces, creating new problems for colonial authorities. In mining areas such as the East Rand, bachelor communities of native laborers encroached on the edges of white towns, sparking widespread fears of black men raping white women. Even more disturbingly, old tribal enemies, now dislodged from their homelands, began to find a common ground in their shared experiences of racial oppression. As they traveled back and forth between urban and rural areas, this sense of racial solidarity began to permeate the native community. It also began to extend beyond national borders as they obtained unprecedented access to the outside world not only through their encounters with black foreigners but also through their consumption of mass culture.
White settlers were most concerned about the natives' increasing encounters with African Americans. South Africa's industrial growth had attracted many black Americans to Cape Town, Durban, and other port cities, where they worked as stevedores, machinists, and tradesmen alongside a cosmopolitan mix of native Africans, Indians, and Afro-Caribbeans. Some black Americans even ventured further inland, laboring on the railroads, while others came as missionaries, helping to establish the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) across the country. White South Africans were particularly suspicious of the AME missionaries' role in the rise of “Ethiopianism,” a religious tradition that embraced the need for greater black autonomy in both the sacred and the secular realms.112
They were no less wary of the subversive impact of visiting African American performers. Black American minstrel troupes like Orpheus McAdoo's Jubilee Singers had toured in South Africa since the late nineteenth century. Although these troupes certainly catered to the darky stereotypes of white audiences, they still managed to infuse their performances with a sense of sophistication and style, and through them, many native Africans across class lines came to see black Americans as exemplars of urbanity and modernity. Men like McAdoo encouraged this perception, often providing native fans with glowing accounts of black American achievements in education and business.113 Inspired by one of the jubilee singers' performances in 1890, one native reviewer had asked, “When will the day come when the African people will be like the Americans? When will they stop being slaves and become nations with their own government?”114 Although full of exaggerations about the extent of black American political independence, these performances influenced local black musical traditions and inspired African audiences to imagine a better life beyond the confines of their own circumstances. White South Africans came to blame nearly every example of native insubordination on the poisonous influence of visiting African Americans. Coupled with the urban migration of native men, this outside influence seemed to be inspiring a dangerous brand of black consciousness that transcended not only tribal but also national affiliation.
As part of this accelerating black cultural traffic from across the Atlantic, the postfight publicity and moving picture only threatened to exacerbate things. Even though nonwhites were prohibited from entering bioscope theaters in cities like Johannesburg, most white South African commentators still agonized over the special power of photos and film, both in terms of their visual impact and their ability to reach poor and working-class people of color. As one editorialist warned:
Within a week or two the mail papers will be introduced, having full page illustrations of the fight and certainly posters will be issued with these journals depicting the defeated Jeffries prostrate and the victorious negro standing above him, ready to administer a final blow. These pictures will be exhibited in the shop windows and on boards in the public streets, and will have an even more demoralising effect upon the native mind than the mere news of the white man's defeat. Again, we shall be treated with numerous yards of bioscopic films giving every degrading phase of the contest, and as these pictures were obtained at a heavy cost they will be extensively advertised.115
Already tales of Johnson's triumph were not isolated to “the staid newspaper-reading citizens” but were making their way into the enthusiastic conversations of “cab-drivers, messengers, and every other class of the coloured population.” The local natives in Bloemfontein reportedly cabled Johnson to congratulate the black heavyweight on his victory over the white American.116 Likewise, signing himself “a Black Coolie,” an Indian from Pietermaritzburg wrote a bold and contemptuous letter to the Times of Natal.117 “The white races can do or say what they may, but the fact remains branded in the heavens ‘that the Black man is wearing the laurels of the ring of the world,’ and may he always be,” the writer declared. “A white man cannot do as he pleases. Man proposes but God dispenses.” Given the Indian's obvious lack of respect for whites as well as the strong likelihood that members of his community shared his sentiments, the barring of the Jeffries-Johnson fight film seemed justified.
White commentators were especially anxious about the large number of young native men living in urban areas, many of whom were houseboys (domestic servants) and mine workers with the disposable income to spend on fight reports and film tickets. Even before the Jeffries-Johnson controversy came to a head, the houseboys' growing impertinence had become a topic of public discussion. Their exposure to white civilization in the cities was apparently making these “young hot-bloods” all the more unmanageable.118 One white writer joked, “It is unfortunately the case that as his [the houseboy's] intelligence exp
ands his energy diminishes.”119 Given the houseboys' close proximity to white women and the longstanding belief in the hypersexuality of black men, their unruliness was no laughing matter. A letter to the editor warned, “We in these colonies, for the sake of good government and safety for our wives and children…should do our best to prevent the natives getting swelled head [sic] and attempting to imitate their dusky champion.”120 Many white settlers feared that the circulating images of Johnson would only make the natives bolder.
Although the specific conditions of industrialization and black migration differed between the United States and South Africa, black working-class men on both sides of the Atlantic were increasingly becoming connected through a shared culture of the urban dandy, an important facet of the rise of transnational New Negro politics. Rather than taking on the best of civilization, much like Johnson, the prototypical urban houseboy seemed to have contracted all of its vices. He was supposedly a spendthrift who wasted all of his money on gaudy suits with bright colors and loud patterns. Annoyingly smug, he considered himself “a member of fashionable native society,” inviting “other house-boys to his room at night, where they [would] sit till the small hours smoking cigarettes and discussing house-boy affairs in stentorian tones.”121 Perhaps most importantly, he ended manual labor, often preferring to make easy money in the underground economy. White South Africans also painted a similar portrait of the archetypal black mine worker. His purported participation in the illicit diamond trade enabled him to afford elaborate outfits, cigars, and champagne. He often spoke loudly and swaggered along city sidewalks, refusing to be silent and invisible.122 While the “nigger dandy” may have been a figure of derision in the eyes of white South Africans, native men actively adopted this flamboyant persona, in defiance of the racial order, as a means to express publicly their own class aspirations and masculine prerogatives.