Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Page 15
These descriptions of African dandies bore a striking resemblance to Johnson's own New Negro lifestyle outside the ring, including his love of fashion, jewels, fast cars, and white women, his cultivated worldliness, and his general irreverence for white men. The African American heavyweight, along with the native houseboy and native mine worker, embodied all of white South Africa's worst fears of racial, gender, sexual, and class upheaval at the turn of the twentieth century. Thus, the Jeffries-Johnson prizefight provided native men with yet another unsanctioned and subversive connection with the wider black world. As gangs of native youths gathered in the streets to celebrate their black American hero's conquest, white South Africans looked to white America for direction.
The controversy surrounding the fight and its film encouraged white South Africa to see its racial destiny as closely linked with that of Jim Crow America. They openly expressed their support for white Americans' violent and repressive response to Johnson's victory. In contrast, many English metropolitan sportsmen used the match to claim a moral high ground over their colonial contemporaries. They lamented the imposition of race in the boxing ring, complaining that white Americans had violated the enlightened British ethics of fair play. Racial, ethnic, class, and religious divisions were not to intrude upon the neutral realm of sport, which in theory offered every man an equal chance at winning.
FIGURE 7. White South African officials worried that exhibitions of the Jeffries-Johnson fight film would only exacerbate the growing impertinence of native houseboys. “The Kaffir House Boy,” Sunday Times, 10 July 1910.
Yorick Gradeley of Health & Strength cautioned that it was “presumptuous” for English boxing fans “to dogmatise upon this racial problem.” Located far from the realities of colonial life, they had come to regard the “negro” as their brother. Yet white settlers' arduous experiences in places like South Africa had proven that if the black man “fancied that he was mightier…he would strive to wrest the scepter from his master's grasp.”123 Gradeley emphasized, “He [the negro] is not your brother; he is no fit mate for your sister. He belongs to a different race; a race that, for its own sake as well as for yours, must be kept separate.”124 The metropolitan calls for a dispassionate spirit of fair play were simply inapplicable to the semicivilized, racially diverse, and highly contentious environments of both the United States and the British colonies.
Invoking the famous story of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gradeley elaborated on these underlying connections between British colonialism and the American “negro problem.” “Oh, it's all very well for you to remind me of the pretty, but maudlin sentimentality of ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’ little Eva, and all that. The negro of that day was a better man than the negro of to-day,” Gradeley declared.125 Under slavery the “negro” had been “pure”; now that he was free, he had become “intolerable.” Gradeley insisted that he was not calling for a return to slavery but rather for the recognition that emancipation had not been “an unmitigated blessing.” He maintained, “I tell you straight that we have no right to judge our Colonial and American kinsmen harshly…[just] because they do not love the black man quite as much as they do their own race.”
Gradeley's candid assertions about the need for a color line both within and beyond the ring provoked a passionate debate in Health & Strength, which tended to pit metropolitan readers against white South Africans. This sporting debate built on the ongoing conflict between metropolitan liberals and white colonials over the political and social status of nonwhites in the British Empire. At the crux of the conflict was the question of whether citizenship rights should be dependent on civilization or skin color. English liberals frowned upon white settlers' often blatant displays of color prejudice, which they saw as rude and uncouth. They argued that demonstrating one's grasp of Western civilization was the key to obtaining full citizenship; therefore, nonwhites could aspire to it, even if their progress was slow. White South Africans, on the other hand, criticized English people in the metropole for their naïve and sentimental view of nonwhites. Determined to construct a white nation, they turned to the United States as a model for racial policy, from immigration restrictions to residential segregation.126
Some English sportsmen were critical of this apparent infiltration of U.S. racial values into the colonies. An outraged Health & Strength reader questioned, “Is Yorick Gradeley an Englishman? If so, then I am disgusted with him, because I think that every Englishman wanted the best man to win.”127 Critiquing white Americans' preoccupation with race, another Londoner advocated character over color as the true marker of manhood. “Some of us would as soon claim kinship with Booker Washington or Coleridge Taylor as with Charles Peace, though the latter's skin was undoubtedly whiter,” he contended.128 In this way they demonized their white American and colonial counterparts without acknowledging their own culpability in the imperial world order.
Coming to Gradeley's defense, white settlers argued for the strict enforcement of racial segregation. A Pietermaritzburg reader charged that Gradeley's critics would not be so quick to claim the black man as their brother if they actually lived in South Africa. He explained, “The black out here has a few centuries to live before he can compare even with the lowest white, let alone be acknowledged as brother.”129 He believed that “social equality” would be a “mistaken policy.” A farmer from Wolvenkraal agreed, arguing that people in England were closing their eyes to the reality of interracial conflict in the colonies. “One thing is certain as far as South Africa is concerned, and that is that before long a serious war will result between the white and black races,” he declared. “The authorities are all asleep, the natives are becoming more and more aggressive day by day, and I should not be surprised if one night they were to rise and massacre the whole population of South Africa, and that all through their being educated.”130 English sportsmen were only fooling themselves if they failed to see the merits of maintaining a strict color line.
Much to the relief of Gradeley and his supporters, the USCE and its transnational censorship movement managed, for the most part, to keep the Jeffries-Johnson film from appearing in either the British colonies or the southern United States. Still, however, they failed to shut it down completely. In the fall of 1910 the film started showing in a number of U.S. locales, in front of largely white male audiences. The small percentage of African Americans who attended screenings faced racial segregation and intimidation. The fight film appeared in theaters and outdoor venues in New York City, Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Hoboken, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Peoria, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, and a host of other U.S. towns and cities. Even in places where prohibitions were in effect, it played clandestinely for white audiences in hotel suites and summer homes and on Mississippi River barges. Across the border in Mexico it entertained packed crowds in local movie halls.131
The film was also a box office success in a number of European cities. Parisian journalists had encouraged France to remain “open” to the Jeffries-Johnson film, and when it finally arrived it was widely advertised in sporting magazines.132 It ran for months not only at the American Biograph Theater in Paris but also at smaller venues in the provinces.133 The moving picture also enjoyed profitable runs at London's National Sporting Club and at theaters in Dublin and Brussels. Although the film had to be “revised” by police authorities before it could be shown, it played in Berlin and other cities across Germany.134
Caught up in a mix of local, national, and transnational debates over the color line, Johnson's triumph and its film recording had put white people on notice. Together these media events not only exposed the growing global influence of U.S. racial culture, but they also pushed the instability of Western imperialism to the forefront of public debate. White settlers urged their metropolitan counterparts to wake up to the frightening realities of the worldwide race problem in an age of increasingly rapid travel, trade, and communication. It seemed as if the fight had managed to shake some of the racial sentimentality out of England. As one
African American correspondent complained, “The English [public], who usually take delight in anything it believes reflects adversely to the credit of America or Americans suddenly reverts to advice for suppression of the Negro.”135 These ideas could even be found in serious newspapers like the Times. “It is very easy for us in England, where we have no color problem, to talk with indignation and abhorrence of the lynchings and the outrages which occur so frequently in the Southern States of America,” a Times editorialist acknowledged. However, they had “yet to see how the English would act if confronted with entirely similar conditions,” and he feared that they “would be no more tolerant.”136 Johnson's arrival in London in the summer of 1911 would soon put them to the test.
3
Jack Johnson versus John Bull
The Rise of the British Boxing Colour Bar
Colored Men and Women Making Good in Europe—No Color Line to Hamper Them and in Letters and Trade They are Making Fame for Themselves and their Race
—Chicago Defender, 29 July 1911
This is a fight between black and white, and it will be flashed in all its detail, printed and pictured, before men, women and children, in places where races of different colour live together. There is no problem more anxious, for the present and for the future, than that of colour; none about which there are more sinister features; none on which instinct, passion, and prejudice are more inflammable; none therefore, on which it is more imperative that nothing should be done to inflame or excite.
—The Bishop of Winchester commenting on the Wells-Johnson match, 1911
When Jack Johnson journeyed to London in June of 1911, the Chicago Defender extolled the seemingly progressive racial mores of Britain. “JACK TREATED LIKE MAN AND GENTLEMAN” its front-page headline blazed.1 The correspondent Sylvester Russell described everything from Johnson's transatlantic crossing to his “grand arrival in the British capital” for the ready consumption of African Americans in search of hope for a color-blind future. Russell repudiated the various white American claims of Johnson's second-class quarters during his steamship voyage to London, arguing that the black heavyweight had stayed in the engineer's cabin, a coveted location. He was also more than happy to recount Johnson's cold rebuff of a white southerner while onboard the steamer. When the southerner had warned the black champion not to get too familiar with the white folk in England, Johnson had told him to mind his own business.2
Russell's depiction of Johnson's first days in London provided a powerful refutation of the southerner's remarks. Upon Johnson's arrival a policeman had begged him to take a taxi, fearing that the throng of English enthusiasts that had gathered to greet him might become unmanageable. Obliging the officer, Johnson made his way to a cab, smiling and bowing to his right and left, as many in the crowd cheered raucously, struggling for a closer view. When the cab drove off Johnson waved his hat to the fans that followed him on foot. In recounting this wild demonstration of white British support for Johnson, Russell mused, “Perhaps the reason why Theodore Roosevelt condemned prize fighting in America is best described from the lionization of Mr. J. Arthur Johnson in England.”3 Johnson's popularity abroad seemed to portend a dangerous subversion of the racial status quo.
In September 1911, however, a heated controversy arose in the English press when word got out that Johnson was set to take on the British titleholder and former soldier in the British Indian Army, Bombardier Billy Wells. The match was scheduled for 2 October at Earl's Court in London, with a purse of £8,000.4 Rather than casting the fight as an Anglo-American competition for world heavyweight supremacy, many English commentators imagined the proposed match as a colonial contest embodying the real-life race war threatening to engulf the British Empire.
Although incidences of armed anticolonial insurrection were relatively rare during this period, British imperial authorities still recognized the fragility of their control. Consolidating the nation's power and territory in southern Africa had proved difficult. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902) the British forces had sustained massive casualties as they struggled to bring Afrikaner lands under the Union Jack. Secular nationalist movements were also endangering British rule in India and Egypt, while African natives and Indian immigrants began to push for greater recognition in South Africa.5 Making matters worse, Britain's nonwhite subjects greatly outnumbered its white colonial settlers and officials. An editorial in London's Daily Chronicle questioned, “It is from the capital of Britain, from the heart of the British Empire, which has so many colour problems and racial difficulties within its orbit, that films are to go forth depicting a fight between black and white—between a black champion and a white soldier?”6
Just as the London Times editorialist had predicted a year earlier, Englishmen now faced with racial troubles similar to those of the United States were proving to be “no more tolerant.”7 Some metropolitan elites feared that a highly publicized heavyweight title fight between the audacious African American and Britain's white champion would simply import U.S. racial violence into the colonies. Given that a cadre of British intellectuals and officials had long envisioned the United States' Reconstruction after the Civil War as an ominous example of the chaotic dangers of multiracial democracy, this reaction was not unexpected. Thanks to publications such as the British historian James Bryce's American Commonwealth, they were well aware of the “negative” consequences of giving black men political power.8 With their own subjects calling for greater independence in the colonies, they had begun to see their fate as enmeshed with that of white America.
Johnson's impending fight against Wells only heightened this sense of shared racial destiny. Reverend Frederick Brotherton (F. B.) Meyer spoke out against the interracial match from his pulpit at Regent's Park Baptist Church: “God knows there is horror enough in the Southern States of America, trouble enough between ourselves, the settlers, in South Africa and the black population, difficulty enough and in plenty in India, and we do not want to make more bitter the antagonism between white and black.”9 Although Meyer had previously associated with prominent black people in London, even offering his support to the Trinidadian barrister and activist Henry Sylvester Williams for the Pan-African Conference in 1900, the possibility of a black pugilist shaming white British honor in the ring, in the very nerve center of the empire, was simply too dangerous a proposition.10 Because of Johnson's proven popularity with the dark proletariat across the globe, he posed a different set of problems than more palatable members of the black bourgeoisie such as Williams. A writer for London's Daily Telegraph reminded readers that Johnson's defeat of Jeffries in 1910 had inspired brutal scenes across the United States that “were sickening in the antagonism between the two races.”11 He admonished his fellow Englishmen to wake up to their imperial responsibilities. “Even if you say that we have but few negroes in this country compared with them [white Americans],” he argued, “remember that you rule a mighty negro population.” Reverend Meyer and others abandoned their already fragile sense of imperial brotherhood with British colonial subjects in favor of their growing racial kinship with white Americans.
Much as he had in Australia, when Johnson arrived in England he brought the United States' vexing “negro problem” with him. In many respects the black heavyweight posed the race question in the British metropolis with a breadth and intensity that formal political action simply could not, inspiring a surge of white opposition at the municipal, national, and imperial levels. After all, he threatened to blur the line separating white citizens from nonwhite subjects, not only through his physical prowess in the ring, but also through his public claims for recognition as a man outside the ring.
Johnson's difficulties in London exposed the intimate relationship between Jim Crow segregation and the racial fault lines of British imperialism. His black American fans initially had high hopes for their champion's overseas visit, especially since black boxers had a long and successful tradition of fighting in England. However, Britain's backlash against the Wells-
Johnson match left many disillusioned, for it underscored the fact that their local experiences of racial oppression were just one facet of a broader effort to keep nonwhites outside the bounds of modern civilization. At the same time, the looming prizefight also made the specter of race war in the colonies all the more tangible for white sports fans in the British metropole, provoking empire-wide discussions about the merits of American-style racial segregation and the urgent need for white Anglo-Saxon solidarity around the world. Although it was the first time that an interracial match had received such criticism in England, the heated controversy helped inspire the rise of Britain's boxing colour bar. Even as Johnson and his black fans imagined and sought out better opportunities in Britain, they quickly discovered that Jim Crow and John Bull were not-so-distant relatives.
BLACK AMERICANS' ATLANTIC DREAMS
It was not easy for African Americans to interpret Europe's racial mores. From the moment Johnson arrived in London, the picture on the ground proved complex. Despite the glowing description of Johnson's British welcome published in the Defender, the black champion found it hard to move about freely in the capital city. Anticipating difficulty in securing accommodation appropriate for a man of his status, Johnson had sent his white valet to book a room for him at the Piccadilly Hotel.12 The many conflicting reports of Johnson's overseas travels became an important aspect of the vibrant public debate over the racial progressiveness of Europe and its possibilities for African American exile and citizenship.
Black Americans had long envisioned Britain and Europe in general as spaces of civilization in contrast to the barbarism of Jim Crow America. Yet they often based this perception on a misunderstanding of the particular symbolic role that both U.S. racism and African Americans played in the complicated dance of European imperial politics. The United States served as a foil against which nations such as Britain and France could claim greater racial tolerance. Since the nineteenth century Britain had welcomed African American abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Henry “Box” Brown, and it became a popular destination for black stage performers and professional athletes. Embracing Johnson and other African American rebel sojourners enabled white Britons to demonize white Americans while glossing over their own complicity in the racial and imperial status quo.