Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  As the Cape Times stressed, interimperial cooperation was absolutely essential, for “localisation was no longer possible.” Modern technology now had the power to disseminate “long accounts of such purely physical and often brutalising displays to every quarter of the globe.”78 Since both the threat and the use of physical force were still central to the maintenance of imperial order, they understood the degree to which such a fight would undercut white authority. The Cape Times warned that it would lead to the “grave danger of establishing in the native mind a vague theory of a physical force standard as between the two races.” As a graphic transgression of the basic physical mores of imperial governance, the Wells-Johnson match jeopardized the colonies' delicate balance of power. “In the past the white man has been taught that it is degrading to maltreat a black; a coloured man that it is a heinous offence to attack a white,” one British reporter declared. “The fact that the capital of the Empire sees no harm in such a contest as is now proposed must go far towards shattering this doctrine.”79

  Within this gendered discourse of power, white male physical and political control became inextricably linked with the sexual ownership of white women. For many of South Africa's social commentators, interracial mixing in the boxing ring would provide a dangerous pretext for interracial mixing in the bedroom. This was particularly disturbing since native African houseboys often lived and worked without male supervision in close proximity with the wives of white settlers.80 The Wells-Johnson match seemed indicative of the ultimate breakdown of the color line—an affront to both the prerogatives of white men and the propriety of white women. This controversy had exploded in the midst of heated discussions over the so-called Black Peril. Widespread fears of native African men raping white women paralleled the U.S. hysteria about interracial sex, of which Johnson, with his many highprofile relationships with white women, was a prime target.81 A South African editorialist claimed that the rape of white females by black men now seemed to “recur constantly.” “The animus of the people will be kindled and the ‘Lynch Law' applied,” he warned. “I shall not be surprised to hear one of these days that an Association has been formed, with branches over the whole of South Africa, to see that such crimes be severely punished.”82 Fears of the Black Peril were inspiring in South Africa white vigilantism similar to that of the United States' Ku Klux Klan.

  Given this social context, it was not a stretch to argue that if black men beat white men in the ring they would feel entitled to ravish white women in the bedroom. The decision to hold the Wells-Johnson contest in London had apparently “startled” white colonial settlers because of the “license freely granted to the black man, in all innocence, by white men and women.”83 Many white South Africans believed that British officials simply did not grasp the gravity of the Black Peril. The high commissioner of Rhodesia, Lord Herbert Gladstone, had recently commuted the death sentence of a native African servant accused of raping a white woman, inspiring protests across southern Africa.84 As one editorialist declared, “We do not say the coloured man should be shunned as though he were a pestilence; we do say that his place is not amongst a family of comely, cheerful English girls.”85 He called for the barring of this “abhorrent” and “demoralising” exhibition, along with its film. “There should be no hesitation in this matter, no playing with fire in the midst of powder barrels,” he cautioned. “We cannot afford to graft another branch on the ‘Black Peril' tree.”

  Many of the antiprizefight activists claimed that the Wells-Johnson match was symptomatic of a broader trend of Western decline and a return to barbarism. They believed the interracial fight would have a detrimental effect on imperial management and also worried that it would allow the brutishness of the colonies—their violence, despotism, heathenism, and interracial mixing—to permeate the urban spaces of the metropole. In a fiery sermon at Regent's Park Chapel, Reverend Meyer drew a doomsday parallel between Britain's future and the fall of ancient Rome. He argued that the Romans were a “dissolute, money-loving race, from whom all the strength of their old nobility had gone.”86 The rich had monopolized Rome's resources, leaving the poor to live in crowded slums. Consequently, Roman rulers had to assuage popular discontent with the exhibition of gruesome gladiatorial contests that played to people's baser instincts. Meyer argued that interracial boxing matches functioned in much the same way for Britain's poor and working class. “The reason men like to see blacks fighting whites is because the black men fight so passionately,” he maintained. “It introduces the element of animalism which you do not see in the case of two white boxers.”87 In Meyer's view, this kind of perverse miscegenation in the ring was a metaphor for Britain's descent into degradation.

  Ironically, the English sportsmen who supported the Wells-Johnson match used many of the same arguments to bolster their case. The one thing that both sides seemed to agree on was the vulnerability of white control in the modern age and the need for collective vigilance. In an open letter to Meyer the editor of Health & Strength claimed that the banning of the interracial fight would provide the clearest sign of British decadence. He and many other physical culturists believed that economic prosperity and urban industrial life had caused in English society a breakdown that could be diagnosed through the declining bodies of its white citizens. Calling boxing a “social regenerator,” the editor accused Meyer of “retarding the physical development of the race.” “Abolish boxing,” he wrote, “and you abolish the greatest of all man-making games.”88 Running away from this boxing challenge would dangerously debase white manhood in the eyes of people of color. As the editor of Boxing charged, Meyer and the other protesters were, in effect, tacitly admitting that white pugilists were scared to put the matter of racial supremacy to the test—an action that would have perilous consequences in South Africa, India, and beyond.89

  Fearing the potential fallout of the Wells-Johnson fiasco, British commentators on both sides of the issue had begun to sound a lot like their white American counterparts. From his training camp in Paris Johnson realized that the door was closing on his match. Sick of being bad-mouthed in the British press, he told reporters, “It's just this, you don't want me to win, and that's the truth…but I am going to win.”90 Try as he might, Johnson could never really separate himself from the imperial context in which he fought.

  JACK JOHNSON VERSUS JOHN BULL

  These heated debates about the fate of the match exposed the tenuous position of African Americans in Europe. One black sportswriter exclaimed, “For the love of Mike, tell us, please what they are trying to do to our big black fighting champion over in England. Where he stood absolutely solid a month ago, today he has no standing at all.”91 Even when faced with stories of Johnson's difficulties, some black Americans refused to give up on their faith in English civilization. They could not fathom that “color” had anything to do with the British backlash against the match. Instead they blamed the “sensational-craving daily papers” of the United States for spreading lies to make it appear as if “other countries” were “equally guilty” of racial prejudice.92 Still others chose to lay the blame at Johnson's feet. One sportswriter mused, “Was it Jack Johnson's pompous ways in England and the flashiness the colored champion displayed with his white wife that caused such a reversal of feeling in the land of King George?” It seemed as if Johnson's inappropriate conduct had “suddenly changed” things, since England had always been “a paradise for colored boxers.”93 Yet none of these interpretations adequately explained the great lengths that British clergymen and government officials went to cancel the interracial match.

  A few weeks before the Wells-Johnson fight the British Home Office considered using the black heavyweight's precarious status—he was neither a first-class citizen of the United States nor a British subject—to stop the match. Although Johnson had seriously contemplated becoming a British citizen, government officials were not about to welcome him into the fold. In a Home Office report prepared by the barrister Sir John Simon, he considered En
gland's right to deny Johnson reentry. “An alien who is so prevented from entering this country…can take no legal proceedings against the Government,” Simon argued, continuing, “An American citizen like Johnson who is prevented from landing can only have recourse to his own Government and ask them to exercise diplomatic pressure.”94 Given white America's collective disgust for Johnson coupled with the unlikelihood of the U.S. government coming to a black man's defense, Simon realized the heavyweight would be left with no options. While optimistically seeking alternatives to U.S. citizenship, Johnson found himself abandoned, with little political leverage, in Britain.

  Despite Sir Simon's clever suggestion, Home Secretary Churchill chose not to bar Johnson's entry for the time being, and on 23 September the black heavyweight returned to England to set up his training camp in north London's Epping Forest. Much to the disgust of Meyer and other opponents of the Wells-Johnson fight, the public controversy had driven ticket sales through the roof. With just a little more than a week before the scheduled match, the ten-thousand-seat Empress Hall was completely sold out.95 The Barker Motion Picture Company had purchased the rights to the prizefight film for $100,000, and the flood of requests for it had already far exceeded the company's expectations.96

  Johnson was now singing a very different tune about English racial tolerance. He turned against the Britain that he had praised so highly just months before, juxtaposing its racist hypocrisy with his recent Parisian welcome. “I am going on with my training expecting the fight to come off. We have signed to box under National Sporting Club rules and if they stop this fight, England cannot claim again she is the nation that allows fair play,” Johnson declared.97 Countering reports that he was just money-hungry, he contended, “Well, I'm just doing my work, and can any man be blamed for getting the best price he can?” Playing on the imperial rivalries of the day, Johnson warned that if Britain banned the fight the promoter would simply move it to the “fair country” of France.

  The day after Johnson's return to London the protest against the prizefight finally came to a head. With public pressure mounting, the Home Office deemed the match illegal, declaring it a breach of the peace and counter to the best interests of the nation and empire. On 25 September the Variety Theatres Control Association added insult to injury by applying for an injunction to prevent the match, claiming that Johnson was already contracted to perform for them on 2 October. A few days later the freeholders of Earl's Court (Metropolitan District Railway Company) filed their own injunction to prohibit the lessees of their property (Earl's Court Company) from hosting the contest.98 With the Home Office's outlawing of the fight, the director of public prosecutions then summoned Johnson and Wells, their managers, and the promoter White to the Bow Street Police Court to defend their actions. The Wells-Johnson match had managed to provoke the biggest test case on boxing on English record.99

  The Bow Street case against the Wells-Johnson fight became a sensation in the British press. By 2 PM on 28 September “there were fully a thousand people” waiting for the principals to arrive at the trial.100 Rather than hiring a solicitor, Johnson chose to speak for himself in court. He engaged the Crown's witness, Police Superintendent Duncan McIntyre, in an intense cross-examination. He showcased not only his own mental acuity but also McIntyre's embarrassing ignorance of professional boxing. Johnson objected to McIntyre's reliance on a book of newspaper clippings to answer his questions. “The witness does not know what he is talking about,” Johnson declared. “If he only goes by the book his evidence is very thin.”101 Johnson even managed to get McIntyre to admit that he had never actually seen a boxing match. “You have no idea what they are?” Johnson questioned. “No,” McIntyre confessed. By the time Johnson reemerged from the courthouse, the crowd had grown even bigger. “Spectators surged round the door and broke through the police cordon,” making it difficult for him to leave the scene.102

  That same day the freeholders of Earl's Court obtained their injunction from England's High Court, thereby preventing their lessees from staging the fight. The judge had upheld the freeholders' claim that the proposed match would go against the terms of the lease, which stated that all exhibitions “shall be of a high class and be conducted with due regard to the maintenance of order and shall be in no way contrary to decency or morality, and shall not endanger or in any way injuriously affect any of the licences in force for the premises.”103 Recognizing the futility of the situation, White agreed not to promote the contest in the British Isles or in any of Britain's domains and the Home Office dropped its legal proceedings.104

  Now it was time for French sports fans to gloat, as they chided the British for their rigid, puritanical values. According to Boxing magazine's Parisian correspondent, many Frenchmen claimed that the English hysteria over the Wells-Johnson match provided the perfect justification for their own nation's “drastic action in disestablishing Church and State.”105 The various reasons against the interracial match in England seemed to have no merit in France. Parisian boxing publisher and promoter Leon Sée scoffed, “Battle of the races? Fear of riots between whites and blacks? There are not even 100 niggers in all of France. To see an Englishman beaten? To us it's all the same, so long as the best man wins.”106 Jacques Mortane of La Vie au grand air also pointed to Johnson's citizenship dilemma, contending that the black American's cold reception in England had convinced him to abandon any thoughts of becoming British. If Johnson ever decided to attain French citizenship, Mortane argued he could do so with ease.107 As French fans criticized the blatant racism of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, they somehow managed to overlook the violence and exploitation of their own colonial endeavors.

  Blind spot aside, French commentators were by no means the only ones to level such a critique. After the cancellation of the Wells-Johnson match, the black champion and the black American press also decried the duplicity of British race relations. For them, the Home Office ban highlighted the link between the racial oppression of African Americans and that of British colonial subjects. This public outcry coincided with African American discussions of European imperialism at the turn of the century. With the rise of an organized Pan-African movement beginning in London in 1900, concerned black scholars, religious leaders, and activists from across the diaspora entered into a dialogue on the worldwide race problem. These debates continued through the developing black presses in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa.

  Boxing provided the perfect forum for this expanding conversation on race and imperialism, reaching well beyond the purview of black intellectual and political elites. Johnson himself took a jab at the inconsistency of British policy, noting that their rhetoric of racial tolerance was certainly not backed up with any real recognition of the rights of nonwhite peoples. “You are funny people, you English,” Johnson scolded the readers of Health & Strength. “I cannot make you out at all.” Johnson used a humorous anecdote to poke fun at the arbitrary nature of British “equality,” noting the uneven benefits of so-called British civilization:

  There were two missionary wives out there in Africa talking about their servants, as women always do when they get together. They both had black servants…. One of them had just engaged a maid from her husband's church—a “convert,” they called her. “Oh, my dear,” cried her friend, “I would never have a Christian servant on any account!” There's a lot of logic in that, isn't there? If that missionary wife preferred the heathen to the convert, what was her husband drawing his salary for? But that's you English all over. You call the black man your brother; you say he is equal with you; that we're all one family. I must say you've got a queer way of showing your brotherly feelings.108

  For Johnson, all this talk about interracial conflict was pure “bunkum.” “We get it in the States; we're used to it there, but we did expect something different from England,” he chided. The black champion was understandably bitter. Just as he was seeking out alternatives to life in Jim Crow America, British clergymen and government offici
als were instilling racial segregation in John Bull's boxing ring.

  For many African American fans the prohibition of the WellsJohnson match had shone a spotlight on Britain's central role in the preservation of the racial and imperial status quo. In an article titled “The Truth Out at Last,” a writer for the Cleveland Gazette declared, “The plain fact was…that the spectacle of a Negro whipping a white man would give too much encouragement to the blacks of the English provinces [colonies], in several of which that country was and is having more or less trouble to keep them subjugated.”109 For Britain, banning the fight had become a basic matter of “self-preservation” since its “black belt stretched around the globe.”110

  An editorialist for the New York Age critiqued what he perceived as the “radical change of British public opinion on the race question within the last half century,” a change that seemed to have coincided with their expansion into West and South Africa.111 He viewed British Africa as a particularly rabid case of imperial exploitation that differed from their intervention in India. Although he acknowledged that British abuses of the Indian people had made the fear of colonial subversion ever present and the need for military occupation obligatory, Britain had never attempted to settle India. It now appeared as if the British policy of white settlement in Africa (and especially South Africa) was creating conditions of racial repression and segregation similar to those of the United States. “The natives are treated, for the most part, as aliens and are tolerated, under drastic restrictions, in the colonies or forced back into the interior,” he explained.

  The cynical protest against the interracial fight was really about race, power, land, and profit rather than about Christianity, morality, uplift, and civilization. One African American sportswriter charged, “Some who were eager to stop the prize fight in London are equally eager for dividends from South African investments where a far more degrading contest is going on involving the exploitation and debasement of millions of their fellow beings.”112 The writer predicted that the banning of interracial fights would spread across the Old World since most European countries had “holdings in Africa or a sphere of influence.”