Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  Parts of chapters 4 and 5 appear in the Radical History Review, the special issue “Reconceptualizations of the African Diaspora,” 103 (2009): 59–81, and are reprinted here with the permission of Duke University Press. An earlier version of chapter 3 appears in the Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 657–89, and is reprinted here with the permission of the University of Hawai‘i Press. Thank you to the editorial teams and anonymous readers of both journals for providing cogent critiques that shaped my book revisions. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for the University of California Press; their suggestions helped me to better frame the book's arguments. My editor Niels Hooper has been a great proponent of my vision, even if it took me a little longer to achieve it than we initially expected.

  Finally, I have to give a “shout out” to all the people in my life who are closest to me and have accompanied me on this journey. A million thanks to my parents John and Elisea Runstedtler, who have helped me out in innumerable ways and have always told me that they are proudof me. I am grateful to Allan, Sabine, Naomi, and Nathan Runstedtler for teaching me about the preciousness of life and family. Thanks to my Aunt Christine Runstedtler for her support, to my cousin Joy Garcia in Manila for her encouragement, and to Aunt Eva, Uncle Boy, Karina, and Jun Rojas for opening their home to me. My friends have been my second family. Thanks to Madonna Gimotea and Mary Sheridan for continuing to be such important people in my life. Maryjane Viejo has been the best friend ever. She has always kept me laughing and pumped me up even when I have doubted myself. Thanks also to the Viejo family for their hospitality over the years. Jill Sessa made living in Buffalo more fun than I ever imagined it could be. Her positive attitude is infectious and her fearless determination inspiring.

  Joseph Johnson, my rock, my special someone, has been there to support me even when I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. I could not have done this without him. Last but certainly not least, I thank Billie, who has become the pint-sized joy of my life, putting a smile on my face each and every day.

  Preface

  SPARRING NATIONS, GLOBAL PROBLEM

  Just six months after my return from a research trip in Paris, France experienced its worst stint of civil unrest since the uprising of May 1968. On 27 October 2005, French police had chased three African teenagers from the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois into a power substation, where two succumbed to electrocution. The deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré produced an eleven-day shockwave of violence and car burning in disenfranchised banlieues (suburbs) all across France, from Lille to Rouen to Nice to Strasbourg. Reportedly, the young men had run away when they saw the officers, fearing that they would be subjected to the police interrogation and harassment customary in their largely immigrant and working-class neighborhood.1 By 8 November President Jacques Chirac had declared a state of emergency, invoking curfews to help restore order. With copycat violence breaking out in Brussels and Berlin, some European officials even worried that the racial unrest would spread to other countries on the continent.

  When the smoke cleared, France was forced to reckon with the origins of this violent rage. While the right-wing minister of the interior (now president) Nicolas Sarkozy denounced the rioters as “scum,” Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was more measured in his assessment of the problem. Villepin blamed some of the unrest on “criminal networks,” but he also acknowledged that racial and religious prejudice, along with poverty and unemployment, had pushed many of the young rioters to lash out. “We must struggle against discrimination,” Villepin admitted. “Everyone's behavior must change…. We must have a welcoming republic where everyone must be respected.”2

  As I read the various reactions to the riots, captivated by the debates about racism in the French Republic, I came across an interesting letter to the editor in USA Today. A reader from Tampa, Florida, took offense at journalist Souhelia Al-Jadda's suggestion that the French riots were “acts of civil disobedience,” rooted in racial injustice, and therefore connected to the 1960s drive for civil rights in the United States.3 The angry reader called this political characterization of the French riots and their supposed linkage to the U.S. context “not only irresponsible, but…also an insult to the memories of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”4 With his steadfast refusal to see any relationship between France's racial violence and the African American freedom struggle, the reader effectively negated the United States' own history of race rioting, along with its continued problems of racialized poverty and segregation.

  The French were hardly innocent in this bout of discursive jabbing. They have consistently refused to acknowledge publicly the underlying connections between the legacy of U.S. slavery and segregation and their own history of imperialism and racism. In the wake of the riots, a political scientist at the American University of Paris reflected on this glaring blind spot. “After [Hurricane] Katrina, many French took an undisguised glee in poking the eyes of the Americans,” Professor Steven Ekovich confessed. “They said this couldn't happen in France.”5

  Even though David Crary of the Associated Press maintained that the French riots and the U.S. government's slow response to Katrina's devastation of black New Orleans had forced these two “sparring nations” (his words, not mine) to move beyond this sport of finger-pointing, the fundamental connections between racial politics on both sides of the Atlantic have, for the most part, remained submerged, away from public scrutiny.6 Most mainstream interpretations of these destructive events began with the assumption that racial discrimination is an inherently national problem—one that can be solved simply by exorcising the psychological demons of race prejudice from a few irrational white citizens. They rarely grappled with the larger global historical and structural forces linking the cultures of race in France and the United States. Defining the problem this way would force both nations to acknowledge their shared culpability in the same political economic legacies of slavery and imperialism. It would have deeper implications about the racial status quo than both countries, eager to declare the triumphant dawn of a color-blind and classless neoliberal era of peaceful global integration, are currently willing to address.

  Such “sparring” contests between Western nations over their relative levels of racial tolerance are not new, and in particular black Americans have long served as important ciphers in these debates. Throughout Jack Johnson's infamous world championship reign (1908–15), France welcomed African American sportsmen and performers, all the while claiming the moral high ground over uncivilized Jim Crow America. In 1908 Johnson knocked out the Canadian fighter Tommy Burns to become the first-ever black world heavyweight champion. Two years later, when he took on the United States' “great white hope” Jim Jeffries, French sportsmen claimed to be above the racial dimensions of the match. They scoffed at white Americans who, blinded by a bad case of negrophobia, insisted that Jeffries would win against the much younger and more talented black fighter. Some Parisian sportswriters even blamed white American prejudice for transforming the interracial prizefight into a vulgar spectacle that played on people's baser instincts for the sake of profits. Johnson and his black American fans also joined in this discursive battle, praising France for its color blindness while critiquing white American racism on the world stage.

  A century later, similar “sparring” matches surfaced with the rise of the United States' “great black hope,” President Barack Obama.7 Just months before his historic victory, Obama's visit to Berlin, Paris, and London in July 2008 became a celebratory story of European equality and democracy. Although most reports about Obama's fame in Europe argued that it was an outgrowth of George W. Bush's failings in foreign policy, race formed the subtext of the discussion. A kind of “Obama mania” had taken hold as largely white crowds cheered for the black American presidential candidate. A poll conducted by London's Daily Telegraph suggested that if Western Europeans could participate in the November election Obama would surely win, since 70 percent of Italians, 67 percent of German
s, 65 percent of the French, and 49 percent of Britons claimed they would vote for him.8 The implicit message was that white Europeans were racially enlightened, and perhaps even more so than white Americans.

  On 12 November 2008, CNN's Situation Room discussed Europe's reaction to the news of Obama's presidential win. Citing the “jubilant headlines” from across the Atlantic in celebration of Obama's election, the anchor Wolf Blitzer asked, “Is Obama's popularity there evidence that racism has essentially been wiped out of Europe?”9 A report by CNN correspondent Carol Costello went on to show that “Europe's racist fringe” had reared its ugly head in the wake of Obama's victory, much to the chagrin of the majority of white Europeans. After the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi jokingly described Obama as “young, handsome, and even tanned,” Carla Bruni, the Italian-born wife of French president Sarkozy, called his comment offensive and declared, “I am pleased to have become French.” Costello unearthed more virulent European criticism of the U.S. president-elect. A Polish politician and member of the conservative Law and Justice Party named Artur Górski decried Obama's win as “the end of the civilization of white men.” Jürgen Gansel, a German legislator and neo-Nazi, issued a press release condemning Obama's popularity in Germany in which he stated that “Obama fever…resembles an African tropical disease.” Interestingly enough, Costello's report never discussed Europe's historical or current treatment of its own nonwhite constituencies. Yet Europe's metropolitan centers are arguably in the midst of their own set of racial conflicts, as more and more people of color from the former colonies enter their borders demanding equality and respect. Although more strident than polite conversation would permit, the opinions of Górski and Gansel are hardly an aberration.

  Back in the United States, commentators from both ends of the political spectrum were eager to declare that Obama's exceptional achievement proved that no other country in the world provided its racial minorities with as many opportunities, that the nation had officially entered a postracial era. As the election results came in on 4 November, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked a panel of experts what Obama's victory would mean for U.S. race relations. Bill Bennett, a conservative pundit, former U.S. secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, and former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H. W. Bush, launched into his interpretation: “I'll tell you one thing it means…. You don't take excuses anymore from anyone who says the deck is stacked, I can't do anything, there's so much in-built this and that. There are always problems in a big society, but we have just—if this turns out to be the case [with] President Obama—we have just achieved an incredible milestone for which the world needs to have more respect for the United States than it sometimes does.”10

  In other words, there was no reason to continue talking about any structural inequalities facing young black Americans, for the United States had proven to the world that its racial barriers could be scaled with hard work and determination. Taking a slightly different tack, the liberal journalist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times was optimistic that “Barack Obama's political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American ‘brand' to be less about Guantanamo and more about equality.”11 It could provide “a path to restore America's global influence,” since white Americans were showing that they could “see beyond a person's epidermis.” Whether in the United States or in Europe, this rush to claim racial progress and harmony based on the embrace of a prominent black figure effectively effaced any discussion of the broader historical, structural, and cultural forces connecting their continued problems of racial inequality.

  Taking a closer look at the story of Jack Johnson and the world he traversed can help us begin to excavate these largely unspoken linkages. The surprising scope of Johnson's high-profile career throughout Europe, Australasia, and the Americas obliges us to think beyond the often-stagnant domestic squabbles over reformist solutions to racial disparities. The controversies surrounding his far-reaching travels highlight the intrinsic relationship between the rise of a global color line and the expansion of Western imperialism and capitalism. Even now, at a moment when many politicians have declared the dawn of a “color-blind” and “multicultural” era, racial inequality remains a defining feature of the contemporary world. Today's most powerful engines of global economic integration—multinational corporations, transnational financial institutions, and trade alliances—push an array of agendas that involve both discrimination and displacement on a grand scale. The transnational trade in racial ideologies and practices has also helped to spawn inequities in a variety of realms, including job and housing markets, welfare and educational organizations, legal and criminal justice systems, immigration policies, the state management of indigenous peoples, and environmental regulations.

  Yet geopolitical and economic narratives of the race question have remained largely absent from popular and political discussions in the global North (North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand), particularly in the post-civil rights, postcolonial, post-cold war era. For the most part, race enters the public domain only during discussions of obvious interpersonal acts of racial hatred. “Racism” has been reduced to an aberrant psychological affliction that affects only a small percentage of the world's white population. According to popular logic, decolonized peoples and nations in the global South have been more or less responsible for their own failures, and persons of color in the global North who fail to adopt societal norms have simply chosen to be pathological and unproductive. Given these diagnoses, we often look to the War on Drugs, stricter law enforcement, the expansion of prisons, immigration restrictions, patriarchal family values, structural adjustment and bootstrap economics, counterterrorism, population control, cultural sensitivity training, and ultimately the passage of time as solutions to the enduring race problem.

  The official response to the most recent uprisings in Britain sparked by the police shooting death of Mark Duggan, a twenty-nine-year-old black man from Tottenham, typifies this trend. Prime Minister David Cameron called for “tough love” in dealing with the rioters. “For some of the children who've ended up in this terrible situation there was probably a failure in their background, in their families,” he said. “There probably was a shortage of not just respect and boundaries but also love. But you do need, when they cross the line and break the law, to be very tough.” Cameron even considered hiring William Bratton, a famous American anti-gang czar who served as police chief in New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles, to help Britain reinstate law and order.12

  While our leaders work together to prop up institutions of white supremacy, we waste our energy “sparring” over which nation is doing the best job of “managing” its racial tensions. It is no longer enough to point the finger elsewhere while thumping our own chests with national self-satisfaction, for the challenges we face require us to acknowledge the global routes and consequences of racial ideas, images, policies, and practices. The various controversies that followed Jack Johnson at the turn of the twentieth century can begin to shed some light on the racial disputes that plague us at the turn of the twenty-first. After all, Johnson's career spanned a period of profound change, as new cultural, political, social, and technological developments complicated prevailing racial paradigms and practices, not just in the United States but across the world. In tracing Johnson's journeys we can begin to uncover the real stakes of our own game of race.

  Introduction

  Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

  I thought Muhammad Ali touched the world community like no other, but [Jack] Johnson did likewise.

  —Leland Stein III, Michigan Chronicle, 26 June 2005

  Jack Johnson was well aware of his place in the pantheon of global sporting heroes. In 1927, at the age of forty-nine, the retired African American prizefighter reflected on his “tumultuous career” as the first black heavyweight champion of the world. “I am astounded when I realize that there are few men in
any period of the world's history, who have led a more varied or intense existence than I,” he declared. “My life, almost from its very start, has been filled with tragedy and romance, failure and success, poverty and wealth, misery and happiness.”1 While Johnson claimed that these “conflicting conditions” had made him “somewhat unique of a character,” he also believed that his diverse experiences in a variety of places suggested some larger lessons: “[The] story of the life I have led may…not only contain some interest if told for its own sake,” he argued, “but may also shed light on the life of our times.” While certainly not known for his humility, Johnson was by no means exaggerating his importance as a bellwether of racial and imperial conflicts in the early twentieth century.

  In his day, Johnson was the most famous black man on the planet. Not only did he publicly challenge racial segregation within the United States, but he also enjoyed the same brazen and unapologetic lifestyle abroad, one of conspicuous consumption, masculine bravado, and interracial love. Like other successful African American heavyweights at the turn of the century who refused to be hemmed in by the strictures of U.S. racial politics, Johnson spent a great deal of his career outside the United States, gaining admirers and goading critics of all different races, social classes, political persuasions, and nationalities. Even before he won the world championship in 1908, he had already fought in places as far off as Australia and England, and after his infamous conviction under the federal Mann Act against white slave trafficking in 1913, he fled the United States, lingering in exile throughout Europe and the Americas until he surrendered to U.S. authorities in 1920. In those places that he did not personally visit, his stories and images found their way into local newspapers, magazines, and movie houses, provoking spirited debates about the future of Western imperialism and the rise of a global color line. Often overlooked as a key part of his legacy, Johnson's impact in the wider world is the focus of this book.