Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Page 21
Regardless of these grand pronouncements, Leo Daniels, a concerned black Canadian expatriate who corresponded with the Indianapolis Freeman throughout the 1910s, believed that the African American press simply was not doing enough. Writing from Glasgow, he echoed many of his earlier pronouncements in the wake of the Jeffries-Johnson fight. He argued that “British and American white prejudice” had come together in “united determination to slander” black people.46 Daniels explained, “If a Negro commits a grave offense in America to-day it is flashed across here for publication in the European papers for school boys and girls and other millions to read that same day so that is the way the millions of white people who are no better than we black people are educated and embittered against us.”47 He claimed that the “masses of the British and foreign people” had come to believe that African Americans lived “in a state of semi-cannibalism.” They were “represented to be heathens, rapists of white women, indolent, ignorant, worthless pests only fit to be feathered, tarred, shot or burnt at the stake.” Daniels called for the establishment of “news agents in foreign countries to advocate the cause of the American Negro,” and he requested copies of black American newspapers to distribute abroad.
Daniels also worried that certain kinds of African American visitors were gaining too much visibility in Europe. “The only Negro that is apparently known here,” Daniels maintained, “is the Negro who can sing, dance, sell quack medicine at street corners, box, wrestle or fight.”48 The intervening years had clearly tempered his optimism about the symbolic power of black pugilistic success. Meanwhile, to those back in the United States, the task of disseminating the truth about African Americans' many accomplishments in professions other than performance or pugilism seemed incredibly daunting. Adding to Daniels' observations, the editor of the Freeman lamented, “It is impossible to maintain propagandas abroad or ‘floating’ exhibitions of our status at home.” It was difficult to imagine how African Americans would garner greater respect abroad when Johnson and his fellow black sportsmen had become their most famous representatives.
However, both Daniels and the Freeman's editor underestimated the role of men like Johnson in shaping a transnational conversation on the race question. Because of their special access to the foreign press and performance venues, black boxers had developed their own ways of broadcasting their racial pride and their grievances to European audiences. They were instrumental in cultivating a broad base of international support for the ongoing African American freedom struggle.
Johnson and his contemporaries had already been courting French favor in the years before his Mann Act conviction and arrival in Le Havre. Not only did they help foster the rise of Parisian “negrophilia,” but they also became a popular medium through which French sportsmen critiqued U.S. racism and Anglo-Saxon imperialism more broadly. Recognizing this dynamic, Johnson and his contemporaries actively pursued French sympathy as they called upon the protection of French civilization. Throughout the 1910s Johnson became a cause célèbre in the French press and arguably the most outspoken African American exile in Paris. French sporting journals afforded him many opportunities to circulate his critiques of white America. French readers, already well versed in sensationalized accounts of southern lynch mobs since the early 1900s, came to view Johnson and his black boxing confreres as exiles from the oppressive negrophobia of U.S. society.49
In January 1911 the sporting weekly La Vie au grand air published its first installment of Johnson's life story, titled “Ma Vie et mes combats” (My life and battles), and the serial continued for the next five months. Johnson was famous enough in France for the publishers, Pierre Lafitte and Company, to introduce his autobiography as one of the magazine's most important acquisitions of the year. Greeting readers with a full-page photo of the black heavyweight's fist, a preview for the series boasted that the story would be told by none other than Johnson himself.50
Johnson's French memoir was a quintessential text of African American exile and protest, a kind of New Negro manifesto that predated World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. However, historians have yet to plumb this important document for its insights into black working-class understandings of the global color line. “Ma Vie et mes combats” was the only autobiographical treatment of Johnson published during his career, and there appears to have been no contemporary English translation. In 1914 Pierre Lafitte and Company released an edited version of the series as a book (Mes Combats) to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Johnson's scheduled match against the white American fighter Frank Moran in Paris.51
Certainly there was a demand for Johnson's memoirs among his African American fans. As sportswriter Billy Lewis of the Indianapolis Freeman declared, “I can conceive of no more fascinating ‘piece’ of literature.…Not only would there be a recital of interesting facts, but their inspiration arising out of a quarrel of men about the rights of men. Then with Chicago, New York, London, Paris, as the backgrounds in the main including incidentally, the total world of civilization.”52 Lewis also recognized that such a book might be deemed too subversive in the United States. “Perhaps the story of his life too well told, as Hugo might tell it, or Balzac, would not be well for the present age,” Lewis reasoned, “for when the rights of men are the theme we forget nationality and think of the individual. We exchange places with the subjects readily, and ere we are aware we are all aflame at our vicarious suffering.” Comparing the potential effect of Johnson's autobiography to that of an abolitionist tract, Lewis added, “Harriet Beecher Stowe was such a writer, who could arouse the very rocks to mutiny.” While Johnson could recount his life for a foreign audience, such a story was apparently too incendiary to be printed back home.
Although not tied to any specific political project, Johnson's French memoirs show that his transnational career and working-class origins enabled him to develop a nuanced critique of Western modernity. He played against prevailing discourses of race, manhood, and the body in a variety of often contradicting ways, not only speaking back to popular tropes of black savagery but also defying the rigid discipline of bourgeois life. Prefiguring the wandering nautical narratives of McKay, Johnson depicted a life characterized by masculine pursuits and geographic mobility.53 His narrative not only indicted white American racism but also pointed to the global contours of white supremacy. Johnson refashioned the negative legacy of black slavery into a story of triumph, questioning the gendered justifications for the white man's burden. Moreover, Johnson's life story spoke explicitly to the challenges of working-class African Americans, casting them as agents in the fight against the color line. Even though Johnson had attained the financial trappings of sporting success, he continued to identify with the urban culture of the black proletariat.
The first episode of “Ma Vie et mes combats” was unflinchingly polemical, providing a sharp critique of white Amerian negrophobia and of conventional ideas about the superiority of white Western civilization. As Johnson began, “When a white man writes his memoirs, as I will try to do here, it is customary to start with the history of his family from its earliest times.”54 Johnson disputed the popular belief that black people had no history of which to be proud. “Our memories are passed down, above all, by the tradition of father to son,” he explained. “Whites don't believe it, but we are also proud of our ancestors and during the long days and even longer nights, when we knew neither schools nor books, we still passed on our memories from past centuries.” Addressing his readers as “les hommes blancs” (white men), Johnson argued that even though it made white men proud to connect themselves to the noble soldiers of the Crusades, his ancestors had actually built the grand architecture the Europeans had discovered during their missions in Palestine. “Who constructed the Pyramids 40 centuries ago?” Johnson challenged. “Which race built the Egyptian monuments before such things were known in Europe, where the inhabitants, wearing animal skins, lived a miserable existence in caves?” Embracing the wonders of ancient Egypt as a usable, African past, th
e black heavyweight questioned the historical foundations of white supremacy. He echoed the claims of contemporary black scholars who argued that the Nile Valley was the cradle of all civilization.55
Turning a past of servitude into a virtue, Johnson declared that the physical trials of his enslaved forefathers had helped to make him world champion. “Undoubtedly, it is from my long list of ancestors who were all hard workers, men of the open air, that I have my size, the strength of my arms and the quality of my muscles,” Johnson asserted, “all my inherited traits that make me just as proud as others would be of a baron's coronet.” He argued that his rough childhood had only made him stronger. He recalled, “There were some very hard times in our small home in Galveston, [Texas,] and as soon as I was big enough, my father took me to help him because his job as a porter kept him very busy. At that time, we did not know carpet-sweepers or the vacuum cleaner. There were only old-fashioned brooms, with which I swept. I swept the entire day.” He declared, “I believe that it was this sweeping…that strengthened my back and shoulder muscles.” While French sportsmen, as well as the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and other proponents of the “strenuous life,” contemplated the need for vigorous exercise and a return to nature to regenerate the white race, Johnson claimed that black men's myriad struggles against white domination had already made them more powerful and robust.56
Johnson also used his childhood narrative to counter prevailing ideas about the basic immorality and indolence of the black working class. He claimed that because he came from a tight-knit family he therefore tried to improve his station in order to provide them with a more comfortable life. He spoke lovingly of his mother as a woman with “too good of a heart” and of his older sister, Lucy, whose job it was to keep him in line. “Life was not easy in our small house in Galveston and the days when we had empty stomachs were far more frequent than the feast days. Often my mother had concerns and I sought to comfort her,” Johnson recalled.57
The black champion portrayed himself as an ambitious and resourceful young man looking for a chance to better himself despite the odds. “[At] nine years of age,” Johnson recounted, “I thought about earning my living. Pushing a broom behind my father hardly suited me. I wanted to go out and work on my own account.” It was in the boxing ring rather than the more respectable realms of education or business that he gained more control over his own economic destiny and self-representation. Yet even during his early days as a professional prizefighter he regularly fought on an empty stomach. “I was sustained by the idea that I had to earn money if I wanted to assist my poor mother, who still had a whole brood of children to feed,” he claimed.58
In addition to relating this righteous narrative of sacrifice and self-reliance, Johnson looked back fondly on the less savory aspects of his boyhood. He described a youth punctuated by street fights, gambling, and confrontations with white policemen as he roamed about Galveston's dockyards with his black friends. He also recalled being drawn to the large ships in the port. As an adolescent he decided to travel from Galveston to Key West to Boston, first as a stowaway, and then, after being discovered, as a ship's cook. He gave up on formal education, preferring to experiment with a slew of different occupations, including stable boy, horse trainer, bicyclist, and house painter.59 Even after he set his sights on becoming a championship boxer, homelessness and pennilessness continued to plague him. Johnson claimed that these rough and roving years had prepared him for the vagaries of professional prizefighting. “I cannot tell you how happy I am now that I had to protect myself against hardship and understand poverty as intimately as I did.”60
Johnson's French memoirs also revealed that he consciously performed a brand of urban black working-class masculinity that challenged the racial and sexual politics of the period. He was well aware of his reputation for decadence in the white American press, and he claimed to have kept a scrapbook of clippings. Johnson quoted one of the more amusing descriptions for French readers:
When he is out for a walk, he has the air of a true dandy and all his brothers of color are proud of him. He generally wears a large flat white hat, checkered clothing, a gaudy waistcoat, a colored shirt, gray or green gaiters, very pointed, patent-leather shoes and an enormous diamond as a tie-pin. He never forgets his cane, as large as a sapling, and his knotty fingers are covered with glittering rings. He does not have much money, but all that he has he spends on outfits and good meals.61
Rather than deny such derisive reports of his ostentation, Johnson chose to embrace his public image as a black dandy. “This description, as humorous as it was, was not in sum very far from the truth,” he maintained. Although this audacious strategy of self-presentation made most middle-class African Americans cringe, it provided black sportsmen with a means to publicly recuperate their sense of personal dignity while also protesting the dehumanizing effects of late imperialism and industrial capitalism. For Johnson, his studied dandyism was not just a matter of style. It was also a form of political rebellion, one that not only went against established racial and sexual norms but also mocked the bourgeois Victorian values of industry, thrift, and restraint.62
Johnson's Parisian fans would have understood this point. Extravagant clothes, sparkling jewels, sports cars, sumptuous meals, and interracial sexual attraction had become the hallmark of African American prizefighters, many of whom ran in the same circles as the motley collection of pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, and vaudevillians that frequented urban vice districts. In Paris Johnson and his contemporaries lived on the edges of respectability, becoming fixtures in the city's raucous underground nightlife alongside adoring members of the French avant-garde. Although commonly associated with the intellectuals and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, African American sportsmen had long experimented with this modern sense of masculinity expressed through leisure activities, conspicuous consumption, and the public display of the body.63
Johnson's hardscrabble life in the transnational routes of imperial commerce and culture had made him openly skeptical of the white man's burden. He maintained that the “color question” had caused the “saddest moments” of his fighting career.64 In recalling the widespread controversy over his 1910 defeat of Jim Jeffries, Johnson questioned the gendered justifications of the color line, whether in or out of the boxing ring. To make his point he included a short verse for his French readers:
For there is neither east nor west,
Border nor breed nor birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
Though they come from the ends of the earth.65
While these may have been the words of famed British poet Rudyard Kipling's “The Ballad of East and West,” Johnson remembered learning them from one of his sparring partners.66 With a deep sense of irony, he used the imperial writer's appeal to popular ideas of manhood to critique his undeserved plight. Johnson maintained that he had chosen to operate above the arbitrary color line, for he viewed his title match against Jeffries as a question of courage, strength, and skill rather than race.
Two years later, when Johnson returned to Paris as a fugitive from U.S. justice, he was able to tap into the existing French fascination with and sympathy for African Americans. His Mann Act conviction apparently had no effect on his well-established celebrity in the City of Light. Local newspapers followed Johnson and his white wife wherever they went, printing photos of them surrounded by crowds of admiring French fans.67 One of Johnson's sparring partners reported, “He still drifts around in two automobiles and is able to keep a chauffeur in furs and ice cream.”68 Johnson later recalled, “I was offered several engagements in theaters and music halls. Managers besought me on every hand, each trying to outdo the other in offering me inducements. I decided upon a short engagement at the Folies Bergère, where as long as I remained, crowded houses greeted me at every performance.”69
It appeared as if he might stay in Paris permanently, for, as one African American sportswriter declared, “Evidently Monsieur Johnson is getting a squ
are deal according to what he conceives to be his manhood rights.”70 The international community seemed to be embracing not only Johnson's cause but also the plight of African Americans in general. A report in the Chicago Defender claimed that the French Board of Trade had honored the black champion and his white wife.71 French officials had reputedly declared that Johnson and any other black Americans were welcome in Paris and would have at their disposal all the liberties offered by the French government.
According to the Defender, around five thousand black Americans, including twenty from Chicago, had already made the French capital their home. Moreover, military officials had apparently given Johnson's nephew Rhodes a cadetship at the “West Point of France.”72 At a time when black Americans faced the prospect of menial positions in a Jim Crow U.S. Army, this must have sounded like something out of a utopian novel. However, these reports were most likely exaggerated since the major Parisian dailies never carried any corresponding news of the French Board of Trade event for Johnson, nor did they report any public proclamations of French authorities' desire to welcome African Americans as citizens. Nevertheless, through these circulating stories of their favorite boxing heroes, Johnson's black fans came to view Paris as a refuge from racial oppression. Johnson's exploits both in and out of the ring also suggested a more accessible and immediate form of social mobility outside the regular channels of politics, education, and business. After all, Johnson was “just a plain Galveston levee roustabout who found out he could fight and then got rich.”73 This roustabout had managed not only to evade U.S. authorities but also to transmit his story of racial persecution across Europe.
PERFORMING RESISTANCE