Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  Boxing itself was a foreign sport, and in the years before World War I it became increasingly popular in France. Previously Frenchmen had practiced the savate, a system of defense involving both kicking and punching. Around 1905, however, the French public began to abandon the savate in favor of the British and eventually the U.S. style of boxing. Words like knockout and fighter came into use as a variety of French periodicals began to cover and support the fledgling boxing industry.13

  Théodore Vienne, Frantz Reichel, Paul Rousseau, and Victor Breyer, the founders of La Société de Propagation de la Boxe Anglaise (Society for the Propagation of English Boxing, or SPBA), worked to legitimize boxing in the eyes of the French public.14 The SPBA strove to develop French champions capable of beating Anglo-Saxon opponents and to promote boxing as a vital means of physical exercise and self-defense. They hoped the sport would help to strengthen and invigorate the French nation by fighting alcoholism and debauchery among its young men. The organization often brought in foreigners to fight French boxers and to tutor French fans in the nuances of boxing technique.15 The SPBA's main venue, the Wonderland Paris, became a hub of social activity, attracting not only the Tout-Paris sportif, or the upper-crust connoisseurs of sport, but also considerable crowds of working-class people.

  As the SPBA eagerly solicited the visits of African American pugilists in the early 1900s, questions of race soon entered the cosmopolitan space of the French ring. Parisian fans argued that their celebration of black prizefighters illustrated their greater modernity and, by extension, their more sophisticated relationship with the colonial world, yet the fame of black American boxers also exposed French anxieties about their place in the global arena, as well as their own ideas about racial difference and the cultural boundaries of civilization. Using this confusing mix of interimperial rivalry and trade to their advantage, Johnson and his contemporaries soon cornered the Parisian market for blackness.

  BLACK BOXERS AND THE FRENCH BODY POLITIC

  Long before the famed African American performer Josephine Baker arrived in the French capital in 1925, spectacles of blackness, especially black manhood, had already become a hot commodity in the Parisian sporting scene.16 Although both vilified and feared in their own nation, African American pugilists became huge celebrities in France: they challenged white men in the ring, endorsed a variety of products, published articles in sporting magazines, toured the French provinces, participated in the underground nightlife of the Parisian bals (dance halls), and even gained the admiration of the European avant-garde. The early French boxing scene revolved around the lives and fights of African American heavyweights, and they emerged as central figures in the racialized and gendered aesthetics of transatlantic modernism.17 Their pugilistic feats became an important cultural site for spirited discussions about race, the body, and the body politic.

  Alongside other modes of African American performance, from the danse du gâteau (cakewalk) to the syncopated rhythms of ragtime, black boxers embodied a vision of modernity both in and out of the ring that appealed to French spectators. In the years before World War I, Parisian fans adopted American-style boxing for many of the same reasons they later embraced jazz. Popularized by African American fighters in France, boxing and its attendant culture seemed to encapsulate the presumed freedom, physicality, and vivacity of black culture. With the American style, one could fight with little appearance of strain or effort. Its crouched stance was more fluid than that of the traditional English method, allowing the boxer to punch and dodge with ease. Georges Max's Pelican Club and Grognet's school promoted their salles de boxe (boxing gyms) as places where Frenchmen could receive expert instruction in the new American method, often from African American champions. Outside the ring, Parisian sportsmen also began to appropriate the flamboyant lifestyles of their favorite black pugilists. Johnson and McVea helped to popularize chewing gum, while their dandified fashions found a place in the shops of local tailors.18 Black American prizefighters exemplified the fundamental paradox of transatlantic modernism, for their combination of African primitivism and raw New World energy became the basis for the cultural regeneration of white France.19

  Black American boxers' great popularity with French fans ultimately stemmed from their embodiment of primal black physicality, seen as the polar opposite of the effete intellectuality of white civilization. Unlike their white American and British counterparts, French sports reveled in spectacles of black strength. McVea's early matches against white fighters exemplified this growing fetishism of the black male body. When McVea knocked out English fighter Jack Scales in January 1908, his physical stature and boxing skill mesmerized French spectators. As Jacques Mortane recounted in colorful detail, with McVea's “avalanche” of blows, Scales's head had “oscillated three or four times from front to back, as if the shock would remove it from his trunk.”20 For McVea, who found himself effectively shut out of mainstream U.S. boxing when first-rate white American pugilists refused to fight him, French journalists' graphic description and public celebration of his interracial triumphs must have seemed extraordinary. For close to two years he was an invincible hero, beating white opponent after white opponent in front of large crowds of Parisian fans. In France black male physicality was a saleable commodity rather than a cause for alarm.

  Figure 12. French sporting magazines frequently featured news and photos of the major black American heavyweights, including Sam McVea (pictured here), Joe Jeannette, Jack Johnson, and Sam Langford. La Vie au grand air, 30 May 1908. From the author's collection.

  Although bouts featuring two black pugilists had little mainstream marketability in the United States, les combats nègres (nigger matches) formed the centerpiece of the French boxing industry. In 1909 a series of fights between McVea and Jeannette captured the attention of Paris, provoking passionate debates about race and modernity. Through these matches sports enthusiasts discussed the nature of black masculinity, physicality, savagery, and solidarity and also pondered the intimate relationship between the survival of the French Republic and its African colonies. They eagerly consumed many of the same essentialist images of blackness circulating in white American and British publications and performances, reconfiguring them to suit their local cultural and political needs. As the McVea-Jeannette fight series linked sport with popular science, politics, and aesthetics, the boxing ring became an important arena in which all of these racialized themes intertwined.

  The two African American pugilists traveled to Paris at a moment when calls for white physical regeneration in the face of modern decadence gripped the French popular consciousness. With its native-born population in decline, many physical culturists believed that France was, in effect, a dying nation, not only unable to protect its own citizens at home but also incapable of bearing its share of the white man's burden abroad.21 While French fears of white degeneration centered on their diminishing birthrate in the face of German demographic explosion and the threat of German invasion, the African colonies emerged as the ultimate resource for national revival. Writing in 1910, Colonel Charles Mangin argued that France possessed an untapped human reserve, the force noire (black army), which would help to sustain the geopolitical strength of the imperial nation.22 “All the French will understand that France does not stop in the Mediterranean, nor in the Sahara,” the colonel explained, “that it extends to Congo; that it constitutes an empire vaster than Europe.”23 Despite Mangin's rhetoric of inclusion, this “expansion” would not only require continued white French stewardship, but it would also keep the majority of black subjects safely contained within colonial borders.

  Rather than an endorsement of black sovereignty, Mangin's faith in the force noire had more to do with prevailing beliefs about the revivifying effects of primitive African manhood. He maintained that Africans had “the qualities which the long fights of modern war required: rusticity, endurance, tenacity, a combative instinct, the absence of nervousness, and an incomparable power of shock.”24 However, colonial posters,
military postcards, drawings, and photographs always portrayed the soldiers of the force noire as endearing, humorous, and even happy-go-lucky. African American boxers also became nonthreatening symbols of colonial Africa. The consumption of primitive blackness embodied by men like McVea and Jeannette offered a means to regenerate white French manhood, and by extension the French imperial nation, in the safety of the metropolitan capital.

  The amazing feats of black prizefighters often did more to support the French mission civilisatrice than to undermine it. The public fascination with McVea and others was an extension of France's already well-established culture of imperial spectacle. Black American boxers embodied the full range of African stereotypes already in operation in the French capital. In the late nineteenth century, elaborate displays of colonial peoples at the Paris Expositions Universelles (1889 and 1900) accompanied the expansion of French imperialism in Africa. Parisian theater had also taken to sensationalizing the French conquest of Dahomey (Benin) through epic plays, staged reenactments of battles, and ethnographic scenes involving “authentic” natives. This combination of state-sponsored exhibits and popular entertainments offered a glimpse of the supposedly colorful, brutal, primitive, and physical African lifestyle, thereby reifying the racial hierarchy while also helping to rationalize the need for white French intervention.25 Black American fighters found themselves folded into this commercial culture of blackness as they boxed and performed in many of the same venues as these colonial spectacles. The Parisian sports columnist Henri Dispan admitted, “Each time Mr. Samuel McVea and other gentlemen of color fight, I am well aware of the emotions that a trip to the heart of Africa must give.”26 In his descriptions of their matches, Dispan freely melded stereotypical images of black slaves on the plantations of la Louisianne (Louisiana) with those of cannibalistic natives in the African jungle. It certainly would not have been a stretch for French audiences to view men like McVea and Jeannette as essentially “African,” especially since black American performers often masqueraded as Zulus, Ethiopians, and Dahomeyans in marketing themselves to European audiences.27

  Alongside these depictions of black colonial barbarity, the image of the African tirailleur (soldier) emerged as the epitome of the French civilizing process: a physically robust yet domesticated savage who had not only been tamed but trained to happily serve in the defense of white French interests. With its coverage of the Dahomean War in 1892, the mainstream French press constructed the African tirailleurs as faithful heroes—deferential, determined, and, perhaps most importantly, cheerful and comical. The tirailleurs first made their appearance in Paris in 1899, marching proudly to the cheers of white French spectators in the Bastille Day parade. By World War I their smiling pictures graced French advertisements for the beverage Banania, accompanied by the catchphrase “Y'a Bon!” (Dis be good!).28 The blackface caricatures of African American boxers often spoke the same petit nègre (pidgin French). A popular advertisement for Sen-Sen chewing gum, a licorice-flavored breath freshener, featured a grinning McVea next to a battered white fighter with the caption “Moi, toujou vainqueur, toujou souriant, jamais knock-out, car moi toujou mâcher” (Me always winner, always smiling, never knock out, because me always chewing).29 Much like the tirailleurs, McVea and his contemporaries exemplified the same duality of controlled ferocity, except this time it was in the service of white French amusement.

  Figure 13. The caricatures of black American boxers that appeared in French newspapers closely resembled popular images of the African tirailleurs (soldiers). “Après le match—Sen-Sen chewing gum,” L'Auto, 28 March 1909. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  The McVea-Jeannette series also coincided with the rise of l'Art nègre, as avant-garde artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso began to experiment with the aesthetics of primitivism. These artists employed African motifs to shock viewers and disrupt conventions, thereby critiquing what they saw as the stultifying conformity of white French civilization.30 Several of them were even known to frequent the matches of African American boxers, using them as a source of creative inspiration. “Since 1910, I had been attracted to boxing matches,” the cubist painter André Dunoyer de Segonzac later recounted. “The black heavyweight champions Sam MacVea, Sam Langford, and Joe Jeannette amazed French sporting youth.” He recalled seeing Johnson in a wrestling match at the Nouveau Cirque, “beautiful like an Apollo from the Congo.”31 Segonzac and others came to identify with the black heavyweights, for their savage vitality in the ring stood in direct contrast to the supposed degeneracy of the period. Even as the French tried to dissociate themselves from the imperial politics of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, they actively participated in the very same ideas of race and the body that bolstered the global project of the white man's burden.

  The announcement of the first McVea-Jeannette match had reportedly “revolutionized the world of Parisian sportsmen.” A month and a half before the scheduled fight on 20 February, fans had already begun to inquire about tickets. “It is the question of the day,” one journalist observed, “and in all the boxing clubs and athletic milieus, we discuss this subject with passion.”32 Another sportswriter claimed, “It is not just Paris, but all the regions [départements] and even abroad that are interested in the great event of February 20.” Ticket requests had come to L'Auto from “London, Brussels, Liège, Anvers, Genève, Roubaix, Lille, Troyes, Rouen, Reims, Orléans, and even Bordeaux.”33

  The publicity surrounding the McVea-Jeannette match had ethnographic and social Darwinistic undercurrents, exposing French views on the inherent physicality of black people and their evolutionary separation from white civilization. Parisian spectators seemed to revel in the African American competitors' imagined brutality as an antidote to their own effete and effeminate modernity. Referring to McVea and Jeannette as “les deux terribles nègres” (the two terrible niggers), French sportswriters promised the match would be more gruesome than any other fight in the capital.34

  This French eroticism of the virile black male body not only drew scores of fans (both men and women) to the African American fighters' training camps, but it also inspired the publication of countless pictures and the brisk sale of souvenirs. In describing Jeannette's first public workout, one sportswriter exclaimed, “I will not surprise anyone by saying that his musculature is superb: his large shoulders and supple, elegant legs.”35 Alongside Jeannette's “extraordinary virtuosity,” he also touted McVea's “extraordinary power and speed.”36 Many Parisian sporting magazines showcased photos of McVea and Jeannette in just their boxing trunks, baring their powerful chests. The dark-skinned McVea had a stocky, muscular build, while the biracial Jeannette had a much leaner, chiseled physique. French fans could even treat themselves to figurines and silhouettes of the two African American pugilists, specially crafted for the occasion by local artists.37

  Blackface images, neolithic caricatures, and simian tropes abounded in the prefight publicity, betraying the exotic, paternalistic gaze of French spectators. Despite the fact that McVea and Jeannette differed greatly in color and appearance, one cartoon reduced them both to white eyes and lips against a black background, while others featured the same markers of savagery, including dragging knuckles, exaggerated lips, jutting jawbones, and overhanging foreheads. A popular French cartoonist depicted McVea as a menacing gorilla and poked fun at Jeannette's seeming inability to find human sparring partners strong enough to train with him.38 Even though Jeannette reportedly declared that he was a “mulatto” rather than a “nigger,” European artists still defined him by the racial tropes of the day.39 Many of their caricatures suggested that both fighters possessed an unrivaled animalistic strength.

  On the evening of 20 February, hundreds of sports fans waited anxiously outside the Cirque de Paris on avenue de la Motte-Picquet well before the start of the fight card. Although the modern venue had a capacity of more than four thousand spectators, several thousand fans still had to be turned away. Many prominent European sportsmen attended, as did ic
ons of the theater, arts, and letters. Also on hand were political and scientific leaders, from dukes to marquises to doctors. This historic match was not just the domain of the rich and famous, for the promoters had set aside a section of seats for the city's less fortunate. They had also expanded the betting services to accommodate the large number of transactions coming from every sector of society. In the end, the box office alone garnered a record-breaking eighty-five thousand francs.40

  La Patrie called it “the greatest match that we have ever seen in Paris.” French journalists portrayed the fight as almost titillatingly pornographic in its brutality. “For more than an hour, a half-breed as handsome as Hercules [Jeannette] and the strongest of the Ethiopians [McVea] worked patiently and furiously to send one another to dreamland,” writer Georges Dupuy poetically recounted. “It was the assault of a tiger against a bison.” Jeannette, the “tiger,” was “agile, supple, powerful, aggressive, and perfectly composed,” while McVea, the “unbeatable black bison,” possessed a rock-hard forehead and enormous neck. With his many feints and dodges, Jeannette made his slower opponent look awkward at times. McVea, however, also hit Jeannette with pounding blows, knocking him to the canvas. Throughout the fight McVea struggled to counter Jeannette's assiduous technique with crushing force, and after twenty rounds he emerged the winner by referee's decision. The celebration of McVea's victory spilled into the streets of the capital.41

  With the match ending by decision rather than by knockout, many spectators felt cheated. In the weeks before the fight French fans had anticipated “a butchering capable of causing future prohibitions” of boxing in Paris.42 From the streets to the pages of sporting magazines, there was a flurry of discussion over whether the McVea-Jeannette match had been faked. Exposing underlying fears of black solidarity and conspiracy, many fans argued that the two fighters had entered into a secret “entente.” One correspondent complained that McVea and Jeannette had not only “lacked determination and hate,” but also had failed to bring “enough passion” to the ring.43 Countering such opinions, another fan wrote a blistering defense of the fight, maintaining that those who questioned the match's veracity were simply uncivilized people “whose keen desire was to see a boxing ring transformed into a bullfighting arena.”44 As this fan so astutely observed, driving this controversy were basic assumptions about the inherent savagery of black men and the viciousness of African combat, especially since these allegations almost never arose in response to matches involving white boxers.