Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Read online

  Known for his sturdy physique and his steadfast refusal to fight any black challengers, especially Jackson, Sullivan was the ultimate icon of white American working-class men. Accompanied by a troupe of boxers and the African American Bohee Brothers minstrel performers, he followed Buffalo Bill's lead, exhibiting his pugilistic talents throughout England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In Birmingham Sullivan's tour converged with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and the industrial city reveled in its white American heroes. Nearly twenty thousand spectators, including “a large number of Buffalo Bill's followers,” attended Sullivan's exhibitions at Bingley Hall.79 Both these spectacles of white American manhood—one a romanticized vision of Western conquest and the other a celebration of urban working-class strength—resonated with Britain's own racial and imperial mythology. Contemporary U.S. commentators recognized the sheer power of these images. An illustrator for Life magazine called it “The Triumph of the West,” depicting a British royal procession that featured Buffalo Bill on horseback followed by Sullivan posing atop an elaborate float for scores of admiring fans.80

  Alongside these grand displays of white American manhood, U.S. tropes of blackness were also central to the growing trade in racialized amusements. Just as popular ideas and images of the so-called East provided Westerners with a means to construct whiteness in opposition to an exotic “other”—what Edward Said called “Orientalism”—popular tropes of the “negro” had come to play a similar geopolitical role. The negro was a hybrid construction, an admixture of black images from across the diaspora. Because of the cultural power of the United States, the archetypical “stage darky” of blackface minstrelsy emerged as one of the predominant images of blackness. The stage darky permeated not only the United States but also wherever African American performers and their burnt cork imitations traveled. Elements of the stage darky pervaded representations of black South African miners, colonial subjects in India, and even Australian Aboriginals. In this way, a local narrative of race situated in the specific historical realities of U.S. plantation slavery and Jim Crow segregation developed into a global story of white supremacy.81

  This trade in stock images of black America was not without reallife consequences. Given white Britishers' limited contact with people of African descent, their racial education often came from commercial amusements emanating from the United States. Writing in 1885, Major A. B. Ellis of the First West India Regiment argued that the circulating images of blackface minstrelsy made it next to impossible for black soldiers to get any respect in England. As Ellis observed, “The popular idea in Great Britain of the negro is that he is a person who commonly wears a dilapidated tall hat, cotton garments of brilliant hue, carries a banjo or concertina, and indulges in extraordinary cachinnations at the slightest pretext.”82 As the frustrated officer maintained, this vision of blackness was just “as far from the truth” as the stereotypes propagated “by the vivid fancy of Mrs. Beecher Stowe.” So popular was Uncle Tom's Cabin, as both a book and a play, that it continued to influence English perceptions of black people from all parts of the diaspora for many years to come.83

  When Jackson traveled to England in 1892 to fight the white Australian Frank Slavin, he experienced the same kind of conflation. Many Londoners viewed him as a “curiosity,” since they had only encountered black people through the “burnt cork darkies of minstrelsy.”84 Even though Jackson was technically a British subject and certainly saw himself as such, they still perceived him largely through the prism of U.S. racial narratives.

  As much as Jackson and his generation of black pugilists remained trapped in this web of minstrel imagery, they also proved indispensable to the development of a cosmopolitan black counterculture. They were part of an expansive network of black cultural traffic, one that included the likes of Henry “Box” Brown, the famed abolitionist performer, and the celebrated vaudeville duo of Bert Williams and George Walker.85 The performative elements of boxing, both in and out of the ring, held a special appeal for the black masses. Through their pugilistic heroes, everyday people gained a sense of control over the black body and its gendered representation at a moment when prevailing ideals of citizenship and the nation remained interwoven with images of white manhood. After Jackson defeated Slavin to capture both the English and Australian heavyweight titles, an enthusiastic African American reporter declared that Britain was “One Spot where the Negro is a Man.” As the reporter bragged, Jackson's “exemplary bearing in the ring” had garnered him “troops of friends of all ranks and grades in the social scale.” In civilized England the black man could apparently “'live, move and have his being' on terms of absolute equality with the white man.”86 Although the foreign exploits of men like Jackson certainly provided African Americans with a means to critique the Jim Crow color line, they also exposed the limitations of commercial mass culture as a forum for collective resistance.

  Whereas visual imagery and performance helped to translate counterhegemonic ideas of race across national borders, they were also susceptible to their own distortions and elisions. As black American sportsmen became some of the most infamous stand-ins for an imagined community of nonwhite peoples across the globe, their hypervisibility had real implications for the construction of black and anticolonial nationalisms and transnationalisms in subsequent decades. Their well-publicized version of black success was not only male-dominated but also overwhelmingly focused on the cultivation of the body, displays of physical strength and sexuality, conspicuous consumption, antisocial behavior, and outward performance. In turn, the growing prominence of African American images of blackness complicated later attempts to build transnational racial solidarity. The very ubiquity of black American sojourners and their exhibitions tended to obscure the complexities of race in different spaces while also pushing the concerns of their peers from across the diaspora and the colonial world to the margins of public debate.

  Following in the cosmopolitan footsteps of men like Jackson, Johnson strutted onto the world stage in the early years of the twentieth century. Australia was his first overseas destination. chapter 1 explores the controversy surrounding Johnson's relationship with a white Australian woman in 1907 in tandem with the public outcry over his 1908 defeat of the reigning world heavyweight champion Tommy Burns in Sydney. Placing these two incidents within the context of contemporary fears of impending race war in the Pacific region exposes the deep-seated relationship between modern ideas of race and the body. U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt's own fascination with boxing and the “strenuous life” echoed popular British and Australian concerns about their fitness for the white man's burden. With mounting anxieties over white degeneration, colonial spaces and interracial conflict became the imagined backdrop for the regeneration of Anglo-Saxon manhood.

  Expanding on these themes of white degeneration and nonwhite subversion, chapter 2 examines the concerted efforts across the United States and the British Empire to ban the moving picture featuring Johnson's defeat of the white American champion Jeffries in 1910. News of this heavily anticipated interracial fight and its film recording traveled far beyond the confines of the actual event in Reno, Nevada. The many reports and visual representations of Johnson's victory inspired anticolonial discussions and celebrations around the globe, from South Africa to India to Fiji. They also provoked interimperial conversations about the maintenance of white supremacy in the modern world, especially given the increasingly transnational reach of commercial mass culture.

  The next three chapters shift the spotlight to Johnson's European travels throughout the 1910s, exploring the tensions between his exhilarating freedom of movement and the realities of the global color line. The transnational tumult that followed the announcement of Johnson's world championship match against the British titleholder Bombardier Billy Wells in London, England, provides the centerpiece for chapter 3. As white men on both sides of the Atlantic joined together in their search for a “white hope” to unseat Johnson, the boxing ring became a space of inte
nse discussion about the urgent need to police the racial divisions between citizens and subjects.

  Unfairly convicted in 1913 under the Mann Act, which prohibited white slave trafficking, Johnson chose to seek refuge abroad rather than go to jail. Chapter 4 examines Johnson's European exile as part of a wider culture of black working-class resistance in the years before World War I. In Europe black sojourners found a ready market for their matches and exhibitions along with many opportunities to publicly critique the injustices of Jim Crow America. Yet, although European sportsmen often embraced African American boxers to demonstrate their own civilization and racial enlightenment, their sense of allegiance only stretched so far. As chapter 5 demonstrates, this was certainly true of black American boxers' experiences in France. Although they became instant celebrities in Paris, there was a darker side to their success. Exoticized for their physical prowess, hypermasculine sexuality, and flashy style, they remained commodities in the profitable trade of racialized spectacles.

  As the Great War spread across Europe, Johnson was once again on the move. As chapter 6 shows, his subsequent journeys across the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly in Cuba and Mexico, coincided with the United States' growing influence in the region. Traveling along the same routes as U.S. power, Johnson found himself confronted by the profound irony of being black and American at a moment when the United States was beginning to take on a more prominent geopolitical role. Although Johnson eventually surrendered to U.S. authorities in 1920, bringing his long sojourn to an end, his rebellious feats in and beyond the ring had already unsettled the racial order in much of the late imperial world. Chapter 7 explores Johnson's insurgent legacy in the aftermath of his career. The storm of controversy surrounding the Senegalese boxer Battling Siki (dubbed the “French Jack Johnson”) exemplified the escalating conflict between Western imperialism and black/anticolonial radicalism during the interwar years. Although he was no longer in the limelight, Johnson had helped to unleash a rising tide of color across the globe.

  1

  Embodying Empire

  Jack Johnson and the White Pacific

  This battle may in the future be looked back upon as the first great battle of an inevitable race war…there is more in this fight to be considered than the mere title of pugilistic champion of the world.

  —Australian Star on Burns versus Johnson, 5 December 1908

  On 26 December 1906 Jack Johnson left San Francisco for his first journey overseas, traveling to Australia aboard the steamship Sonoma. At twenty-nine years of age, the African American heavyweight was by no means a rookie; he was already well known in professional prizefight circles and had traveled throughout the United States. He was also very well versed in the racist ways of Jim Crow America. What Johnson knew less was the kind of reception that awaited him beyond U.S. borders. As his manager, Alec McLean, assured him, Australia could not be any worse than America.1 Not in need of much convincing, the ambitious Johnson agreed to try his luck abroad.

  Johnson's initial experiences matched his optimism. Although he battled seasickness throughout the trip, he was sad to leave the “charming friends” he had met aboard the Sonoma. Johnson later recalled, “For the first time in my life, I was pleased to find myself in a group in which we did not take into account people's color.”2 When he arrived in Sydney on 24 January 1907, the city's white sportsmen embraced him with open arms, and local newspapers declared that he would not be forced to confront a color line in Australia.

  Despite this warm welcome, Australian fans had more in common with their white American counterparts than they cared to admit. As they viewed Johnson through the distorted lens of blackface minstrelsy, he appeared more an exotic curiosity than a man. “He has a genial face,” the Sydney Truth described, “somewhat babyish looking and of the type of the little coons who may be seen devouring watermelons in a well-known American picture.”3 Since the mid-nineteenth century, minstrelsy had been a staple in Australian theaters, providing white settlers with a glimpse of U.S. racial politics. Australians had eagerly embraced this U.S. import, adapting both its imagery and its language to their local scene. So-called “nigger” bands played on Australian steamers, and street minstrels paraded outside neighborhood pubs dressed in loud suits complete with oversized collars and coattails.4 Not surprisingly, when the dandified heavyweight arrived, white Australians immediately cast him as a minstrel. Wrapped up in the sentimental tropes of blackface comedy, Johnson, for the time being, seemed harmless.

  Over the next two years the black heavyweight transformed from an amusing spectacle to a serious threat in the eyes of many white Australians. They discovered that he was the farthest thing from a submissive stage darky. Much like in the United States, Johnson's conquest of white men in the ring and white women in the bedroom did not go over well Down Under. These were both serious violations of racial protocol at a time when preserving the strength and purity of white bodies was central to white supremacist thought. Thus, the public uproar over his relationship with a white Australian woman in 1907 and the subsequent backlash against his 1908 world championship victory over Tommy Burns in Sydney were essentially two sides of the same coin.

  Though geographically distant and demographically different, the two nations shared the same underlying logics of race and the body. First forged in the performances of blackface minstrels, these transnational links proliferated with the expansion of mass sporting culture at the turn of the twentieth century. By the time Johnson reached Sydney, the athletic body had become an important medium through which white men expressed their mutual interest in the maintenance of global white domination. The image of an ideal citizen was a muscular white male. This focus on the physical provided an easy justification for the exclusion of people of color from mainstream politics and society. Their dark skin and exotic bodies became the tangible proof of their unworthiness for full citizenship rights and self-determination. It marked them as contaminating threats to the health of the white body politic.

  The rise of rationalized physical training and organized sport also helped to naturalize social Darwinist theories about the survival of the fittest. “Man is and always will be, a fighting animal,” declared the famed white American and former world heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries.5 Countless articles in U.S., British, and French sporting magazines reflected the widespread idea that how a group of people (a race, ethnicity, or nation, for example) fought provided a clear demonstration of its relative cultural and political status.6 Like many of his contemporaries, Jeffries believed that “the better fighter a nation was, the more quickly did it become civilised, because it tackled and downed the things which bound it to savagery more speedily.” Conquering nations “were those that had learned the advantages of scientific fighting.”7 Boxing was especially suited to the needs of white men and white nations, for it promised to improve their productivity, self-discipline, courage, and self-reliance in the face of growing challenges to their authority.

  White men, however, could never fully contain the fluid meanings of sport and physical culture. Wherever they traveled, Johnson and other black boxers publicly disrupted not only the mainstream ideals of the white male body and the white body politic but also the racial fictions of the degenerate stage darky. Thanks in part to the growing popularity of prizefighting, their powerful black bodies became the visual portents of racial Armageddon, at once feared and desired by white sporting audiences and celebrated by people of color around the world.

  THE WHITE BODY POLITIC

  Theodore Roosevelt maintained a longstanding fascination with boxing throughout his life in public office, first as the governor of New York (1899–1900) and later as the president of the United States (19019). The sport played a big role in Roosevelt's political self-fashioning as a rugged proponent of the “strenuous life.” He often credited boxing with his early success as a colonel in the Spanish-American War. “A good deal of whatever it was that carried me through the San Juan business,” Roosevelt once w
rote, “I owed to the lessons I had learned as regards [to] temper and courage in the days when I used to box.”8 The heroic myths about his charge up Cuba's San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders had helped transform him from an effeminate “Jane-Dandy” to an icon of white American manhood.9 Roosevelt actively cultivated this image, surrounding himself with professional pugilists like John L. Sullivan, Oscar “Battling” Nelson, and Robert Fitzsimmons. He even hired “Professor” Mike Donovan, a former bare-knuckle fighter and the head instructor at the New York Athletic Club, as his family's official boxing trainer. A regular fixture at both the governor's mansion and the White House, Donovan often sparred with Roosevelt. “I have noted his career in politics, [and] seen him go for the mark there with the same pertinacity that he shows when boxing,” Donovan later recalled. “Resistance, discomfiture, [and] hard knocks in one domain as in the other serve only to make him keener.”10

  Roosevelt's pairing of physical fitness and political affairs was more than just an idiosyncratic trait. It was indicative of the rising importance of the body as a modern social construction at the turn of the twentieth century. The Muscular Christianity movement had first appeared in 1850s England, and by the early 1900s it had spread throughout the United States.11 Its proponents argued that Christians needed to cultivate not only their spiritual and mental strength but also their physical health. To glorify the body was to glorify God, and white Anglo-Saxon Christian men had a special responsibility to develop their physiques for the battles of modern life. Over time this body culture became increasingly secularized.

  The acceleration of industrialization, improvements in printing, photography, and cinematography, and the rise of consumerism contributed to this cultural reconfiguration of the body. The emergence of music halls, saloons, sporting papers, the penny press, and movie houses fostered a bachelor culture of mass spectatorship and readership in the growing cities of Europe, the United States, and their empires.12 Physical strength and vigor became favorite topics of discussion in these homosocial spaces. Athletes and bodybuilders also became sought-after entertainers and heroes among the masses. Alongside traveling pugilists, physical culturists like Eugen Sandow of East Prussia and Bernarr MacFadden of the United States developed touring shows and established publishing empires. As these sports celebrities mingled with heads of state in the United States and Europe, the line between physical and political fitness blurred.13