Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  Despite the vast geographic scope of his career, Johnson is still most remembered by historians and boxing fans alike for his many public battles against the laws and customs of Jim Crow America.2 This tendency to frame the black American heavyweight's cultural and political significance within the borders of the United States has a long genealogy, rooted in racial conflicts within and beyond the boxing ring. After Johnson finally lost the world title to Jess Willard in 1915, white Americans were eager to bury any memory of his global pugilistic dominance and to ensure that such a sweeping travesty of white supremacy would never happen again. The world heavyweight championship remained racially segregated until the mid-1930s, when the young African American fighter Joe Louis rose to prominence. Hoping to break this boxing color bar and to secure a world title match for their protégé, Louis's managers went out of their way to distance him from Johnson's controversial legacy of irreverence and interracial relationships. This tactic paid off, for Louis wrested the world heavyweight championship from the white American favorite James J. Braddock in 1937.

  These initial efforts to suppress the public memory of Johnson's contentious and cosmopolitan life dovetailed with the United States' racial and geopolitical stakes during World War II and the early cold war. There was simply no place for Johnson's ilk in the period's popular discussions of racial progress and respectability. Johnson and the global imagination of race and resistance that he had come to symbolize, especially for black Americans in the early 1900s, were increasingly submerged under the weight of crossover sporting heroes like Louis and the national priorities they came to represent, from desegregation and the expansion of civil rights to the construction of a positive image of U.S. democracy for people of color around the world.3

  It was not until the rise of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s that Johnson came back into public view. Johnson's resurgence as a black icon owed much to the growing fame (and infamy) of another African American world heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali. As Ali's resistance to the Vietnam War made him at once a pariah in the eyes of conservative white America and an anticolonial hero around the globe, he developed a close sense of connection with the man he called “Papa Jack.” Although he disapproved of Johnson's preference for white women, he shared his predecessor's defiance in the face of white discrimination. “I grew to love the Jack Johnson image,” Ali explained. “I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger white folks didn't like.”4 This Johnson “renaissance” also extended into the arts. The Great White Hope, Howard Sackler's play based on Johnson's life, was so well received by audiences in Washington, D.C., that it secured a spot on Broadway in 1968. The play's film adaptation, directed by Martin Ritt, opened to critical acclaim in 1970.5 The following year Miles Davis released A Tribute to Jack Johnson. For the audacious jazz musician, Johnson embodied the period's spirit of open black defiance and black pride. “Johnson portrayed freedom,” Davis's liner notes declared. “It rang just as loud as the bell proclaiming him champion.…His flamboyance was more than obvious.”6 This flurry of black cultural production was fleeting, and over the next thirty years Johnson's legacy languished in relative obscurity. His “bad nigger” image certainly did not mesh with the Reaganite myth of color-blind meritocracy, nor did it fit with the increasing calls for “law and order” in the turbulent 1990s.7

  Now, in the first years of the twenty-first century, it has taken the attention of the celebrated white American documentary producer Ken Burns to bring Johnson back into the public consciousness of mainstream America. On 13 July 2004, on the eve of the Athens Olympics, Burns led a bipartisan and multiracial committee of politicians and celebrities in filing a petition with the U.S. Department of Justice for a posthumous presidential pardon for Johnson. Senators John McCain, Edward Kennedy, and Orrin Hatch, Representatives Charlie Rangel, Eddie Bernice Johnson, and Jesse Jackson Jr., boxers Sugar Ray Leonard, Bernard Hopkins, and John Ruiz, and entertainers Chuck D, Samuel L. Jackson, and Wynton Marsalis, among others, requested that the boxer's bogus Mann Act conviction officially be overturned. It seemed like a prime opportunity to raise public awareness in the United States about the indignities that Johnson endured at the hands of Jim Crow racism. “Our country will be represented in Athens by people of all races,” Burns told reporters. “Today, American kids do not know who Jack Johnson was or what he accomplished, in part because his magnificent career was stolen from him by this wholly unjust legal decision.”8 With an air of nationalist triumphalism the Republican senator McCain added, “Pardoning Jack Johnson will serve as a historic testament of America's resolve to live up to its noble ideals of justice and equality.”9 A symbolic gesture, Johnson's presidential pardon promised to provide both an important teaching moment and a cathartic release from the country's racist past. Eight years and one president later, however, Johnson has yet to be officially vindicated.

  It is rather ironic that Burns and his committee picked the eve of the Athens Olympics to place this pardon before the world. When his PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson premiered on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2005, it was, for the most part, interpreted as an American tale both at home and abroad.10 In the final moments of the film, the black American writer Stanley Crouch described Johnson's life as “uniquely American,” a quintessential bootstraps tale of black success. “America—for whatever its problems—still has a certain kind of elasticity and a certain latitude that allows the person to dream a big enough dream that can be achieved if the person is as big as the dream,” Crouch maintained.11 Across the Atlantic, a reviewer for Britain's Manchester Guardian put a more negative, yet still decidedly U.S.-oriented, slant on the racial moral of Johnson's story. Noting the recent proliferation of U.S. films celebrating white boxing heroes such as James J. Braddock (Cinderella Man, 2005) and the fictional Maggie Fitzgerald (Million Dollar Baby, 2004), he argued that “the rawest black boxing stories cut too closely to America's sense of itself to be likely hits.” Critiquing white American hubris, he scoffed, “Count on Hollywood to concern itself with white boys—or girls—on the make, and not with black men taking on the whole white world, and knocking it flat on its arse.”12 In his eyes, Unforgivable Blackness offered a welcome correction to Hollywood's glaring omission, resurrecting Johnson's gritty story from “Ellisonian invisibility,” a reference to Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man.

  Yet, as the British critic's comments also suggest, the black American champion's career was profoundly global. He not only defied white America, but he also took on the “whole white world.” While Johnson has posthumously reemerged as a symbol of the ultimate victory of U.S. freedom, individualism, and democracy, his global stature and its larger, more insurgent implications have for the most part remained buried. This domestication of Johnson's legacy points to the limitations of our own understandings of persistent racial inequality in this supposedly postcolonial, postracial era.

  Johnson's numerous battles against white supremacy in far-flung spaces around the world provide the narrative thread for this global history of race, gender, and empire in the early twentieth century. Always traveling in search of an unprejudiced place to ply his boxing trade, Johnson was a “rebel sojourner.”13 His life defied convention and fixity, for he refused to “cast down his bucket” and stay in his ascribed racial place. Although his boxing skills and financial success turned out to be exceptional, his peripatetic existence was far from unique. Johnson was part of a hardscrabble world of black men who traveled extensively as professional fighters, minstrel performers, circus attractions, maritime workers, casual laborers, and sometimes all of the above. Although black women also participated in this migratory lifestyle, often as entertainers, it was still largely a male-dominated phenomenon.14 Thanks to improvements in railway and transoceanic travel, Johnson and other black sojourners could not only chase opportunities throughout the United States but also try their luck across other countries and continents. Advances in communications technol
ogies, from the democratization of newspapers and photography to the rise of the telegraph and moving pictures, also allowed for the unprecedented transmission of their likeness and life stories across the globe. However, as Johnson and his contemporaries discovered, no matter how far they journeyed or how widespread their fame became, they could never fully escape the shadow of the color line.

  The relentless swirl of controversies that followed black pugilists like Johnson was emblematic of the deep-seated relationship between the rise of modern ideas of race and the expansion of global connections.15 The color line they faced was not a relic of days gone by, nor was it just a simple matter of individual or national psychology. Although built on the racial regimes of an earlier era of slavery and empire, it was a quintessentially modern construction. While definitely shaped by local, national, and regional conditions, it was also a global structure routed in the transnational flows of capitalist imperialism, urban industrialism, and the expanding mass culture industries.

  The eminent black American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois certainly recognized this in 1900 when he addressed the first Pan-African Conference in London, England. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line,” Du Bois declared; “the question as to how far differences of race…are going to be made, hereafter, the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing…the opportunities and privileges of modern civilisation.”16 As Du Bois later observed in “The Souls of White Folk,” published in an August 1910 issue of the Independent, the rise of a “new religion of whiteness” had caused the proliferation of racial segregation in a variety of forms.17 The world's many nations, ethnicities, and religions were increasingly becoming divided along a white-nonwhite binary. This binary was neither natural nor inevitable but actively constructed through the extension of imperial and commercial links in the early twentieth century. More than just an expression of white dominance, this zealous fixation on racial boundaries also indicated that conventional modes of racial control were in crisis—a crisis brought on by the active resistance of nonwhite peoples as they fought for greater access to the fruits of “modern civilisation” on their own terms. Perhaps influenced by the widespread white backlash against Johnson's defeat of Jim Jeffries just one month earlier, Du Bois likened this new religion of whiteness to the powerful waves of the ocean, for its destructive doctrine of exclusion appeared to be flooding the earth.

  Its transformative strength came from its ability to speak to the hopes and fears of regular people. Although larger struggles over power, land, resources, and profit were definitely at the heart of this new racial religion, for its many adherents it also involved what Du Bois called the “discovery of personal whiteness.”18 The transnational circuits of commercial mass culture were instrumental to this sense of individual conversion since they carried the gospel of whiteness to folks from all walks of life.

  Shifting ideals of manhood and the body, as well as the rise of mass production and consumerism, set the stage for this far-reaching religious revival. Both a physical activity and a commercial amusement involving man-on-man competition, boxing lay at the intersection of these modern developments. Although proper patriarchal organization remained an important marker of whiteness and civilization, and therefore the right to political self-determination, by the turn of the twentieth century Victorian notions of manliness grounded in the ideals of productivity, frugality, and self-denial were beginning to fall by the wayside. A new sense of masculinity emerged, expressed through recreational pursuits, the conspicuous consumption of mass-marketed commodities, and the public display of bodily strength.19

  At the same time, Western nations became increasingly concerned with maintaining the physical health of their populations. With the rise of what the philosopher Michel Foucault termed “biopolitics,” the policing of fitness versus degeneracy formed the basis of new racial regimes in the metropolitan centers and across their empires.20 This desire to create strong imperial nations in the normative image of a white, bourgeois, heterosexual man inspired a variety of disciplinary mechanisms, from physical education to sexual purity campaigns to involuntary sterilization. Yet biopolitics was not just an apparatus of state power, for it spawned a host of transnational culture industries dedicated to the improvement, preservation, and celebration of white, and especially male, bodies.

  This anxious drama often played out most prominently in the cultural realm. With the accelerating shift to mass production centered in cities, spaces of mass consumption (sporting arenas, vaudeville theaters, movie houses) became integral sites for public debates over questions of racial difference and imperial control.21 Not surprisingly, in this same period professional boxing had begun to shift from a local, often criminalized activity practiced in seamy saloons by bare-knuckled proletarians to a transnational sporting industry complete with gloved competitors, official rules, and governing bodies. Progressive reformers and state officials also began to see amateur boxing as a powerful instrument of normalization—a means to remake white men from across class and ethnic lines into stronger and more productive patriarchs, workers, citizens, and soldiers.22

  Because of their audacity and success in and out of the boxing ring, Johnson and other black pugilists became some of the most notorious heretics of this new religion of whiteness. Even though they lived on the fringes of respectable society, their geographic mobility, their public visibility, and most of all their physical conquest of white men put them at the very center of a developing black counterculture. Alongside the more conventional political work of black Atlantic activists and intellectuals like Du Bois, they played an integral role in the emergence of a popular black global imagination and a more confident race consciousness that touched the lives of ordinary people of color within and beyond the United States.23

  Their dual status as both second-class citizens and sporting celebrities gave them a unique perspective on the global color line, along with a mobile platform from which to protest it. They often had more “real world” experience than their middle-class counterparts in negotiating the local conditions of racial oppression in various spaces outside the United States. They were at once reviled and adored as they traveled to destinations throughout the Atlantic world and across the Pacific Ocean. While overseas they publicly challenged the hypocrisy of white supremacy, gaining the admiration of people of color in different places. Stories of their successes and troubles abroad also inspired black Americans back home to expand their geographic imaginations and to envision their racial struggles as part of a global problem.

  For Johnson and other rebel sojourners, their widespread fame ultimately was a double-edged sword. As they entered the transnational circuits of professional boxing, they became even further enmeshed in a complex racial economy that extended far beyond the purview of Jim Crow America. They soon became some of the most glaring symbols of the mounting confrontation over the terms of race and empire in the modern world.

  BLACK BOXERS AS MODERNITY'S DISCONTENTS

  Johnson was not the first black pugilist to experience such an expansive life and career. Throughout the nineteenth century black boxers were always on the move, their migratory lives often overlapping with those of sailors, itinerant laborers, and traveling performers. The legendary bare-knuckle boxer Thomas Molineaux, the first black man to claim the title of “American champion,” was one such wandering figure. Likely born in Virginia sometime around 1784, the former slave was earning his living as a prizefighter in New York City's bustling Catherine Market by 1804, and by 1810 he had already journeyed across the Atlantic for a title fight against the reigning English champion, Tom Cribb.24

  In the decades after Molineaux's celebrated career, scores of other black boxers continued to survive by their wits in the wider world. Recognized more for their skin color than their national affiliation, they were the quintessential black cosmopolitans. Born in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1813 to an African seaman and a local peasant woman, James Wharton, better know
n as “Jemmy the Black,” started out as a cabin boy on a ship that voyaged between Cairo and London. During a violent altercation with the ship's cook, Jemmy's fighting ability caught the attention of an English passenger who encouraged the black youth to become a prizefighter. Although Jemmy initially found work at a British boxing booth taking on all comers, by the 1830s he had emerged as one of the period's most famous black pugilists. The next generation of black prizefighters gave rise to strong-minded men like John Perry, dubbed “The Black Sailor.” The son of a white mother and a black British father in Nova Scotia, Canada, Perry fought in England and Australia throughout the 1840s and 1850s. In 1849 he even captured the heavyweight title in Australia, where his opulent clothing and confident demeanor unnerved many of the local white journalists.25

  By the 1860s African American men had begun to emerge as the leading force in the transatlantic fight scene. A native of Washington, D.C., the black sailor Bob Smith developed into a successful bareknuckle fighter popularly known as “The Liverpool Darkey.” Much like his predecessor Jemmy the Black, Smith first tested his boxing skills aboard a ship bound for England. After enduring many attacks at the hands of his white mates, Smith fought back, beating them all. Sensing a chance for easy profits, the ship's captain offered to back the black American as a professional fighter in Liverpool.26