Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  Starved for updates on Johnson's experiences abroad, sportswriter Billy Lewis opined, “If he were a great literary man, a great writer, such as Allegheri Dante [sic] was, doubtless the world would get some fine reading just about this time. He would take his tormentors to—[hell]…cutting out both purgatory and paradise.…O, if he could write like he could fight. But he can't. He's just a plain, blunt man.”74 Although for Lewis prose was the best medium of protest, Johnson and his cohort of black pugilists had developed other means to express themselves publicly and to advance their causes as they traveled overseas. They became masters of performance, not only in the ring but also on the stages and streets of Europe. They lived unapologetically as they competed with white men for jobs, became the headlining acts in theaters, made bold declarations to the press, toured around with impeccable style, and openly fraternized with white women. In Britain this influx of African American working men inspired a backlash, of which Johnson, the fugitive, became the most notorious target.

  In August 1913 the black champion traveled to London, England, with his wife and entourage for another leg of his European exile. Almost two years had passed since the cancellation of his match against Bombardier Billy Wells, and behind the scenes Lord Lonsdale and the Home Office were conspiring to uphold a color bar in the British boxing ring. It appeared as if the stage were one of the few spaces still open to Johnson in England, and he was determined to fight for his continued access to both its financial rewards and public platform.

  Sporting a “smartly cut gray frock coat, giving full display to his diamonds,” he held a press reception in his West End residence. Johnson was reportedly set to earn $5,000 a week from his twice nightly performances of sparring, dancing, singing, and playing his bass viol at the Euston and South London music halls. However, objections were already surfacing from the Variety Artists' Federation (VAF), a British trade union representing vaudeville performers. The VAF had begun to instruct its members to boycott the venues where Johnson was slated to appear.75 Despite this disturbing development, Johnson spoke confidently to the journalists in attendance. “They will soon come around and will be the first to lend a pal a hand,” he declared.76 When asked if he would return to the United States, Johnson joked, “I've got a good many friends there but when I meet them, if there is such a place as heaven, I hope it will be heaven and not America.”

  Over the next few months Johnson's bittersweet experiences in London painted a rather ambiguous picture of European tolerance. His own difficulties with segments of the English public seemed to betray an emerging, and disconcerting, trend in British metropolitan race relations. Just as growing numbers of black performers, athletes, and workers began arriving to fill the nation's demand for cheap labor and entertainment, Britain's policing of racial boundaries appeared to be tightening. The increasing visibility of African American men was causing white Britons to rethink the risks of living in an interracial society.

  By the early 1900s there were already signs that England's racial climate was changing. Jim Crow seemed to be blowing through the British Isles in a new and more powerful way, within the larger context of what an editorialist for the African Times and Orient Review dubbed, “The Americanisation of England.”77 “American enterprise has captured the principal trades of our country,” he observed. “The American accent rings through theatreland, and the variety art of America dominates the halls.” Yet the most tragic development of all was that “the worst elements of American race-hatred” were being “imported into English Government.” Even the “good old English characteristic of fair play” was becoming “a thing of the past.”

  Racial segregation and color consciousness appeared to be infiltrating British life in a variety of ways. English lawyers in the South Eastern Circuit had decided to exclude nonwhite barristers from eating in their mess hall.78 They also urged aspiring lawyers from the colonies to return home after taking the bar exam, since their continued presence in the British metropole would inevitably bring them racial discrimination from all angles. White Londoners began to worry about the seventy African students presently in the city, calling for greater white supervision so that they “should not, from ignorance or inexperience, be allowed to drift among unwholesome influences.”79 Even visiting African American professionals were finding it increasingly difficult to secure hotel accommodations in London. A reporter for the New York Age declared, “The poison of American race prejudice is working powerfully in places where its presence was not heretofore suspected.”80 The characterization of this rising racial intolerance as an invasion of white American principles rather than a consequence of British imperialism not only exposed the pervasiveness of England's national mythology of racial tolerance, but it also revealed contemporary anxieties about the expanding international influence of the United States and its supposedly “peculiar” racial politics.

  Yet the increasingly rigid construction of Britain's color bar was more than just a simple process of “Americanisation.” The frightening reality of black men from across the diaspora converging on the metropole was giving everyday Englishmen a taste of their own imperial medicine. Freeman sports columnist Lewis complained that the England of old—the one of abolitionist William Wilberforce, the one that had “honored and protected Frederick Douglass”—no longer seemed to exist.81 As a college sophomore he had come across what proved to be a prophetic passage in a British illustrated weekly. Pointing to the rampant negrophobia in the United States, it reasoned, “If the situation were here as there, our laboring men being jostled out of employment by the Negroes we would have the same conditions.” This passage had left Lewis reeling with a sense of shock and betrayal, for as a young man he had placed his faith in the progressiveness of English racial mores. However, Britain's changing demographics had made the so-called Negro a local problem. Not only did the British have to contend with their African possessions, but now growing numbers of black men were landing on their own shores.

  As far back as 1908, a London correspondent, whose story appeared in several U.S. newspapers, complained that a “Negro invasion” was overtaking the British Isles. Reportedly, thousands of African Americans had arrived in England over the past few years, and thousands more were expected to come. The first arrivals were “artists and athletes who realizing that they suffered in England but few of the disabilities attached to their race in the United States” had encouraged their friends to join them abroad.82 According to figures furnished by the U.S. embassy in London, there were five thousand black Americans in England, and four thousand of them had arrived in the last year. A black quarter sprung up in London's Soho district, spawning two restaurants that served “fried chicken, sweet corn and other delicacies dear to the negroe's [sic] heart.” Although one African American journalist believed that British reports were simply exaggerating the number of black Americans living in the capital alongside East Indian and West African immigrants, he acknowledged that there were more than “enough dark people in London to cause the oldest inhabitants to sit up and take notice.”83 African Americans were just one of many black ethnic groups living in London. Laborers, performers, and sailors from Africa and the Caribbean had also converged on the metropolitan capital in search of work. Nonetheless, it was easiest to blame the African American “outsiders” for bringing the “negro problem” to Britain, since it elided English culpability in the global project of white supremacy.84

  Black American boxers were essentially cashing in on the increasing wages and leisure time of Britain's white working class. Many acquired steady, and often lucrative, employment in two working-class amusements, professional boxing and minstrel shows. By the early 1900s the boxing business was robust enough for venues in London and the provincial towns to host prizefights several nights a week. African American blackface performers were also gaining widespread popularity in Britain. While white minstrels wearing burnt cork had dominated English stages in the nineteenth century, by the turn of the twentieth century African
American artists had begun to supplant them. African American blackface entertainers performed in town halls, assembly rooms, variety theaters, hippodromes, and cinemas throughout the country, rivaling circuses as the most sought-after shows.85 They also became popular attractions in the seaside resort towns that catered to weekend crowds of middle- and working-class Britons. With the growing demand for “authentic” coon songs and plantation melodies, white minstrels found themselves “driven off the sands by the American negroes.”86

  While African American performers clearly catered to the imperial tastes and racial myths of English audiences, their access to the stage gave them greater control over their own image. Theater critic Lester Walton of the New York Age saw the British rejection of white minstrels in favor of African American blackface artists as an example of racial progress. Around the same time that Johnson arrived in London, Charles Hart, a black comedian in the same vein as Bert Williams, became a huge hit in the city's vaudeville scene.87 Walton argued, “The fact that Charlie Hart is making good in England in blackface shows that the English theatregoer knows the difference between burlesquing a race and ridiculing a race.” Even though the stage and sporting arena remained the only two venues in which the British public seemed to welcome them, touring African Americans like Johnson endeavored to make the best of this tenuous situation.

  Yet the same assertiveness and ambition that had helped black Americans to achieve some success in the United States was now sowing the seeds for a backlash in Britain. “The English are called phlegmatic, and we, especially those ‘brilliant’ ones landing there for our country, are their very opposites,” Billy Lewis explained. “The English do not take to our forwardness, even that of the white Americans,” he claimed, adding, “And we are a forward race, the most aggressive, and also progressive on the earth when not hindered.” Lewis admitted that this special “spirit” had turned out to be “both damning and saving.”88

  As black sportsmen pushed their way into formerly white preserves, they subverted British social norms, from the workplace to the bedroom. In a letter to the African Times and Orient Review, Stephen Hamilton, a disgruntled forty-one-year-old coal miner from Monmouthshire, Wales, raised a number of concerns about the increasing number of black men in Britain. “I must tell you candidly that I am not in sympathy with the class of coloured people that are in our district,” he confided. “All the negroes we see are either pugilists or show-men.”89 As Hamilton explained, “I fancy we get the scum; they come in to Cardiff or Newport, two docks where coal is shipped, then they hear of the money got in coal mines, [and] they leave their ships and wander about the valleys of Wales.”

  Hamilton's observations were not unique. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most of the black men in Britain arrived as sailors. Laid off from ships or attracted to the potential for work in the burgeoning coal mining industry, black seamen initially became a presence in Cardiff in the 1870s. By the 1910s Cardiff was second to London in its proportion of foreign-born inhabitants, including Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and African Americans. Always the first crewmembers to be cast off, black seamen found it hard enough to find employment on new ships, let alone on land, since white sailors and laborers frequently refused to work with them. Many of them became destitute as they wandered from port to port in search of employment.90

  Not only were black men competing in the local labor market, but they now infringed upon the sexual territory of white men. “Why don't they bring black women or girls with them?” Hamilton asked, “but they demoralise white girls by marrying them.” Although he acknowledged that it was “not fair to judge the coloured race by Jack Johnson or Sam Langford or other pugilists,” he obviously viewed these shifting demographics through the lens of popular stereotypes about African American prizefighters' pomposity, hypersexuality, and, most of all, their fondness for white women.

  Hamilton's longtime exposure to the circulating fiction and rumor of Jim Crow America only reinforced his belief in the inevitable problems associated with race mixing. One of his uncles had taught him that before the U.S. Civil War, “it was not safe for a man to go to work in the morning and leave his wife by herself, because of the blacks breaking in and assaulting her.” In turn, Uncle Tom's Cabin provided the overarching framework for his encounters with black Americans. Hamilton had read the novel and seen its theatrical adaptation. Yet men like Johnson were the furthest thing from Uncle Tom, colliding with the coal miner's ideal of a docile darky. Amid this hodgepodge of segregationist sentiments, Hamilton had come to the conclusion that colonial subjects “should marry women of their own colour” and “should stay in their own country.”91

  A report in London's Evening Standard resonated with many of Hamilton's views on miscegenation. Written by the manager of a local detective agency, the article caught the attention of the African American press. The detective warned, “The wave of indignation now sweeping over the United States against the recent marriage of Jack Johnson to a white girl in Chicago is nothing compared to the storm which will burst in this country if Englishmen do not speedily awaken to the real peril of the black invasion which has been going on steadily for the last two years.”92 London had apparently become “a paradise for the black man,” since he was “permitted to mix with white women on social equality.”93 Given the growing insolence and hostility of the “Negro character,” violence was a necessary reaction. As the detective declared, “Lynching seems to be the only way to prevent the wholesale commission of crimes against womanhood by modern Negroes because fear is the sole restraining influence they know.” New Negroes no longer seemed to know their “place.”

  These collective concerns about increasing interracial contact in the metropole, along with the growing assertiveness of black men, continued to emerge in discussions of black boxers' exploits in and out of the ring. British publications betrayed an underlying anxiety about the preeminence of African Americans in the heavyweight division. Titled “The Dark Side of the White Hope Problem,” a cartoon in Boxing encapsulated these fears, depicting a crowd of African American pugilists as a sea of apelike sambo faces, so numerous that they filled the page with blackness.94 Another English sportswriter penned a sarcastic piece about black prizefighters' apparently unwarranted sense of pride. He explained, “The sensitiveness of some [black] boxers is abnormal and requires a rigid observance of numerous unwritten rules and regulations in its treatment.”95 Pluto, a hotheaded black pugilist from Coolgardie, Australia, seemed to provide a perfect example of this racial phenomenon. He had reportedly banged a white journalist's head against a doorstep for calling him a “nigger” in print. In some respects Pluto sounded a lot like Johnson. The sportswriter scoffed, “Clothe the negro in a suit resplendent with all the known colours on and above the universe, put spats upon his boots and crown him with the latest thing in hats, and no man dare call him equal. Add pugilism as his solitary accomplishment, and his value per ounce will exceed the price of radium per ton.” Clearly confidence, honor, and aggression were not suitable expressions for black men to display in public.

  Britain's “Black Scare” and its broader implications did not go unnoticed in black America. Although previous African American press reports from London had tended to tell a different story of interracial contact—one in which miscegenation excited no comment and fair-haired English ladies were free to marry men of color—an editorialist for the Indianapolis Freeman maintained that Britain's supposedly “new” racial paranoia was not so new at all.96 “The black man's fight is around the globe, a fact we have been trying to make plain for years,” he declared. “The world seems to be contesting the black man's right to exist.”97 In his view, the “Black Scare” revealed much more about white hypocrisy than black inferiority. “If it is said that the original intent was for each race to occupy its own zone, it can also be said that the white folks were the ones who thought to change things,” he argued. “America must go to Africa to bring in black folks. England is pud
dling about in Negro affairs in Africa.” British imperialism was no better than white American racism. “Great Britain and the rest of them go out of their way to cultivate the acquaintance of the barbarians,” he declared. “They introduce schools and religions among them, teaching them the brotherhood of man, leading them to suspect that they are a part of the human family, and as such have rights in common.” Regardless of this rosy colonial rhetoric, people of color still remained outside the bounds of civilization.

  Johnson arrived in London amid this simmering controversy, and his well-publicized presence soon brought the situation to a boil. He had hoped for a profitable, if not peaceful, sojourn in the British capital. A local syndicate had booked him for the highest weekly salary “of any vaudevillian abroad,” white or black. Among African Americans there was a sense of shared vindication in Johnson's international fame. “It must be refreshing to be treated as your position demands and not according to your color,” theater critic Lester Walton maintained, “even if you have to go abroad to experience the unusual sensation.”98 Johnson went out of his way to garner attention in London, sometimes waiting on “prominent street corners” for onlookers to gather so that he could stroll with an audience.99

  FIGURE 11. British cartoons such as this one betrayed an underlying anxiety about the preeminence of black Americans in the heavyweight division. “The Dark Side of the White Hope Problem,” Boxing New Year's Annual 1914.

  However, Johnson's plans to become England's biggest vaudeville attraction quickly fell apart. Given the increasing visibility of African American sportsmen and performers in Britain, it is hardly surprising that Johnson's access to England's stages became a point of public debate. Claiming that the black champion's exhibitions would represent a clear “degradation of the music halls,” VAF members decided to take collective action, launching a full-scale boycott of the venues where Johnson was set to perform.100 Although some justified their stance as a defense of artistic standards and others pointed to Johnson's legal troubles, in many respects the VAF's protest fused racial prejudice with labor protectionism. As an escaped African American felon, Johnson was also proving a political liability for Britain. If the black heavyweight's performances were to proceed without complaint, “it would be a public scandal, if not an affront to the United States.”101 Much as he did through his campaign against the Wells-Johnson fight in 1911, Reverend F. B. Meyer tried to turn this controversy into a national issue. “Surely our variety stage will not stoop so low as to engage him,” Meyer declared. “All that makes for national decency appeals to the variety managers to save us from the threatened disgrace.”102