Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  For all of its hype, the Johnson-Moran match was uneventful. Lasting twenty rounds, it ended with referee Georges Carpentier's decision in favor of Johnson. Even Billy Lewis admitted that Johnson had won only on the basis of his superior technique. Despite the previous claims of French journalists, the aging black champion was actually in much poorer physical condition than the younger Moran.116

  When news of the match result reached Chicago's South Side, Johnson's African American supporters celebrated his Parisian victory in the streets.117 Johnson had publicly transgressed the white man's burden on two fronts—the physical and the sexual. His superior strength and skill had prevailed, and he had gained the admiration of white French women. An editorialist for the New York Age declared, “The English speaking people in all quarters of the globe, who have decided that black men shall not have a fair chance…because the success of black men in anything over white men sets a bad example to the African and Asiatic colored people…have had another dose of ‘White Hope Knock-Out' rammed down their throats by John Arthur Johnson.”118 Countering white American reports of Johnson's “dissipated mode of living,” another black writer maintained that the black American's triumph proved that he had “lived a physically clean life.”119 Not only was Johnson's physique “truly marvelous, his strength…that of a gorilla” but he also possessed “a cunning, fighting brain.” Johnson's black fans delighted in the fact that he ripped, tore, and jarred his white opponents into submission, leaving them physically damaged.

  The African American press also highlighted Johnson's special popularity with white French women—a story of sexual attraction that could never have played out in such an open forum in the United States. Tales of the black heavyweight's interracial appeal in France continued to circulate in the African American community months after the Johnson-Moran fight. Taking his cue from French reports of the match, Billy Lewis described the subversive scene in exquisite detail for African American readers. “Four magnificently beautiful women in extraordinarily candid evening gowns” had crowded Johnson's corner of the ring. “They held each other by the hand, and shivered in stimulated ecstasy,” Lewis added with a flash of drama.120 The women had beckoned for Johnson as they tiptoed closer, calling him a “beautiful creature” and a “magnificent brute.” One had even “stroked Johnson's bare, brown hide,” while the others “pressed closer with little squeals.” As Lewis tantalized his readers, “Their bare, round arms stretched through the ropes. Their eyes glistened. Filmy cloaks fell from their rounded shoulders. Johnson lay at his ease, his eyes half closed as they patted his great bak [sic] with slender hands from which they had frantically stripped the gloves.” Reveling in the cross-racial eroticism of this spectacle, Lewis depicted an incredibly subversive image of black masculine sexuality and white female desire.

  Yet, Lewis recognized the limits of this scenario. Whether French women considered the black champion to be beautiful or brutish, they simply admired him as a “physical man.” Although this certainly beat the “general detestation” that white America had for black people, it was by no means an equal relationship.121 A cartoon in the Indianapolis Freeman captured the essence of this French gaze, depicting Johnson as a blackface beast surrounded by the eyes of French boxing fans.122 Lewis contended, “He was a Negro even in Paris. London was yet worse. Other European cities would not even tolerate him.”123 Europeans were now throwing their support behind the white Frenchman Carpentier. This seemed to be part of a trend of increasing race prejudice on the continent. Another black journalist explained, “Since American prejudice has crept into Europe it is not uncommon for a man of color who happens to be on the otherside [sic], to be made to understand that he has a dark skin and his privileges are limited for fear of offending some of the American visitors and loosing [sic] their patronage.”124 Some parts of Europe had even “adopted the American rule” against interracial boxing matches.

  Unfortunately for Johnson, his victory over Moran coincided with the outbreak of World War I. Although Johnson never received any of his promised $14,000 in winnings, his black fans still managed to find a positive lesson in his victory.125 His physical and sexual transgressions of the color line had convinced many of them that the white man's burden could also be fought on other fronts. As a postfight editorial in Grand Bassa, Liberia's African League declared, “You may not be a pugilist but you may be in your calling what Jack Johnson is in his calling—at the top, Dr. Booker Washington is there as an educator…and other Negroes of the United States are getting there as financiers and in other callings.”126 Johnson's ring success compelled black people to “take courage and move forward, along all progressive lines.” As war engulfed the European continent, Johnson and his fellow black sportsmen had already paved the way for the momentous arrival of African American soldiers in France.

  In August 1914 a correspondent for the Chicago Defender announced that Johnson had “shown his allegiance to the French flag by offering his services to fight for that country.”127 Rumors that Johnson, now a French citizen, had been named the colonel of a French regiment spread throughout black America. French military officials apparently believed that “if he could master the world in the prize ring, he could do so on the field of battle.” The Defender even claimed that the French government had arranged for Johnson to receive a monthly pension if he were ever injured in combat.

  Given the persistence of racial segregation and antiblack violence within the U.S. Army, these imaginary tales of Johnson's military leadership in France must have sounded revolutionary to African American readers. Stories of courageous black men in battle were central to African American understandings of racial equality in the French context. Commenting on France's decision to use black troops to fight the Germans, one black American journalist maintained that it was “the first time” such a thing had occurred in Europe “since the Moors of Northern Africa were driven out of Spain,” and that he expected “none of them to fight more bravely under the Tri-Color than JOHN ARTHUR JOHNSON, the Champion Prize-fighter of the World.”128 Bob Scanlon and Eugene Bullard were two expatriate African American boxers who proudly served in the French Foreign Legion during World War I, earning medals and accolades for their bravery under fire.129 It seemed as if the symbolic victories that Johnson and other black pugilists had achieved in Europe's boxing rings were now being realized in the actual theater of war.

  The racial stereotypes circulating in the cosmopolitan realm of the French boxing ring, however, ran counter to this official rhetoric. Scanlon's public image encapsulated the French public's rather ambivalent acceptance of African Americans. Although Scanlon became a recognized war hero, during his years as a boxer Parisian sportswriters often cast him as a comical savage. When he knocked out the white Frenchmen Henri Marchand in 1914, a diasporic mix of black imagery pervaded the various descriptions of the match. For Henri Dispan, the fight was akin to an African ritual of cannibalism. “You devourers of pale men's flesh, monstrous idols squatted at the edge of the forest of coconuts, is your thirst for blood not yet quenched?” he asked.130 It seemed as if “all of Africa and its American colonies” had come to see the “sacrifice” of Marchand, including “Toucouleurs, Mandingoes, Foulahs, Pahouins and those of Louisiana and Texas.” In honor of their hero's triumph, they had danced all night “to the sound of the banjo and the tom-tom.” While Dispan and other Parisian sportsmen viewed Scanlon's black fans with a sense of bemused contempt, they could still see that black Americans and French Africans had discovered a dangerous racial common ground in the boxing ring. Even as the French continued to profess their ideals of color blindness, the “invasion” of black American boxers was undoubtedly driving them to revisit the racial logics and practices of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

  Despite all the reports of Johnson's military ambitions, unlike Scanlon and Bullard, he never actually stuck around to fight for the French. By the summer of 1914 the war had essentially foiled his plans for a peaceful and profitable exile in West
ern Europe. He also faced escalating threats of extradition to the United States. Chased by special agents from the Department of Justice, Johnson rushed to the U.S. embassy in London, where he managed to finagle the necessary papers for travel to Russia.131 Since the Russo-American extradition treaty did not include the Mann Act, Johnson believed he had found his way to safety.132

  Although Johnson would escape extradition by heading east, there were no guarantees that he would escape the race question. Russia was not necessarily a destination of great promise for African Americans in 1914. True, black sailors, artists, entertainers, and professional athletes had visited Russia since the nineteenth century, and stories about the absence of prejudice in Russia also appeared periodically in the African American press.133 However, for some African American journalists Russia's anti-Jewish pogroms revealed that nation's own dangerous manifestation of race thinking, and they likened this “ritual murder” to the barbaric violence of the Jim Crow South.134

  With few other options, the heavyweight champion and his entourage journeyed to St. Petersburg for a series of exhibitions organized by the expatriate black American promoter George Thomas. Johnson became fast friends with Thomas, a plucky Georgia native who had left the United States years before in search of his fortune. Through a combination of wit and grit, the former valet had managed to build a profitable amusement empire in Russia that included an immense glass-roofed park known as the Aquarium. As Johnson later described it, the Aquarium “was a veritable city, a city within a city.” Alongside its many entertainment venues it included “residences, hotels, cafés, restaurants and other facilities.”135

  Johnson's plans for a lucrative series of boxing exhibitions at the Aquarium never came to fruition. Before the black heavyweight ever had the chance to perform, Germany declared war on Russia. Pushed out of St. Petersburg, Johnson and his party once again found themselves on the run in August 1914.136 They hurried from Germany to Belgium and then to France, where many U.S. and British citizens were frantic to escape the approaching battles. Despite the chaos Johnson never seemed to lose his cool. One white American claimed to have encountered the black champion in Paris, “his face…wreathed in smiles” as large “crowds surrounded him urging him to fight for France.”137

  For a brief moment Johnson and his entourage were relieved to have made it back across the English Channel. Britain, however, had also entered the war. Caught in the midst of the mounting conflict, visiting and expatriate African Americans such as Johnson desperately searched for a way out of London. “Oh, how I long for State street,” one black Chicagoan reportedly cried out, tears streaming down his face.138 Unfortunately for Johnson, whose legal troubles in the United States were still unresolved, he could not yet return home like the others.

  6

  Viva Johnson!

  Fighting over Race in the Americas

  Este boxeador fifí,

  en México un héroe fue,

  aunque Sanborn le hizo—!fu…

  Pero el general Fafá

  le dijo:—Amigo, ten fe,

  que si alguno te hace !mú!

  yo a dodos les hago mé.

  This boxing dandy

  was a hero in Mexico,

  although Sanborn wouldn't serve him.

  But General so-and-so

  told him: Have faith, friend;

  if somebody turns you away,

  I'll make him pee in his pants.

  —“Johnson Fifi!” El Universal, 1919

  As war-torn Europe closed its doors to African American civilians, Jack Johnson sought refuge in the Caribbean and Latin America. Although the United States remained off-limits, he was happy to be moving closer to home. No longer in the prime of his career, the thirty-six-year-old champion had been on the run for a year and a half, and his exile was beginning to take a physical and emotional toll.

  Johnson left Britain in December 1914 optimistic about the opportunities that awaited him in the Americas. His recent popularity in France had led him to believe that Latin peoples everywhere, regardless of skin color, were more racially tolerant than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Given the region's diverse demographics, he also hoped to find crowds of colored supporters. Over the next six years Johnson sailed to Argentina, Barbados, Cuba, and Mexico before surrendering to U.S. authorities in 1920. While Johnson and many of his black American contemporaries imagined and searched for a racial paradise in the Americas, they soon found that the color line had already etched itself into the cultural and political landscape.

  FIGURE14. Although Jack Johnson was by no means immune to color prejudice in Mexico, his audacious personality and flashy style made him an instant hero with local fans, especially the fashionably dressed young men known as the Fifi. “Johnson Fifi!” El Universal, 2 November 1919.

  This leg of Johnson's journey not only reveals the hemispheric impact of U.S. race culture, but it also provides an alternative perspective on black Americans' foreign encounters in the early twentieth century. The controversies surrounding Johnson's world championship defeat in Cuba in 1915 and his Mexican sojourn from 1919 to 1920 epitomized the profound irony of being black and American at a time when the United States was expanding its influence in the region. World War I was not the only phenomenon that opened up new cultural and political spaces for the development of black transnationalism and internationalism in the 1910s. Turning away from Europe's metropolitan capitals, Johnson and other black Americans looked south for racial solidarities grounded in the shared realities of white American domination and cultural hegemony. They found some of their most powerful connections in the borderlands and colonial spaces on the fringes of the United States.

  Despite its official stance of isolationism, the United States was beginning to see itself as a new kind of global leader, and its role in the spread of boxing seemed to be a perfect metaphor for its foreign policy agenda.1 Rarely tied to any official state programs, this popular pastime of rank-and-file military men moved in very much the same way that U.S. influence aspired to—with a seeming ease and informality, and appearing to embody the character of U.S. democratic ideals while offering foreigners a means to express their own manhood, whiteness, and modernity. Boxing also came on the heels of U.S. capitalism and consumerism. White American promoters more or less controlled the boxing industry in places like Cuba and Mexico, catering to the interests of U.S. tourists and expatriates for the sake of profits. They often viewed the locals' enthusiastic embrace of pugilism as yet another example of the positive effects of U.S. stewardship. Through boxing, white Americans exerted a form of cultural power that helped them to advance the widespread adoption of U.S. mores and manners in their expanding spheres of influence.2

  Yet boxing was truly a two-edged sword. Although it provided the framework for the ultimate public relations campaign for white American intervention, it also furnished a platform for popular expressions of political independence and transnational race consciousness. White elites in places like Cuba used the sport to showcase their nation's fitness for self-determination. Boxing also appealed to people of color living on the margins of both U.S. imperialism and elite nationalism. With his epic story of success in the face of discrimination, Johnson became a folk hero to men of color in the region, inspiring them to take up the sport on their own terms.

  ALLIES IN THE AMERICAS

  Johnson's return to the Americas intersected with larger debates about race and U.S. intervention in the region. By the 1910s the Caribbean and Latin America had become an important part of the global imaginary of white and black Americans alike. For white Americans the region was a space of profit and play. Most black Americans maintained an optimistic if ambivalent outlook on the area. Although it represented a refuge from Jim Crow racism, many feared that the United States' growing influence would undermine its racial fluidity. Still, Johnson and his contemporaries could not dismiss the fact that when visiting the region they often enjoyed greater privileges than the local people of color precisely becau
se of their claims, however nominal, to U.S. citizenship.

  Some even saw themselves as potential beneficiaries of U.S. intervention. A journalist for the Chicago Defender pointed to the Naval Academy's new emphasis on intensive Spanish-language training as proof of the rising importance of their southern neighbors. The United States had “waked up” to Latin America's possibilities, and many North Americans were now “endeavoring to capture their share of this rich plum.” As U.S. high schools and colleges introduced more Spanish instruction, they were also “acknowledging the growing commercial and economic importance of Latin America.” Rather than censuring this trend, the journalist argued that this southward expansion was particularly important for the black community since these lands would “offer equal opportunity to all men.”3

  Throughout the 1910s a smattering of reports in the black American press seemed to confirm their welcome, particularly in Johnson's first destination of Argentina. By 1913 Geneva Graham of Chicago had managed to establish a successful hair salon in Buenos Aires. “She is counted as one of the leaders of fashion, her wardrobe coming direct from Paris,” one report claimed.4 Having traveled through Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina as the personal chauffeur of Julius Rosenwald, Ernest Stevens was convinced that black Americans could prosper in South America. In Buenos Aires he had witnessed men of color “filling every responsible position in government service.” As long as they had money to spend, it was “no trouble to buy or enjoy anything.”5