Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  Battling Siki faced the same wall of white opposition that Johnson had tried to break through in the previous decade. His troubles deepened in late October, when news surfaced of a possible fight against Britain's heavyweight champion. For one African American journalist, the match seemed like “a desperate effort to bolster up ‘white prestige.'”62 “The British are pushing forward their lone ‘white hope,' Joe Beckett, on the chance that he may accidentally succeed where Carpentier so ignobly failed,” the journalist joked. Carpentier had already beaten Beckett. However, “the British sporting world, backed by the sentiment of imperialistic circles,” crossed its fingers and hoped for the best.

  The memory of Johnson's victories still haunted some. Much as he had in the 1910s, Lord Lonsdale, the president of London's National Sporting Club, warned the British Home Office about the potential fallout of the interracial match. Lonsdale continued to believe that prizefights “between white and black men” had a “detrimental effect on their respective races.”63 In a heated letter to Lonsdale, Major J. Arnold Wilson, the Siki-Beckett promoter, countered that things had changed since the days of Johnson. “Surely if these [black] men were fitted to take a chance with us in the war, then they are fitted to take part in our sports,” he charged. Banning the match would be an “open insult…to the black subjects of His Majesty, Indian and otherwise.”64

  With the Beckett fight on the horizon, Siki's involvement in a minor tussle set off a chain reaction of white efforts to undermine him. At the French middleweight championship between Maurice Prunier and Ercole Balzac on 8 November 1922, Siki worked in Balzac's corner. Balzac was in command of the match until Prunier fouled him with a low blow. When the referee counted Balzac out, declaring Prunier the winner, Siki and Balzac's other men jumped into the ring. In the ensuing scuffle Siki shoved Prunier's manager, Fernand Cuny.

  Still embittered by the fall of Carpentier, French boxing officials saw their chance to stop the Senegalese fighter. The French Boxing Federation (FFB) met to determine Siki's fate after his supposedly savage attack of Cuny. Even those who defended Siki against censure painted him as a primitive. Cuny himself claimed that Siki had not meant to hurt him. “Of course, it [his behavior] is deplorable, but is he entirely responsible?” Cuny questioned. “He holds a title too heavy for him? He is a child who has been allowed to play with a gun.”65 Of course, Cuny overlooked the fact that Siki had used a gun quite capably for France during the war. In his own defense Siki declared, “When I was just the nigger Siki nobody bothered with my jokes, or [they] laughed at them; now that I'm champion, they get angry!”66 The FFB tribunal slapped the Senegalese prizefighter with a nine-month suspension. It also took away Siki's boxing license and stripped him of his French light-heavyweight title. Making matters worse, exaggerated tales of Siki's allegedly criminal ways flooded the French press, as Parisian journalists accused him of selling drugs in Montmartre and fraternizing with an underage French girl. In the mainstream U.S. press, writers were attempting “to build up a wall of prejudice against this black Senegalese fighter simply because he ha[d] married a white wife.”67 In response to this hullabaloo an editorialist for the New York Age argued, “We do not believe that very many people, either white or colored, realize how deeply the factor of sex enters into what is called the race problem. Some day we are going to write a plain spoken article on the subject.”68

  Siki's ban expanded into other countries. Following the FFB's suspension, the British Home Office jumped at the opportunity to prohibit the Siki-Beckett fight on British soil, arguing that it would engender racial feeling and was therefore not in the best interests of the nation. The New York State Boxing Commission also followed suit, announcing that Siki would not be permitted to fight in the state until he was cleared of all charges. Italian boxing clubs subsequently closed their doors to Siki, and even the city of Rotterdam, located in his wife's home country, instituted a ban on all interracial fights.69 A black American reporter complained, “Since the colored fighter became champion, there has been a systematic campaign of propaganda to discredit him before the public.” It did not help that Siki openly enjoyed the company of white women and the excitement of Parisian nightclubs: “By his indiscretions in private life, Siki has become known as the ‘Jack Johnson' of Europe.”70

  White settlers in the British colonies were happy the Home Office had taken a stand. Their own encounters with “the negro” had convinced them of the potentially negative effects of interracial contests. “A negro is physically different to a white man, and is able to bear blows on his body which would simply stun and seriously injure a white man,” one settler wrote to the Home Office. “Anyone who, like myself, has lived in negro countries, knows this from personal experience.”71 He believed it was “most unfair and unsportsmanlike to pit a white man against a negro.” “The only vulnerable part in a negro's body is his shins,” he claimed. “A negro's shins are so tender that a white boy's kick will double him up, and put him out of action.” Since the rules of boxing did not permit kicking, interracial matches left white men at a distinct disadvantage. In a letter to the African World, another English settler agreed that mixed matches were a bane to those who bore “the burden and the heat of the day ‘neath Africa's sun.” 'The stirring of racial consciousness in millions of men barely higher than savages in the scale of evolution,” he maintained, “must inevitably detract from the standing and safety of the European.”72 These letters about prizefighting exposed not only the brutal and inescapably physical nature of the white man's burden but also its increasing vulnerability.

  This white antagonism only enhanced Battling Siki's fame as a transnational symbol of nonwhite resistance. The Senegalese parliamentarian Blaise Diagne brought Siki's case in front of his white colleagues in the French Chamber of Deputies. During the budget appropriation for physical education Diagne moved that it be reduced by three hundred thousand francs, charging that national sporting societies like the FFB had purposely set out to derail Siki.73 According to Diagne, the FFB was punishing the African fighter for celebrating his victory in the cafes of Paris, yet no one ever complained when white pugilists did the same. The FFB's suspension was also depriving Siki of his ability to earn a living. Diagne charged, “These men who are as French as you are, though they are of different color, have a right to the same justice as you,” and he cautioned his fellow deputies about the danger of giving the impression that France had two unequal forms of justice—one for white Frenchmen and another for colored subjects.74 Despite Diagne's impassioned appeal, his motion failed to pass by a margin of 408 to 136.

  The Vietnamese anticolonialist and communist leader Ho Chi Minh made some of the same arguments in the radical journal Le Paria. As he considered the importance of the Siki-Carpentier match and the white backlash it inspired, Ho declared, “The boxing championship has changed hands, but national sporting glory has not suffered, because Siki, a child of Senegal, is in consequence a son of France, and hence a Frenchman.”75 Even though they operated on different cultural terrains, Ho saw Siki and René Maran, the Martiniquan author of the anticolonial novel Batouala and winner of the Prix Goncourt, as making similar contributions to the fight against white supremacy. “Following Maran's ironical pen,” Ho argued, “Siki's gloves have stirred everything, including even the political sphere.” “A Carpentier-Siki match is worth more than one hundred gubernatorial speeches to prove to our subjects and protégés that we want to apply to the letter the principle of equality between races,” Ho claimed. He also criticized the British Home Office's banning of the Siki-Beckett match. “This does not surprise us,” Ho scoffed. “As His British Excellency could digest neither [Mustafa] Kemal's croissant nor [Mahatma] Gandhi's chocolate, he wants to have Battling Siki swallow his purge even though the latter is a Frenchman.”76 Taking it a step further than Diagne, Ho argued that Siki's struggles were symbolic of the continued capitalist and imperialist exploitation of the world's “indigenous proletarians.”77

  Among black
Americans, Siki's struggles also sparked public conversations about the transnational reach of the color line. Many saw the cancellation of the Siki-Beckett match as an obvious case of British race prejudice. They accused the Home Office of hiding behind the hypocritical subterfuge that mixed matches provoked racial disturbances. As one reporter pointed out, “Siki stirred up no racial feeling when he fought with shot and shell against the Boche [German soldiers] when England's back was to the wall.”78 For now, John Bull had leveled Siki with a low blow. “It will not be ever thus, however,” the reporter warned, “for the horizon is bedimmed with black and yellow clouds.”

  Yet this was much bigger than just Britain or France. In a speech at Liberty Hall in November 1922, Garvey argued that Siki's tragic plight validated the UNIA's international platform. “We have always held to the opinion that there was absolutely no difference between the Englishman and the Frenchman and the American when it comes to the race,” Garvey explained. Siki's treatment in France was similar to that of Johnson in the United States. White Americans “had to find some excuse to get rid of Johnson to restore the championship to the white man, because they could not allow a Negro to hold such an honor, as it would make the Negro realize that he is really a man.” Now “France sought ways and means of getting rid of Siki.” Garvey declared, “There is a set position for the Negro not only in America, but all over the white world, and any man who flatters himself to believe that his position is one of equality depending upon conditions as they are has a false opinion and a false idea of life.”

  Claude McKay came to a similar conclusion. He used Siki's quandary to critique the conservative nationalist agendas of the black bourgeoisie in the United States and France. “The black intelligentsia of America looks upon France as the foremost cultured nation of the world,” McKay noted, “the single great country where all citizens enjoy equal rights before the law, without respect to race or skin color.” Closing their eyes to the “vile exploitation of Africans by the French,” they had come to believe that “one imperialist exploiter” could be “better than another.”79 Siki's troubles were like a slap in the face to the black bourgeoisie—especially to Diagne, whom McKay saw as a puppet of the French government. Although Diagne supported Siki in the Chamber of Deputies, he had recently abandoned the Pan-African movement because its increasingly radical and militant stance clashed with his assimilationist aspirations. McKay believed that the white backlash against Johnson, Siki, and other black boxers was ultimately about the need to maintain a compliant black workforce. “The Negro must not show himself capable of fighting and winning,” he argued. “It is not entirely safe for capitalistic America, which makes twenty million Negroes bow down.”80

  Any changes to the status quo would come too late to save Battling Siki. By January 1923 the Home Office had decided to use the provisions under the Aliens Restriction Act to bar Siki from even setting foot on British soil. The International Boxing Union also stripped Siki of his remaining titles.81 After his FFB suspension ended, Siki's career continued its downward slide. On St. Patrick's Day in 1923 he lost a controversial decision to the Irish-American Mike McTigue in Dublin, and later that year, when Siki traveled to the United States, his fight record was mediocre at best.

  In December 1925 the Senegalese fighter was found shot to death in the New York City neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen. His untimely death, much like his life, personified the escalating fight between so-called civilization and savagery. Typical of other white press reports, the Times of London observed, “At heart he remained a savage, with all the weaknesses of a savage thrown into a doubtful atmosphere in the white man's world.”82 Although many black American sportswriters had expressed their support for Siki over the years, they, too, saw him through the lens of prevailing tropes of African primitivism. With a tinge of irony, a Chicago Defender journalist declared, “They [the white press] say he died of too much civilization. And perhaps they are right. Siki did die of civilization—the civilization as dished out to him by White America.”83 Much more critical of the Senegalese “Jungle Boy,” another African American writer pronounced, “Siki challenged civilization, civilization accepted his challenge, they fought a good fight, and civilization won.”84 At least for now “civilization” had come out on top, but Battling Siki's contentious career, much like that of Johnson in the previous decade, pointed to a “rising tide of color” that threatened to topple the imperial order.

  Even as white officials endeavored to eradicate the black global vision inspired by boxing's rebel sojourners, that vision had already permeated the ideas and strategies of activists throughout the diaspora. Much like Johnson and Siki, Garvey became the target of white authorities precisely because of his transnational appeal, particularly among working people of color. The same U.S. Bureau of Investigation that led the manhunt for Johnson after his conviction under the Mann Act in 1913 was now charged with the surveillance and persecution of Garvey, McKay, and black activists of various political stripes.85 Similar to Johnson, Garvey and the UNIA also attracted the consternation of British colonial officials in Africa, and not without reason. Even though Garvey never managed to cement his political power or bring revolutionary change in his lifetime, both he and Johnson remained potent symbols of black pride and black autonomy that reverberated across the decolonizing continent in the decades to come. As the king of Swaziland later told Mrs. Amy Jacques Garvey, he knew the names of only two black men in the West: “Jack Johnson, the boxer who defeated the white man Jim Jeffries, and Marcus Garvey.”86

  Epilogue

  Visible Men, Harmless Icons

  In 1929 James Thurber of the New Yorker chose Jack Johnson as the subject of a “Talk of the Town” piece. Though Johnson still walked “proudly,” Thurber noted that “his face no longer gleam[ed] in the ebony and gold splendor which admiring Londoners compared to a ‘starry night’ almost twenty years ago.”1 Now living in a modest dwelling on 148th Street, the former world champion still enjoyed recounting his international travels for anyone who would listen. “He loves to talk of his favorite city, Budapest,” Thurber observed, “and of the time at the start of the war when the Germans did not molest several trunks containing all his wife's sables.”2

  In 1932, the year before the Nazis came to power, Johnson traveled back to Europe to perform in Paris and to visit Berlin, where he had received an offer to open a boxing school. During his time in the French capital Johnson made frequent appearances at the Parisian nightclub of fellow black American Ada “Bricktop” Smith, much to the delight of distinguished personalities like Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier, and Cole Porter. Although Johnson was no longer the European phenomenon he once had been, he remained a symbol of black achievement. As Bricktop recalled, “If anybody ever made me feel proud of who and what I am, it was Jack.”3

  By 1933, however, Johnson had become a kind of museum piece as he “boxed” with youngsters in Dave Barry's Garden of Champions at the Chicago World's Fair. On the outskirts of this “Century of Progress Exposition,” the once illustrious and notorious Johnson appeared alongside the Midget Village, the exotic dancer Sally Rand, and the Aunt Jemima Cabin. In exchange for a dollar, each child could take a few swings at the former champion.4

  Figure 18. The former champion never gave up his cosmopolitan flair. Jack Johnson in retirement, 21 May 1931. © Bettmann/Corbis. Courtesy of Corbis.

  The following year the black American heavyweight Joe Louis burst onto the professional boxing scene, demolishing opponents in the ring while maintaining a low profile outside the ring. No longer able to command large audiences or lucrative theater contracts at the age of fifty-six, Johnson saw an opportunity in Louis. After Louis's 1935 victory against the Italian boxer Primo Carnera, Johnson made his move, pitching his skills as a trainer to the young up-and-comer. Louis's management team, however, unceremoniously rejected his offer. Fearing that any association with the infamous black fighter could push their protégé out of world championship contention, Louis's h
andlers would not allow the young boxer to follow in Johnson's irreverent footsteps. As his trainer, Jack Blackburn, warned, the “White man hasn't forgotten that fool nigger with his white women, acting like he owned the world.”5 Determined to construct Louis as a respectable black icon, they kept his encounters with white women, his love of fast cars, and his frivolous spending out of the press.6

  In 1937, the same year that Louis won the world title against the white American fighter James J. Braddock, Johnson found himself relegated to the basement of Hubert's Museum and Flea Circus on New York's 42nd Street. Johnson appeared next to a mishmash of sideshow acts, including a sword swallower, a trick dog, a half man-half woman, and even a performer who styled himself as “Congo the Wild Man.” Dressed in a suit with a blue tie and French beret, the former champion answered visitors' questions in an affected British accent.7 Although he had been reduced to a mere relic of his former worldly self, he still clung to the cosmopolitan air of his past. No matter his circumstances, Johnson refused to relinquish his dignity. In a cruel twist of fate, he died in a car wreck in 1946 at the age of sixty-eight, after angrily speeding away from a North Carolina diner that declined to serve him.

  For decades after his tragic death, Johnson remained an obscure figure in American popular memory. Thanks to the efforts of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and the multiracial, bipartisan Committee to Pardon Jack Johnson, scattered reports about his unfair conviction began appearing in the mainstream media in 2004. However, by the end of President George W. Bush's second term in office, the committee had yet to procure Johnson a posthumous pardon.