Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  With the election of the nation's first black president, Barack Obama, in 2008—a century after Johnson became the first black world heavyweight champion—the committee saw an opening. It stepped up its campaign, and dual requests for a posthumous pardon passed the Senate and the House in the summer of 2009. Ironically, it was two white Republican boxing aficionados, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Representative Peter T. King of New York, who were the main drivers behind these requests to (according to the House resolution) “expunge a racially motivated abuse of the prosecutorial authority of the federal government from the annals of criminal justice in the United States.” Although they claimed their efforts were not politically motivated, they believed that a pardon would be a “strong symbol of racial and political harmony” (one sorely needed by the Republican Party).8 Yet less than a month after signing the House request to pardon Johnson, the white Republican representative Lynn Jenkins complicated matters when she declared that her party was searching for a “great white hope” to stop Obama and the Democrats' policy agenda during a town hall forum in Kansas. Predictably, Jenkins later claimed ignorance, denying that she had used the phrase in a racial manner.9

  This was an embarrassing faux pas, especially since McCain and King had managed to rally Johnson's descendants in support of the pardon campaign, even though they had long hidden their relationship to him. Linda Haywood, a fifty-three-year-old seamstress in Chicago, remembered her parents' efforts to keep from her the truth about her notorious granduncle. As a sixth-grade student in 1966 she had seen Johnson's photo on her classroom wall. “It was up there next to pictures of Sojourner Truth and George Washington Carver as part of a black history week my teacher put together,” Haywood recollected, yet she “didn't have the first clue who the man was.”10 When Haywood was twelve her mother finally told her the story of her Granduncle Jack, and she could see that “it pained her” to do so. “But it wasn't just her,” Haywood recalled. “The shame was there for all members of my family.” Even though Haywood's parents claimed that they had wanted to protect her from a “legacy of racial injustice,” their silence most certainly stemmed from Johnson's ongoing demonization at the hands of the white establishment and some members of the black middle class.

  In October 2009 McCain and King sent a letter to President Obama urging him to use his power to pardon the late boxer, but the White House offered no immediate comment. Some skeptics argued that Obama was not likely to bite since posthumous pardons are time-consuming and therefore rare.11 Obama also had sound political reasons to avoid opening this racial can of worms. The black president had won the recent election based on a largely nonracial platform. He had also openly assailed the very black men—those living on the margins of respectable society—whom Johnson likely would have hung around if he were alive today.12 Obama never personally responded to the request. Instead, in December 2009 the Justice Department announced that it would not grant Johnson a posthumous pardon. In a letter to Representative King, the department's pardon lawyer Ronald L. Rodgers stated that their general policy was not to process posthumous requests because they preferred to use their resources for people who were still alive and could “truly benefit” from their help.13

  Since then, there have been murmurs about McCain and King's plan to reintroduce a congressional resolution for a posthumous pardon. Given their questionable attitudes of late toward undocumented workers and Muslims in the United States, it is curious that they remain steadfast in their desire to (in King's words) “correct an historic wrong, and also, in a small way but significant way, help to bring the country together.”14 Linda Haywood has also expressed her continuing commitment to Johnson's fight for justice and plans to send a personal letter to President Obama on her granduncle's behalf. “I think having a letter from a family member will help put a face on our plea,” she said.

  Figure 19. U.S. senator John McCain (R-AZ) speaks as Dorothy Cross (in wheelchair), the grandniece of Jack Johnson; Cross's daughter, Constance Hines (center); Cross's family friend Betsy Victoria (right); and Representative Peter King (R-NY) (left) listen during a news conference on Capitol Hill, 1 April 2009. McCain and King introduced a resolution calling on President Barack Obama to posthumously pardon Johnson. © Getty Images.

  However Johnson's prospects do not look good, for recent efforts to procure a posthumous pardon for the black leader Marcus Garvey—who was convicted on trumped-up mail fraud charges in 1923—have also fallen on deaf ears. In a letter to Obama about Garvey's case, the Florida-based Jamaican-born attorney Donovan Parker wrote, “It would be fitting if both you, Mr. President, and the first lady visit Jamaica for the purposes of signing the executive order pardoning Marcus Mosiah Garvey.”15 Yet Parker received the same terse rebuff from Rodgers as Johnson's supporters. In the midst of an economic downturn and with another presidential campaign underway, it is hardly surprising that Obama and his administration have no real interest in forging black Atlantic connections—except, perhaps, for those that promote the expansion of U.S. capital and political influence. For now, it seems as if Johnson's pardon (as well as Garvey's) might just be a dead issue.

  Nevertheless, Johnson's insurgent legacy lives on at the fringes of mainstream culture. In 2004 the socially conscious rap artist Mos Def celebrated the black champion's special brand of defiance in his blues-inflected songs “Zimzallabim” and “Blue Black Jack.”16 This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb, a southern punk band known for their explicitly antiwar and antiracist politics, also paid tribute to the black heavyweight's courageous stand against white supremacy in their raucous rendition of “Jack Johnson.”17 More recently, the Guyanese-American comic book writer and artist Trevor Von Eeden published a two-volume graphic novel titled The Original Johnson, which George Gene Gustines of the New York Times described as “unflinching in its depiction of racism in America…and the tragedies and triumphs of Johnson's life, including his sexual conquests.”18

  Perhaps it is best that President Obama has left the issue of Johnson's pardon unresolved. Without the neat ending of the first black U.S. president publicly absolving the first black world heavyweight champion, it is more difficult to put the icing on the cake of postracialism in the United States. It also makes it much more difficult to reduce Johnson and his global anticolonial legacy to a simplistic symbol of the triumph of U.S. neoliberal democracy. Over the past few decades we have already seen this happen to the likes of Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali. In the early 2000s, there was renewed interest in Louis's emergence as an American hero during World War II, especially after his morale-boosting victory over the Nazi-supported fighter Max Schmeling in 1938. Books and documentaries focused on this dimension of Louis's career largely at the expense of exploring his more complex legacy as a black hero who symbolized a variety of causes, from Ethiopian autonomy in the face of Italian imperialism to the collective strength of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the face of the exploitative Pullman Company.19

  Despite the fierce white backlash against Ali in the late 1960s, mainstream America has even managed to co-opt his irreverent slick talking, his membership in the Nation of Islam, his involvement with Malcolm X, and his resistance to the Vietnam War as proof of the United States' commitment to freedom of speech. Over the years, as his aging body has succumbed to the ravages of Parkinson's disease, it has become much easier to shape the slurring, shaking Ali into a nonthreatening symbol of American courage and righteousness in the face of adversity. This sanitizing process reached its apogee in the summer of 1996, when Ali lifted his palsied hand to light the Olympic flame in Atlanta, Georgia. By November 2009 President Obama saw no contradiction between publishing a letter of tribute to Ali as “a force for reconciliation and peace around the world” and then, a few days later, calling for an additional thirty thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan during a speech at West Point.20 As Ali's biographer and Nation sports editor David Zirin warned, “Today, Ali has been described as ‘America's only living saint.'…But in a time when billions g
o to war and prisons while 50% of children will be on food stamps for the coming year, we can't afford Ali, the harmless icon.” This domestication of Louis, Ali, and Johnson obscures the fact that despite the achievements of the black freedom struggle to date, there is still much unfinished business at both the local and global levels.

  Using the success and visibility of black athletes as incontrovertible proof of black advancement has always been a dubious proposition. The growing demand for black performers in the late nineteenth century was intimately connected to the expanding trade in white supremacist entertainments that accompanied the intensification of Western imperialism. While Johnson and other black sojourners often found prosperity in the cultural arena, the color line kept them out of formal politics and barred them from more “legitimate” forms of employment. Their notoriety may have given them a unique platform from which to critique the racial world order, but it also made them vulnerable to white scrutiny and to being used in the service of white supremacy.

  Their public visibility also influenced the tenor of black politics in subsequent decades. Although they laid the cultural groundwork for black global visions of the twentieth century, they also circumscribed black protest in other ways. Thanks to the stylized personas of Johnson and other black American athletes, masculine ideals of audacious bravado, physical strength, hyperheterosexuality, and conspicuous, over-the-top consumption have become an integral part of the aesthetics of black self-assertion and resistance, often to the detriment of black women and queer communities. At the same time, the global preponderance of African American images of blackness has served to marginalize the concerns and ideas of black people in different places throughout the diaspora, making it difficult to build racial solidarities across national borders. This form of African American cultural hegemony has only accelerated with the United States' rise to world dominance in the second half of the twentieth century.

  Even today, the hypervisibility of black American athletes has not translated into increased black political power or racial equality more generally. Instead, this hypervisibility has become a frequent point of critique for white conservatives and certain members of the black middle class. There has been a tendency to blame black youth, particularly those from poor and working-class backgrounds, for their overinvestment in the cultural arena and, in particular, for their supposed “sports fixation.”21 Yet this perspective ignores not only the problematic history of black spectacles but also the current conditions driving black hypervisibility in the sporting and entertainment industries. Black youths' focus on achieving success in the cultural realm is not just a simple matter of individual “choice.” It is also symptomatic of their lack of access to formal political channels and their continued social and economic marginalization.22 For professional sports teams, sporting manufacturers, and media companies—still predominantly white-owned enterprises—exploiting the vulnerability of black people and the disposability of young black bodies for the sake of profits has become business as usual.

  Much as they did in Johnson's day, cultural representations of blackness now command the world's attention, even as nonwhite peoples continue to face repression of all kinds. The political and economic agendas of the global North have worked to install highly sophisticated and exploitative forms of neocolonialism in the global South. At the same time, people of color living in the global North still experience income and wealth disparities, unequal access to education, healthcare, and affordable housing, disproportionate arrests and prison time, and overexposure to environmental hazards. While politicians are rushing to declare the end of racism, increasingly strident calls for the closing of national borders to nonwhite peoples and for the preservation and reinvigoration of (white) nationalist cultures are reverberating across North America and Europe. How can we declare the end of “race” when these profound contradictions and inequalities remain? What transnational solidarities can be revived and reconfigured to combat this enduring problem?

  In revealing the global stakes of the race question, Johnson's remarkable journeys at the turn of the twentieth century point to the need for reconceptualizing what race means to us at the beginning of the twenty-first. While he was certainly flawed, Johnson was also an incredible man of the world who defied white supremacy in its various manifestations. Although elements of his biography are certainly triumphant, his story is much more complicated than just a question of granting civil rights and ending de jure segregation; it is, in fact, much bigger than just the United States. Examining stories such as Johnson's in all their complexity will not only help us to understand why the color line continues to resonate with such breadth and intensity, but it will also help us to challenge the facile conceptions of “color blindness” and the “postracial” that often foreclose meaningful reflection and social change. After all, his global legacy speaks to the alternative, often buried ways of understanding the intrinsic relationship between racial ideas and practices and the rise of the modern world. It also points to a buried tradition of transnational alliances that must be renewed and reenvisioned. How we choose to remember Johnson will ultimately reveal the depth of our own racial conversations, and the scope of our own imagination for a more equitable future.

  Notes

  PREFACE

  1. After an internal police review confirmed that two officers had chased the youths, the policemen were set to go on trial in October 2010. However, a Paris appeals court dropped the case in April 2011. See “French Police Criticised over Deaths of Youths That Led to Riots” (8 December 2006), www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/dec/08/france.angeliquechrisafis?INTCMP=SRCH (accessed 1 September 2011); “2 French Police to Stand Trial in Deaths of Teens” (22 October 2010), http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=11945881 (accessed 1 September 2011); “Paris Court Drops 2005 Riots Case against Police” (27 April 2011), www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/27/court-drops-france-riots-case-police (accessed 1 September 2011).

  2. Quotations are taken from “France PM: Curfews to Stem Riots” (7 November 2005), www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/11/07/france.riots/index.html (accessed 10 November 2005). Also see Johanna McGeary, “Outside Looking In,” Time, 13 November 2005; James Geary and James Graff, “Restless Youth,” Time, 13 November 2005; Craig Smith, “Riots and Violence Spread from Paris to Other French Cities,” New York Times, 6 November 2005; Mark Landler and Craig Smith, “French Officials Try to Ease Fear as Crisis Swells,” New York Times, 8 November 2005; Olivier Roy, “Get French or Die Trying,” New York Times, 9 November 2005.

  3. Souhelia Al-Jadda, “In French Riots, a Lesson for Europe,” USA Today, 8 November 2005.

  4. “Letter to the Editor,” USA Today, 13 November 2005.

  5. David Crary, “Riots in France and Hurricane Katrina Have Forced Sparring Nations to Confront Race” (14 November 2005), http://blackvoices.aol.com/black_news/canvas_directory_headlines_features/_a/riots-in-france-and-hurricane-katrina/20051114094009990001 (accessed 17 November 2005).

  6. Ibid.

  7. Many articles dubbed Obama the “great black hope.” See, for example, “Great Black Hope? The Reality of President-Elect Obama” (6 November 2008), www.nationalreview.com/articles/226264/great-black-hope/nro-symposium (accessed 12 August 2010); Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “The Great Black Hope: What's Riding on Barack Obama” (November 2004), www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.wallace-wells.html (accessed 12 August 2010); “The Great Black Hope,” New York Times, 5 July 2009.

  8. “Europe Obama Mania,” Sunday Times (Perth), 20 July 2008, Newspaper Source Plus, EBSCOhost (accessed 5 January 2011). Also see Shelley Emling, “Europe Looks to Obama as New Ray of Hope,” The Record (Kitchener/Cambridge/Waterloo, ON), 23 July 2008, Newspaper Source Plus, EBSCOhost (accessed 5 January 2011).

  9. CNN Situation Room, “Europe's Racist Fringe: Reaction to Obama's Victory” (12 November 2008), www.cgi.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0811/12/sitroom.01.html (accessed 4 January 2011).

  10. CNN Election Center, “Election Night ‘08
Coverage Continues” (4 November 2008), http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0811/04/ec.03.html (accessed 4 January 2011).

  11. Nicholas Kristof, “Rebranding the U.S. with Obama,” New York Times, 22 October 2008.

  12. “Rioters Need Tough Love, Says David Cameron” (2 September 2011), www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14760686 (accessed 2 September 2011); “Ex-NYC Top Cop Says He Is in Talks about Role in Riot-Hit UK” (12 August 2011), www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44116798/ns/world_news-europe/t/ex-nyc-top-cop-says-he-talks-about-role-riot-hit-uk/ (accessed 1 September 2011).

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Jack Johnson, In the Ring—And Out (1927; New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 21.

  2. For cultural analyses of Johnson's fight against Jim Crow, see David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 17-54; Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3-18; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-44; Davarian Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 194-204. There are some exceptions, including Patrick McDevitt, May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880-1935 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 76-78; Jeffrey Green, Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain, 1901-1914 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1998), 172-80; Richard Broome, “The Australian Reaction to Jack Johnson, Black Pugilist, 1907-9,” in Sport in History, ed. Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979); Claude Meunier, Ring noir: Quand Apollinaire, Cendrars et Picabia découvraient les boxeurs nègres (Paris: PLON, 1992); Jeff Wells, Boxing Day: The Fight That Changed the World (Sydney: HarperSports, 1998). McDevitt and Green discuss Johnson's difficulties in Britain, Broome and Wells explore Australia's reaction to Johnson, and Meunier examines his reception by the French avant-garde. For well-researched biographies of Johnson, see Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975); Geoffrey Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2004); Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1983). Although all of these biographers trace Johnson's journeys abroad, they are less interested in what these journeys reveal about the global dimensions of racial ideas, practices, and modes of resistance.