Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner
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89. Wells, Boxing Day, 82; Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 113-14.
90. “White Australia Policy,” Tasmanian Mail, 26 December 1908.
91. “More Perils of the Sea,” Bulletin, 24 December 1908.
92. “The Nigger Asserts Himself.”
93. “A Man and a Brother,” Bulletin, 24 December 1908.
94. “Versatile Mr. Johnson,” Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 1908.
95. “The Great Fight in Plain Black and White,” Punch, 31 December 1908.
96. Right-Cross, “Boxing,” Arrow, 2 January 1909.
97. “Black versus White,” Health & Strength, 7 March 1908; Romney, “ ‘Tommy’ Burns: An Appreciation of the Man and the Fighter,” Health & Strength, 28 March 1908; “Sporting Notions,” Bulletin, 31 December 1908.
98. “Mostly in New South Wales,” Bulletin, 7 January 1909.
99. “Sporting Notions,” Bulletin, 14 January 1909; “Gunner” James Moir, “Why Tommy Burns Will Win,” Health & Strength, 21 November 1908.
100. “A Lady's Letter from Sydney,” Tasmanian Mail, 9 January 1909.
101. Both quotations are from Right-Cross, “The Eve of a Great Battle,” Arrow, 26 December 1908.
102. “Arrangements for Huge Crowd at Stadium,” Arrow, 26 December 1908.
103. From 1907 to 1909 London and his wife toured the Pacific Islands, a voyage that later inspired his South Sea Tales (1911) and Cruise of the Snark (1913). London welcomed the opportunity to cover the Burns-Johnson match, since his Pacific voyage had left him ridden with debt and tropical disease. For more on London's coverage of Johnson, see Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Jack London's Racial Lives: A Critical Biography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 179-205.
104. “Boxing Championship,” Australasian, 2 January 1909.
105. “The Prize Fight,” Sydney Morning Herald, 28 December 1908; “Boxing Day,” Sydney Morning Herald, 28 December 1908; “Great Boxintg Mach [sic],” Tasmanian Mail, 2 January 1909.
106. “The Prize Fight.”
107. “The Fight across the Wires,” Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 1908.
108. “Melbourne Notes.”
109. “Sporting Notions,” 31 December 1908.
110. “Boxing Championship”; Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 122.
111. “Sporting Notions,” 31 December 1908.
112. “Boxing Championship.”
113. “Johnson Wins,” Sydney Morning Herald, 28 December 1908.
114. “Boxing Championship.”
115. “Sporting Notions,” 31 December 1908.
116. “Boxing Championship.”
117. Ibid; “Jack London on the Fight,” Australasian, 2 January 1909. Numerous newspapers throughout the United States, the British Empire, and France reprinted London's postfight report.
118. “Melbourne Notes.”
119. Ibid.
120. “Johnson Wins”; “Boxing Championship.”
121. “The Great Fight in Plain Black and White.”
122. “Back Johnson Heavily,” Indianapolis Freeman, 23 January 1909.
123. All the quotations in this paragraph are from “Boxing Championship.”
124. Ibid.
125. Ibid.
126. “The Great Fight in Plain Black and White.”
127. “Sporting Notions,” 31 December 1908.
128. “Johnson Wins.”
129. “A Lady's Letter from Sydney.”
130. “Melbourne Notes.” Also see “Talk on Change,” Australasian, 9 January 1909.
131. Lester A. Walton, “The Johnson-Burns Fight,” New York Age, 31 December 1908.
132. “Back Johnson Heavily.”
133. Walton, “The Johnson-Burns Fight.”
134. “The Superiority of the Black,” New York Age, 31 December 1908.
135. “The Black Gladiator. Veni, Vidi, Vici—Jack Johnson,” Indianapolis Freeman, 23 January 1909.
136. Cleveland Gazette, 23 January 1909.
137. Lester A. Walton, “In the Sporting World,” New York Age, 28 January 1909.
138. “Burns and Johnson,” Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 1909. A smoodge is someone who attempts to curry favor through flattery.
139. “Crowd Hoots Johnson,” Sydney Morning Herald, 31 December 1908.
140. “Sporting Notions,” 14 January 1909.
141. “The Great Fight,” Observer, 2 January 1909.
142. “Boxing Championship.”
143. Right-Cross, “Boxing,” Arrow, 9 January 1909; “Boxing,” Punch, 21 January 1909; “Sporting Notions,” Bulletin, 7 January 1909.
144. “Topics of the Week,” Australasian, 2 January 1909.
145. “Ladies' Letter,” Punch, 31 December 1908.
146. All quotations in this paragraph are from “The Whit [sic] Australia,” Indianapolis Freeman, 16 January 1909.
147. “The Boxing Contest,” Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1908.
148. “Will Fight Johnson Again,” Health & Strength, 9 January 1909.
149. “The Great Fight.”
150. Quoted in “Johnson's Prophetic Vision,” Baltimore Afro-American, 1 May 1909.
151. Tom Beasley, “Our Colored Brethren,” Bulletin, 31 December 1908.
152. Ibid.
153. “The Great Fight,” Henry Lawson, 1908, quoted in Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism, 2nd ed. (1970; New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 107-8.
154. “Topics of the Week.”
155. “Current Cartoons,” Punch, 7 January 1909.
156. “Topics of the Week.”
157. “Boxing,” Punch, 21 January 1909.
158. “Current Cartoons.”
159. “The Great Fight in Plain Black and White.”
160. “Melbourne Notes.”
161. Randolph Bedford, “White v. Black,” Melbourne Herald, 26 December 1908. Also see Rodney G. Boland, “Bedford, George Randolph (1868—1941),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography—Online Edition, Australian National University, 2006, www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A110512b.htm (accessed 4 February 2007).
162. “Theatres &c.,” Australasian, 9 January 1909.
163. Bedford, “White v. Black.”
164. Stanhope, “The Colour Question,” Times, 23 September 1911.
165. All quotations in this paragraph are from Jack McLaren, My Odyssey: South Seas Adventure (1925; Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1946), 175.
166. “The Boxing Contest,” Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 1909.
167. “The Editor's Ideas,” Boxing, 23 October 1909.
168. James J. Jeffries, “The Need of an Athletic Awakening,” Physical Culture, May 1909, 397.
CHAPTER 2. WHITE CENSORS, DARK SCREENS
1. Hugh D. McIntosh, “The Pride of the Blacks,” Boxing, 24 September 1910. Also see Yorick Gradeley, “Jim Jeffries—The Outdoor Man,” Health & Strength, 7 May 1910; “The Big Fight,” Star, 11 July 1910.
2. McIntosh, “Pride of the Blacks.”
3. Daniel Streible, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 9, 195. Streible provides an in-depth history of early interracial fight films within a U.S. context.
4. See Michael Rogin, “The Sword Became a Flashing Vision: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation,” Representations no. 9 (Winter 1985): 150-95; Michele Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and Aesthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 85-104.
5. Streible, Fight Pictures, 24-25.
6. “Pictures and Pugilism,” Moving Picture World, 18 December 1909.
7. On urban industrialism and the rise of early film, see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner, 1990); Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (New York: Scribner, 1990).
8. Streible, Fight Pictures, 9.
9. “The Great Fight,” Observer,
2 January 1909.
10. Streible, Fight Pictures, 204.
11. “Le Match Tommy Burns—Jack Jackson à Paris,” La Vie au grand air, 6 March 1909, 155. There was no mention of any racial conflict caused by the film in the French colonies.
12. Streible, Fight Pictures, 207.
13. Ibid., 205-6.
14. “Some Comments on the Championship Contest,” Boxing World and Athletic Chronicle, 14 July 1910.
15. Georges Dupuy, “Le Grand match Johnson-Jeffries,” La Vie au grand air, 23 July 1910.
16. Geoffrey Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2004), 170.
17. Ibid., 189, 191; “Ministerial Opposition to the Jeffries-Johnson Fight,” Indianapolis Freeman, 4 June 1910.
18. Streible, Fight Pictures, 218; “Pictures and Pugilism.”
19. “World's Championship at Frisco—July 4,” Mirror of Life and Sport, 18 June 1910.
20. Streible, Fight Pictures, 219.
21. “How They Brought the News from Reno,” Indianapolis Freeman, 30 July 1910. Also see Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 192-93. La Vie au grand air had even contracted the African American heavyweight Joe Jeannette to report on the fight from a black perspective. Dupuy, “Le Grand match Johnson-Jeffries.”
22. “To Cover Big Fight,” Moving Picture World, 9 July 1910. Also see Streible, Fight Pictures, 219.
23. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 198-199, 202.
24. Ibid., 203; “Procession to the Fight,” Dublin Evening Mail, 5 July 1910.
25. “Gate Receipts $270,775,” Boston Daily Globe, 6 July 1910.
26. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 208-11.
27. “Fight Pictures Now Being Printed,” Moving Picture World, 16 July 1910.
28. Streible, Fight Pictures, 13; “The Fight Films,” Englishman, 8 July 1910; “Heavy Telegraph Tolls,” Boston Daily Globe, 6 July 1910.
29. “To You, Mr. Jack Johnson,” Savannah Tribune, 9 July 1910.
30. All quotations in this paragraph are from “City Wild over Result,” Indianapolis Freeman, 9 July 1910.
31. R. Desmarets, “Après le championnat du monde,” L'Auto, 6 July 1910.
32. “Excitement in London,” Dublin Evening Mail, 5 July 1910.
33. “Sequel to the Jeffries-Johnson Fight,” Times, 6 July 1910.
34. John Maynard, “For Liberty and Freedom: Fred Maynard and the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association,” Lecture for New South Wales State Library, Sydney, 2004, 27.
35. “Fight Pictures Now Being Printed.”
36. “Government Prohibits Prize-fight Pictures,” Globe, 8 July 1910; “Film Men Will Wait,” Washington Post, 9 July 1910; Streible, Fight Pictures, 235.
37. “Fake Fight Pictures Stopped in Theatre,” New York Times, 10 July 1910.
38. See Greatest Fights of the Century: Jack Johnson vs. Jim Jeffries (1965). Held in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, this film is an abridged version of the 1910 Jeffries-Johnson fight film. Also see Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 199-200.
39. “Show Jeffries Tried,” Washington Post, 10 July 1910.
40. “Mr. Johnson Talks,” Moving Picture World, 20 August 1910.
41. Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 244.
42. “A vous…touché!” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 1 February 1911.
43. Moving Picture World, 2 July 1910; “One Roosevelt Hunt Fails,” Moving Picture World, 1 May 1909; “Pictures of the Roosevelt Hunt,” Moving Picture World, 18 December 1909.
44. Gerald R. Gems, The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 48; Streible, Fight Pictures, 129; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 146-64. Kaplan maintains that the films of the Spanish-American War laid the groundwork for the production style and great popularity of Birth of a Nation.
45. “Sheriff Ignores Fight Films,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 21 August 1910.
46. Rev. H. F. Jackson, “The Moving Picture in Relation to the World,” Moving Picture World, 16 July 1910. Emphasis in the original.
47. “Paying the Fiddler,” Moving Picture World, 30 July 1910.
48. Quoted in “Governors Urged to Aid Crusade,” Boston Daily Globe, 6 July 1910. Also see “Pictures of the Prize Fight,” Christian Endeavour Times, 14 July 1910.
49. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Recent Prizefight,” Outlook, 16 July 1910.
50. Streible, Fight Pictures, 222.
51. “Cities Prohibit Fight Pictures,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 July 1910; “Censors Pass on Reno Fight Views,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 9 July 1910; “Chicagoans May See Fight Films,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 July 1910; “Governors Oppose Pictures,” New York Times, 8 July 1910.
52. Maine and Iowa had already passed fight film bans in 1897 and 1908, respectively. “Pictures from Reno Must Not Be Shown,” Globe, 7 July 1910; Streible, Fight Pictures, 205. Also see “More Cities to Bar Fight Pictures,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 July 1910; “Hornet's Nest Stirred up by Fight Picture Men,” Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1910; “Syndicate Will Invoke Law,” Washington Post, 7 July 1910; “The Prize Fight Moving Pictures,” Outlook, 16 July 1910.
53. “Frisco Bars Fight Pictures of Jeffries-Johnson Scrap,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 July 1910; “Censors Pass on Reno Fight Views.”
54. “Picture Men to Fight Ban,” New York Times, 7 July 1910; “May Withdraw Fight Pictures,” Los Angeles Times, 9 July 1910. The Patent Company had paid $200,000 for the film rights in the hopes that Jeffries would win the fight. Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 125.
55. “Pictures from Reno Must Not Be Shown.”
56. “Governors Urged to Aid Crusade”; W. Knight Chaplin, People's Society of Christian Endeavour Year Book (London: Andrew Melrose, 1898), 8; W. Knight Chaplin, People's Society of Christian Endeavour Year Book (London: Andrew Melrose, 1899), 5, 7.
57. “Francis Edward Clark,” in Dictionary of American Religious Biography, ed. Henry Warner Bowden (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 114. Also see “The Open-Air Cure,” Christian Endeavour Times, 7 July 1910; “Fatness a Vital Matter,” Christian Endeavour Times, 7 July 1910; “Shapely and Beautiful,” Christian Endeavour Times, 7 July 1910; “The Religious Outlook in America,” Christian Endeavour Times, 14 July 1910.
58. “Pictures of the Prize Fight.”
59. “The Johnson-Jeffries Pictures,” Boxing World and Athletic Chronicle, 14 July 1910.
60. “Fistic Gossip,” Boxing World and Athletic Chronicle, 21 July 1910; “Telegrams,” Barbados Globe and Colonial Advertiser, 11 July 1910; “Fight Pictures in Dublin,” New York Times, 21 August 1910.
61. “Blacks & Whites,” Cape Times, 7 July 1910.
62. Truman Harte, “American News and Notes,” Boxing, 16 July 1910. Also see “The Big Fight,” Daily Gleaner, 7 July 1910; “After the Fight,” Cape Argus, 6 July 1910.
63. For the most part, this interpretation of the racial violence could be found only in the African American press. See, for example, N. Barnett Dodson, “Johnson the Real Victor,” Baltimore Afro-American, 16 July 1910; “Negro Press on the Fight,” Washington Bee, 16 July 1910; “Views of the Afro-American Press on the Johnson-Jeffries Fight,” Baltimore Afro-American, 16 July 1910.
64. “Jack Johnson in his Pride,” Boxing, 16 July 1910.
65. “Prohibition of Pictures,” Times of Natal, 8 July 1910.
66. “And Not a Friendly Port in Sight,” San Francisco Examiner, 9 July 1910.
67. “Glorifying the Coon,” Sunday Times, 10 July 1910; “Johannesburg Action,” Star, 9 July 1910; “Pictures of the Fight,” Star, 14 July 1910; “Union Government Instructions,” Cape Times, 9 July 1910; “Reno Pictures Prohibited in the Union,” Star, 14 July 19
10. The Wesleyan Methodist Church in Johannesburg and Pretoria also publicly opposed the fight film. “A Wesleyan Protest,” Star, 9 July 1910; “A Wesleyan Protest,” Rand Daily Mail, 7 July 1910.
68. “The Fight Films.”
69. George S. C. Swinton, “The Colour Problem,” Times, 19 September 1911.
70. “Case of Jamaica: An Agitation to Be Started,” Daily Gleaner, 9 July 1910.
71. “Race Riots in America,” Mirror of Life and Sport, 9 July 1910.
72. “The Moving Pictures,” Cape Times, 9 July 1910.
73. “Fight Rouses Race Feeling,” Globe, 6 July 1910.
74. “New Brunswick Picture Protest,” Boston Daily Globe, 16 July 1910; “Telegrams”; “Government Prohibits Prize-fight Pictures.” The Ontario government used a 1909 act regarding patron safety in movie houses to institute its ban.
75. “Jack Johnson Is ‘In Bad’ in Berlin,” Boston Daily Globe, 16 July 1910. This article is a reprint from the New York World.
76. “Bar Johnson from Berlin,” Los Angeles Times, 17 July 1910. On black entertainers in Berlin, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 137-38.
77. “Jack Johnson Has Won the Double Crown,” Indianapolis Freeman, 30 July 1910.
78. “Knocked Out! Two Ways of Looking at It,” Punch, 7 July 1910.
79. Quotations in this paragraph and the next are from “Demoralisation,” Times of Natal, 6 July 1910.
80. Savannah Tribune, 9 July 1910.
81. William Pickens, “Talladega College Professor Speaks on Reno Fight,” Chicago Defender, 30 July 1910.
82. “Rev. G. E. Bevens' Opinion of Johnson's Victory,” Baltimore Afro-American, 16 July 1910.
83. “Lessons of the Prize Fight,” Cleveland Gazette, 23 July 1910.
84. Pittsburgh Solidarity quoted in “The Fight at Reno,” Cleveland Gazette, 23 July 1910.
85. “What a Folly,” Washington Bee, 9 July 1910; Dodson, “Johnson the Real Victor.”
86. “Strong Arm of the American Law,” Chicago Defender, 30 July 1910. Also see W. H. Bates, “The People's Forum,” Baltimore Afro-American, 23 July 1910; “Those Moving Pictures, Prize Fights and Lynching,” Cleveland Gazette, 16 July 1910; “Captain John T. Campbell Writes on the Moving Pictures of the Jeffries and Johnson Fight,” Broad Ax, 23 July 1910.