Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  Johnson's breach of the pugilistic color bar appeared to have unleashed a flood of colored ambitions in the Pacific. “Already the insolent black's victory causes skin troubles in Woolloomoolo,” Bedford despaired.163 An hour after the fight he had witnessed a Lascar publicly pontificating on the Marquess of Queensberry rules in front of two white men. Native Fijians had also become more rebellious with the arrival of press reports describing Johnson's victory. A white policeman in Suva recalled the inflammatory words of one native: “White man he no use; black man he knock him down every time.”164 Faced with such open defiance, the officer felt obliged to show the native that “not every coloured man is a Johnson.”

  In recounting his South Sea voyage in the aftermath of the fight, the Australian travel writer Jack McLaren acknowledged that maintaining an aura of white superiority sometimes “called for great ingenuity.”165 McLaren pointed to the collective efforts of white planters to keep the many reports and photos of the interracial match “away from native eyes” in the Solomon Islands. Despite this vigorous campaign of censorship, news of Johnson's triumph quickly spread throughout the native community, and, as McLaren recalled, “Our prestige began to rock!” To regain control of the situation, one of the planters called the native chiefs to an emergency meeting at which he tried to convince them that, all photographic evidence aside, Burns had actually made a courageous comeback to win the fight. The planter hoped that the chiefs would relay this story to their people, thereby reinforcing the idea that “no matter how big and strong a black man was he could not triumph over the strength and cunning of a white.” Whether or not this scheme ultimately was successful, the white planters definitely understood that their political power rested on prevailing notions of white men's physical supremacy—especially since the natives greatly outnumbered them.

  The Burns-Johnson match highlighted the need for continued white vigilance in the region. One boxing fan declared, “Let young Australia take heed, and when the black man (by black man I mean all coloured races) at last looks this way with a yearning to revenge the many insults, may we have many thousands of men of the Burns type to oppose their oncoming.”166 “It will be a ‘degrading spectacle,’” he warned, “but must be faced, nevertheless.”

  In the meantime, boxing fans turned to the former champion Jim Jeffries to restore white dignity in the ring and beyond. “Does anyone imagine for a moment that Johnson's success is without its political influence, an influence which has only been checked…by the personality of Jem Jeffries?” one sportswriter asked. “It is not so much a matter of racial pride as one of racial existence which urges us so ardently to desire the ex-boilermaker's [Jeffries's] triumph.”167 Jeffries agreed, rallying his fellow physical culturists: “Unless we propose to become a nation of weaklings, it is about time that we woke up athletically speaking.”168

  2

  White Censors, Dark Screens

  The Jeffries-Johnson Fight Film Controversy

  It seems absurd that a battle in faraway Nevada, disgusting in its details and with the most sordid environment, could have such wide-spread effects. But every student of native life, every administrator of native affairs, and everyone engaged in holding the balance between the white and black races, will acknowledge that the prestige of the dominant races has been lowered in the minds of the inferior races by this brutal conflict at Reno.

  —Times of Natal (South Africa), 6 July 1910

  Reflecting on Jack Johnson's resounding defeat of Tommy Burns in 1908, the Australian promoter Hugh McIntosh declared that the prizefight pictures had “influenced the various coloured races in each country where they were shown.” A self-professed “student of human nature,” McIntosh had noticed “the keen, eager interest displayed by the coloured peoples of the earth in the personality, life, and career” of the black champion. In South Africa the natives had gathered around film advertisements graced with Johnson's photo. So enthusiastic was their response that police throughout the Union had ordered promoters to “refrain from exhibiting posters, photos, or anything that might excite the Kaffir mind.”1 Crowds of natives had flooded theaters to watch the moving picture, cheering each time Johnson landed a blow. Even more disturbingly, they congregated outside after the film, boisterously reanimating his victory. As McIntosh acknowledged, a couple of celluloid reels had managed to transport this undesirable racial spectacle all the way from Rushcutters Bay to the street corners and movie houses of South Africa.

  The Burns-Johnson fight film had even stirred up people of color in Asia and the South Pacific. Stopping in Ceylon on his way from Australia to England, McIntosh had marveled as the “Hindoos and Cingalese…flocked to see the pictures in great numbers and displayed a remarkable knowledge of the smallest details pertaining to the contest.” 2 Droves of Fijian natives had also seen the film, and many began to express a passion for professional boxing. By early 1909 Johnson was enough of a celebrity in Fiji to attract throngs of fans during a stopover on his way home from Australia. Even the “alien races” of Siam, Portugal, Burma, Japan, the Philippines, the West Indies, India, Egypt, and Mexico had reportedly shown great interest in the fight pictures. Regardless of their diverse cultures and complexions, these communities of color had each transformed Johnson's victory into a symbol of local resistance. Johnson had emerged as the world's first black movie star, and his fight films became the period's most widely disseminated representations of black male dominance.3

  No wonder McIntosh worried about the possible consequences of “coloured superiority in the sport of boxing.” His concerns were part of a much larger discussion about the impact of mass culture on racial and imperial politics across the globe. The increasingly transnational reach of commercial amusements such as sports was proving to be both the backbone and the bane of white supremacy's existence. While professional boxing was an important medium through which white men, especially white ethnic working-class men, envisioned their place in the political economy of empire, it also provided people of color with a public space for challenging the racial order.

  Staged in Reno, Nevada, on 4 July 1910, Johnson's subsequent title match against the white American Jim Jeffries exemplified these competing dynamics. Alongside the question of the interracial fight's advisability as a live event, its reproduction and dissemination through the press, photography, and film became heated points of contention in places around the world. Transnational organizations like the United Society of Christian Endeavor in tandem with local white officials, newspaper editors, reformers, and clergymen led a concerted campaign to censor the Jeffries-Johnson fight film. Their collective efforts sparked interimperial conversations about the importance of preserving global white supremacy. The controversy surrounding the Jeffries-Johnson match and its moving picture also inspired open displays of racial pride and anti-colonialism in a variety of nonwhite communities. It not only encouraged people of color to view their own oppression as part of a worldwide race problem, but it empowered them to imagine a future of freedom and solidarity stretching beyond their local circumstances.

  Through the boxing ring, journalists, politicians, progressives, and fans alike could see that the accelerating flows of mass commercial culture were connecting diverse peoples in new ways, thereby transforming the terrain of imperial power and resistance. The United States was at the forefront of this shift as one of the biggest purveyors of racial spectacles. Alongside blackface minstrelsy and other U.S. exports, the Jeffries-Johnson fight and its film pushed the American “negro problem” onto the world stage, making the United States the most talked-about space of racial conflict and African American men the most visible people of color around the globe.

  Although most film scholars cite D. W. Griffith's Birth of Nation (1915) as the period's most prominent cinematic representation of U.S. race relations, by the early 1900s U.S.-produced interracial fight films had already achieved international distribution.4 This genre emerged right alongside the intensification of racial segregation and West
ern imperialism, for it provided viewers with a dynamic image of Darwinian competition. Contained within the small space of a ring and organized into short rounds, boxing matches were well suited to the new medium's very real limits on camera movement and the length of celluloid reels.5 Despite the fight films' often grainy images shot from a distance, the specter of light versus dark was undeniable and therefore applicable to a variety of racial contexts. The portability of film reels also made it easy for producers to market and distribute their prizefight pictures to an international audience. Since these films were silent, local exhibitors could add their own narratives, tailoring them to the language and cultural references of their viewers. As interracial fight films resonated with a combination of local and global debates over the color line, they garnered broad box office appeal.

  Fight pictures (interracial or otherwise) were an essential part of the developing film industry. “The fortunes of the prize ring are apparently interwoven with those of the moving picture,” declared one U.S. critic. “Without the moving picture your modern prize fight would be shorn of its financial glamour and possibilities; without the prize fight the moving picture would not appeal to as many people as it apparently does.”6 Much like the burgeoning boxing industry, the rise of commercial filmmaking accompanied the expansion of urban industrialism. The growth of cities and of working people's disposable income and leisure time had created a ready market for moving pictures.7

  Although the advent of boxing films enabled the sport to draw a more diverse spectatorship across race, class, gender, and age lines, white immigrant and working-class men still comprised the majority of the genre's initial audience. Early fight films proved far more popular with the male spectators of burlesque shows than with the mixed-gender audiences of storefront movie theaters. However, once prizefight pictures made their way into the nickelodeons' all-movie variety shows and the entertainment programs at amusement parks, fairs, and carnivals, their viewership began to expand. These films also had a long shelf life, often remaining in circulation for months.8

  Though there were earlier productions, it was the Burns-Johnson match that solidified the interracial fight film as a touchstone for interimperial discussions about the maintenance of white supremacy. Cinematographers for the British division of the Gaumont Film Company had recorded the action from a platform that towered above the spectators at Rushcutters Bay. Just two days after the match the moving picture was ready for exhibition, and approximately seven thousand Australians attended screenings in the very same stadium where Burns had met his painful demise.9 Over the next three months McIntosh traveled from Australia to Britain to the United States exhibiting the ninety-minute film all along the way.10 In February 1909 the film debuted at England's National Sporting Club and then appeared in various music halls throughout London. The Parisian sporting magazine La Vie au grand air paid fifty thousand francs for the rights to show the film in France and its colonies.11 McIntosh then sailed across the Atlantic to unveil the film in Chicago and New York City. Although African Americans were forced to watch the Burns-Johnson moving picture from the black sections of white-run venues or in separate “race theaters,” they embraced the film as a public platform for racial pride, much like their counterparts in the colonies.12

  Despite Burns's loss, screenings of the fight film also became exercises in racial solidarity for white American and British audiences, as they rallied for Jim Jeffries's return to the ring. Already retired for several years, the aging Jeffries was overweight, out of shape, and hesitant to challenge Johnson, yet these realities did little to dissuade his white fans. During a run of the fight film at the American Music Hall in New York City, Jeffries appeared on stage, and McIntosh roused the crowd by repeating Jack London's now famous call for a white hope to remove “the golden smile” from Johnson's face.13 It was not long before Jeffries decided to enter the fray.

  AN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA EVENT

  Looking back on the Jeffries-Johnson prizefight, some European journalists charged that there was something particularly “American” about its promotion. They blamed white Americans' rabid racism, sensationalism, and commercialism for turning the fight into a virtual race war when it was merely a boxing match between two men. “The whole proceedings were organised on that colossal scale which appears natural to the citizens of the United States,” declared one British correspondent.14 The French sportswriter Georges Dupuy called the fight “a gigantic example of American spiel.”15 He argued that Jeffries's inflated pride coupled with Yankee race prejudice had produced countless exaggerations and extraordinary publicity in the U.S. press. “The savage hatred of the nigger in America, will never change, and I imagine that the lynchings and burnings of blacks will have better days than ever,” Dupuy speculated. He argued that U.S. companies were largely to blame, for they had used the fight's racial dimensions to help advertise their products: “Six months before the combat, immense posters lined the streets of large cities, praising in the words of Jeffries the merits of certain soaps and laxative pills.” White Americans' penchant for hype and profits, along with their rising preeminence in the global marketplace of commercial culture, had catapulted this race war across the world.

  Yet these supposedly unique U.S. obsessions were far less exceptional than these foreign correspondents claimed. European sportsmen were also eager to cash in on the Jeffries-Johnson fight. The interracial match became a bona fide international media event as it resonated with the racial concerns of people in a variety of places.

  In November 1909 Johnson and Jeffries signed a deal to fight each other for a purse of $101,000 and a share of two-thirds of the film rights.16 Organized by the U.S. promoter Tex Rickard, the world championship match was set to take place on Independence Day in San Francisco, California. A group of white American reformers and clergymen came out in opposition to the proposed fight, arguing that it would prove to be both a barbaric spectacle and a national disgrace. Many African American sportswriters countered these criticisms, claiming that it was racism rather than morality that fueled the protest against the prizefight. Feeling the weight of public pressure, on 15 June 1910 Governor James Norris Gillett barred the Jeffries-Johnson match from the state of California. With just nineteen days until the bout, Rickard scrambled to save his event from cancellation by moving it to the frontier city of Reno, Nevada.17

  Because of the contest's racial overtones, speculation abounded over how much revenue its moving picture would generate. Harper's Weekly estimated a box office of no less than $1,000,000, while Moving Picture World had a more conservative estimate of $160,000.18 Most sports-writers agreed that the film's profitability ultimately would depend on which racial representative emerged triumphant. One British journalist argued that if Johnson won “the value of the pictures would be cut down largely,” since they would likely face prohibition in the U.S. South and apathy in the North and West.19 In light of this risk all three of the stakeholders sold their portions of the film rights before the fight: Johnson for $50,000, Jeffries for $66,000, and Rickard for $33,000.20 Despite all the commotion and contingencies, the fight attracted worldwide attention. In the week before the contest, hundreds of reporters from all over the United States descended on Reno along with a large contingent of foreign correspondents from Britain, Australia, and France. An African American reporter marveled, “Who could have ever thought that a Negro would have figured as a principal in an affair which drew on the newspapers of civilization…for representatives at the ringside?”21 Telegraphers and cinematographers also reached the frontier city and began setting up their equipment. While the telegraphers would be on hand to send out round-by-round reports of the action, the J. & J. Company had won the license to produce a film of the fight for later display. J. & J. had assembled a group of camera operators from the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, the Selig Polyscopic Company, and the Vitagraph Company to record the action. Endeavoring “to make the greatest sporting film ever,” they stationed nine moving picture
cameras near the ring.22

  Adding to the bustle of preparations already afoot, tens of thousands of spectators began to arrive in Reno aboard special trains. They flooded the city, jamming the streets and overwhelming local restaurants and hotels.23 On the morning of the fight, the crush of bodies only intensified as throngs of fans made their way to the venue in trolley cars, in automobiles, and on foot. By the afternoon, a boisterous crowd of more than sixteen thousand packed the open-air stadium. In addition to the “plain dips and stickup men…mine owners, stock brokers, touts, blacklegs, politicians, bank presidents and second-story men” from across the United States, “long-robed Chinamen, ultra-modishly attired Japanese, stolid Germans, vivacious Frenchmen, [and] many Britons…rubbed shoulders in motley comradeship.”24 The match raked in a record gate of $270,775.25

  Right from the opening bell, Johnson dominated the action, toying with Jeffries and showboating for the spectators. Although Jeffries managed to bloody Johnson's mouth in the fourth round, the African American champion still controlled the match. By rounds seven and eight it appeared as if Jeffries was simply too beat-up and tired to retaliate, and by round fourteen his eyes were swollen, his nose broken, and his body covered in blood. In the fifteenth and final round, Johnson knocked the beleaguered white challenger to the canvas several times. Fearing for the health and safety of his charge, Jeffries's manager, Sam Berger, jumped into the ring to stop the fight while Jeffries's trainer, Bob Armstrong, threw in the towel. As Rickard signaled Johnson's victory to the crowd, the black heavyweight became the undisputed champion of the world.26 Much like Burns's supporters in Australia two years earlier, the disappointed spectators in Reno streamed out of the stadium in near silence.