Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  It was no longer possible to separate imperial politics from the tenor of metropolitan race relations because maintaining empires required that people of color remain a separate caste outside the benefits of Western democracy. This type of information would have been eye-opening for the many African Americans who imagined Britain as a civilized oasis, and for those who actively sought out opportunities for life and liberty across the Atlantic. As the Age editorialist emphasized, alongside the growth of British interests and the development of repressive policies in Africa, “prejudice against the blacks” had become “a national policy in the British Islands.”113

  He also viewed white American and British racism through the same lens, claiming that their policies betrayed the kind of imperial arrogance that had caused the fall of ancient Rome. He critiqued the over-confidence of Englishmen who boasted that “the sun never sets upon the British Empire.” Comparing the Wells-Johnson controversy with the white American outcry against the Jeffries-Johnson fight film in 1910, he likewise contended that the United States had much to learn from Rome's tragic example. “'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's' does not set well on white stomachs when Caesar happens to be black in the face,” he maintained. “It proves that the white race has a big yellow streak in its nature; and moral cowardice is always associated with structural mental weakness.” Rome's demise provided a glimpse of the Anglo-Saxon's troubled future.

  Johnson's overseas travels and travails had brought the global color line into view for African American fans back home. “Poor, innocent Jack Johnson and his Reno have brought forth this world discussion, and perhaps for the better,” one journalist declared.114 The black champion's difficulties abroad seemed to confirm that it was best to “wage a universal war for the Negro's uplift, regardless of his whereabouts, with the thought in mind that the part will not transcend the whole.” A year after the Wells-Johnson controversy a racial incident in the coastal town of Yarmouth, England, highlighted this interconnectedness. A group of white thugs attacked an unsuspecting black Jamaican man in the street as they shouted, “You dirty dog, Jack Johnson.”115 The status of African Americans was clearly tied to that of other Africans throughout the diaspora. As long as people of color anywhere continued to be deprived of their rights, there would be no real answer to the race question.

  FROM COLOR LINE TO COLOUR BAR

  Writing in the 1920s, Trevor Wignall reminisced, “It was Johnson's ill-fortune to transform a thin colour line into a colour bar that has become as wide as a continent.”116 Although Wignall's contention bordered on hyperbole, the Wells-Johnson case became a useful precedent invoked by the Home Office to ban many high-profile interracial matches in Britain. It also set the stage for the British Boxing Board of Control's decision to bar nonwhite men from British title fights until 1947.117 Much like Jim Crow's color line, John Bull now had his own colour bar.

  Since the racial boundaries of the boxing ring had become such a powerful metaphor for the boundaries of manhood and citizenship, they had to be policed. “There seemed to lurk a fear that the Negro all over the land would feel his ability to meet the white man on an equal footing,” an African American writer later recalled of the WellsJohnson controversy, “but no amount of suppression of what transpires on such occasions can stifle that inherent knowledge of manhood which every Negro knows is within him.”118 In subsequent years the British boxing magnate Lord Lonsdale wrote letters of protest to the Home Office, effectively thwarting two interracial matches involving the black American heavyweight Sam Langford. In 1913 Langford was scheduled to fight the German-American Frank Klaus in London. Even though Lonsdale admitted that the two boxers were “particularly well-conducted and respectable,” he advised that it was still impossible “to overcome the fact that the competition [was] a ‘coloured' one.”119 A year later Lonsdale took it upon himself to contact the Home Office regarding an upcoming match between Langford and the white American Gunboat Smith. Lonsdale once again admitted that Langford was a “straightforward and honest” man; however, he still warned that the interracial fight was likely “not in the interests of the Nation.”120 The Home Office agreed and told Lonsdale that he “would be doing a public service in getting the scheme dropped.”121 Not even respectable black men could scale the British boxing colour bar.

  Commonplace ideas of social and political modernity remained tangled in a popular biology of race and the body that transcended national and imperial borders. A British editorialist argued that all interracial fights should be banned because of the inherent physical differences between blacks and whites. As “neolithic” men, black boxers possessed thicker skulls and a “lower nervous organization,” giving them an unfair advantage over their more refined and civilized white opponents.122 It had been “scientifically and medically recognised that the higher a man's intellect the more he is sensitive to pain.”123 Such ideas were not limited to Britain, since many of them appeared in white American discussions of black athletes. White boxing fans explained away the political significance of African American ring success by tying black men's physical prowess to their alleged lack of modernity and, by extension, their unsuitability for self-government.

  FIGURE 9. White sportswriters explained away the political significance of black ring success by tying black men's physical prowess to their alleged lack of civilization. “Snowy Baker's Search for an Aboriginal Hope,” Boxing, 21 March 1914.

  This discussion had even reached the fringes of the “civilized world” in Australia. Hugh McIntosh's assistant Reginald “Snowy” Baker gave Boxing a wry account of his search for an “Aboriginal Hope” in 1914. He outlined what many believed was the appropriate role for non-white men in the ring, assuring readers that Aboriginal pugilists were absolutely no threat to the racial order. “The Aboriginals aren't like the African negroes,” Baker observed. “They're an entirely different race. They're full of humour, good-natured all the time, but they love a fight.”124 Mirroring contemporary discussions in the British metropole, Baker claimed that “Australian Aboriginals have the thickest skulls in the world. The African negro's skull is an egg-shell in comparison.” “It's almost impossible to hurt an aboriginal with a blow,” he added. “When they're fighting or being clubbed they laugh all the time.” Baker's Aboriginals were the ideal men of color. They were physically gifted but mentally inferior, and they could withstand harsh physical punishment without complaining. Yet Baker's depiction revealed much more about white fears about the place of nonwhite men in the modern world than about the “true” nature of Aboriginals. His remarks exposed a nostalgic longing to return to the days before black men like Johnson dared to stand up against white men, whether in the ring, in the press, or in everyday life.

  British subjects and black Americans continued to challenge these white racial fictions. An editorialist for the African Times and Orient Review, a London-based anticolonial weekly, complained that English sportswriters had the “'White Man's Burden' complaint in a particularly virulent form.”125 Turning the assumption of white civilization on its head, he argued that it was the Anglo-Saxon's appetite for brutality that had made interracial matches such a huge phenomenon. Similarly, the black American fighter Frank Crozier declared that the British boxing colour bar was a grievous insult against “the British-born black sons of the great Empire,” and certainly “enough to make the coloured race cry out for self-government.”126 Crozier had long offered his own alternative theory of black physicality, boasting to white reporters that he had acquired his muscular strength by “mental suggestion.” The real danger of interracial matches was that they implied that whites and nonwhites belonged to the same evolutionary category, not only in boxing but also in politics and society. Unlike Baker's fictive Aboriginals, New Negroes like Johnson were ready to fight for a legitimate place in the world.

  4

  The Black Atlantic from Below

  African American Boxers and the Search for Exile

  How incongruous to think that
I, a little Galveston colored boy should ever become an acquaintance of kings and rulers of the old world, or that I should number among my friends some of the most notable persons of America and the world in general! What a vast stretch of the imagination to picture myself a fugitive from my own country, yet sought and acclaimed by thousands in nearly every nation of the world.

  —Jack Johnson, In the Ring—And Out

  In 1912 Jack Johnson found himself a political prisoner of sorts, unfairly prosecuted by the U.S. government. His athletic prowess, his dominance over white fighters, his refusal to follow the etiquette of Jim Crow, and, most of all, his penchant for the company of white women had finally caught up with him. With his dubious conviction under the federal Mann Act against white slave trafficking in 1913, Johnson fled the United States, lingering in exile throughout Europe and the Americas for the next seven years. “I know the bitterness of being accused and harassed by prosecutors. I know the horror of being hunted and haunted,” Johnson later recalled. “I have dashed across continents and oceans as a fugitive, and I have matched my wits with the police and secret agents seeking to deprive me of one of the greatest blessings man can have—liberty.”1 Building on his global popularity as a pugilist, he soon became the most widely publicized African American émigré in the world.

  Johnson certainly remembered his foreign sojourn as a kind of exile. At various points in his 1927 autobiography he called himself a “fugitive,” a “voluntary exile,” and a “wanderer.”2 He insisted that being separated from his mother, Tina “Tiny” Johnson, was the most painful aspect of his time abroad. “It was she of whom I thought when I wandered as an exile in foreign lands,” he later lamented, “but she died before I could negotiate the return, and while I was in distant lands, helpless to reach her, one of her last wishes was that she might see me.”3 Over the years Johnson had come to see his “flight to Europe” as one of his “greatest errors.” He maintained a profound sense of ambivalence about his experiences overseas. “I had a delightful time in my travels and learned much concerning the world, [but] I was, nevertheless, an unhappy and restless individual,” he recalled. “Nothing came into my life in the way of adequate compensation for the stings and grief I suffered over my separation from my friends and relatives.”4

  Far from an “error,” Johnson's exile was a key episode in the already long-established tradition of African Americans who imagined and searched for better prospects in foreign spaces. During his sojourn, Johnson emerged as the ultimate emblem of a thriving black Atlantic counterculture from below. In the early 1900s there was a surprising fluidity of movement for poor and working-class black American men throughout the Atlantic world. There were still no sophisticated mechanisms in place to prevent their informal visits, even for those of little education and means who journeyed abroad as sailors, casual laborers, entertainers, and athletes.

  The foreign travels of black American working men were symptomatic of their disenfranchised status politically, economically, and socially within the United States. Finding their horizons limited by the crushing repression of Jim Crow in the South and the de facto segregation of the North, many opted to join in the accelerating movement of goods, services, and commercial culture that permeated national borders. Some found a place in the rowdy multiracial milieu of port cities, laboring as maritime workers, stevedores, and longshoremen. Others ventured further inland in search of jobs in the mining sector and other dangerous heavy industries. Scores of black men also took advantage of the rising global preeminence of U.S. culture, and in particular the increasing foreign demand for African American popular culture. Often rejecting backbreaking manual labor in favor of more profitable opportunities in the field of popular entertainment, they became ever more ubiquitous figures of fear and desire.

  Professional sports (particularly boxing) became tightly entwined with notions of freedom, mobility, exile, and racial progress in the folklore of the black American community. Black prizefighters were the cosmopolitan protagonists of some of the first widely available writings on African American travel and exile, helping to inspire a popular black global imagination that was much more about exploration and discovery than doctrinaire politics. In covering these boxers and their foreign destinations, black journalists educated readers about the possibilities and the pitfalls of living abroad. African American sportsmen also used their unprecedented access to the foreign and domestic presses to broadcast their own agenda on racial inequality. In addition to their role in this emerging print culture of the diaspora, they played an integral part in shaping a diasporic culture of performance, one that presented images of racial advancement that spoke to the imagination of the black masses. Their daring exploits and expressions in and out of the ring not only went against the conventional bourgeois narratives of racial uplift, but they also challenged the whitewashed visions of modernity circulating in the popular culture of late imperialism.

  BLACK BOXERS AS BLACK EXILES

  In November 1912 Johnson was arrested and charged with bringing his former flame, a white American call girl named Belle Schreiber, across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. Drafted by Republican congressman James Robert Mann of Illinois, the White Slave Traffic Act (Mann Act), which barred the interstate and international transport of women for “prostitution or debauchery” and “other immoral purposes,” had gone into effect on 1 June 1910. So vague was the Mann Act's wording, with phrases like “crimes against nature” and “unlawful sexual intercourse,” that prosecutors even used it to police sexual encounters between consenting adults, especially those involving black men and white women.5 Although Johnson's relationship with Schreiber had actually taken place before the passage of the Mann Act, this did not prevent his arrest. A month earlier Johnson's newest squeeze, an eighteen-year-old white prostitute named Lucille Cameron, had refused to cooperate in the first Mann Act case against him. The second time around, however, officials were resolved to make the trumped-up charges stick. Not one to shy away from confrontation, Johnson added fuel to the fire by marrying Cameron in December 1912, just three months after his previous wife, Etta Duryea, committed suicide.

  Johnson's well-publicized legal troubles signaled that the strict maintenance of a color line, particularly a sexual one, had become a national priority in the United States. Fears abounded over black migration to the North and its concurrence with the rising number of young, single white women living in urban areas. The failed attempt by Democratic congressman Seaborn A. Roddenbery to add an antimiscegenation clause to the U.S. Constitution, the passage of bills to ban black-white marriage in ten northern states, the frequent police crackdowns on interracial vice districts, and the many cases against African American men who dared to consort with white women occurred alongside the public uproar over Johnson's sexual escapades.6

  Although the black champion openly fraternized with white women from the sexual underworld—a popular pastime of many professional athletes of his time—there was simply no evidence to suggest that he had ever solicited or sold their services for money. Johnson's eventual conviction, which carried a 366-day prison sentence and a $1,000 fine, underscored not only the second-class citizenship of Johnson but that of all African Americans. One black editorialist complained, “The pugilist as a citizen has not been given a square deal. As a Negro, a member of a despised race, he has been meted out a terrible punishment for daring to exceed what is considered a Negro's circle of activities.”7 The black heavyweight's ring successes and romantic choices had merely “violated public sentiment, not the laws.”8 Nonetheless, U.S. officials seemed bent on using the lowest possible means to discredit him. As one African American journalist declared, Johnson's Mann Act conviction was clearly “meant as a lesson to the black folk, the world around.”9

  Faced with the prospect of jail, Johnson sought his mother's advice. Although he was initially hesitant to flee, Tiny Johnson had begged him to leave the United States, insisting that she would rather see her son die than go t
o prison.10 Seeking exile abroad appeared to be a safe and viable option. “The spotlight is a fearful ordeal,” one black journalist observed. “It ran Roosevelt to Africa, Carnegie to Skibo castle, [and] J. P. Morgan up and down the continents.”11 Because of Johnson's color and the nature of his profession, he had even more reason to run. “When some big black colossus knocks the point from the head of a huge Olympus, not only the spotlight becomes overworked,” the journalist argued, “but the cruel searchlight in his private character is done with a prejudice and a frenzy that would make the angels weep.” Feeling the searing “heat of white hate,” Johnson decided to take the transatlantic plunge in June 1913. The Bureau of Investigation, established in 1910 to enforce the Mann Act, led the heavily sensationalized manhunt for Johnson.12

  A few weeks after his disappearance from Chicago, Johnson gave a British reporter the “exclusive story” of his escape from the clutches of U.S. officials. He claimed to have taken a train across the border into Canada with his nephew Gus Rhodes, disguised as a member of the Negro Giants baseball team.13 Even though Johnson knew that violations of the Mann Act were not extraditable offenses in Canada, his carefully choreographed exit north of the border was not without serious risks. Earlier in the year a report in the Indianapolis Freeman claimed that the Canadian government had issued a general order to all of its immigration inspectors instructing them to prevent Johnson's entry into the country. Canadian officials had called into question not only Johnson's physical health but also his moral character, the very same reasons typically used to bar the admittance of African American settlers and migrants.14 As Freeman sportswriter Billy Lewis bemoaned, “Canada has caught the cure, and one feels to say, ‘Etu [sic] Brute.'” Safe havens for African American fugitives like Johnson seemed to be disappearing. “On the last day it is said that the wicked shall flee and be without a hiding place,” Lewis declared. “Are we now in those days? Have we been wicked? More wicked than others? Aren't we rather hard pressed for a hiding place?”15