Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

by Theresa Runstedtler

  John R. Marshall, an African American colonel in the 8th Illinois Regiment, was reputedly named field marshal of Argentina's government troops in early 1914. “This government is always ready to accept the intelligence of the American Negroes, and offers to them the same opportunity that it does any of our citizens,” a Defender report from Buenos Aires proclaimed.6 The capital city had purportedly received more than eighteen thousand “well educated, well groomed and equipped colored men and women from the United States of America.” Yet these were curious statements given that Argentina in the early 1900s was marked not only by large-scale white immigration from Europe (in a conscious effort to whiten the nation) but also by a corresponding decline in its black population. Although Afro-Argentines had a long history of military service, black soldiers rarely became high-ranking officers.7 Regardless of these inconsistencies, many black Americans had come to view South America as a space of equality and possibility.

  In mid-December 1914, Johnson's own arrival in Buenos Aires proved to be a festive occasion. He was the first U.S. boxing champion ever to set foot on South American soil. Pugilism in Argentina had heretofore been a largely elite and quasi-legal sport, practiced by British immigrants in private clubs. Johnson's visit, however, pushed it into the mainstream.8 An honorary guard of soldiers and marines escorted him to places of interest throughout the capital. Local promoters also approached him to fill theatrical dates, and he performed in numerous exhibitions in Buenos Aires and its surrounding towns. As Johnson later recalled, “The South American city gave me such a rousing welcome and I was an object of much concern on the part of the people, all of whom treated me with the utmost kindness.”9 Shortly after Johnson's departure for Barbados in January 1915, a black American traveler named T. Grand Pre affirmed that Argentina was “the prettiest and most delightful place in the world to live.” Although the “white [American] man took his prejudice there,” he apparently “could not make it stick.”10 Despite increasing U.S. influence in the region, it looked as if Latin America would remain true to its spirit of racial egalitarianism.

  At the same time, the bidding war commenced for permission to host the world heavyweight championship match between Johnson and the white hope Jess Willard. Many white Americans believed that Johnson would finally meet his match. Nicknamed the “Pottawatomie Giant” after his home county in Kansas, Willard was not only nine years Johnson's junior but also substantially larger, at a whopping six feet six inches and 230 pounds. Before trying his hand at boxing Willard had held a variety of demanding jobs, from a horse breaker and trainer to a teamster who transported goods by wagon.11 He was not just a boxer but a bona fide American cowboy who embodied the “strenuous life.”

  In January 1915 the syndicate promoting the Willard-Johnson match, led by Jack Curley, met in New York City to decide on a location. A contest between U.S. promoters, this bidding war illustrated that prizefighting was an important part of the ever-expanding reach of U.S. capital and consumer culture in the Americas. Representatives for U.S. sporting interests in Havana, Cuba, and the Mexican border cities of Tijuana and Juárez competed, and in the end it came down to a fight between Juárez and Havana.12

  Curley and his syndicate eventually chose Juárez, setting a fight date of 6 March 1915. With its proximity to the United States, Juárez seemed like a perfect location for maximizing profits, especially since the match would coincide with the Southwestern Cattlemen's Convention. A frontier space that served as a playground of vice for U.S. tourists, Juárez had six railroads passing through it on the line to California. At least ten thousand spectators could be drawn from its U.S. sister city, El Paso, Texas, alone. Curley also expected upward of fifty thousand spectators to come from across the United States, and he believed that, with a few alterations, the Juárez racetrack could accommodate up to 100,000 people. The revolutionary Mexican general Francisco “Pancho” Villa had even sent Curley a letter with some words of encouragement: “I feel sure that the great American public that will attend the match will see for themselves that this city is lawful and normal, and that we are indeed a law-abiding community.”13 The Willard-Johnson fight offered the turbulent Mexican nation an opportunity to showcase its legitimacy and modernity in front of a white American crowd.

  Not everyone was excited at the prospect of an interracial bout involving the brash black American champion in Juárez. Some white Americans believed that this was not the kind of example that the United States should be setting for its less civilized neighbors south of the border. A committee from the First Christian Church in El Paso wrote a letter of objection to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Reverends Perry Rice, Wesley Webdell, and J. F. Williams pleaded with Secretary Bryan to prevent “this brutal and brutalizing event” and, if possible, to extradite Johnson so that he could finally serve jail time for his Mann Act conviction.14 The clergymen confided, “We are so confident of your personal attitude and desire in matters of this kind that we feel it wholly unnecessary to make any further representation of the case to you.” Bryan was already a well-known advocate of U.S. military intervention in the Mexican Revolution.

  Included in the reverends' correspondence to Secretary Bryan was a translated version of their protest letter to General Villa. “Such an event would be very deeply deplored by all the good citizens of El Paso and of the United States,” they cautioned Villa. Using the language of paternalism, they added, “We sincerely believe that only harm can come to your own people as a result of this contest.” They warned Villa that his people would be “placed under influences” that would “only be detrimental to their development,” for prizefights caused “civilization” to suffer wherever they took place. The clergymen urged Villa to work with them to “avert this impending disaster.”15

  Although the reverends' arguments centered on their desire to protect Mexico's supposedly impressionable citizens from barbarity and vice, it was obvious that the racial dimensions of the Willard-Johnson match had pushed them over the edge. Prizefights were already a well-established part of the sporting scene in Juárez, and yet this was the first time that they had ever bothered to register a complaint. Worried that Juárez's racial and moral laxity would seep across the border to infect El Paso, Reverend Price and his cronies felt more than entitled to petition U.S. federal officials to intervene in Mexican affairs.

  The Department of State ultimately refused to do anything to stop the fight. Given the revolutionary upheaval in Mexico “and the lack of a central government…recognized by the United States,” they were averse to making any requests for Johnson's extradition.16 Furthermore, U.S. officials did not believe that it was their place to advise Mexican authorities to stop the fight, especially since it appeared to be a singular event rather than a recurrent problem that would continue to haunt El Paso. Not only would the white hope match go on, but Johnson would be able to continue his travels, raising the profile of boxing and gaining a colored following throughout the Americas.

  The black champion, accompanied by his wife, Lucille, and his Australian sparring partner, Frank Hagney, did just that. The three left Buenos Aires aboard the Highland Harris, arriving in Barbados on 7 February 1915. “Quite unexpectedly, the privilege has been afforded Barbadians to see a celebrated fighter, although, strictly speaking, not in the same category as Kitchener, Joffre, or French,” a Defender correspondent declared.17 Through his many conversations with the residents of the majority-black island, he had discovered that Johnson was already a crowd favorite. Although the black heavyweight may not have been a military commander along the same lines as Herbert Kitchener, Joseph Joffre, or John French, many Barbadians had read of his successes in Paris. They had even heard rumors that Johnson “had become a Frenchman, and had been called on to put aside the gloves and shoulder a rifle.”

  Johnson came on the heels of black American entrepreneurs and tourists who had forged their own links in the region. The successful businesswoman Madame C. J. Walker had journeyed to the islands of Jamai
ca, Cuba, and Haiti to introduce her company's hair products, sometimes spending her winters abroad. Even lesser lights of the black community such as Calvin C. Lewis, the captain of the Tea Room at Chicago's American Hotel, had visited Cuba and Jamaica.18

  African Americans had long admired the Caribbean as a space of black resistance and self-government. From 1889 to 1891 there was much optimism surrounding the appointment of Frederick Douglass as the U.S. minister to Haiti and the U.S. chargé d'affaires for the Dominican Republic. By the 1910s, however, the promise of greater black control in the region appeared to be diminishing.19 One black American journalist claimed that the Caribbean was now “threatened with the danger of being Americanized.”20 He believed that Caribbean people were drawn to the “enterprising spirit of the United States,” particularly when contrasted “with the inertness of Great Britain.” The U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico, its administration of Cuba, and its building of the Panama Canal seemed to have “excited their admiration.” The “numberless” white American visitors were also knitting closer commercial and social ties between the United States and the islands. Yet this closeness would come at a cost. The journalist predicted that this growing “intimacy” would soon culminate in the U.S. occupation of Haiti.21

  Against this backdrop of race and international relations, Johnson became a huge celebrity with black Barbadians. A large crowd of fans accosted him at customs. Later that same day many gathered to greet him in front of the Standard Hotel, where they made High Street virtually impassable as they gave him “an ovation only equalled by those bestowed on royalty.”22 Local newspapermen descended upon Johnson, and J. E. Branker, the manager of the London Electric Theater, booked him for a boxing exhibition. When Johnson ventured into Bridgetown in search of a schooner to take him to Cuba, “the crowds that followed his automobile were so great that a guard of honor comprised of mounted policemen escorted him all about.”23

  On the night of Johnson's much-anticipated appearance at the London Electric Theater, there were more spectators than seats. The event started with a screening of the recent Johnson-Moran fight film, followed by the display of life-size portraits of the black champion. When Johnson finally appeared on stage in his fighting togs, the crowd greeted him with “tremendous applause.” Johnson engaged in a little self-promotion, regaling the audience with stories about his foreign travels and past fights, assurances of his integrity as a boxer, and news about his upcoming match against the white American Willard. Next he invited challengers from the crowd. A Trinidadian man volunteered to put on the gloves against Johnson, but his courage was short-lived. At the first sign of Johnson's powerful blows he sprinted into the stage wings.24 Johnson and his partner Hagney then closed the triumphant evening with a sparring exhibition.

  Black American boxing fans took great pride in Johnson's commanding presence as their representative in Barbados. When Barnard Bonnafam of the schooner Lillian Blaubelt sued the black heavyweight for breach of contract, Johnson decided to defend himself in court. Bonnafam claimed that Johnson had agreed to pay $1,000 for passage to Cuba but later reneged on their agreement, choosing to travel aboard a different ship. Bonnafam, however, failed to produce any supporting documentation, and Johnson won the case. An “extraordinarily enthusiastic demonstration” greeted the black pugilist as he left the courtroom victorious.25 Even the white-run Barbados Globe and Colonial Advertiser had to admit, “In appearance as well in speech Jack Johnson is brimful of refinement and polish, and, by the pictures of him produced in the American press, has been wickedly libelled.” Despite his legal troubles, Johnson had “made many friends” on the island.26

  As Barbados embraced Johnson the controversy over his upcoming match with Willard deepened. Although Reverend Rice and his fellow protesters initially failed to get the fight moved from Juárez, in February 1915 they finally got their wish. Mexico's political turmoil had forced the fight's U.S. promoters to search for an alternative location. According to Andres Garcia, a Mexican consul in El Paso, the newly installed president Venustiano Carranza vowed to oppose Johnson's entry into Mexico, since the prizefight would bring revenue to his rival, General Villa.27 For Johnson to make it through any port controlled by Carranza's men—who, at that time, held the eastern seaboard and occupied Mexico City—he would have to present a recent U.S. passport. A fugitive since 1913, Johnson did not have the requisite papers, and he feared arrest at the hands of Carranza's men. When he arrived in Cuba aboard the steamship Henry Krager he decided to remain in Havana rather than continuing on his journey to Tampico, Mexico.28 Undeterred by Johnson's sudden change of plans, Curley and his fight syndicate moved the match to Havana.

  CUBA'S WHITE HOPES

  By the 1910s the multiracial island of Cuba, much like Mexico's border cities, was a popular space of play for U.S. tourists—one that promised to furnish the desired box office figures for the white hope match. During the U.S. military occupations of 1898-1902 and 1906-9, boxing on the island had been more or less limited to U.S. servicemen. Thereafter the locals began to embrace the sport, and the Academia de Boxeo opened its doors in 1910. Yet interracial bouts and the victories of black boxers quickly inflamed the island's racial frictions, and the Cuban government banned the sport in 1912.29

  Over the next few years Cuban officials lifted the ban as they recognized boxing's ability to bring in U.S. dollars. On 1 January 1915, the Cuban government granted the U.S. promoter Billy Gibson permission to conduct fight cards in the capital city.30 As Gibson told the New York Times, “Cuba is destined to be the home of boxing, and everybody in Havana, including the President of Cuba and Mayor of Havana is enthusiastic over the plan to stage championship battles at Havana.”31 Gibson had big plans to build a sporting empire in Cuba. “When you consider that the park at Havana can be reached in fifty hours from New York,” he argued, “it can readily be seen how encouraging the prospects are. It is a delightful trip in the Winter and the climate appears to be made to order.” The Willard-Johnson match would certainly appeal to a race-conscious U.S. crowd, enhancing Havana's reputation as a fun place of transgression. Safely contained beyond the borders of the United States, the city's exotic appeal for white Americans stemmed, in large part, from its racially mixed and, therefore, racially charged atmosphere.32

  U.S. tourists and dollars were not the only benefits that boxing would bring to Cuba. U.S. sportsmen and promoters saw it as a kind of progressive tool that would help Cuban men to develop a better appreciation for democracy, discipline, and civilization. Gibson's boxing enterprise had reportedly inspired Cuba's elite to cast off their “lethargic condition.” As a New York Times correspondent criticized, over the years Cuban youth “had apparently acquired the Spanish mañana habit—tomorrow is good enough.”33 These young elites had forgotten their obligation to lead, and in particular their responsibility to “teach the Cubans the finer points of the game which is the major sport of all civilized nations.” Thanks to Gibson's entrepreneurial “Yankee hustle,” their growing participation in boxing supposedly signaled Cuba's emergence as a modern capitalist nation. Boxing gained popularity right alongside other physical education programs designed to fashion Cubans into bourgeois citizens, including those of the YMCA, which opened in Havana in 1905.34

  The rising fame of black American fighters in Cuba during this period also attests to boxing's racialized appeal for Afro-Cubans. In February 1915 the editor of the English-language Havana Daily Post, George M. Bradt, had attempted to arrange a match between the black heavyweights Sam Langford and Sam McVea. Bradt and the two fighters' managers believed that the twenty-five-round match, to be held in a new fifteen-thousand-seat stadium located in Maine Park on the Malecón, “was the sort of thing that the Cubans wanted.”35 Even though this fight never occurred, a twenty-round match between McVea and Battling Jim Johnson did take place on 20 February in front of ten thousand fight enthusiasts.36 The U.S. tradition of battle royals involving young black boys had also become part of the Cuban fight scene.37
Although the promotion of black-on-black matches and battle royals suggests an element of white voyeurism at work, one cannot underestimate the impact of black American fighters on Afro-Cubans' race consciousness, especially at a moment when the Cuban government was trying to suppress black political mobilization.

  As Johnson practiced a sport that was both a mode of colonial discipline and a forum for countercultural resistance, his presence provoked contentious debates about the racial trajectory of the new Cuban nation. Like other black Americans who traveled to Cuba, he found himself at the fraught intersection of the growing networks of U.S. hegemony and black transnationalism in the region. Johnson and his contemporaries looked to Cuba as a space of possibility and solidarity, yet the realities of U.S. imperialism still governed their actions.

  Black American participation in the Spanish-American War in Cuba exemplified this ambivalent relationship. Many African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington urged the men in their communities to enlist. They believed that black soldiers' bravery on the battlefield would not only demonstrate their loyalty to the United States but also prove their worthiness for full citizenship. The four black regiments of the regular army—the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry—became a source of collective pride. Black Americans also saw the Cubans as their racial relatives and believed that the Cuban fight for independence paralleled their own domestic struggle for equality.

  Despite U.S. officials' public rhetoric in support of the Cuban revolutionaries, it became apparent that they had no real intention of granting the island its independence. Some black Americans criticized their nation's imperial stance. They feared that white American rule on the island would be even more brutal than that of the Spanish, especially since the United States did little to ensure the freedom and dignity of its own black citizens back home.38 When the Spanish forces left Cuba in 1899 the United States remained, installing a military government. Although the inclusion of the Platt Amendment principles in the Cuban constitution of 1901 brought an end to the first U.S. occupation, in reality this step represented only nominal independence for the new nation. The amendment not only sanctioned continued U.S. involvement in Cuba's domestic and foreign affairs, but it also permitted the United States to maintain a naval base at Guantanamo Bay. U.S. interests continued to flow onto the island, and the threat of U.S. annexation remained.