Yet Johnson had no intention of staying abroad. When he arrived in Tijuana he opened the Main Event Café and began making plans to go home.151 As he later revealed, “I was not satisfied with my lot in life. There was nothing, I felt, which would compensate me for continuing as an exile from my home and friends, so I thought constantly of returning but was at a loss as to how I should proceed.”152 Rumors that Johnson would remain in Mexico and become a citizen circulated in the African American press. However, without any legal status in the chaotic Mexican Republic, Johnson found himself in deep trouble after the assassination of his political patron Carranza in the spring of 1920.153 On 5 June 1920 a Tijuana judge ordered Johnson to leave Mexico within thirty days, and on 20 July, seven years after fleeing the United States, the forty-two-year-old boxer crossed the border, surrendering himself to federal agents. Johnson's rebellious sojourn had finally come to an end.
7
The Empire Strikes Back
The “French Jack Johnson” and the Rising Tide of Color
When you summarize the great achievements and accomplishments of the darker people of the world in their upward climb you do not wonder that you hear so much from the thinkers of the white world about the rising tide of color.
—“The Darker Races of the World Coming Back to the Front,” Negro World, 21 October 1922
From the colonial viewpoint, a Carpentier-Siki match is worth more than one hundred gubernatorial speeches to prove to our subjects and protégés that we want to apply to the letter the principle of equality between races.
—Ho Chi Minh, “About Siki,” Le Paria, 1 December 1922
When Jack Johnson crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, spectators swarmed as he posed with U.S. officers in front of the clicking motion picture cameras. The African American heavyweight appeared to be “in a joyous mood, laughing and talking with those about him.”1 “I'm back home, and it sure feels mighty good,” Johnson exclaimed. “It is home sweet home for me and no one who has never been away can know how good it feels to get back again, whatever is in the future.”2 As Johnson recalled, his “viewpoint,” while “never provincial,” had been “considerably broadened by the varied experiences and contacts” he had made throughout his journey:
There are few countries in which I have not traveled. I have not only loitered along the beaten paths of old and new worlds, but I have gone into many strange and out-of-the-way corners of the globe and mingled with strange and little known people…. Having thus often found myself in the most exclusive circles of men the world over, I have on the other hand leaped to the other extreme and lived side by side with the aborigines and savages of the South Seas, of the Fiji Islands, and the Hinterland in Australia; the provincials of French and English possessions; the semi-savages—the Yaqui of Mexico; ruffians and adventurers of South America and the West Indies.3
Although not immune to the civilizationist ideas of his time, Johnson was a transformed man. His journeys had given him a greater appreciation for the oppressive circumstances facing people of color the world over. His journeys had also pushed questions of race and empire to the forefront of public discussions in a variety of locales. The defiant heavyweight had, in many respects, changed how his colored fans saw themselves, laying the groundwork for an increasingly militant and global movement against white domination. He had also forced the white world not only to confront its shared vulnerability but to question the moral and ideological underpinnings of its geopolitical supremacy.
Johnson surrendered his passport to U.S. authorities, making his homecoming complete. “Foreign lands are all right for the foreigner, and I have no complaint to make regarding the treatment I have received in the many different countries in which I have lived during my seven years' absence from home,” Johnson declared, “but I am an American through and through, and no country, however generous, can take the place of my country.”4 After short stops in San Diego and Los Angeles, he took a northbound train under the watch of two federal agents. Crowds cheered for Johnson at every station.5 Fearing that disturbances would arise as thousands of fans, many of them African American, gathered to greet the black heavyweight in Chicago, deputy marshals stopped the train before reaching the Windy City. They locked Johnson up in the Will County Jail, where he awaited his bail hearing. On 14 September 1920 federal judge George Carpenter decided to make an example out of the unruly and arrogant fighter. Carpenter not only denied Johnson's request for bail, but he also ordered the black heavyweight to serve out his 366-day sentence at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.6
During his time in prison, Johnson continued to fight his sentence. He sought parole, applied to the president for clemency, and asked the attorney general for early release. In a letter to Attorney General Harry Daugherty dated 25 March 1921, Johnson professed his innocence and argued that his trial had made “flagrant appeals to passion, race hatred and moral infamies.”7 When Daugherty publicly pondered the possibility of releasing Johnson a couple of weeks early letters of protest flooded in calling for the defense of white American womanhood. One handwritten note dated 25 June 1921 and signed by “three white ladies” challenged, “Would you insult the women by pardoning this man? Do you know his crimes against white women? Why this clemency towards the despoiler of homes? Disgusting.” Daugherty responded by announcing that Johnson would have to serve out his final weeks at Leavenworth.
Even after Johnson's pugilistic decline and imprisonment, the aspirations of nonwhite athletes and their fans could not be contained. Johnson's defiant legacy had already taken hold. Dubbed the “French Jack Johnson,” the Senegalese-born prizefighter Battling Siki rose to stardom in the early 1920s. Much like his flamboyant predecessor, Siki publicly flouted the constraints of colonial etiquette. Siki also faced concerted white efforts to strip him of his world light-heavyweight championship title and to cast him as a savage unprepared for the discipline and complexity of modern life. For people of color, Siki's battles encapsulated the period's intensifying struggle over the racial and imperial status quo, and the balance seemed to be tipping in their favor. Alongside Siki, the Philippine flyweight Francisco Guilledo, nicknamed Pancho Villa in honor of the Mexican revolutionary, and the Argentine heavyweight Luis Firpo, who had a vast number of fans across Latin America, further threatened white North American and European control of the ring.
Were white men up for the challenge? Frank O'Neill, a correspondent for the New York-based Ring magazine, pondered the state of white physical fitness after touring Asia with a group of U.S. baseball players in 1925. “We of the Caucasian race have a happy conceit that we are the world's natural athletes,” he asserted, “that we have created all the records in every sport, and that the white athlete dominates the earth. And it is no doubt true.”8 Yet O'Neill was not so certain of the white man's continued dominance. “Off in the jungles of Africa are men who can high jump seven feet, who leap twenty-five feet chasms, and who can walk down a deer in the jungles,” he warned. “Comanche Indians could run for hours across deserts,” and Asia teemed with “athletic material, rich almost beyond dream.” White America's “John W. Average Man” was also becoming “an athletic slacker of the worst form” who preferred to take “his exercise by proxy.” All the evidence suggested the decline of white men's power, at least in the physical realm.
A Ring reader from Chicago, Illinois, claimed that O'Neill was “unnecessarily apprehensive.”9 “As long as America is a Mecca to Europe's million, her manhood and womanhood will be continually strengthened and invigorated by the infusion of new blood,” he proclaimed. “Instead of deteriorating, I expect to see the American athlete achieve still greater renown in the world of sport.” Tied together by “blood,” white people on both sides of the Atlantic would help each other to maintain the upper hand.
Such concerns about the strength of white bodies were not uncommon in the wake of World War I. The mass destruction and death had exposed the physical and political liabilities of white men, raising troubling questio
ns about the preservation of white control. Eugenics reached new heights in this moment of geopolitical instability. In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), the Harvard-educated political theorist and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard warned of the racial implications of what he called “the first White Civil War.” Their internecine conflicts had distracted them from the mushrooming population of colored peoples who threatened to encroach on their power and space. Stoddard feared that the “frightful weakening of the white world during the war” had opened up “revolutionary, even cataclysmic possibilities.” He warned that the darker races, “long restive under white political domination,” were developing “a common solidarity of feeling against the dominant white man.”10 Japan's growing military force and the eruption of postwar race riots, from the Red Summer in the United States to the numerous clashes between whites and black soldiers in Britain, offered an apocalyptic vision of the future.
The African American radical Hubert Harrison believed the eugenic ironies of the recent conflict presented people of color with an unparalleled opportunity. Although the war had been waged to determine who would “dictate the destinies of the darker peoples and enjoy the usufruct of their labor and their lands,” it was actually undermining white authority.11 “Not only will the white race be depleted in numbers,” Harrison explained, “but its quality, physical and mental, will be considerably lower for a time.” The war had claimed the white race's strongest and bravest men, ensuring that successive generations would come from a weaker stock. As people of color felt the grip of white control loosen, they could “demand[,] and finally secure, the right of self-determination.” U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's appeals for a new postwar order built on the principle of international equality seemed to sanction this call for self-determination, heightening expectations. When the Paris Peace Conference (1919) left white supremacy and Western imperialism intact, many people of color felt betrayed.12 The powerful waves of the “new religion of whiteness” that W. E. B. Du Bois had first seen washing over the earth a decade earlier now faced an angry surge of heretics.
This “rising tide of color” was more than just a consequence of World War I; it also grew out of a longer tradition of black working-class travel and resistance. By the 1920s and ’30s the transnational black counterculture inspired by Johnson and other rebel sojourners was manifesting itself in a more urgent and organized manner. In the United States African Americans took their cues from Johnson's brash persona, embracing the masculine ethos of the New Negro. As the scholar Alain Locke explained, “Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on” and now the “[white] American mind must reckon with a fundamentally changed Negro.”13 This New Negro was not only militant in his pursuit of manhood rights but also proud of his race. In the cultural realm, artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance, much like the Francophone proponents of the Négritude movement and the Latin American advocates of El Negrismo, worked to reshape both the self-perception and public opinion of black peoples. This cultural reconfiguration accompanied an explosion of black radicalism and diasporic politics. Du Bois and a Senegalese member of the French Chamber of Deputies named Blaise Diagne convened a Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919, bringing together fifty-seven delegates from across the United States, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) endeavored to unify the world's scattered peoples of African descent in opposition to their white oppressors while also encouraging black economic and political self-sufficiency. Inspired in part by the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and faced with continued problems of labor exploitation, other black activists looked to communism, socialism, trade unionism, and anarchism as modes of collective struggle. They closely followed the exploits of other nonwhites fighting for independence, from Indian and Turkish nationalists to advocates of “Asia for the Asians.”14 United in its critique of the racial, imperial, and capitalist world order, the empire was striking back.
Boxing remained a popular metaphor for these escalating fights over racial equality and political self-determination. In a speech to the Brooklyn division of the UNIA in 1922, Garvey declared that the postwar period was no time for cowering or complacency: “The age for turning the right cheek if you are hit on the left is past. This is a Jack Johnson age, when the fittest will survive.” Black people had to step up because Africa now had the upper hand, with an opportunity to shift the balance of power: “The bankrupt nations of Europe, unable to rehabilitate themselves through their own countries, are looking to Africa as their hope. British East Africa must support Britain, French West Africa must support France with resources to rebuild. Italian Africa must also serve the same purpose.”15 Garvey lashed back at members of the black bourgeoisie who criticized his organization for being “too radical.” They were simply out of touch with reality, for the world was rapidly “reorganizing.” “Every race is seeking a place of its own,” Garvey explained. “Japanese is [sic] looking for a greater Japan, India—a free India, greater India; Egyptian, a free and independent Egypt. The Irish, who had been clamoring for 750 years for a free and independent Ireland, have got an Irish Free State.” Just as Johnson had fought for the right to live freely on his own terms, colonial peoples everywhere were claiming their independence.
The masculine aesthetics and international travels of African American boxers had opened up a space for the black radical imagination of the interwar years. When the Harlem Renaissance writer and leftist activist Claude McKay traveled to London in 1919, he was immediately confronted with Johnson's legacy. During McKay's first encounter with his literary hero George Bernard Shaw, the Irish Fabian writer declared, “It must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet. Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?…You might have developed into a successful boxer with training. Poets remain poor, unless they have an empire to glorify and popularize like [Rudyard] Kipling.”16 While Shaw's assumptions about the inherent physicality of black men annoyed McKay, Johnson's success both in and out of the ring had challenged the masculine politics of the white man's burden. Boxing had also become one of the most popular pastimes of radical men's organizations. As McKay recalled, several African American boxers had joined the International Club, a multiracial leftist group in London that counted Jews, Italians, Irish, East Indians, and West Indians among its diverse membership. Sparring exhibitions and prizefights were a regular part of the club's social calendar.17 Boxing clearly resonated with their vision of proletarian revolt.
As this colored militancy took shape, boxing also became part of a biopolitical program of white regeneration and defense. With their weakness exposed by the war, the United States and other white nations tried to stem the tide of nonwhite immigrants through restrictive laws and stepped up efforts to bring white ethnic working-class men into the racial fold through programs of assimilation.18 Boxing became an integral part of the global efforts to reinvigorate white manhood. Not only did it mesh with prevailing ideas of race improvement, but the sport had long modeled a more flexible, cosmopolitan sense of whiteness. Boxing's official use as a military training method for troops during World War I had also given the quasi-legal working-class sport a newfound legitimacy in mainstream culture.19 As boxing entered a “Golden Age,” black fighters found themselves effectively shut out of world heavyweight championship contention. Johnson's reign had passed, and white American pugilists like Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney moved to the forefront as international stars.20
Despite these attempts to keep championship boxing white, increasing numbers of colored men took up the sport. By 1924 Ring magazine had received subscription requests from Brazil, Sumatra, Egypt, and Puerto Rico. Its reader feedback section also attested to boxing's popularity in India, the Philippines, China, and Panama.21 While the expansion of boxing followed the global movements of imperial troops and civilians, people of color actively appropriated the sport to project their own vision of a new world order, one based on racial justice and colo
nial liberation. Johnson's pugilistic career may have been over, but his political and cultural legacy still cast its shadow across the globe.
SIKI BATTLES THE GLOBAL COLOR LINE
Battling Siki's comparisons with Johnson were well deserved. The Senegalese fighter lived large, with little concern for his proper racial place in society. He loved big-city excitement, fashionable suits, absinthe, wine, cigarettes, exotic pets, and, most of all, white women.22 The black American boxer Bob Scanlon once happened upon a crowd of Parisians watching Siki “with two big Great Danes and a revolver firing it in the air and trying to make the dogs do tricks.”23 Even as white writers expressed their dismay, most offered a fairly benign interpretation of Siki's brazen behavior. To them, it showed he was unfit for civilization. As one of Siki's opponents, Harry Reeve, told Boxing, the Senegalese was “like a wild man let loose in Europe,” a kind of “nigger minstrel” in both his dress and mannerisms.24 Unaccustomed to modern life, Siki fell prey to its worst vices. He was in desperate need of white tutelage. “I myself am sorry for him as although he is almost a wild man, he is as harmless as a baby when under proper control,” Reeve explained.25 This description melded well with the grinning, childlike depictions of the Senegalese tirailleurs (soldiers) fresh from fighting on behalf of their French masters. Much like the tirailleur, Siki found himself cast as an anachronistic throwback at the very same time that the rising tide of color was calling for a more prominent place in the modern world.
Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Page 32