Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner

Home > Other > Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner > Page 36
Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner Page 36

by Theresa Runstedtler


  3. On the white American embrace of Joe Louis as a national hero, see Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, “Constructing G.I. Joe Louis: Cultural Solutions to the ‘Negro Problem’ during World War II,” Journal of American History 89, no. 3 (December 2002): 958-83.

  4. Muhammad Ali quoted in David Remnick, “Struggle for His Soul,” Observer, 2 November 2003. Also see Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 108-9.

  5. Martin Ritt, director, The Great White Hope (1970; Twentieth Century Fox, 2004); Howard Sackler, The Great White Hope (New York: Dial Press, 1968).

  6. Miles Davis, A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971; Columbia/Legacy, 2005).

  7. Although Jack Johnson remained an obscure figure in the 1990s, the alternative country musician Tom Russell did produce a song named after him on the album Hurricane Season (Philo, 1991). Johnson also appeared in Joe R. Lansdale's fictional short story “The Big Blow” (1997), which the author later expanded into a novel of the same name. Joe R. Lansdale, The Big Blow (Burton, MI: Subterranean Press, 2000).

  8. “Jazz Legend Miles Davis Pays Tribute to Boxing Great Jack Johnson,” Call and Post, 5 May 2005.

  9. Senator McCain quoted in Ken Burns, “Mr. President, Pardon Jack Johnson,” Los Angeles Times, 13 July 2004.

  10. Ken Burns, director, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (PBS Paramount, 2005). The documentary's screenwriter Geoffrey Ward also published a detailed biography of Johnson by the same name. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness.

  11. Stanley Crouch quoted in Steve Kroner, “A Uniquely American Story,” San Francisco Chronicle, 14 January 2005.

  12. John Patterson, “On Film: Black Boxers Took on the World and Knocked It Flying,” Manchester Guardian, 21 January 2005. See Clint Eastwood, director, Million Dollar Baby (Warner Brothers, 2004); Ron Howard, director, Cinderella Man (Universal Pictures, 2005). This trend has continued. David O. Russell, director, The Fighter (Paramount Pictures, 2010); Gavin O'Connor, director, Warrior (Lionsgate, 2011).

  13. I borrow the phrase “rebel sojourner” from Wayne Cooper's far-reaching biography of another itinerant black icon of the early twentieth century, Claude McKay. Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996).

  14. Black feminist scholars have examined the travels of black working-class women. Hazel Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (New York: Verso, 1999), 7-66; Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1999).

  15. There is a growing literature on the global dimensions of the color line and the relationship between racial formations and globalization. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Walter Gobel and Saskia Schabio, eds., Beyond the Black Atlantic: Relocating Modernization and Technology (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006); Kamari Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds., Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

  16. W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 639.

  17. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” Independent, 18 August 1910. Also see Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 9.

  18. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk.”

  19. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 16-20.

  20. Holt, Problem of Race in the 21st Century, 35. For more on the concept of biopolitics, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume I, Introduction (1978; New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 139-44.

  21. Holt, Problem of Race in the 21st Century, 60. Historian Davarian Baldwin makes similar assertions about the importance of commercial culture as a site of racial formation in urban black communities. Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes, 13.

  22. On the late nineteenth-century shift to regulated, gloved fights under the Queensberry rules, see Elliot Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 207-47; Jeffrey Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1988), 3-29.

  23. Paul Gilroy's seminal book on the black Atlantic sparked an explosion of scholarly work on black internationalism and transnationalism. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Much of this work has remained focused on the interventions of black intellectuals, missionaries, activists, and artists. For example, James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Robin Kelley, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem: Black History's Global Vision, 1883-1950,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999): 1045-77; Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Michelle Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: The International Agenda of African American Clubwomen, 1880-1940,” Journal of African American History 89, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 203-22; Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Carol Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 19221963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Magdalena J. Zaborowska, James Baldwin's Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Robert Carr, Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  24. On the life and career of Thomas Molineaux, see Kevin Smith, Black Genesis: The History of the Black Prizefighter 1760-1870 (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2003), 27-60.

  25. Ibid., 95-105, 121-22.

  26. Nat Fleischer, Black Dynamite, 5 vols., vol. 1, Story of the Negro in Boxing (New York: C. J. O'Brien, 1938), 87-88.

  27. On Jackson's international career as a prizefighter and performer, see Susan F. Clark, “Up Against the Ropes: Peter Jackson as ‘Uncle Tom’ in America,” Drama Review 44, no. 1 (2000): 157-82; David K. Wiggins, “Peter Jackson and the Elusive Heavyweight Championship: A Black Athlete's Struggle Against the Late Nineteenth Century Color-Line,” Journal of Sport History 12, no. 2 (1985): 143-68.

  28. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 187.

  29. Scholars have begun to explore the importance of proletarian travel and resistance in the making of the Atlantic world, particularly through the lens of black maritime workers. Julius Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Co
mmunication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1986); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  30. On the historical and experiential groundings of black radicalism, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

  31. Stephens, Black Empire, 167-203; Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 187-240.

  32. McKay's novel follows the exploits of the African American southerner Lincoln Agrippa Daily, otherwise known as “Banjo,” as he lives among a motley group of drifters in the port city of Marseilles, France, in the 1920s. Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929; New York: Harvest Books, 1970).

  33. Claude McKay, “Negroes in Sports,” in The Negroes in America (1923; Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1979), 54.

  34. McKay, Banjo, 331.

  35. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1925; New York: Macmillan, 1992), 5.

  36. A number of scholars have pointed to the “queer” (nonnormative) and anarchistic dimensions of black transnationalism. Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, nos. 2-3 (2008): 191-215; Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

  37. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 5-6.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid., 7-8.

  40. Johnson quoted in ibid., 8.

  41. Ibid., 10.

  42. Johnson, In the Ring—And Out, 27-28.

  43. Ibid., 27.

  44. Ibid., 29; Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 11.

  45. Johnson, In the Ring—And Out, 31.

  46. Ibid., 31-32; Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 12.

  47. Johnson, In the Ring—And Out, 34.

  48. Ibid., 33-34; Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 10.

  49. Johnson, In the Ring—And Out, 36.

  50. Johnson's unpublished prison memoir quoted in Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 22.

  51. Quotations in this paragraph are taken from Johnson, In the Ring—And Out, 37-38.

  52. Ibid., 38-39; Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 24.

  53. On the competing ideals of black manhood, see Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes, 195-96; Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 151-53.

  54. Quoted in Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 56-57.

  55. “The Black ‘King’ of the Pugilists,” Daily Chronicle, 21 September 1911; Trevor Wignall, Story of Boxing (New York: Brentano's, 1924), 257; Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes, 199.

  56. J. B. Lewis quoted in Johnson, In the Ring—And Out, 7.

  57. Paul Gilroy examines black Americans' historical association of cars with freedom within the context of their broader relationship to patterns of consumerism, suburbanization, and privatization. Paul Gilroy, Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010), 4-54.

  58. Antonio Gramsci's concept of the “organic intellectual” provides a helpful framework for understanding the importance of traveling African American athletes and performers in the rise of a popular black global vision. Organic intellectuals maintain strong links with the working people and their everyday lives and struggles. They often come out of the working class, developing their critical awareness and radical imagination through experience rather than dispassionate study at traditional, elitist institutions. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

  59. Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man's Burden,” McClure's Magazine 12 (February 1899).

  60. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Paul Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

  61. Historian Ann Laura Stoler argues that a shared interest in biopolitics linked together seemingly disparate examples of imperial rule. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (December 2001): 829-65; Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Stoler's work has inspired a growing field that examines the role of discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body in the theory and practice of Western imperialism. Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Eileen Suarez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

  62. Challenging conventional ideas of American exceptionalism, U.S. scholars have taken on the project of writing empire back into mainstream U.S. history. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980); Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Matthew Pratt Guterl, James T. Campbell, and Robert G. Lee, eds., Race, Nation, and Empire in American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Kramer, Blood of Government; Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters of Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

  63. Bernard Porter, The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-1995, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 1996), 84-101.

  64. Conklin, Mission to Civilize, 1-10.

  65. This general interpretation of the late imperial moment can be found in Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues; Thomas G. August, The Selling of Empire: British and French Imperialist Propaganda, 1890-1940 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

  66. President Cleveland quoted in Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues, 22. For more on empires and markets, see ibid., 15-58.

  67. Porter, Lion's Share, 77-81; August, Selling of Empire, xii, 7. Much like their U.S. counterparts, European scholars have also taken on the task of restoring the importance of imperialism in the mainstream histories of their nations. Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and Through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: C
olumbia University Press, 2006).

  68. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 137, 178-80, 210. Also see John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  69. Charles Pearson quoted in Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 3.

  70. On the gendered anxieties of the late imperial moment, see Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. On the concurrent rise of sport and body culture, see John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001); Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Michael A. Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Gerald R. Gems, The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Lisa Grunberger, “Bernarr MacFadden's Physical Culture: Muscles, Morals and the Millennium” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997); McDevitt, May the Best Man Win; Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

 

‹ Prev