Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner
Page 40
69. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 269. Also see “Will the Fight Be Stopped?” Daily Chronicle, 20 September 1911; “Protests Against the Match,” Daily Chronicle, 21 September 1911; “To Stop the Fight,” Daily Chronicle, 22 September 1911. For a more detailed discussion of the reaction in Britain, see Patrick McDevitt, May the Best Man Win: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880-1935 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 75-78.
70. “'Colour Feeling,' ‘Times’ Wants It Stopped in Interests of the Empire,” Daily Chronicle, 20 September 1911.
71. “The Johnson-Wells Match,” Times, 29 September 1911.
72. “The Primate and the Johnson-Wells Match,” Daily Telegraph, 20 September 1911; “Our Note Book: Black Peril in the Prize-ring,” South African News, 26 September 1911.
73. “Black v. White: South Africa against the Fight,” Daily Chronicle, 22 September 1911; “Wells-Johnson Fight: Great Organized Protest,” South African News, 21 September 1911.
74. “The Colour Question and the Fight,” Times, 26 September 1911.
75. “Johnson Fight Stirs Clergy in England,” New York Times, 24 September 1911.
76. Quoted in Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 268.
77. “Will the Fight Be Stopped?”
78. Quoted in “Black v. White: South Africa against the Fight.”
79. “Johnson-Wells Match: Attitude of the Owners of Earl's Court,” Times, 23 September 1911.
80. “White Servants for Black,” Transvaal Critic, 24 December 1908. Some believed that they should abandon this custom by replacing black male servants with white female servants.
81. Gareth Cornwell, “George Webb Hardy's The Black Peril and the Social Meaning of ‘Black Peril’ in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, no. 3 (1996): 441-53; Timothy Keegan, “Gender, Degeneration and Sexual Danger: Imagining Race and Class in South Africa, ca. 1912,” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 459-77. For contemporary critiques see “The ‘Black Peril’ In South Africa,” African Times and Orient Review, July 1912; “Black Peril: The Native View,” African Times and Orient Review, October 1912; “The Black Peril: Mrs. MacFadyen's Appeal at the Races Congress,” South African News, 19 September 1911. On the white American persecution of Johnson against the backdrop of antimiscegenation hysteria see Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3-18.
82. “What Readers Say: The So-called ‘Black Peril,’” South African News, 26 September 1911.
83. “Our Note Book: Black Peril in the Prize-ring.”
84. Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902-1935 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000), 2021. On 20 December 1910 Gladstone commuted the death sentence of Alukuleta, an African houseboy who was convicted of raping Bessie Comer in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Alukuleta still had to serve a life sentence.
85. “Our Note Book: Black Peril in the Prize-ring.”
86. “Legal Action to Stop the Fight,” Daily Chronicle, 25 September 1911.
87. “The Rev. F. B. Meyer Interviewed,” Boxing, 30 September 1911.
88. “The Editor Talks: Shall Boxing Be Abolished?” Health & Strength, 23 September 1911. Also see “What the Parsons Think of the Wells-Johnson Match,” Health & Strength, 30 September 1911.
89. “The Editor's Ideas,” Boxing, 30 September 1911.
90. “Johnson-Wells Fight Is Denounced in London,” Indianapolis Freeman, 7 October 1911.
91. “No Fight in London,” Indianapolis Freeman, 14 October 1911.
92. Cleveland Gazette, 7 October 1911.
93. “Johnson Is ‘In Bad’ in ‘Dear Old England,’” Indianapolis Freeman, 18 November 1911. Also see “Jack Johnson in Bad,” Indianapolis Freeman, 9 December 1911.
94. Sir John Simon, “Wells-Johnson Fight,” 1911, HO 45/10487/110912, BNA.
95. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 267.
96. “Johnson-Wells Fight Picture Rights Important”; “Prize Fight Films,” Transvaal Critic, 13 October 1911.
97. “Summonses for Fighters,” New York Times, 27 September 1911.
98. “Johnson-Wells Match: Action by Earl's Court Freeholders.”
99. “Johnson-Wells Match: Mr. Churchill's Decision.”
100. “The ‘Fight.’”
101. “Johnson-Wells Match: Summonses Against the Principals,” Times, 28 September 1911.
102. “The ‘Fight.’”
103. “Johnson-Wells Match: Injunction Against Earl's Court Company,” Times, 28 September 1911.
104. “The Boxing Match,” Times, 29 September 1911.
105. F. H. Lucas, “Parisian News and Notes,” Boxing, 30 September 1911.
106. Leon Sée, “A propos d'une interdiction,” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 4 October 1911.
107. Jacques Mortane, “Se Rencontreront-ils?” La Vie au grand air, 7 October 1911, 675.
108. “What the Two Men Think.”
109. Cleveland Gazette quoted in “Some Higher Criticism; Or, Philosophy of the Fight That Failed,” Indianapolis Freeman, 25 November 1911.
110. “Fight Didn't Go,” Indianapolis Freeman, 7 October 1911.
111. “English Race Prejudice and Jack Johnson,” New York Age, 5 October 1911.
112. “Some Higher Criticism.”
113. Quotations in this paragraph and the next are from “English Race Prejudice and Jack Johnson.”
114. “Some Higher Criticism.”
115. Jeffrey Green, Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain, 1901-1914 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1998), 178.
116. Wignall, Story of Boxing, 258.
117. “Lift the Colour Bar,” [1947], British boxing: Colour Bar 1947, Colonial Office Records 876/89, BNA.
118. J. M. Batchman, “Prize Fighting and Prize Fighters,” Indianapolis Freeman, 23 December 1911.
119. Lord Lonsdale to Frank McKenna, 16 March 1913, “ENTERTAINMENTS : Boxing. Contests between coloured men and white men,” 1912-25, HO 45/11880, BNA.
120. Lord Lonsdale to Frank McKenna, 29 April 1914, HO 45/11880, BNA.
121. Frank McKenna to Lord Lonsdale, 1 May 1914, HO 45/11880, BNA.
122. “Black-and-White Boxing: Necessity of a ‘Colour Line,’” Morning Post, 4 May 1914.
123. F. H. Lucas, “Should Coloured Boxers Be Ostracised?” Boxing, 30 May 1914.
124. “Snowy Baker's Search for an Aboriginal Hope,” Boxing, 21 March 1914.
125. “Black and White in the Boxing Ring,” African Times and Orient Review, 12 May 1914.
126. “Should Coloured Boxers Be Ostracised?” Known primarily as a wrestler in Europe, Crozier had taken up boxing in Paris in the 1910s with moderate success.
CHAPTER 4. THE BLACK ATLANTIC FROM BELOW
1. Jack Johnson, In the Ring—and Out (1927; New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 23.
2. Ibid., 25, 71, 101.
3. Ibid., 71.
4. Ibid., 126-27.
5. Geoffrey Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2004), 298; Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 11.
6. Mumford, Interzones, 7, 10-12, 17. For a comprehensive treatment of the Mann Act, see David J. Langum, Crossing over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
7. “Jack Johnson's Case,” Indianapolis Freeman, 17 May 1913.
8. Billy Lewis, “Jack Johnson Brought Down to Date,” Indianapolis Freeman, 18 January 1913.
9. “Champ Jack up against the Wall,” Indianapolis Freeman, 14 June 1913.
10. Johnson, In the Ring—And Out, 85.
11. Dr. M. A. Majors, “Jack Johnson Is Crucified for His Race,” Chicago Defender, 5 August 1913.
12. Gary Edward Holcomb, Claude McKay, Code
Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 25.
13. Mirror of Life and Boxing World, 19 July 1913. Also see Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 348.
14. On the various efforts to prevent African American and Afro-Caribbean immigration into Canada in the early 1900s, see Sarah-Jane Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 22-60.
15. Billy Lewis, “Jack Johnson Cannot Enter Canada,” Indianapolis Freeman, 22 March 1913.
16. “Jack Johnson Outwits His Uncle Sam,” New York Age, 10 July 1913.
17. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 348-49.
18. “Jack Johnson Outwits His Uncle Sam”; Billy Lewis, “Jack Johnson Making History,” Indianapolis Freeman, 5 July 1913.
19. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 58.
20. A. F. Bettinson and W. Outram Tristram, eds., The National Sporting Club: Past and Present (London: Sands & Co., 1902), 53, 228.
21. Nat Fleischer, Black Dynamite, 5 vols., vol. 4, “Fighting Furies”: Story of the Golden Era of Jack Johnson, Sam Langford and their Negro Contemporaries (New York: C. J. O'Brien, 1938), 228.
22. “Famous Coloured Quartette who Rule the Roast,” Boxing, 12 August 1911. Also see Leon Sée, “Quadrille nègre,” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 24 December 1913.
23. “A Bit of Langford's Early Days,” Boxing, 4 December 1909. Also see Fleischer, Black Dynamite, 125-26.
24. Craig Lloyd, Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 14-15.
25. Bullard's autobiography quoted in ibid., 16.
26. Fleischer, Black Dynamite, 126-27.
27. “A Bit of Langford's Early Days.”
28. Joe Jeannette, “That World's Title,” in Boxing New Year's Annual 1914 (London, 1914).
29. Bob Scanlon, “The Record of a Negro Boxer,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (1935; New York: Frederick Unger Publishing, 1970), 208.
30. Lloyd, Eugene Bullard, 33.
31. Ibid., 22-28.
32. Fleischer, Black Dynamite, 122, 126-27, 170-71.
33. Ibid., 173-74, 195. There are conflicting reports of McVea's hometown and year of birth. See Tracy Callis, International Boxing Research Organization, “Sam McVea” (3 September 2006), www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/mcvea-s.htm (accessed 20 September 2006).
34. See, for example, E. Desbonnet, “Mais Mac Vea troubla la fête,” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 5 April 1911; “Joe Jeannette, automobiliste,” La Vie au grand air, 21 March 1914, 267; Georges Dupuy, “Le Tigre et le bison,” L'Auto, 21 February 1909; “Joe Jeannette et sa petite famille,” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 7 January 1914.
35. “Billy McClain on Automobiling,” Indianapolis Freeman, 18 November 1911; “Negro Fighters in the Old World,” Indianapolis Freeman, 9 September 1911.
36. Lester A. Walton, “In the World of Sport: MacVea Showers Praise on MacClain,” New York Age, 14 September 1911; “Billy MacClain Returns Home,” Chicago Defender, 6 August 1912. On McClain's stage career, see Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 132-34.
37. “Billy MacClain Returns Home.”
38. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home: An Autobiography (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 231.
39. Quotations in this paragraph are from Jack Johnson, “Mes malheurs,” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 16 July 1913. For the translation, see “French Board of Trade Honors Jack Johnson and Wife,” Chicago Defender, 9 August 1913. The version in the Defender contains some errors but still maintains the basic meaning of Johnson's speech.
40. “Jack Johnson to Return October 1st,” Chicago Defender, 12 August 1913. Also see Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 352.
41. Cary B. Lewis, “Editor, R. S. Abbott to Go Abroad,” Indianapolis Freeman, 18 April 1914.
42. “London Rejoices Over Colored Mayor and Mayoress,” Chicago Defender, 29 November 1913.
43. See “Beauty of Paris,” Chicago Defender, 19 July 1913; “Ghent Historic Old Town,” Chicago Defender, 19 July 1913. For other examples of travel and lifestyle articles on Europe, see “Great Avenue Safe,” Washington Bee, 9 July 1910; “Europe's Highest Village,” Washington Bee, 16 July 1910; “This Queen Works,” Washington Bee, 16 July 1910; “A Lapland Wedding,” Savannah Tribune, 16 August 1913; “Travel in the Cotswolds,” Chicago Defender, 6 September 1913; “In London,” Savannah Tribune, 23 August 1913; “Bolden's Trip Abroad,” New York Age, 17 July 1913.
44. “Chicago Defender Covers the World,” Chicago Defender, 20 August 1912.
45. “Chicago Defender Sold in Europe,” Chicago Defender, 15 November 1913.
46. Leo W. Daniels, “The Negro Is a World Question,” Indianapolis Freeman, 17 January 1914.
47. Leo W. Daniels, “What They Think of Us Abroad,” Indianapolis Freeman, 17 January 1914.
48. Ibid.
49. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 176.
50. “Une Publication sensationelle,” La Vie au grand air, 14 January 1911, 21. Because of his somewhat limited French language skills, Johnson likely dictated or wrote out his memoirs for a French ghostwriter/translator.
51. Jack Johnson, Mes Combats (Paris: Pierre Lafitte & Co., 1914). There is now an English translation of this book, Jack Johnson, My Life and Battles, trans. Chris Rivers (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007). Johnson's first English autobiography, In the Ring—And Out, did not appear until 1927.
52. Billy Lewis, “Preparing for the Big Scrap,” Indianapolis Freeman, 13 June 1914.
53. McKay's works, Banjo and A Long Way from Home, have emerged as two of the most examined texts of early twentieth-century black American, particularly working-class, travel. Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 129-203; Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 187-240. Banjo describes the multiracial working-class environment of the French port city of Marseilles, while McKay's autobiography traces his own international wanderings. Claude McKay, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929; New York: Harvest Books, 1970); McKay, A Long Way from Home.
54. Jack Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” La Vie au grand air, 21 January 1911, 47.
55. Johnson also expressed his diasporic pride by hanging a wall-size picture of a black Cleopatra in his Chicago nightclub, the Café du Champion. Davarian Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 81, 199.
56. Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” 21 January 1911, 47. On Theodore Roosevelt's ideas of the “strenuous life,” see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 170-215.
57. Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” 21 January 1911, 48.
58. Ibid; Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” 4 February 1911, 79.
59. Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” 28 January 1911, 64.
60. Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” 18 February 1911, 114.
61. Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” 4 March 1911, 146.
62. Elisa F. Glick, “The Dialectics of Dandyism,” Cultural Critique 48 (Spring 2001): 131; Elisa F. Glick, “Harlem's Queer Dandy: African-American Modernism and the Artifice of Blackness,” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 3 (2003): 414.
63. 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.
64. J
ohnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” 18 February 1911, 114.
65. Johnson, “Ma Vie et mes combats,” 29 April 1911, 275. La Vie au grand air printed the English verse and then translated it for readers.
66. Ironically, Kipling was one of Johnson's favorite poets. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 329.
67. “French Board of Trade.” For photos of Johnson in the French press, see “M. et Mme Jack Johnson se plaisent fort chez Maitrot,” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 6 August 1913; “Le Napoléon de la boxe,” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 13 August 1913; “Jack Johnson, à son passage à Lyon,” La Boxe et les boxeurs, 3 September 1913; “Jack Johnson et sa femme,” Excelsior, 28 August 1913.
68. Billy Lewis, “England after Heavyweight Title,” Indianapolis Freeman, 10 January 1914.
69. Johnson, In the Ring—And Out, 89.
70. Billy Lewis, “Jack Johnson in Paris,” Indianapolis Freeman, 9 August 1913.
71. “French Board of Trade.”
72. Ibid.
73. Lewis, “Preparing for the Big Scrap.”
74. Lewis, “Jack Johnson in Paris.”
75. “Jack Johnson to Appear in London,” Times, 20 August 1913. Other reports claimed that he would earn $2,500 a week. See Lester A. Walton, “Theatrical Comment,” New York Age, 4 September 1913.
76. “Johnson Ignores Protests,” New York Times, 25 August 1913.
77. “The Americanisation of England,” African Times and Orient Review, May 1913.
78. “Barred by Colour,” African Times and Orient Review, May 1913. Also see “Color Line Drawn in Great Britain,” 23 September 1913, Reel 2, 334, Tuskegee Clippings File, Division of Behavioral Science Research, Carver Research Foundation, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama (Sanford NC: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1981).
79. “African Students in London,” African Times and Orient Review, May 1913.
80. “Strange Doings in London Town,” New York Age, 10 July 1913. Also see “Prejudice Grows in London,” New York Age, 3 July 1913.
81. Billy Lewis, “Jack Johnson in Paris, Says He Will Stick,” Indianapolis Freeman, 19 July 1913.