Visible men: African American boxers, the New Negro, and the global color line

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 103, 2009, Pages 59-81

  Runstedtler, Theresa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 64249119722     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2008-031     Document Type: Article

References (140)

1. Jacques Mortane, "Tous les nègres en Europe" ("All the Niggers in Europe"), La vie au grand air (Life in the Great Outdoors), May 9, 1908, 292. Several scholars have noted the difficulty of translating the French word nègre into its English equivalent. Despite its visual similarity to "negro," nègre was still a derogatory term in the early 1900s whose meaning was likely closer to that of the word nigger. See Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 25-38;
2. Jack Johnson, My Life and Battles, trans. Chris Rivers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), xv-xvi.
3. Sam McVea's name had a number of popular spellings including McVey and MacVea.
4. For more on Taylor's extensive travels, see Andrew Ritchie, Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).
5. See, for example, "La Caricature à l'Étranger: 'Boxing One of Most Popular Sports in France Just Now,'" Boxe et les boxeurs (Boxing and Boxers), June 7, 1911, 2025. A reprint from a New York newspaper, this cartoon lampooned French sports fans for their fascination with black boxers.
6. Much of the historical scholarship on black diasporic politics remains focused on the efforts of African American activists, intellectuals, and writers, particularly during and after World War I. See, for example, Edwards, Practice of Diaspora;
7. Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993);
8. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
9. Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005);
10. Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Antonio Gramsci's concept of the "organic intellectual" provides a helpful framework for understanding the importance of traveling African American sportsmen in the rise of a popular black internationalism.
11. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
12. On the importance of the culture industries for the shaping of modern racial formations, see Davarian Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 8-9.
13. The expansion of whiteness as a racial category was not simply a U.S. phenomenon. On the transatlantic discourses of whiteness and Anglo-Saxonism in this period, see Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895-1904 (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1981);
14. Paul Kramer, "Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910," Journal of American History 88 (2002): 1315-53.
15. Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exhibitions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 6.
16. Also see Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869-1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
17. On the turn-of-the-century fascination with white male bodies (their aesthetics and abilities), 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);
18. Michael A. Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1997);
19. Lisa Grunberger, "Bernarr MacFadden's Physical Culture: Muscles, Morals, and the Millennium" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1997);
20. John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001);
21. Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
22. The role of the black working class in the making of the Atlantic world is beginning to receive more attention. See, for example, Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997);
23. Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 187-240;
24. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000);
25. Stephens, Black Empire, 167-203.
26. Nat Fleischer, "Fighting Furies," Story of the Golden Era of Jack Johnson, Sam Langford and Their Negro Contemporaries, vol. 4 of Black Dynamite: The Story of the Negro in the Prize Ring from 1782 to 1938 (New York: O'Brien, 1938), 173-74, 194-201.
27. James Weldon Johnson, "The Passing of Jack Johnson," New York Age, April 8, 1915.
28. "Laying Down His Crown," New York Amsterdam News, April 9, 1915.
29. In The Practice of Diaspora, Edwards masterfully explores the budding print culture of the black diaspora, focusing on the inherent problems associated with the translation of language and ideas across borders. Although Baldwin's study focuses on Chicago, the mass consumer marketplace was also creating spaces of protest for people of color outside the United States (Chicago's New Negroes, 13, 195).
30. See also Claude McKay, "Negroes in Sports," in The Negroes in America, ed. Alan L. McLeod (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1979), 54. On the development of modern black masculinity alongside consumer culture, see 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).
31. On the gendering of the African diaspora, see Jacqueline Nassy-Brown, "Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space," Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): 291-325;
32. Stephens, Black Empire.
33. For a discussion of race as fetish and commodity, see Frantz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness," in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 109-40;
34. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 207-31.
35. See Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 58, 114, 141;
36. Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 9-13.
37. In his discussion of the famed blackface entertainer Bert Williams, Chude-Sokei contends that "the 'universal' status of... the 'stage Negro' enabled the specifics of the African American context to masquerade... as globally representative in ways that were ironically supported by the cultural power of the United States" (58).
38. Much of the literature on African American performers and artists in France still focuses on the interwar years. See, for example, Brett Berliner, Ambivalent Desire: The Exotic Black Other in Jazz-Age France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002);
39. William Shack, Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
40. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).
41. See Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Lemke describes primitivist modernism as a hybrid, multiracial, and transatlantic cultural formation.
42. Shawn Michelle Smith's exploration of French praise for W. E. B. Du Bois's photographic exhibition of the American Negro at the 1900 Paris Exposition exposes the same dynamic. See Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
43. "French Call Fight a Fake Unless a Knock-Out Ends It," Washington Post, February 19, 1911.
44. French newspaper reports corroborate this story of black American independence. McVea took his white manager to court and then took over the management of his own affairs. See "Sam Mac Vea devant le tribunal" ("Sam Mac Vea before the Court"), L'auto, March 28, 1909; "Sam Mac Vea Manager," L'auto, October 15, 1909.
45. Jacques Mortane, "Athlétisme: Un beau combat de boxe" ("A Beautiful Boxing Match"), La vie au grand air, January 11, 1908, 26.
46. "Après le match - Sen-Sen chewing gum" ("After the Match: Sen-Sen Chewing Gum"), L'auto, March 28, 1909. McVea's caption was written in the same pidgin French (petit nègre) spoken by many of the African tirailleurs. On the importance of language in the maintenance of the racial division between white and black in the French military, see Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, 14.
47. For a discussion of "contact zones," see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
48. Sylvie Chalaye, Nègres en images (Negroes in Imagery) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), 110-11;
49. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, 9-10.
50. Charles Mangin, La force noire (The Black Force) (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 355.
51. On the existence of a similar racial dynamic in the United States, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170-215. Bederman illustrates that Theodore Roosevelt and other white American middle-class adherents of the "strenuous life" appropriated the Wild West and images of primitive Native American manhood to combat the supposed feminizing tendencies of modern life. Building on Bederman's analysis, I argue that this discursive relationship among race, manhood, and the body was not just a U.S. phenomenon but rather a fundamental part of the broader geopolitical climate of the white man's burden.
52. Chalaye, Nègres en images, 99-101.
53. Ibid., 103.
54. Also see Dana S. Hale, "French Images of Race on Product Trademarks during the Third Republic," and Richard Fogarty and Michael Osbourne, "The Constructions and Functions of Race in French Military Medicine, 1830-1920," in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 131-46, 206-36;
55. and Hale, Races on Display: French Representations of Colonized Peoples, 1886-1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 91-99;
56. Berliner, Ambivalent Desire, 9-36.
57. Patricia Leighten, "The White Peril and L'Art Nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism," Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 609-30;
58. Jennifer Boittin, "Soleil Noir: Race, Gender, and Colonialism in Interwar Paris" (PhD diss., Yale University, 2005), 16.
59. André Dunoyer de Segonzac, qtd. in Claude Meunier, Ring noir: Quand Apollinaire, Cendrars et Picabia découvraient les boxeurs nègres (Black Ring: How Apollinaire, Cendrars, and Picabia Discovered the Black Boxers) (Paris: PLON, 1992), 35.
60. L. Manaud, "Un véritable championnat du monde" ("A True Championship of the World"), L'auto, January 6, 1909.
61. "Comment s'entraînent Jeannette et Mac Vea" ("How Jeannette and Mac Vea Train"), L'auto, February 12, 1909.
62. See, for example, "Les deux terribles nègres s'entraînent avec ardeur" ("The Two Terrible Niggers Train with Ardor"), L'auto, January 15, 1909.
63. L. Manaud, "Joe Jeannette au travail" ("Joe Jeannette at Work"), L'auto, January 9, 1909.
64. Also see L. Manaud, "Le grand match - Sam Mac Vea contre Joe Jeannette" ("The Grand Match - Sam Mac Vea against Joe Jeannette"), L'auto, February 19, 1909;
65. Jacques Mortane, "Joe Jeannette à l'entraînement" ("Joe Jeannette in Training"), La vie au grand air, February 13, 1909, 106.
66. "Les deux terribles nègres."
67. G. Dubois, "Leurs mensurations" ("Their Measurements"), L'auto, February 18, 1909;
68. "Silhouettes des combattants" ("Silhouettes of the Fighters"), L'auto, February 20, 1909.
69. "Joe Jeannette à Paris" ("Joe Jeannette in Paris"), L'auto, January 8, 1909;
70. "Les grands combats de boxe" ("Great Boxing Matches"), L'auto, January 14, 1909;
71. Mich, "Joe Jeannette ne trouve plus d'adversaires!" ("Joe Jeannette Can't Find Any More Adversaries!"), L'auto, January 29, 1909;
72. Mich, "Les grands champions" ("The Great Champions"), L'auto, February 1, 1909. The caricature of Jeannette shows the black fighter squaring off against a bucking horse.
73. Regarding his race, Jeannette wrote in a British sporting magazine, "Although I have been called a Canadian, I was born in Hoboken, N.J., of a white mother. I am the happy father of two children, also begot of white blood, so that we are none of us of the race known as 'niggers'" ("That World's Title," Boxing: New Year's Annual 1914 [London, 1914], 43).
74. While one could argue that Jeannette expressed an alarming level of racial self-hatred, his marketing of himself as a mulatto fighter certainly played into the prevailing narratives of whiteness and civilization in Europe, where the one-drop rule was less applicable than in the United States.
75. "Les deux terribles nègres"; "L'opinion de la presse" ("The Opinion of the Press"), L'auto, February 22, 1909;
76. "Le grand match de samedi prochain" ("Next Saturday's Great Match"), L'auto, February 17, 1909;
77. "Une grande soirée pugilistique" ("A Great Pugilistic Evening"), L'auto, February 21, 1909; "Ce Grand combat aura lieu le samedi 20 février" ("The Big Fight Will Take Place on Saturday, February 20"), L'auto, January 16 1909; "Le chiffre de la recette" ("The Revenue"), L'auto, February 22, 1909.
78. La Patrie, qtd. in "L'opinion de la presse"; Georges Dupuy, "Le tigre et le bison" ("The Tiger and the Bison"), L'auto, February 21, 1909;
79. "A coups de confetti" ("With Throws of Confetti"), L'auto, February 24, 1909.
80. La vie illustrée (The Illustrated Life), qtd. in "Après le grand match: Que dit-on de la rencontre" ("After the Big Match: What are we saying of the match?"), L'auto, February 23, 1909;
81. J. Joseph-Renaud, "Un cinématographe?...!" ("A Cinematograph?...!") L'auto, February 24, 1909
82. Tristan Bernard, "Après le grand match: Sam et Joe" ("After the Big Match: Sam and Joe"), L'auto, February 22, 1909;
83. "Les jaloux" ("The Jealous"), L'auto, March 3, 1909.
84. Marcel Prévost of Figaro, qtd. in "L'opinion de la presse."
85. Boxing and physical culture had already gained greater respectability as character-building activities for modern men in the United States and in Britain. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170-215;
86. Elliot Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 179-206.
87. "La revanche aura lieu!" ("The Rematch Will Take Place!"), L'auto, March 30, 1909;
88. Meunier, Ring noir, 33-34; Georges Dupuy, "Sam Mac Vea contre Joe Jeannette: Après le grand match" ("Sam Mac Vea against Joe Jeannette: After the Big Match"), L'auto, April 19, 1909.
89. Dunoyer de Segonzac, qtd. in Meunier, Ring Noir, 35-36;
90. "Après le grand match: Impressions d'un monsieur chauve" ("After the Big Match: Impressions of a Bald Gentleman"), L'auto, April 20, 1909;
91. Tristan Bernard, "Le plus beau combat" ("The Most Beautiful Fight"), L'auto, April 19, 1909.
92. On "double consciousness," see W. E. B. Du Bois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," in The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terry Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 11. As Du Bois wrote, "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
93. For descriptions of Grognet's school, see L. Manaud, "Le rendez-vous des combattants" ("The Meeting of Fighters"), L'auto, September 30, 1909;
94. and "Maitres et champions: Un grand établissement sportif à Paris," ("Masters and Champions: A Great Sporting Establishment in Paris"), L'auto, September 16, 1909.
95. La boxe et les boxeurs, December 22, 1909, 67; "A vous touché," La boxe et les boxeurs, December 15, 1909, 41-42.
96. "Ernest Stevens Visits Jack Johnson in Paris," Chicago Defender, April 25, 1914. Stevens had sent a series of letters to the Chicago Defender describing his visits to places like Brazil, Argentina, England, Germany, and other European countries.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.;
99. Geoffrey Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2004), 358.
100. "Une publication sensationelle" ("A Sensational Publication"), La vie au grand air, January 14, 1911, 21.
101. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 4-5.
102. Jack Johnson, Mes combats (My Battles) (Paris: Lafitte, 1914).
103. There is now a composite English translation of the series of articles and this book: Jack Johnson, My Life and Battles, trans. Chris Rivers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
104. Johnson's first English autobiography did not appear until later. See Jack Johnson, In the Ring - And Out (1927; New York: Citadel, 1992).
105. 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. See Edwards, Practice of Diaspora, 187-240;
106. Stephens, Black Empire, 129-203.
107. 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: Harcourt Brace, 1957);
108. Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home: An Autobiography (1937; London: Pluto, 1985).
109. Jack Johnson, "Ma vie et mes combats" ("My Life and Battles"), La vie au grand air, January 21, 1911, 47.
110. Ibid.
111. On Roosevelt's ideas of the "strenuous life," see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170-215.
112. Johnson, "Ma vie et mes combats," January 21, 1911, 48.
113. Ibid.;
114. Jack Johnson, "Ma vie et mes combats," La vie au grand air, February 4, 1911, 79.
115. Jack Johnson, "Ma vie et mes combats," La vie au grand air, January 28, 1911, 64.
116. Jack Johnson, "Ma vie et mes combats," La vie au grand air, February 18, 1911, 114.
117. Ibid.
118. Jack Johnson, "Ma vie et mes combats," La vie au grand air, April 29, 1911, 275. La vie au grand air printed the English verse and then translated it for readers.
119. Kipling was one of Johnson's favorite poets. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, 329. 66. McKay, A Long Way from Home, 61. 67. Ibid., 69-70. 68. New York Times, March 18, 1923, qtd. in Peter Benson, Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race, and Murder in the 1920s (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 12.
120. Ibid., 12-14, 25-26, 37-39.
121. Bob Scanlon, "The Record of a Negro Boxer," in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York: Ungar, 1970), 210.
122. Harry Reeve, "My Impressions of Battling Siki: A Good Man But a Wild One," Boxing, November 15, 1922, 215-16.
123. Dan Schocket, "Battling Siki - the Man They Turned into a Joke," World Boxing, September 1974, qtd. in Benson, Battling Siki, 89. Also see Ed Cunningham, "Siki Denies Coming from Jungle," The Ring, August 1925, 28.
124. "Americanism in France," Messenger, September 1922, 477.
125. "Battling Siki Suspended," London Times, November 11, 1922;
126. J. Bissell, "The Bar Up to Siki," Boxing World, Mirror of Life, and Sporting Observer, November 18, 1922;
127. "Italian Boxing Clubs Close Their Doors to Battling Siki," New York Times, November 15, 1922;
128. "Major Arnold Wilson's Attitude," London Times, November 11, 1922;
129. "Opens Competition for Siki's Title," New York Times, November 23, 1922;
130. "Siki's License Is Canceled by French Boxing Federation," New York Times, November 22, 1922;
131. "Siki Is Deprived of French Title," New York Times, November 10, 1922;
132. "Siki Now Barred from Boxing Here," New York Times, November 11, 1922.
133. Also see Benson, Battling Siki, 251, 253-55.
134. "Siki Case to Be Aired in French Chamber," New York Times, November 30, 1922.
135. Also see Gerald Early, "Battling Siki: The Boxer as Natural Man," in The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1994), 73.
136. "Dark-Hued Deputy Loses Plea for Siki," New York Times, December 1, 1922.
137. McKay, "Negroes in Sports," 50-52.
138. Ibid., 53.
139. "De Siki à la révolution mondiale" ("Of Siki and the Worldwide Revolution"), Le Paria, November 1922.
140. Apparently, film producers were considering hiring Siki to star in a moving picture version of Batuoula. See "Siki's Victory Stirs Americans in France to Protest Equality," Chicago Defender, October 7, 1922.