Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line

Abstract

On October 25, 1970, the night before Muhammad Ali ended his government-imposed exile and returned to the boxing ring to fight Jerry Quarry, he and his entourage watched films of the legendary and controversial fighter Jack Johnson. Ali and Johnson seemed to be cut from the same cloth: both were great black showmen, hounded by the government, and forced into exile. The next night, during the Quarry fight, Ali's assistant trainer and cornerman, Drew “Bundini” Brown, kept shouting, “Jack Johnson's here! Ghost in the house! Ghost in the house!” During Ali's heyday, it was easy to see him as a latter-day Jack Johnson. Proud and defiant cultural lightning rods, both men transcended the ring and the world of sports. They moved the writer Eldridge Cleaver to observe that “the boxing ring is the ultimate focus of masculinity in America, the two-fisted testing ground of manhood, and the heavyweight champion, as a symbol, is the real Mr. America” (Soul on Ice, 1992, p. 87). Cleaver was correct, of course, as was noted by a host of supporters and critics of both boxers. In fact, after Johnson's arrest in 1912 on the grounds that his relationship with Lucille Cameron violated the 1910 White-Slave Traffic Act, a headline in the Cleveland Daily News announced, “Black Pugilist Will Be Made an Example.” The importance of his case was not what he had done but rather what he symbolized.