Runstedtler, Theresa
Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line
California (Berkeley)
2012
OUR SYNOPSIS: Theresa Runstedtler examines the story of Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion, to shed light on international race relations in the early twentieth century. She argues, “The surprising scope of Johnson’s high-profile career throughout Europe, Australasia, and the Americas obliges us to think beyond the often-stagnant domestic squabbles over reformist solutions to racial disparities. The controversies surrounding his far-reaching travels highlight the intrinsic relationship between the rise of a global color line and the expansion of Western imperialism and capitalism.” (xxi) She emphasizes that “Not only did he publicly challenge racial segregation in the United States, but he also enjoyed the same brazen and unapologetic lifestyle abroad, one of conspicuous consumption, masculine bravado, and interracial love.” (1) Johnson’s life embodied clashes between prevalent conceptualizations of Western modernity and of racial division. His transgression of social boundaries led to his wrongful conviction by the U.S. government for white slave trafficking in 1913, leading to an international exile that further globalized his story.
BIG QUESTIONS:
How does Runstedtler’s international approach to this story impact your thinking about the scale of historical African American freedom struggle?
How did capitalist mass culture relate to imperialism in the early twentieth century?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Because of their audacity and success in and out of the boxing ring, Johnson and other black pugilists became some of the most notorious heretics of this new religion of whiteness. Even though they lived on the fringes of respectable society, their geographic mobility, their public visibility, and most of all their physical conquest of white men put them at the very center of a developing black counterculture.” (7)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
“Johnson’s Prophetic Vision,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 1, 1909, 7, https://books.google.com/books?id=CR4mAAAAIBAJ.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Theresa Runstedtler lives in Baltimore.
