Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner by Theresa Runstedtler

Author:Theresa Runstedtler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2014-08-12T12:48:01.320000+00:00

Figure 13. The caricatures of black American boxers that appeared in French newspapers closely resembled popular images of the African tirailleurs (soldiers). “Après le match—Sen-Sen chewing gum,” L'Auto, 28 March 1909. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The McVea-Jeannette series also coincided with the rise of l'Art nègre, as avant-garde artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso began to experiment with the aesthetics of primitivism. These artists employed African motifs to shock viewers and disrupt conventions, thereby critiquing what they saw as the stultifying conformity of white French civilization.30 Several of them were even known to frequent the matches of African American boxers, using them as a source of creative inspiration. “Since 1910, I had been attracted to boxing matches,” the cubist painter André Dunoyer de Segonzac later recounted. “The black heavyweight champions Sam MacVea, Sam Langford, and Joe Jeannette amazed French sporting youth.” He recalled seeing Johnson in a wrestling match at the Nouveau Cirque, “beautiful like an Apollo from the Congo.”31 Segonzac and others came to identify with the black heavyweights, for their savage vitality in the ring stood in direct contrast to the supposed degeneracy of the period. Even as the French tried to dissociate themselves from the imperial politics of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, they actively participated in the very same ideas of race and the body that bolstered the global project of the white man's burden.

The announcement of the first McVea-Jeannette match had reportedly “revolutionized the world of Parisian sportsmen.” A month and a half before the scheduled fight on 20 February, fans had already begun to inquire about tickets. “It is the question of the day,” one journalist observed, “and in all the boxing clubs and athletic milieus, we discuss this subject with passion.”32 Another sportswriter claimed, “It is not just Paris, but all the regions [départements] and even abroad that are interested in the great event of February 20.” Ticket requests had come to L'Auto from “London, Brussels, Liège, Anvers, Genève, Roubaix, Lille, Troyes, Rouen, Reims, Orléans, and even Bordeaux.”33

The publicity surrounding the McVea-Jeannette match had ethnographic and social Darwinistic undercurrents, exposing French views on the inherent physicality of black people and their evolutionary separation from white civilization. Parisian spectators seemed to revel in the African American competitors' imagined brutality as an antidote to their own effete and effeminate modernity. Referring to McVea and Jeannette as “les deux terribles nègres” (the two terrible niggers), French sportswriters promised the match would be more gruesome than any other fight in the capital.34

This French eroticism of the virile black male body not only drew scores of fans (both men and women) to the African American fighters' training camps, but it also inspired the publication of countless pictures and the brisk sale of souvenirs. In describing Jeannette's first public workout, one sportswriter exclaimed, “I will not surprise anyone by saying that his musculature is superb: his large shoulders and supple, elegant legs.”35 Alongside Jeannette's “extraordinary virtuosity,” he also touted McVea's “extraordinary power and speed.”36 Many Parisian sporting magazines showcased photos of McVea and Jeannette in just their boxing trunks, baring their powerful chests.

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