From a Hero to a Villain: Jack Johnson and Black Society, 1908-1913

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 31-65
Author(s):  
Jeonguk Kim
Keyword(s):  
Jack Johnson

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Moore
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Black Masculinity ◽  
Financial Security ◽  
Financial Autonomy ◽  
Jack Johnson

Since Jess Willard defeated Jack Johnson in 1915 through to Floyd “Money” Mayweather’s retirement in 2015, black fighters have continued to face challenges and obstacles to financial security. The same forces that push black men into the ring--poverty and a quest to assert their manhood in a society that tries to deny black masculinity--remain. But he also wants to be recognized for his manhood beyond the ring. To this end, he tries to take care of his family financially, and he invests his money in businesses or property. But when the fighter receives his earnings, he also buys the things he always wanted, the items that make him stand out in sporting society and give him an air of financial autonomy: cars, clothes, and jewelry.

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-120
Author(s):  
KEVIN MUMFORD
Keyword(s):  
Jack Johnson

Sports and Sexuality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik N. Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Western World ◽  
Sexual Expression ◽  
Black Athlete ◽  
Tennis Players ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jack Johnson ◽  
Headline News ◽  
Heterosexual Behavior

This chapter explores the intersection between athletic practices and sexual expression, primarily in the Western world, beginning with the same-sex eroticism of gymnasia in ancient Greece and the charged atmosphere of gladiatorial contests in Rome. After brief mentions of jousting and the Renaissance celebration of chiseled torsos, the chapter focuses on sports’ nineteenth-century reemergence as a chaste antidote to sexual desire, particularly in the movement known as “muscular Christianity.” Already by the early 1900s, however, athletes had begun to cultivate highly sexualized images. The heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, in particular, epitomized white fears of the athletically indomitable and sexually insatiable black athlete. Even as heterosexual behavior in sports became headline news in the twentieth century, homosexuality remained hidden in the shadows until the first female tennis players began coming out in the 1980s. The chapter concludes with the rise of the athlete as sex symbol over the past three decades.

Playing with Lynching: Fandom Violence and the Black Athletic Body

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-183
Author(s):  
Poe Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Fan Studies ◽  
Black Athletes ◽  
Common Occurrence ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Sports Fans ◽  
Parallel Development ◽  
Sports Fandom ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Jack Johnson ◽  
The Relationship

This article traces the parallel development of lynching culture and the fandom surrounding the black athletic body. While only recently have fan studies scholars started to theorize the relationship between racism, sports, and fandom activity, their shared history goes back to at least Jack Johnson, the first black boxer to win the heavyweight championship. From this first encounter with the black athletic body, sports fans with white supremacist leanings have employed lynching iconography and rhetoric to discipline athletes who challenged the general perception of how a public black figure out to behave. I argue that not only is racialized fan violence directed toward black athletes a common occurrence, but that the logics of lynching culture are deeply and perhaps irrevocably intertwined with those of sports fandom writ large.

scholarly journals RETHINKING GRIFFITH AND RACISM

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 604-607
Author(s):  
Melvyn Stokes
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
American History ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
The World ◽  
Jack Johnson

Most years I teach a course called “American History through Hollywood Film.” One of the movies I use for teaching is The Birth of a Nation. This year, in the exam at the end of the course, I asked my students to comment on a particular clip from the film: the scene of the fight in the saloon in which the muscular white blacksmith Jeff (Wallace Reid) battles a group of African Americans and beats them all in a brawl before he is shot in the back. What I expected from the students were some comments on the linkage between alcohol and race, together with a discussion of the wider historical resonances of the sequence, particularly those associated with black boxer Jack Johnson and the attempts to find a “great white hope” able to seize his crown as, since 1908, heavyweight champion of the world. What I got were a number of further suggestions relating to class as well as race that made me want to rethink, at least to some extent, the analysis of this sequence I gave in my 2007 book.

Jack Johnson

Callaloo ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-42
Author(s):  
Kevin Young
Keyword(s):  
Jack Johnson
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