Jeffries got what he deserved ...

Your post blames Johnson for the turn around in the way Australians perceived him.This article suggests they had a skewed view of him from the start and when they realised the reality ,there opinion changed drastically .You can say Johnson should have had enough sense to keep clear of white p***y ,but that implies that he was only accepted if he conformed to the mores of the day.

Johnson's initial experiences matched his optimism. Although he battled seasickness throughout the trip, he was sad to leave the "charming friends" he had met aboard the Sonoma. Johnson later recalled, "For the first time in my life, I was pleased to find myself in a group in which we did not take into account people's color."2 When he arrived in Sydney on 24 January 1907, the city's white sportsmen embraced him with open arms, and local newspapers declared that he would not be forced to confront a Jim Crow color line in Australia.

Despite this warm welcome, Australian fans had more in common with their white American counterparts than they cared to admit. As they viewed Johnson through the distorted lens of blackface minstrelsy, he appeared more an exotic curiosity than a man. " He has a genial face," the Sydney Truth described, "somewhat babyish looking and of the type of the little ****s who may be seen devouring watermelons in a well-known American picture."3 Since the mid-nineteenth century, minstrelsy had been a staple in Australian theaters, providing white settlers with a glimpse of U.S. racial politics. Australians had eagerly embraced this U.S. import, adapting both its imagery and its language to their local scene. So-called "******" bands played on Australian steamers, and street minstrels paraded outside neighborhood pubs dressed in loud suits complete with oversized collars and coattails.4 When the dandified heavyweight arrived, white Australians immediately cast him as a minstrel. Wrapped up in the sentimental tropes of blackface comedy, Johnson, for the time being, seemed harmless.

Though geographically distant and demographically different, the two nations shared the same underlying logics of race and the body. First forged in the performances of blackface minstrels, these links proliferated with the expansion of mass sporting culture at the turn of the twentieth century. By the time Johnson reached Sydney, the athletic body had become an important medium through which white men expressed their mutual interest in the maintenance of global white domination. The image of an ideal citizen was a muscular white male. This focus on the physical provided an easy justification for the exclusion of people of color from mainstream politics and society. Their dark skin and exotic bodies became the tangible proof of their unworthiness for full citizenship rights and self-determination. It marked them as contaminating threats to the health of the white body politic"



"The two met in February 1907, when Toy went to Johnson's stage performance at Queen's Hall to inquire about her mother's missing gold pin. Someone in the heavyweight's entourage had apparently walked off with it during a drunken night at the Grand Pacific. Pressed for time, Johnson invited Toy to drop by his training headquarters at the Sir Joseph Banks Hotel in Botany so that they could resolve the matter. Toy first went to Johnson's hotel accompanied by her stepfather. However, it took a second trip out to Botany with her mother to retrieve the pin. During their visit Johnson invited the two women to watch him train. At just over six feet tall and two hundred pounds, Johnson's taut physique left both Toy and her mother mesmerized as they watched him, stripped to the waist, sparring in the ring. Despite the social taboo against the intermingling of black men and white women, Toy took a liking to Johnson, calling him "a great pugilist and a well-made man." Even Toy's mother had to admit that he was "a beautiful man." When Johnson offered to escort the two ladies home, Toy's mother allowed him to ride along in their sulky.28
Enamored with Johnson, Toy visited his hotel numerous times. She reportedly accompanied him on carriage rides, watched him spar, and waved mosquitoes away from him as the two nestled together on the hotel veranda. He gave her the pet name "Baby" and she called him "Jack." When the Tivolians, a group of Aussie chorus girls from the Tivoli Music Hall, visited Johnson's training camp, Toy stood next to the pugilist in a group photo. Johnson had his arm around her shoulder while she held his walking stick. Rumors began circulating about Johnson's escapades with Toy and the Tivolians.29
They continued to meet. Toy apparently visited Johnson's hotel room at all hours of the day and night-so much so that her stepfather accused her of disgracing the family and kicked her out of the house, locking the door behind her. She finally had to call on a local constable to convince her stepfather to let her return home"



You may say Johnson should have had enough sense to steer clear of white p***y but that just reinforces the stance that you are ok as long as you are a docile black and don't look at our women.

 

Of course Mcvey is " trying " to tear down Booker T. He will say anything to protect his wife beating idol. It's transparent.

What will he say about WEB?

W.E.B. DuBois,
who wrote that “the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of
groups, not of nations, but of races, and he who ignores or seeks to override the race
idea in human history ignores and overrides the central thought of all history,
Johnson had no patience for the concept of “linked fate.” Johnson thought of himself
as an individual unconstrained by race. Indeed, the fighter showed little loyalty to other
Blacks and “had neither faith, confidence nor respect for colored professional men.

After winning the heavyweight title, he refused to fight any of the other men who had
been denied the chance to contend for the championship because of the color line,
saying, “I won’t box any of these colored boys now. . . . I’ll retire still the only colored
heavyweight champ. Even after retiring, he resented the success of Joe Louis and
other Black boxers. The Black press disapproved of Johnson’s independence and
criticized the fact that most of his friends and boxing associates were White men,
commenting that “when [Johnson] turned away from his own people to seek associates
among whites and found them frequently among the most disreputable, there was a
natural revulsion on the part of colored men.”

 

This comment in my opinion encapsulates this argument perfectly. You say "based on reports of those that did not like him..." This totally ignores the fact that A LOT of people had a legitimate reason for disliking Johnson. Johnson's apologists on here want to white washing his failings as a human being and pretend that anyone who disliked him did so because of his skin and no other reason, and that any talk of the more unsavory side of his character is nothing but "character assassination." So basically this massive cross section of people who didnt like Johnson gets totally lumped with a bunch of racists, regardless of whether they were white americans, black americans, french, canadian, british, spanish, swiss, belgian, argentine, mexican, cuban, etc etc. Its a pretty weak argument. Ive submitted, and maintained that when trouble follows a guy like Johnson its not just a coincidence or character assassination. Ive already shown and can continue to show that Johnson was often welcomed with open arms in many places, regardless of his reputation in the United States so he was getting the benefit of the doubt. However, it didnt take long for any locale to tire of him and his antics. That right there should be enough to tell anyone not blinded by bias or hero worship that the guys had problems that extended well beyond some massive world wide conspiracy to keep him oppressed.

 

Why would you lock it?

 

Oh brother. So he has no responsibility for his actions, taking advantage of people, beating people, essentially stealing from them, refusing to abide by the law, pimping, etc etc. Good lord. Yeah, lets blame everyone else for Johnson's failings except himself. Lets totally ignore ALL of the times the guy was arrested BEFORE his first marriage to a white woman and long before his marriage to a white woman became public common knowledge. Lets just pretend that his name wasnt constantly in the papers prior to that for running out on debts, crashing his car, racing, speeding, assault, etc. and just pretend all of his troubles started later on. The problem with that argument is that it is based on fantasy or ignoring the simple facts or not knowing the facts. Either way the argument is flawed and worthless. Just as the argument that Johnson experienced so much hardship and racism as a child that he just rebelled against society and became a misfit and thus society, not Johnson, bears the blame for his actions. In reality Johnson came from a working class family,w was relatively well educated for the times especially for a black child in the south and he was very open about the fact that he didnt experience a lot of racism growing up and actually spent quite a lot of time with accepting white children and families. In fact his troubles all seemed to start after he won the championship and let fame and fortune go to his head. Feeling that now he could do whatever he wanted (although I have found reference in the Galvaston papers to a black John Arthur Johnson and his brother being arrested at about the same age as Jack would have been at the time, so its entirely possible he always had an anti-social bent. But the fact is that from almost the instant he won the championship he started acting like he could do whatever the hell he wanted to whoever the hell he wanted and seemed to actively court trouble. It wasnt until two years after he won the championship that he married Duryea and that was in secret. By the time he married her he had already been arrested twice for beating women and had beaten Duryea brutally. The issue of his marriage did not become a major issue until Johnson married Lucille Cameron in 1912 and that became a major controversy less because he had married a white woman and more because at the time he married her he was charged with kidnapping her by her mother and it was deemed that he married her to protect himself from those charges. If you go back and actually read the press at the time you will several editorials which basically say "if she wants to marry a black man then she gets what she deserves" Not exactly complimentary to blacks but hardly the outrage that followed several of his earlier brushes with the law that had nothing to do with race. And again, it wasnt just one single thing that he did. It was that he was constantly in the papers for something negative. At least three assaults, smuggling, at least two or three lawsuits for breaking contracts and several other instances of refusal to pay for items or services rendered, several instances of speeding, car racing, and car wrecks, and then came the charge that he absconded with this womans daughter and married her without her mothers consent. After literally years, not months but years, of reading about his antics the pot boiled over, and people today who clearly dont have all of the facts and want to take this one situation totally out of context have the nerve to judge that one instance in a vacuum by the standards of today? Please.

 

Why did Johnson return to America? A man as sophisticated as Johnson one would think could have enjoyed Europe and stayed away from America where he was a pariah? Was he homesick?

 

Homesick, and perhaps running out of money.

 

Because he became pariah in europe as well

 

That and a little thing called WW1

 

We don't seem to be finding much common ground here, or even narrowing the issues down.

Johnson seems to be as divisive today as he was a hundred years ago.

 

I don't think this is going anywhere now
.Its just stuff being repackaged and repeated. A thread that has run its course, imo.

 

This is Dubois' opinion of Washington
.
Harvard educated NAACP founder

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became Washington’s main opponent through. Despite initially being a follower of Washington’s

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criticised him for not promoting protest, referring to him as ‘The Great Accommodator’.

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argued that Washington and his ‘Tuskegee Machine’ would damn African Americans to permanent inferiority.

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instead proposed constantly challenging whites for immediate social and political equality, through a ‘talented tenth’, a group of elite blacks that would represent and prove African American’s worth as a whole.

You really are a cretin aren't you