Race, Celebrity and ‘Papa’ Jack Johnson

Questions of race and prejudice in Western law involve a complex interplay between elements of individual and structural discrimination. In Australia, for instance, contemporary trends in the over-policing, disproportionate imprisonment rates and the widespread social neglect of Indigenous people are impossible to divorce from over two centuries of cultural displacement and the non-recognition of Aboriginal citizenship, social customs, property rights and difference. A wealth of studies have long-recognised the legal consequences of Indigenous ‘otherness’ perpetuated by Australian legislatures and courts.³ Periodic gains are occasionally recognised by common law or statutory reform, yet it remains highly debatable whether Western Parliamentary or judicial dispute resolution practices are capable of rectifying over two hundred years of structural discrimination through periodic instances of seemingly tokenistic legal tinkering.

The historical and temporal contexts of legal persecution demonstrate an array of differences in virtually identical institutional settings. It would be a mistake to assert that Australian trends replicate a broader set of discriminatory legal practices against the Indigenous populations of New Zealand or Canada, or the various minority populations of the United States. In short, the immediate context of each reported case is all-important. Nevertheless, contemporary and historical intercultural comparisons offer viable insights into legal developments in similar institutional contexts, providing rich prospects for further inter-jurisdictional theory and research.

An important site of comparative historical law involves disputes relating to popular celebrities. This is a particularly revealing element of United States legal development, and appears to be of increasing contemporary global concern. A recent British review questioning the behaviour of several current sports and entertainment celebrities highlights widespread popular disquiet over the growing frequency of reported incidents, and the effects of role modelling in contemporary media and popular culture.⁴ A similar review compiled by cnn.com, focusing primarily on ongoing paedophilia claims against popular singer Michael Jackson, indicates a broader, yet largely confined, history of legal interventions against popular United States celebrities. During the 1940s Australian-born ‘playboy’ actor Errol Flynn was subject to unproven allegations of statutory rape. Twenty years earlier popular silent film comic Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle endured three trials for rape and homicide after the highly suspicious death of model Virginia Rappe during a privately hosted soiree.⁵ As with Flynn, sexual misconduct was a prominent feature of Arbuckle’s prosecution.

Significantly, although the allegations levelled against both Flynn and Arbuckle remained unproved in United States courts, the film careers of both performers were damaged beyond repair.⁶ More regrettably, the confinement of these controversies to popular crime folklore or contemporary internet tabloid entertainment, serves to trivialise their ongoing impact on important socio-legal processes. As long as celebrity law rests at the fringes of intellectual theory and research, various positive and negative effects of law-making, enforcement, dispute resolution and popular role modelling in an increasingly global, multi-media society will remain hidden from critical investigation.

Perhaps the most audacious series of legal interventions by United States authorities in the early twentieth century involved world heavyweight pugilist ‘Papa’ Jack Johnson. After defeating Canadian title-holder Tommy Burns in a famed event in Rushcutter’s Bay, Sydney,⁷ Johnson became arguably the first modern celebrity to cross dominant white colour lines. While allegations of sexual misconduct mirror the legal encounters of Flynn and Arbuckle,⁸ complex questions of race added a further dimension of anxiety to fuel ‘Papa’ Jack’s contentious public image.⁹ The combination of a brash master of the contentious art of boxing, widespread moral indignation towards Johnson’s private romantic affairs, and the additional dimension of race, secured the world champion’s status amongst his non-sporting opponents as the ideal scapegoat warranting the full weight of federal or state legal scrutiny during his seven-year title reign.

Johnson was by no means the first black sportsman to challenge dominant Western ideals of white, civilised athletic prowess. Early Western fight lore demonstrates a widespread preoccupation with biological, racial, physiological and intellectual difference. The highly publicised fight under bare-knuckle rules between English champion Tom Sayers and United States challenger John Heenan on 17 April 1860, offers a significant precedent to the space occupied by Jack Johnson during the first decades of the twentieth century. Legendary fight historian Nat Fleischer¹⁰ documents a wealth of North American Negro ‘invaders’ attempting to wrest title honours from more respectable English champions. Images reproduced from English and United States periodicals of the time depict Heenan in a dominant animalistic pose, stretching his subordinate white opponent’s neck over the ropes, while angry yet clearly respectable patrons vent their evident ire. As seconds intervened to save their vanquished local hero, several ‘thugs’ in the crowd severed the ropes with pocket knives. This produced a riotous ending to the fray, and Heenan’s inevitable flight. ‘[J]ustices of the peace’, ‘brethren of the cloth’ and noted ‘literati’ including William Thackeray and Charles Dickens¹¹ were all present at the scene, however attempts to secure a re-match failed, and Sayers retained his title with official records documenting a thirty-seven round ‘no-result’.

Historical fight records overshadow a broader series of challenges to conventional white male dominance in physical, intellectual and scientific cultures of the late-nineteenth century. As emerging state authorities unsuccessfully struggled to curtail a popular albeit morally contentious sports pastime,¹² and broader notions of biological positivism decried the innate criminality of Europe’s ‘dangerous classes’,¹³ civilising doctrine reinforced Darwinian notions of white racial superiority throughout the English-speaking world.

During the 1890s the focus of modern heavyweight boxing shifted from England to the lucrative free-markets of the United States. After a substantial yet similarly unsuccessful intervention to outlaw the popular manly sport of prize-fighting,¹⁴ three noted ‘gentlemen’ pioneered the modern revolution in gloved professional heavyweight boxing. ‘Boston Strong Boy’ John L. Sullivan,¹⁵ ‘Gentleman’ James J. Corbett,¹⁶ and Western journeyman ‘Ruby’ Bob Fitzsimmons¹⁷ enhanced the public legitimacy of sports fighting through a combination of skill, entrepreneurial showmanship, and widespread popular celebrity appeal. Without their collective efforts to embrace the amateur Queensberry sporting ethos,¹⁸ modern professional boxing may well have succumbed to the force of the outlaw, criminal label. The extensive popularity of these artful, noble practitioners, and numerous associated developments mirrored in contemporary celebrity sports culture, helped to successfully counter widespread political concern over what many considered an inherently amoral, barbaric, disorderly and violent male pastime.

As elite athletes and professional entertainers it is not surprising each of these three champions has a place in early United States legal records. Anderson illustrates that Sullivan avoided a summary ‘prize-fight’ prosecution in Missouri, and a $500 entertainment tax violation in Texas.¹⁹ The latter involved a problematic criminal law distinction between public and private events, and the verdict offers a landmark statement effectively restricting state intervention to clandestine, disorganised, un-ticketed contests. ‘Ruby’ Bob was charged with manslaughter after the tragic, unforeseen death of sparring partner Con Riordon during a travelling exhibition in Syracuse, New York. Three years before winning the heavyweight title by defeating Corbett, a combination of sincere remorse and insufficient proof of malicious intent guaranteed Fitzsimmons’ acquittal. The detailed verdict is significant as an early statement on the applicability of Western homicide laws to modern competitive sports.²⁰ Corbett avoided legal authorities until his fight management career of the 1920s.²¹ Nevertheless, all three champions were named as participants at the Louisiana Olympic Club, where an audacious state claim against the scope of duly conferred licensing powers successfully outlawed this private organisation and all its related sports business. The quo warranto claim judicial review procedures using grounds similar to contemporary public administrative law ultra vires principles. The ruling permanently dissolved the club with all assets and property granted to the state, and led to the virtual cessation of organised, lawful private fight sports governance throughout this region for the next fifty-years.²²

The early modern heavyweight championship lineage commencing with Sullivan evolved alongside a highly visible colour line. The ‘Boston Strong Boy’ in particular is noted for resisting challenges from viable black contenders.²³ Fears of losing title supremacy to biologically ‘inferior’ opponents in a sport with questionable public moral standing, accompanied various forms of social, political and legally sanctioned race segregation during this volatile era.²⁴ By the turn of the new century Johnson’s arrival on the Western sports pages equally challenged dominant English,²⁵ Australian²⁶ and North American²⁷ perceptions of innate physical, intellectual and behavioural differences squarely predicated on race, as well as the capacity of his opponents to endure his iron fisted athleticism.

Despite more than half a century of slave emancipation in the United States, formal and informal or cultural segregation was enforced in ways difficult to appreciate through a twenty-first century lens. Recent cinema histories by Dan Streibel²⁹ and Lee Grievson³⁰ highlight the convergence of race, law, control and culture, with ‘Papa’ Jack’s influence pivotal in the regulation of emerging multi-media industries of the period. From nicolodeon theatre to early urban cinema, Johnson’s significance to other ‘fightin’ niggahs’ appeared to threaten public order at various intersecting sites. This generated a significant moral censorship purge, extremes of linguistic rage among the most eloquent sports literati of the time, including Jack London,³¹ organised public ‘lynching bees’,³² and calls for expanded legal intervention to put ‘Papa’ Jack in his rightful subordinate place. Legal questions previously centred on the social (un)desirability of professional fight sports were superseded by a new series of moral issues focusing on Johnson’s notorious celebrity and its influences on men of colour more generally. This in turn led to a widespread purge against the champion’s right to the heavyweight crown and the associated spoils of his sporting success, which blurred any meaningful distinctions between this new celebrity’s public and private lives.

Dual legal attacks were directed at the Texan under the Federal Mann and Sims Acts. The champion’s autobiography³³ and most subsequent fight histories emphasise these prosecutions as significant career-ending interventions. In the context of United States law-making of the time, Johnson’s legal encounters highlight many deeper ramifications of federal governance and enforcement in several lucrative ‘outlaw’ industries beyond the prize ring. Records of other litigated cases and the range of discursive, linguistic and silenced narratives within documented legal sources illustrate critical elements of symbolic power commonly revealed when individuals are targeted by criminal enforcement agencies. Despite numerous semiotic limitations, reported verdicts act as pertinent written signposts³⁴ for identifying norms of dispute construction, enforcement and resolution.³⁵ Within the maze of United States national and regional archives, numerous supplementary sources provide a contextual backdrop to ‘Papa’ Jack’s white slavery and fight film bans, demonstrating ongoing tensions between federal and state law-making power within and beyond the square ring. However, Johnson’s contentious public celebrity remains the principal justification for his status as the law’s most prized high-profile target of the period.

White Slavery

The investigation undertaken by the Chicago Vice Commission in 1910 disclosed that the average age of the parlor-house prostitute was twenty-three and one-half years, and that the professional life of a girl in the “big-time” resorts was seldom more than five years. After that she drifted downward into the lower-priced houses, then to the streets and the back rooms of saloons, and finally into such houses as those of the Jungle and Bed Bug Row. In consequence of this rapid turnover of what the vice lords callously called “stock”, constant recruiting was necessary, and to supply the large demand and keep the brothels filled with fresh and attractive girls was the profitable business of the numerous gangs of procurers and white-slavers which operated, not only in Chicago, but in other large American cities as well. It was never established that a national organization of white-slavers existed, but it was often demonstrated that the gangs of the various cities used the same methods and worked together, and that girls were frequently shipped under guard all over the United States. Except in the cases of a few higher-ups, the protection paid by the brothel-keepers was seldom extended to white-slavers; even the politicians appeared to be horrified by such activities. But despite the efforts of police departments throughout the country the traffic was never brought under even a semblance of control until the federal government entered the fight, operating at first under the immigration laws and later under the Mann Act of 1910.³⁶

Herbert Asbury’s histories of the New York, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco underworlds are rife with tales of violence, debauchery, outlawry and fraud. The very foundation of each major city is persuasively contextualised alongside a range of criminal industries. One example involves the settlements in Louisiana during the 1720s, which were dependent on the importation of vagrant or incarcerated French women known as ‘casket girls’.³⁷ This overcame the notable shortage of unmarried women and the hazards associated with unfettered male socialisation. For almost two centuries prior to ‘Papa’ Jack’s emergence, state and federal authorities grappled with an extensive white slave or prostitution industry embedded in North American civilian culture.

The unlawful transport of ‘any individual’ into or within the United States for the purposes of prostitution, or associated unlawful sexual activity thereby, supplemented existing state and local government prohibitions against commercial sex trading.³⁹ The original 1910 federal legislation expanded existing prohibitions targeting illegal ‘aliens’ on United States soil. These predecessors to the Mann Act allowed federal authorities to deport any female with less than three years residency ‘found an inmate of a house of prostitution or practising prostitution’. The Supreme Court in United States v. John Bitty pinpointed the origins of this national felony legislation in an 1875 Act of Congress targeting illegal aliens, as well as prohibitions directly or indirectly aimed at outlawing coerced people trafficking.

The sole focus in ‘Papa’ Jack’s prosecution involved an arrangement with Lucille Cameron to travel from Pittsburgh to Chicago. The written verdict commences with the legal term ‘Prostitution’,⁴¹ and throughout Cameron has no discernible voice to counter this label. Once recognised as a white slave and compatriot to the black fighter, Cameron’s character is unquestioned, assumed, and therefore not worthy of the court’s additional scrutiny. Equally, Johnson is depicted as the habitual sporting playboy with a well-recognised transgressive sexual appetite, justifying his status as a target of federal enforcement surveillance.

Evidence of telegraphic communications between Johnson and Cameron sought to prove an illicit agreement for the latter to travel inter-state. Long-distance telephone conversations, a cabled telex message, and a wire service money transfer provided the essential tools for cross-border surveillance necessary to establish federal jurisdictional power under the Mann Act. Any right to privacy associated with these novel communication technologies of the time is sidestepped in the court’s analysis, despite evident concerns over the constitutionality of the Act, its enforcement and the evidence obtained to establish the prosecution case. Rather, the emphasis throughout remains on Johnson’s celebrity, and his lusts for white women, idle leisure and the excesses of professional fight sports. These factors are of sufficient legal and factual significance to endorse prosecution claims of Johnson’s involvement in commissioning an intentional, organised and predominantly immoral journey between interstate borders.

United States v. Bitty⁴⁴ involved a Mann Act predecessor relied on by the prosecution throughout the Johnson verdict. Questions of social morality were less relevant in this case, despite John Bitty’s overt ploy to defy the morally intrusive national laws. Bitty claimed the federal law was unconstitutional, as it dealt with a technically legal, voluntary, non-commercial union. Nevertheless, the basis of Justice Harlan’s broad ruling was considered essential to sustaining the prosecution against ‘Papa’ Jack. The federal government’s intention in passing the law, rather than any potential undue intrusion into the private lives of its citizens or the character of interpersonal relations between the sexes, is clearly the dominant focus of both verdicts.

The regulation of public morals was generally considered the purview of each state legislature. If lawfully enacted, federal police regulations overruled conflicting state or local ordinances. Race, gender, commerce, public order and sexual morality are all at play in Johnson’s case. Nevertheless, Supreme Court reports between Bitty and 1917 illustrate several male and female protagonists variously contributed to this new era of United States law enforcement focusing on the morality of essentially private human relationships already governed by existing state and local ordinances.

In Johnson the court held that prosecution testimony failed to establish any ‘crime against nature’. Proof of unlawful interstate commerce and an overtly immoral relationship were sufficient to outweigh concerns over allied privacy breaches or any procedural irregularities during police investigations or trial. Despite attempts to adduce evidence linking Johnson’s pugilistic career with the ‘brutish’ propensity to beat up white women being declared inadmissible, the conviction was strongly endorsed by the Supreme Court and remitted for sentencing.

The facts supporting Johnson’s conviction differ markedly from other reported Mann Act convictions of the period. Unlike predatory commercial abductions characteristic of the 1914 prosecution in Wilson⁴⁷ and subsequent rulings,⁴⁸ Johnson’s conviction and nine-month prison term involved no evidence of unlawful coercion. Contrast seventeen-year-old Agnes Couch, responding to an advertisement in Georgia to recruit women for the ‘Imperial Musical Comedy Company at the Imperial Theatre, Tampa, Florida’, who appears far more worthy of the federal government’s interstate protection than the world heavyweight champion’s consenting partner:

Fight Films

In 1910 William Shaw, general secretary of the United Society of Christian Endeavor, which boasted some four million members, sent out an urgent plea that governors prevent the [Johnson v. Jeffries fight] film from being shown in their states. The racial climate in many areas strengthened the plea. Racial tensions ran so high in Cincinnati, for example, that Mayor Louis Schwab had banned the film by executive order, for fear it would set off a race riot.⁵⁰

Preserving the dominant racial order of the time was equally prominent in public debates over the legality of filmed images of Johnson’s contentious heavyweight victories. Kinetoscopes developed by Thomas Edison recorded the first prize-fights in 1894.⁵¹ This important technological development shifted the focus of debate over the legality of professional boxing from the ring to the screen and the sport’s visual representation. Again, questions of race, public order and federal legislative power were prominent in regulating the fight film industry, and are widely discussed in contemporary United States film studies literature.⁵² Significantly, judicial scrutiny of the Sims and Mann Acts invoke virtually identical grounds to assess the validity of national legislative power. In particular, the dominant classification of ‘Papa’ Jack’s film representations as items of interstate commerce informed Supreme Court analysis, and validated a further series of paternalistic bans targeting an innovative and highly popular entertainment form and its most popular transgressive performer.

… I was to take films of the fight and exhibit them in South America and Europe, which sections of the globe were to be my exclusive territory. I collected the fight percentage due me just before the fight, but an additional percentage, which Willard’s managers owed me if I lived up to my agreement to lie down, was not paid until the fight was almost over. They tried hard to renege on payments to me and even went so far as to try and deprive me of the films which were to be given me, according to the contract. Pictures of the fight were made by Mace, and when I learned that the situation was not ripe for my return to the United States, I immediately left Havana for London … I waited for the pictures several weeks and when they did not arrive, I cabled to Curley asking why they had not been sent. He replied that they were on the way. I watched eagerly for their arrival, and when they did arrive, I was astounded to find that they were blank – that they never had been on a spool. I cabled demanding an explanation and in reply was told that the deception was due to Mace, the maker of the films.⁵³

Amidst much hyperbole ‘Papa’ Jack’s autobiography reveals the surreptitious character of organised fight film trafficking during his title reign. Immense public demand followed Jess Willard’s Cuban victory in 1915 to restore the legitimate Western sporting order. Assistant Attorney General Warren claimed the prohibition was a valid exercise of national police powers under the federal constitution. As with principles informing the constitutionality of the Mann Act, this claim justified identical restrictions against the interstate commercial transportation of Johnson’s fighting images.

Four reported Supreme Court rulings again illustrate the dominance of the socially divisive racial morality centred on Johnson’s public celebrity over several crucial economic interests at stake in United States popular culture. The first landmark case involved a constitutional challenge to the legality of the Sims Act by film director Lawrence Weber after confiscation of the films by federal authorities in New Jersey.⁵⁵ Despite Weber’s emphasis on the lucrative commercial value of Johnson’s fight films the claim was unsuccessful, and this verdict became the foundation for a series of customs seizures involving originals or copies of the valuable contraband.

Significant profit estimates as well as persistent assurances of good order at organised private venues were insufficient to convince District Judge Hale of the primacy of individual, private economic rights over the national interest in removing the films from public circulation. Layers of local and state revenue were thus instantly stripped by the overriding federal policing powers. Even unprocessed fight-film negatives could be confiscated under Sims Act precedents. Each Supreme Court ruling supporting the new customs powers consistently subordinates individual economic, travel, property and privacy rights to the highly conservative yet overriding social and moral benefits of prohibition. The net effect is one of the first modern forms of popular cultural censorship authorised under the guise of illicit trade regulation.

… [A]ll photographic films imported under this section shall be subject to such censorship as may be imposed by the Secretary of the Treasury … The language of the act is very broad; so broad that it relates to films, not only designed, but which may be used, for purposes of public exhibition. The production of a negative film, and its importation, is inevitably only the first step in the final use as a positive film. The whole, from the beginning to the end, is only a development from taking the negative film to the final exhibition of the positive film. The negative film has no practical use of value, as the evidence shows, except to be developed in a positive form and exhibited in connection therewith. The whole is a process in which every step counts.⁵⁷

Technological innovation attempted to overcome the prospect of confiscation by an expanded federal customs bureaucracy operating within the United States and around the nation’s external borders. The overt defiance of broadly interpreted Sims Act criteria produced some unique attempts to deliberately evade the spirit of the federal ban. Sammons⁵⁸ illustrates the innovation of one group of early outlaw film traffickers invoking complex technical measures to outsmart federal enforcement agents patrolling the Canadian border.

In April 1916 New York authorities uncovered a scheme by which negatives of the fight film were developed into positives without physically importing the film into the United States. … A movie camera was set up on the American side eight inches from the New York-Canada border, with the lens directed to the north. At approximately the same distance on the Canadian side rested a box with an electric light; through this was run an original positive film taken from the negative film made in Havana. Unexposed film was moved along the reel and through the camera on the American side; the two reels were connected in a way that allowed both to turn simultaneously, and thus a negative reproduction was made in America of the positive film in Canada. Pantomimic Corporation then rephotographed from the secondary negative and prepared to distribute positives of the contraband film.⁵⁹

Grievson indicates this prohibition takes modern notions of state sovereignty and law enforcement to a new level by ‘disciplining the movement of rays of light’.⁶⁰ Streibel⁶¹ details extensive opposition to Johnson’s fighting images throughout the nation’s south, with local and state authorities campaigning vigorously from the time of ‘Papa’ Jack’s 1908 title victory in Australia to ban fight films for promoting physical brutality, their undesirable effects on child viewers, and the obvious potential for racial violence. Among the plethora of flow-on effects on multi-racial news, theatre and popular culture, the nationwide prohibition also led to new forms of technological innovation to subvert the ban. The production of numerous ‘fake fight films’ of Johnson’s title bouts against Jeffries in 1910 and Willard in 1915, blurred previous distinctions between the real and the virtual,⁶² with significant impacts on both the legitimate and outlaw entertainment economies, as well as the credibility of the nationwide bans and their enforcement. Nevertheless, the core basis for validating enforcement actions involving domestic or international cross border trafficking, whether through real or virtual methods, remained squarely in the moral realm. The Supreme Court acknowledged the innovative uses of new entertainment technologies, while unanimously supporting the legislative intention underpinning the bans.

Johnson’s loss to Willard triggered widespread suspicions later confirmed in his autobiography that ‘Papa’ Jack had in fact ‘thrown the bout’. This result generated additional fears of copycat violence amongst antagonised fight fans viewing films of the contest. In addition, fears of racial unrest remained prominent to support the Sims Act provisions and the consequent expansion of domestic and international customs enforcement. This replicates the universal endorsement of persistent intrusions into Johnson’s private communications under the Mann Act. The seemingly haphazard regulation of public morality and the lucrative film industry at state and local levels also enhanced federal interventionist arguments by regenerating historical debates over the lawfulness of prize-fighting per se throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A range of moral concerns over the legality of professional boxing in the pre-moving-picture-era re-emerged to provide renewed symbolic force for vigilant and expanded national enforcement in preserving civil morality, despite the extensive popularity of professional boxing and abundant evidence of orderly fight film screenings.

Rather than intricate discussion of the competing and contrasting benefits of wire technologies in an emerging entertainment context, each judicial record examining the Sims Act prohibitions squarely defines fight films as a form of interstate commerce. This mirrors the federal jurisdictional foundation for the prohibitions under the Mann Act. However, the alternate ground of free speech would have invariably shifted the Supreme Court’s focus. While this is unlikely to have produced a different series of fight film rulings given the moral imperatives at stake, Grievson indicates the adoption of the commerce clause under the Mutual Film Corporation precedent sidestepped crucial technological issues.⁶⁵ This ensured private communication and commercial rights remained secondary to powerful national counter-justifications favouring expanded criminal prohibition and powers of seizure to prevent fight film importation and public display. This view was unanimously endorsed in three reported verdicts, which uncritically supported the constitutionality of the 1915 Sims Act upheld in Weber v. Freed.

The final case involved an appeal against a decision by federal authorities to seize copies of the Johnson v Willard film lodged by James J. Johnson and several others.⁶⁶ By 1916 section 37 of the Federal Criminal Code incorporated the original 1912 Sims Act prohibitions, seemingly ensuring beyond doubt the legality and desirability of the bans and their proactive enforcement. As with each previous Supreme Court ruling, the customs powers were emphatically supported by highlighting the ‘brutalising and pernicious effect’ of fight film screenings. Racial questions are close to the surface of the carefully worded ruling. As with the voices of actual or supposed white slaves, the real targets of prohibition nevertheless remain peripheral to the intricate legalities authorising each enforcement action.

By ignoring evidence that proposed and actual screenings were customarily held in orderly, private, ticketed venues, the United States Supreme Court ensured generic objections to fight sports canvassed in a wealth of state judicial decisions entered the fight film debate.⁶⁷ Analogies between disorderly prize-fights and second hand viewing in public or private theatres were supported by the federal Supreme Court. A 1905 verdict highlighting the disorderly character of prize-fights under Massachusetts criminal law⁶⁸ indicated any ticketed event with a large audience could be characterised as a public hazard to justify a criminal conviction. However, the ruling in Johnson does not reveal Commonwealth v. Mack involved a guilty plea after seemingly orderly ticketed affair, with seating provided for 1,000 patrons and a prominent sign stating ‘no drunks allowed’. As Streibel and Grievson illustrate,⁶⁹ the tendency to misrepresent the nature of analogous prize-fight verdicts was facilitated by the intricacies of recognised Supreme Court procedure, and offered abundant support for a highly contentious form of national media and commercial censorship, despite the inability of fragmented state laws to outlaw prize-fighting during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Any novel act of deliberate importation was ‘clearly against the spirit and meaning of the statute’. The ruling in Johnson provided further unconditional endorsement of federal criminal law over parallel state economic, taxation or commercial film regulations. The combination of an expanded customs bureaucracy at national and domestic borders, and ‘Papa’ Jack’s highly contentious celebrity provided ample fuel to validate a self-fulfilling legal revolution, playing on a moral panic endorsed by formal processes of legislative action, rights classification and judicial decision-making. ‘Practically unlimited’ repeat audiences, and estimated sale revenues of ‘at least’ $1,000,000 per film, ultimately provided false justifications to enforce a desirable national moral order equivalent to media censorship under contemporary parlance. The complex melding of public and private legal, philosophic, moral and racial dimensions allowed the Sims Act to be uncritically endorsed through a series of speculative, circular and self-justifying assertions, highlighting vague potential threats to public order maintenance if no paternalistic federal criminal intervention had in fact been instigated.

A young man named A. Weil, who now lives in Chicago, appeared on the scene to claim the films. When they were transferred to him, I snatched them from him and obtained possession, though not until after a heated argument and various attempts to get them from me had taken place. I contracted with Barker & Company, one of the largest film firms in England to make prints of the films, and these I put on exhibition throughout England. I also sold the rights to the pictures to a South American company and with the proceeds from this sale and the display of the pictures in the United Kingdom was able to realize very satisfactory returns – returns which were ample enough to make me feel somewhat repaid for the manner in which Curley and his partners had bilked me. I also sold the Australian rights to the pictures to Rufe Nailor.⁷¹

Without the Australian connection the legend of ‘Papa’ Jack would be reduced to one of many failed attempts at twentieth-century sporting greatness.⁷² In the shadows of other more culturally palatable gentleman practitioners of the noble art, Johnson continued a complex United States legal legacy targeting elite heavyweight professional boxers. Late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century developments represent a significant turning point in the evolution of a highly contested Western professional sports ethos. Nevertheless, an array of novel legal issues stem from this landmark period of Western entertainment, commercial and social history.

On returning to the United States from a period of self-imposed exile to avoid serving the Mann Act imprisonment term, the deposed champion finally succumbed to his outlaw reputation. Leavenworth Penitentiary hosted the former champion for nine-months, and witnessed a memorable Thanksgiving Day victory over ‘Topeka Jack’ Johnson and 227 pound Chicagoan George Owen. According to ‘Papa’ Jack’s autobiography published in 1927, it was a festive event compared to the harsh routines of prison life, with ‘more than a thousand’ prison inmates and state officials from Kansas and Missouri in attendance. A band ‘played march tunes’ and well-known sportsmen and newspaper writers reported on the proceedings.⁷³ The battling black gentleman, who was no stranger to the infamous Texan battle royale,⁷⁴ continued a mediocre travelling sparring career, forever tarnished by the impact of federal legislative morality.

All Supreme Court verdicts analysing the Mann and Sims Act prohibitions endorsed the supremacy of federal bureaucratic powers over alternative state, local and private legal, proprietary or civil rights. The preservation of national public morality endorsed the infiltration of federal customs inspection, seizure and confiscation powers into state enforcement territory. As with the bureaucratic administration of the New York State Athletic Commission, established in 1911 to create a public monopoly over professional boxing in that state, the combined effects of national criminal law making significantly transformed recognised law enforcement methods under United States public law. By targeting Johnson and his image, highly politicised inter-jurisdictional tensions over individual and social rights were laid before the Supreme Court. Vast financial rewards stemming from an otherwise haphazardly regulated state industry, encouraged private technological innovation to defy perceived federal interference with individual privacy and economic rights. Paternalistic motives incorporating strong moral denunciation towards professional fight sports supplement this body of uniformly conservative judicial rulings, to ultimately ensure ‘Papa’ Jack’s actual and virtual exile throughout the United States.

By classifying Johnson’s private affairs within the ‘genus’ of amoral sexual conduct, the Supreme Court subordinated individual freedom of choice to more dominant and highly conservative notions of appropriate, desired private relations between the sexes. Throughout, Lucille Cameron’s inability to consent to such an undesirable arrangement is inferred by the exclusive focus on Johnson. Adversarial procedure customarily restricts the range of stories or truths open to a court’s legal consideration. As such, Johnson became the victim of a targeted enforcement purge and was labelled a predatory white slave trader, while Cameron, the main subject of the Mann Act’s protection, had no voice as a mere young woman legally incapable of exercising a rational, or desirable, choice to associate with the flamboyant celebrity.

Similarly, novel technologies were subject to the rigours of adversarial method with little concern for the relevant policy issues associated with an emerging popular entertainment medium. The Sims Act verdicts also highlight limitations inherent in rationalised Western democratic governance and judicial procedure. Rather than developing agreed models of enforcement with existing state or local agencies, the process worked in reverse. In response to several legal challenges instigated by individual citizens, the Supreme Court simply validated expanded national and domestic border controls by creating a hierarchy of constitutionally sanctioned individual and structural rights. Conventions of judicial method, document production and rational doctrine simultaneously identified and reinforced a range of prospective national harms, as individual cases were routinely pigeonholed into a narrow range of pre-determined and highly questionable legal criteria.

Corpus Juris Secondum acknowledges the prohibitions under the legal headings of federal interstate commerce and customs duties.⁷⁸ This authoritative legal source, along with contemporary cinema histories, generally omits reference to a further series of six federal⁷⁹ and two state⁸⁰ fight-film verdicts renewing these interventionist trends during the prohibitionist era of the ‘roaring’ twenties.⁸¹ Representations of the legendary battles between New Yorker Jack Dempsey and former serviceman Gene Tunney⁸² renewed moral anxieties over the effects of professional boxing and its popularity amongst theatre audiences. However, unlike the Johnson bans a decade earlier, permissive white recreational culture appears to be the principal target of this second federal enforcement blitz against the lucrative prize-fight film industry.

Supreme Court doctrine endorsed proof of any interstate transport to validate a Mann Act conviction. Rulings interpreting and applying the ‘white slave’ Act were broad enough to incorporate ‘sexual debauchery’ as well as any truly commercial ‘profit sharing’ arrangements. The monitoring of genuinely exploitative and premeditated, outlaw interstate trafficking in turn validated the national policing of morality as commercial, anti-social, criminal vice. Similarly, lists of complex photographic mechanisms sought to confront novel commercial film and transmission industries. Supreme Court verdicts of the 1950s used similar grounds to validate federal legislation outlawing the deposit of ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy’ publications in national mail services,⁸⁹ and unlawful mob-based monopolies plaguing national fight-sports governance.⁹⁰ Throughout the twentieth century, contested racial, cultural and economic tensions underpinned most federal interventionist precedents, endorsed by conformity to standard democratic processes of legislative reform, executive law enforcement expansion, and Supreme Court doctrine. However, the latter in particular were faced with numerous alternative choices under a malleable rights-based constitution.

Late twentieth century interdisciplinary socio-legal theories⁹¹ add layers of complexity to historical arguments on difficult social questions and their negotiation by governmental and political institutions in their context. Nevertheless, revisionist arguments contesting the legitimacy of recognised law-making power highlight the limits of rationalised decision-making, and the inevitable reduction of complex social issues to contests over procedural fairness, power and consequent social discipline.⁹² The cumulative effects of each unsuccessful power struggle throughout modern United States history perpetuates racial discrimination in the face of isolated and periodic legislative or judicial gains. Williams Crenshaw discusses the commercialised misogyny of Afro-American rappers 2 Live Crew, and political debates involving conservative white politicians championing censorship and paternalistic cultural liberation on behalf of all black women. These questions of racial censorship could be appropriately transposed over the legal suppression of ‘Papa’ Jack’s celebrity eight decades earlier:

In a virtually identical context separated by time, the abstract, rationalised arguments of the democratic process impose a moral value on minority communities through the sheer power of legal decision-making. While free speech debates in contemporary popular culture replace commercial trade restrictions of the past, the essence of the problem remains virtually identical. ‘Papa’ Jack’s confronting celebrity and more recent questions of music, art and cultural censorship involve paternalistic legal interventions, which are highly distanced from their immediate cultural sources. The credibility of legal procedures invoked in each case ensures the ‘correctness’ of any intervention regardless of the outcome. Those least able to play a meaningful role within these institutions are generally the most suppressed by the formalities of lawful morality-based governance.

Johnson was the first of several generations of black heavyweight champion boxers tainted by the interventionist power of United States law. Within the square ring, only the ‘Brown Bomber’ Joe Louis during the 1940s wartime era,⁹⁴ and ‘The Greatest of All Times’, Cassius Clay or Muhammad Ali, surpass ‘Papa’ Jack’s seven-year heavyweight title reign.⁹⁵ Studies informed by the Chicago School of Criminology during the 1950s demonstrate boxing provided a rare legitimate outlet for displaced young Afro-American men living with entrenched poverty and social dislocation during the post-war era.⁹⁶ For these youngsters, the iconic fame, wealth and celebrity associated with world title status represented one of few accessible goals to succeed in an environment presenting few legitimate or meaningful employment opportunities. For these young men, ‘Papa’ Jack Johnson, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali were exceptions to the general rule of modern civilisation decreeing black men were unable to succeed in a white, male dominated, bureaucratic world.

The downsides of this celebrity status involve the concerted interventions of state and federal law. All modern elite fighters of colour share elements of Johnson’s contentious yet pioneering template. While each individual champion’s life story is fraught with a myriad of truths, the inevitable connections with ‘Papa’ Jack’s career ending legal interventions appear to have inter-generational filter effects on various contentious minority public celebrities. Joe Louis is one of few black heavyweight icons seemingly immune from the power of authorised state intervention and effects of the criminal label. Ali’s career is most illustrative, disrupted at its prime during the height of the Vietnam War. A persuasive conscientious objection argument, combined with evidence of the discriminatory practices of United States draft boards, were insufficient to avoid a federal conviction and subsequent professional licensing ban for failing to accept military induction.⁹⁷

‘Iron’ Mike Tyson completes a problematic outlaw equation with a highly publicised rape conviction and barrage of unsuccessful parole appeals. Tyson’s animalistic excesses reinvigorate the outlaw prize-fighter stereotype in an extreme, late-century racial form. Like a terrier snapping at the heels of ‘everlasting’ entrepreneur Don King, Tyson has created his own notoriety through a persistently violent, catastrophic and self-destructive celebrity. Nevertheless, Tyson demonstrates elements of extreme vulnerability, and while allegations of violent sexual misconduct must be considered seriously, Tyson is a problem child, and the perfect target for any trumped-up legal interventions.⁹⁸

Contemporary media technologies continue to confound the artificial limits of state and national jurisdictional borders.⁹⁹ Ongoing concerns over global media regulation and censorship involve highly malleable and morally laden terms such as ‘offensiveness’,¹⁰⁰ and ‘hate speech’,¹⁰¹ or contentious forms of protest including effigy and flag burning.¹⁰² Encoded and decoded within text and historic celluloid,¹⁰³ and reinforced by each new censorship controversy, the melding of racial, media and commercial issues transcends rigid, legal constructed public and private boundaries. The wealth of accumulated knowledge in conventional legal fields demonstrates periodic cycles of well-rehearsed historic justifications to endorse the unlawful characterisation of Western professional boxing.¹⁰⁴ Beneath the surface, many important and highly relevant stories illustrating the discriminatory character of modern legal process warrant further excavation. Racial, sexual and violent celebrity personalities provide one pertinent lens in the foreground of modern legal history. However, silenced voices, such as those of Anges Couch¹⁰⁵ and other white slave women, are only ever viewed through the enormously dark shadow of accused traders such as Johnson and other prosecuted men. These untold stories warrant further investigation and innovative reconstruction beyond the strictures of the formal written legal record.¹⁰⁶

Predatory environments increasing female vulnerabilities defy legitimate norms of free recreational movement central to all civic communities. Sexual politics abound in each of the above examples, legitimising feminist concerns over extremes of violence by celebrity male athletes and the silenced voices of individual victims.¹⁰⁷ Recent controversies involving elite Australian Rules and Rugby League footballers during an annus horribilus for male team sports in 2004,¹⁰⁸ emphasise the currency of sexual politics and associated limitations of Western adversarial criminal investigations.¹⁰⁹ Uncontrolled excesses of collective male recreation, fuelled by alcohol and cultural largesse, highlight the ongoing problems of male group sexual morality and its complex links with contemporary sports cultures. Unlike the strongly interventionist traditions of United States federal and state legal institutions targeting the non-sporting behaviour of heavyweight prize-fighters, recent Australian investigations into youthful, male, multi-racial sexual misconduct produced no sustainable criminal prosecutions. This might be a legacy of the different legal cultures in each nation, or the hegemony of Australian footballers compared with black boxers in the United States. Regardless of potential causes, the relationships between celebrity, law, violence, race and sexuality are extremely complex, and long neglected by critical Western theoretical and empirical research.

The multi-layered legal equation demonstrated here conflates several variables. Popular reverence for male celebrities converges with a hyper-aggressive, inter-racial and sexually charged series of gendered legal relations. Overt, covert and implied references to stereotypes of black and white hopes and their questionable character within modern fight-lore are largely hidden in the voluminous, technical mass of United States legal records. Within a template emphasising the innate historical dangers of the contentious morality of professional boxing, race, technology and fear generate highly confined methods of defining and reinforcing the modern black professional boxer’s outlaw status. Rational judicial review procedures demonstrate complex inter-jurisdictional law-making and enforcement tensions, and are resolved within confined methodological parameters producing highly questionable outcomes. These sites of jurisdictional uncertainty provide numerous themes for ongoing and imaginative historical and cross-cultural investigation to tease out consistent patterns in the modern development and enforcement of biased, discriminatory and morally centred laws.