Chris Hedges: Battling White Supremacy in the Ring
February 15, 2021
Chris Hedges reviews Gerald Hornes book, The Bittersweet Science, on
racism, racketeering and the political economy of boxing.
Jack Johnson, African-American boxer and world heavyweight champion, in
Sydney, ca. 1908. (Wikimedia Commons)
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
There were three nationally prominent Black men in the early 20th century.
Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute; W. E. B. Du Bois,
perhaps Americas most important intellectual; and the world heavyweight
boxing champion Jack Johnson.
Washington, lavishly funded and feted by the white ruling class, embraced
submission. DuBois, Washingtons nemesis, exposed and condemned the
economic, political, legal and cultural systems that ensured submission.
And Johnson simply refused to be submissive, dating and marrying white
women, flaunting his wealth in tailored suits and fine motor cars, opening
an integrated nightclub in Chicago run by his wife, who was white, and
pounding Caucasian opponents senseless at a time when striking a white man
out of the ring could mean death by lynching.
Boxing, as the historian Gerald Horne argues in his engaging and
meticulously researched book, The Bittersweet Science: Racism,
Racketeering, and the Political Economy of Boxing, was effectively
weaponized by Blacks in the battle against white supremacy.
It was vital in demolishing the ugly stereotypes and myths propagated by the
white majority about Blacks. Johnson, perhaps the greatest heavyweight boxer
of all time, was as eloquent and uncompromising as he was tactically
brilliant in the ring.
And when he could not be defeated, the white ruling class hounded and
persecuted him, as they would do decades later with Du Bois, by perverting
the law to banish him from the sport and drive him into exile.
Boxing was, as Horne notes, in many ways the ne plus ultra of capitalism
itself, the essence of its unavoidable accoutrements: white supremacy,
masculinity, violence, profiteering, corruption.
Boxing matches were a common diversion for white slaveholders. Olaudah
Equiano and Frederick Douglass write of witnessing boxing matches arranged
by slaveholders, not only as entertainment for themselves, Horne writes,
but also as a way to encourage divisions and rancor among captives.
Forcing enslaved people to fight, often to the death, is as old as human
bondage. It was a custom practiced by the Etruscans at funerary games, a
forerunner of Roman gladiatorial contests. SS officers in Auschwitz made
Salomo Arouch, the Greek middleweight boxing champion who was of Jewish
descent, fight other prisoners two or three times a week for their
entertainment. Boxers in Auschwitz that lost were usually sent to the gas
chambers or shot. Arouch had some 200 bouts in Auschwitz. He survived
because he was undefeated.
Painting of Minoan youths from a Bronze Age fresco circa 1650 BC shows
ancient use of boxing gloves. (Le Musée absolu, Phaidon, Wikimedia Commons)
Following slavery, Black boxers were enticed or coerced into the ring. A
popular form of entertainment at fairs and carnivals was the battle royal.
As many as a half dozen Black men, stripped to the waist and sometimes
blindfolded, were herded into a roped arena on a platform, and made to fight
until only one man was standing.
But there was also an established and popular Black boxing circuit. As the
skill of Black boxers became undeniable, and white challengers were
defeated, whites mounted a crusade to ban interracial prizefighting. It was
feared that Negroes would no longer accept the hocus-pocus of white
supremacy as they were busily dismantling boxers of that persuasion in the
ring, Horne writes.
The Los Angles Times noted the explosive nature of Jack Johnsons victory
over
James J. Jeffries with this political cartoon suggesting a stick of dynamite
would not have caused as much violence. (Wkimedia Commons)
Boxing was and is about gambling. Its popularity has waned in large part
because of its brutality 87 percent of boxers suffer brain damage during
their lifetime, and between 1945 and 1985, 370 pugilists died from injuries
incurred in the ring. But in the 1950s there were five weekly televised
boxing shows. The sight of Black men, as Horne writes, battering into
incoherence those once thought to be the ruling race was a potent tool in
the battle against Jim and Jane Crow and segregation.
Cesspool of Corruption
The popularity of the sport also made it a cesspool of corruption, drawing
into its orbit mobsters, predatory promoters and managers, on-the-take
referees and boxing officials along with colorful con artists. Boxers, often
fleeced of their purses, as was the heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, or who
were unwilling to fix fights to pull off gambling coups, could end up dead.
Horne notes that it was only Muhammad Alis ability to mobilize The Fruit of
Islam, the muscle organized by The Nation of Islam, which saved him from
organized crime.
Mobsters controlled the career of the heavyweight champion Sonny Liston.
Frankie Carbo, from the Lucchese crime family, took 52 percent of Listons
earnings; Frank Blinky Palermo, a mobster reputed to have fixed the fight
between Jake LaMotta and Billy Fox in 1947, took 12 percent, and John
Vitale, the boss of the St. Louis crime family, walked away with another 12
percentleaving Liston with a pittance after paying training and other
expenses, Horne writes.
Sports writers were also routinely given cuts, including Damon Runyan who
had 4 percent interest in the earnings of Joe Louis, the world heavyweight
champion from 1937 to 1949.
It was in 1964 that the heavyweight Sonny Liston, whose loss to Ali
catapulted the former Louisville Lip into the ionosphere of fame, got into
a heated confrontation with Las Vegas top mobster, Moe Dalitz (who had
roots in [the fight promoter Don] Kings Cleveland), though the scalding
words were exchanged at a posh Beverly Hills hideaway, Horne writes.
If you hit me, Dalitz growled menacingly to the barely literate boxer,
youd better kill me, because if you dont, Ill make just one telephone
call and youll be dead in 24 hours. Dalitz was no cipher: Former Nevada
Governor Grant Sawyer said that the jowly and pugnacious battler was
probably as responsible for the successful gaming economy in Southern Nevada
as any one person. Perhaps predictably, Liston died mysteriously at home a
few years later in circumstances that remain opaque. As shall be seen,
Liston had questionable ties to various mobsters throughout his star-crossed
career. One investigator charges that he agreed to take a dive in his
second fight with Ali, i.e., agreed to lose beforehand, thereby making
[the billionaire developer Kirk] Kerkorian a lot of money, who then
proceeded to give him a sweet deal on his Las Vegas abode.
Tellingly, Horne writes, perhaps the other sport that challenged boxings
pre-eminent role as a sink of corruption was a sport where non-humans were
paramount: Horse racing. This culture of corruption was facilitated by the
fact that boxing was a major sport without a regular schedule, strict
regulation on a national scale (facilitating the arbitrage opportunities
eased by scores of statewide regulatory bodies), reliable records, objective
scoring, etc., Horner writes.
It was a kind of free enterprise of deregulation or neoliberalism run
amok; that is, it was a sport designed with raw capitalism in mind, which in
turn lubricated the path for the arrival of gangsters who thrived in such an
environment, especially when the bodies to be exploited were
disproportionately those of an ebony hue. It was a battle royal updated
for the 20th century.
The rise of gifted Black boxers, such as Johnson, gradually put pressure on
white promoters to repeal the racial ban and allow Black boxers to fight
whites.
Search for Great White Hope
And once boxing was integrated, in large part because of the relentless
lobbying by Johnson who hounded and taunted white champions, there was a
ceaseless and frantic search for the great white hope. The yearning for a
white boxer who could defeat a Black champion, especially a heavyweight, and
burnish the myth of white supremacy, would define the reign of all Black
heavyweight fighters, including Joe Louis and Mohammed Ali.
Jack Johnson in 1908. (Otto Sarony, Wikimedia Commons)
Johnsons stunning defeat of Jeffries in 1910 was more than just a turning
point in boxing, which it certainly was, Horne writes of Johnsons defense
of his world heavyweight title against the undefeated world heavyweight
champion James Jeffries, who was white and who was lured out of retirement
to fight Johnson.
It upended musty stereotypes about the alleged yellow streak, purported
cowardice and supposed softness of Negro men, as the dark-skinned Johnson
became de facto king of masculinity. It inspired racist attacks and
counterattacks. In the future birthplace of Muhammad Ali, Euro-Americans
attacked Negroes for their outward enthusiasm hailing Johnsons triumph, and
in response Negroes struck back with vigor in Louisville. A Carson City
periodical captured the tensions of the time as it reported breathlessly on
the general movement in most of the large cities to suppress the showing of
the fight films, meaning the unassailable triumphs on celluloid of Johnson
and [Joe] Gans [the World Lightweight Champion from 19021908], among
others: In many of the big cities, especially in the South, where the Negro
population ranks high in numbers, the authorities are putting the ban on the
fight pictures fearing that [said images] further swell the chests of the
colored men.
Those trapped in poverty and discriminated against because of their race or
religion gravitated to boxing, as was still true when I boxed in Boston in
the early 1980s. Boxing was one of the very few tickets out of misery.
Jewish-American boxers in the 1920s were the dominant group in the ring,
followed by the Italians and the Irish. The Jewish fighter Benny Leonard,
who scored 70 knockouts from his 89 wins, was the world lightweight champion
for eight years. Leonard, Lou Halper wrote, did as much with his fistic
prowess to gain respect of the Jews as did the Anti-Defamation League. As
these outcast groups integrated into the wider society, something that
Blacks have never been fully permitted to do, their representation in boxing
diminished.
It did not require an advanced degree to ascertain that qualities that
inhered in adroit boxing quick thinking, instinctively developing strategy
and tactics for victory, tenacity, etc. were fungible and adaptive to
various environments, especially politics, Horne writes. This was
particularly true of the political culture in the U.S., a nation which was
created as a result of violent uprooting of Indigenes and of a pervasive
brutality deployed to keep millions of the enslaved in line.
The descent of boxing, hastened by the publics awareness of the sports
near inevitable traumatic brain injuries and the painful public display of
Alis slurred speech and increasingly limited, shaky movements, saw it
replaced with more extreme fight forms, a kind of free-for-all with the
ultimate beneficiary being orthopedic surgeons in for-profit hospitals, as
Horne writes.
These extreme fights are little more than organized brawls in cages, staged
like the old battle royals for their savagery rather than their art. For
great boxers are artists, able to move with the grace and swiftness of
dancers, endowed with lightning reflexes and able to nimbly outwit, through
superb conditioning, strategy and intelligence, less astute or trained
opponents.
But even when boxing was at its height, these intricate and complex athletic
skills were of secondary importance to most of those who flocked to boxing
arenas, longing to see a man battered and pummeled into an unconscious mass.
Those of us who boxed wanted fights stopped as soon as one of our own
fighters was dazed, unsteady and unable to protect himself. It was, at that
point, for us no longer a sport. But when a fighter was defenseless the
crowds, which we loathed, came to life, clamoring for blood, which those who
organized the fights were only too willing to deliver.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist who was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the
Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He
previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian
Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT
America show On Contact.
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular
column twice a month.