From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line
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From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line
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Overview
The campaign for racial equality in sports has both reflected and affected the campaign for racial equality in the United States. Some of the most significant and publicized stories in this campaign in the twentieth century have happened in sports, including, of course, Jackie Robinson in baseball; Jesse Owens, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos in track; Arthur Ashe in tennis; and Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali in boxing. Long after the full integration of college and professional athletics, race continues to play a major role in sports. Not long ago, sportswriters and sportscasters ignored racial issues. They now contribute to the public’s evolving racial attitudes on issues both on and off the field, ranging from integration to self-determination to masculinity.
From Jack Johnson to LeBron James examines the intersection of sports, race, and the media in the twentieth century and beyond. The essays are linked by a number of questions, including: How did the black and white media differ in content and context in their reporting of these stories? How did the media acknowledge race in their stories? Did the media recognize these stories as historically significant? Considering how media coverage has evolved over the years, the essays begin with the racially charged reporting of Jack Johnson’s reign as heavyweight champion and carry up to the present, covering the media narratives surrounding the Michael Vick dogfighting case in a supposedly post-racial era and the media’s handling of LeBron James’s announcement to leave Cleveland for Miami.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803285248 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 672 |
| File size: | 967 KB |
About the Author
Chris Lamb is a professor of journalism at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis. He is the author of Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Nebraska, 2012) and Blackout: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training (Nebraska, 2004), among other books.
Read an Excerpt
From Jack Johnson to LeBron James
Sports, Media, and the Color Line
By Chris Lamb
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Chris LambAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8524-8
CHAPTER 1
Framing White Hopes
The Press, Social Drama, and the Era of Jack Johnson, 1908–1915
Phillip J. Hutchison
The story of African American boxing champion Jack Johnson and white America's seven-year struggle to repudiate him represents an epic American narrative. As the subject of numerous books, research articles, a Broadway play, a major motion picture, and several documentaries, the historical subject matter informs diverse social and historical concerns. Correspondingly, in addressing Johnson's famous 1910 fight with James J. Jeffries, a particularly intense episode within the larger controversy, historian and journalist Lerone Bennett paraphrases veteran Chicago Tribune editor Henry Wales by observing, "No other single event dug so deep into world consciousness until the Lindbergh flight seventeen years later. ... This was the first great modern happening; it was the first great media morality play." Yet despite the far-reaching nature of the subject matter, and despite acknowledgment that the press played a key role in the epic controversy, scholars have yet to truly focus on the situation from the perspective of journalism history.
This situation is mitigated somewhat by the fact that most Johnson histories draw heavily on press reportage as primary source material, and they cite this material liberally. Yet even as these accounts are thorough in many respects, they fail to fully address the centrality of the press in constructing the lengthy controversy involving the boxer. Most notably, Johnson histories tend to fixate on the boxer in ways that reflect hagiographic qualities; in many ways, they position the boxer as a heroic figure whose epic acts of defiance shaped history as it played out on a social stage. This orientation reflects two problematic trends: It tends to conflate events into a retrospective narrative, an account that loses sight of the open-ended qualities of the situation as it was lived in real time. Moreover, this orientation tacitly portrays the press as a cog that functions within a mechanistic whole, rather than as a historical force in and of itself.
These existing historical narratives, although valuable, need to be complemented by research that more explicitly addresses the manner in which the white press of that era constructed the entire situation as an overarching narrative, one that unfolded in real time for nearly seven years. This essay seeks to better account for the nature of this latter narrative, the vital framing strategy the press employed to render diverse, sometimes discordant, events as socially coherent news for the duration of the controversy. By better accounting for how and why such symbolic strategies cohered socially, this orientation better depicts the ironic and contradictory nature of press reportage of this situation. When events are viewed through the lens of journalism history in this manner, the press more readily appears as an agent of history, a national institution that shaped the episode by defining situations though its reportage and editorial practices.
The Era of White Hopes and Journalism History
The Johnson controversy represents a topically rich and revealing episode in journalism history, one that informs several lines of scholarship that address the form and social impact of the American press at the turn of the twentieth century. Some of these key issues include the construction of race in the press, the transition from the eras of yellow journalism and muckraking to contemporary conceptions of objective journalism, the relationship between the press and the nascent commercial leisure industry, the use of celebrity reporters, the emergence of literary journalism, the affiliations among the press and promotional interests, and assorted institutional insights into reportage and editorial practices during the period.
Naturally, a thorough analysis of press reportage that involves seven years of twists and turns, absurdities and outrages, and paradoxes and contradictions requires a far larger work than a single essay. Yet as a useful entry point for associating these broader issues with journalism history, this essay provides missing perspective that can help historians better interpret the relationship between the press and Johnson. This approach draws heavily on the theories of James W. Carey, who emphasizes the close relationship among journalism, communication technology, and culture. Carey contends that periods of transition, particularly those that reflect seams or ruptures in social systems, are particularly revealing periods for historical inquiry. During such periods, repressed or taken-for-granted issues tend to be contested in the open in ways that provide historians with better access to the consciousness of particular eras.
Assorted scholars have documented that the turn of the twentieth century represents a key transitional period in journalism history. During this period the basic structures of journalism, ranging from approaches to journalistic management to forms of journalistic presentation, evolved significantly. Michael Schudson addresses journalism's marked shift from the sensationalism of the late nineteenth century to a growing sense of professionalism that began to reshape the profession in the early twentieth century. Other scholars, as exemplified by John Hartsock's work, demonstrate that the early twentieth century was marked by tension between what some characterize as "traditional," fact-based conceptions of news and emergent literary (or narrative) conceptions of journalism. Charles Ponce De Leon documents how such factors led to the growth of human interest reporting and its attendant emphasis on celebrity as a news value during this period. Related to this trend, as Robert McChesney documents, newspapers created sports pages and specialized sports reporting beats to accommodate the public's growing interest in sports as part of the nascent commercial leisure industry.
By the time Jack Johnson emerged as a national figure, each of these trends was shaping how journalists engaged audiences and structured reality as news. The present critical-historical study seeks to better synthesize such issues by providing an overview of how the early twentieth-century white press constructed the Johnson episode as a continuing news story. In this regard, as Carey emphasizes, journalism needs to be examined and understood as a corpus, an overarching perspective that includes "multiple treatments of the same story" and "other forms of journalism that surround, correct, and complete the daily newspaper." This orientation helps us better understand how the Johnson controversy reflects Carey's conception of journalism: "News is not information, but drama. It does not describe the world but portrays dramatic forces and action."
Toward this objective, Victor Turner's theory of processual social drama offers an instrumental framework for interpreting how the press structured its reportage of Johnson as a lived narrative, one that oriented — and in many ways animated — the individual news stories associated with Johnson. Turner contends that social dramas are enacted when regular, norm-governed social relations are breached in some manner, and that, if left unsealed, such a breach would undermine the symbolic foundations of a culture. It thus becomes necessary for diverse social interests to coalesce temporarily and engage in redressive actions to seal the breach. In some important ways, Johnson reportage during this period reflected these dynamics: the press defined the fundamental breach and quickly created a basic narrative trajectory toward redress. Because this trajectory implicitly structured news over time, it represented a powerful force that conjoined diverse social forces, shaped the interpretation of unfolding events, and defined news values throughout the controversy.
The Press, Narrative, and Jack Johnson
This approach advances a multifaceted body of literature that examines the narrative construction of news in both historical and contemporary settings. Among the most significant works that address these dynamics is Schudson's discussion of the relationship between narrative and news conventions over time. Further, in a widely cited work, Elizabeth Bird and Robert Dardenne explain how forms of narrative provide order and normality to news. They portray narrative as a symbolic process that delineates news by placing boundaries on happenings and transforming them into events. This orientation has informed diverse journalism history research such as Jack Lule's study of the use of myth to structure reportage in various historical settings. Similarly, Jeffrey Bridger and David Maines demonstrate how specific narrative structures create master frames that both shape and restrict public understanding of significant news events.
The Johnson situation sheds further light on such perspectives, by explaining how America's white press used such narrative strategies to construct what media critic Stuart Hall terms "a preferred reading" of events, a dominant account that effectively marginalized many divergent voices, including those of boxing detractors and the African American press. This theory-informed interpretive framework challenges prevailing historical narratives about the Johnson situation, particularly personality-oriented portrayals that, by their nature, ignore some significant events and conflate others. In the latter respect, most histories portray the controversies surrounding Jack Johnson as a two-act morality play: Johnson inflames white America, and then he defiantly remains "his own man" in spite of unjust persecution. Although valid in some ways, this de facto conventional wisdom is problematic in two key respects: First, it fixates on Johnson at the expense of other social actors and institutions; second, it collapses time and compresses events in ways that lose some vital nuances reflective of the social action as it was lived.
The present study demonstrates that the white press, with little variance, spontaneously framed the open-ended events involving Jack Johnson in terms of an overarching breach-to-redress (or pollution-to-sanctification) narrative trajectory that spanned nearly seven years. In contrast to the previously cited two-act narrative that dominates most Johnson histories, this study explains how the press-driven Jack Johnson social drama played out in three acts, with a substantial complication involving the Mann Act (white slavery laws) during the third act. As explained in noted journalist John Lardner's 1951 account of the era of white hopes, the press constructed the Johnson controversy more around white hopes than around Johnson himself. The first two acts reflected, respectively, journalists' efforts to goad former champion Jeffries out of retirement and the press-fueled buildup to his ill-fated July 4, 1910, fight with Johnson. The third act involves a five-year maudlin period that followed Johnson's victory over Jeffries.
Scope of the Study
For its textual material, the analysis focuses on the daily reportage of three influential metropolitan newspapers: the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Examiner. Each reflects its strategic geographic location in relation to most key events, and each reflects its distinctive perspective of news values, news coverage, and newsroom management. In terms of geography, much of the action occurred in three cities: New York, the national center of media and sports action; Chicago, Johnson's adopted hometown; and San Francisco, the cultural center of the West and the original site of the Johnson-Jeffries fight. Each newspaper also reflects widely recognized, and clearly distinctive, journalistic practices and philosophies during this era. By 1908, Adolph Ochs's New York Times was quickly establishing a paradigm for contemporary conceptions of objective, professional journalism. Robert R. McCormick's newly acquired Chicago Tribune stood out as one of the most influential Midwest newspapers, an outlet that both generated news coverage and received common perspectives of geographically distant issues through freelancers who provided "specials" to newspapers. The San Francisco Examiner, in its role as the flagship newspaper in William Randolph Hearst's expanding chain of publications, dominated West Coast reportage. Hearst's well-documented ties between his Examiner and his influential New York Journal also represent a transcontinental linkage in news coverage and news management. In each case the analysis addresses Johnson reportage as a collective body of work — versus the product of individual reporters or columnists.
Jack Johnson as Social Drama
The Breach
At the dawn of the twentieth century the world's heavyweight championship had been imbued with great symbolic significance. Since the 1880s the title had evolved into a vital, and profitable, popular culture ritual that helped construct America in terms of whiteness, masculinity, and nationalism. Yet by 1905, heavyweight championship boxing faced significant troubles on two counts: first, the sport itself was under fire from the era's influential progressive movement; second, the top four challengers to Jeffries's title were black. Faced with this reality, Jeffries retired in 1905 and presided over the orderly transfer of his title to the best of the era's paltry lot of white contenders. By 1908, after the title had languished in the hands of two uninspiring white champions for three years, the paucity of this strategy became apparent. In hopes of a lucrative payday then-champion Tommy Burns broke the championship's longstanding color barrier and agreed to fight Johnson on December 26, 1908, in Sydney, Australia. For Burns, the decision represented a big mistake. Johnson thrashed him so thoroughly that the police had to stop the fight in the fourteenth round. Although many members of the ringside press initially missed the significance of this situation, Jack London provided a now-infamous assessment for the readers of the New York Herald:
The fight! There was no fight. No Armenian massacre could compare with the hopeless slaughter that took place to-day. ... "Hit here Tahmy" he would say exposing the side of his unprotected stomach ... then would receive the blow with a happy, carefree smile. ... But one thing now remains, Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Johnson's face. Jeff, it's up to you!
Johnson's victory, indeed, represented a critical rupture in the symbolic relationship between the heavyweight championship and the social interests it had come to represent over the preceding two decades. This reality was manifest in journalists' rapid reassessment of the fight and its participants. Before the fight, newspapers reflected an indifferent — if not occasionally complimentary — attitude toward Johnson, an attitude that was consistent with purely sporting considerations. After the fight, however, the media seamlessly positioned Johnson at the center of a national morality play, while, over the course of just one hour, Burns became a nonentity. In short, the situation represented a far-reaching social breach that required redressive action.
Act I: Jeffries Must Commit
Although most histories focus on Johnson during this period, the actions and status of Jeffries, not Johnson, animated the social drama for its first seventeen months. Press reportage demonstrates that the badly out-of-shape Jeffries's willingness to come out of retirement was not a foregone conclusion. Thus, white America's fixation with goading Jeffries out of retirement played out as a dramatic act of its own, one involving enough suspense that it shaped news values in ways that overshadowed Johnson's actions — to include his five boxing matches against white opponents — throughout 1909. Even as Jack London's account of the Johnson-Burns fight concisely characterizes this strategic shift, this reaction was not as instantaneous among the press as most histories imply. Initially, some newspapers, including the New York Times and Hearst's newspapers, were somewhat complimentary of the new champion. The San Francisco Examiner, for example, opened its primary coverage of the fight in Sydney by observing, "Perhaps never before in the history of pugilism was such an ovation tendered a new-born champion as that afforded the giant Negro."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From Jack Johnson to LeBron James by Chris Lamb. Copyright © 2016 Chris Lamb. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Tables,Introduction Chris Lamb,
1. Framing White Hopes: The Press, Social Drama, and the Era of Jack Johnson, 1908–1915 Phillip J. Hutchison,
2. Jesse Owens, a Black Pearl amidst an Ocean of Fury: A Case Study of Press Coverage of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games Pamela C. Laucella,
3. Multifarious Hero: Joe Louis, American Society, and Race Relations during World Crisis, 1935–1945 Dominic J. Capeci Jr. and Martha Wilkerson,
4. Outside the Pale: The Exclusion of Blacks from the National Football League, 1934–1946 Thomas G. Smith,
5. Democracy on the Field: The Black Press Takes On White Baseball Chris Lamb and Glen L. Bleske,
6. A Nod from Destiny: How Sportswriters for White and African American Newspapers Covered Kenny Washington's Entry into the National Football League Ronald Bishop,
7. Jackie Robinson and the American Mind: Journalistic Perceptions of the Reintegration of Baseball William Simons,
8. "This Is It!" The Public Relations Campaign Waged by Wendell Smith and Jackie Robinson to Cast Robinson's First Season as an Unqualified Success Brian Carroll,
9. Integrating New Year's Day: The Racial Politics of College Bowl Games in the American South Charles H. Martin,
10. Main Bout, Inc., Black Economic Power, and Professional Boxing: The Canceled Muhammad Ali–Ernie Terrell Fight Michael Ezra,
11. A "Race" for Equality: Print Media Coverage of the 1968 Olympic Protest by Tommie Smith and John Carlos Jason Peterson,
12. Sports Illustrated's African American Athlete Series as Socially Responsible Journalism Reed Smith,
13. Rebellion in the Kingdom of Swat: Sportswriters, African American Athletes, and Coverage of Curt Flood's Lawsuit against Major League Baseball William Gillis,
14. Chasing Babe Ruth: An Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of Hank Aaron's Pursuit of the Career Home Run Record Maureen Smith,
15. Arthur Ashe: An Analysis of Newspaper Journalists' Coverage of USA Today's Outing Pamela C. Laucella,
16. Michael Jordan's Family Values: Marketing, Meaning, and Post-Reagan America Mary G. McDonald,
17. Rush Limbaugh, Donovan McNabb, and "a Little Social Concern": Reflections on the Problems of Whiteness in Contemporary American Sport Douglas Hartmann,
18. I'm the King of the World: Barry Bonds and the Race for the Record Lisa Doris Alexander,
19. Redemption on the Field: Framing, Narrative, and Race in Media Coverage of Michael Vick Bryan Carr,
20. Weighing In on the Coaching Decision: Discussing Sports and Race Online Jimmy Sanderson,
21. The LeBron James Decision in the Age of Obama Jamal L. Ratchford,
Source Acknowledgments,
Contributors,
Index,