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4. The New Negro’s Brown Brother: Black American and Filipino Boxers and the “Rising Tide of Color”
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105 The New Negro’s Brown Brother: Black American and Filipino Boxers and the “Rising Tide of Color” THERESA RUNSTEDTLER 4 In November 1899, the Eleventh U.S. Cavalry reportedly found a pair of boxing gloves made by Sol Levinson of San Francisco abandoned in the Luzon village of San Mateo. According to the apocryphal story, Filipino prisoners of war claimed that a renegade soldier of the African American Twenty-Fourth Infantry had not only supplied them with boxing gloves but had even given them fighting lessons .1 Many of the first boxers on the islands were black Americans because the all-black Ninth and Tenth U.S. Cavalry, the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth U.S. Infantry, and the Forty-Eighth and Forty-Ninth U.S.Volunteer Infantry composed a sizeable proportion of the U.S. forces from 1899 to 1902. Decades later, in the 1930s, a photographer captured an image of Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion (1908–15), giving pointers to the Philippine fighter “Young Tommy” (also known as Fernando Opao) in a California gym2 (Figure 4.1). Over the years, the boxing ring had emerged as an important cultural “contact zone” in which black Americans and Filipinos not only learned of each other’s plight but also built a sense of racial solidarity.3 Suggestive rather than exhaustive, this essay uses the sport of boxing as a vector through which to trace the underlying connections between the New Negro renaissance and the development of Filipino consciousness from the Spanish– American War to the 1930s. I argue that the rise of the New Negro was just one part of a much wider political current that the white American political scientist Lothrop Stoddard once lamentingly coined “the rising tide of color.” Writing in 1920, Stoddard warned that in the wake of the Great War, the darker races, “long restive under white political domination,” were developing “a common solidarity of feeling against the dominant white man.”Yet this “rising tide of color” was more than just a consequence of the “frightful weakening of the white world during the war.”4 It also grew out of a tenacious tradition of countercultural exchange between subaltern peoples—one ironically aided and accelerated by the expansion 106 THERESA RUNSTEDTLER of Western imperialism and capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even though Stoddard’s alarmist assertions were grounded in the pseudoscience of eugenics (and ultimately led him to advocate for the separation of the races), he was right in characterizing this growing colored consciousness as a collective challenge “against white world-supremacy.” Viewing the New Negro within the context of global cultural flows reveals that the so-called Harlem Renaissance was by no means just an isolated, local phenomenon . Instead, the New Negro movement and other examples of anticolonial agitation in the early twentieth century came together in the undercurrents and eddies of Western imperial military and political power, commerce, and culture. While black studies scholars have begun to emphasize the transnational, anticolonial , and radical leftist character of New Negro politics during the interwar years, many remain focused on the Atlantic World.5 However, even a cursory look at the transpacific travels of African Americans along the burgeoning routes of U.S. empire suggests that we need to expand our geographic scope and imagination of the black renaissance.6 Although historian Michelle Mitchell contends that some black elites eagerly joined the United States’ project of “benevolent assimilation” in the Philippines as a means to reinforce their own racial manhood, figure 4.1. Former world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson giving pointers to Philippine fighter Fernando Opao (“Young Tommy”), circa 1930s. Reproduced from the original held by the Department of Special Collections of the Hesburgh Libraries of the University of Notre Dame. [18.208.203.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:10 GMT) THE NEW NEGRO’S BROWN BROTHER 107 many of the black soldiers and boxers who traveled to the archipelago during the Spanish–American and Philippine–American wars and subsequent U.S. occupation were troubled by their nation’s imperialist designs.7 Much like Frank Guridy demonstrates in his study of early-twentieth-century African American and Afro-Cuban encounters, regardless of their opinions on U.S. expansion, black Americans and Filipinos from across class and ideological lines “often chose to use the imperial structure toward their own ends,” as the everyday interactions of empire building ironically opened up subversive spaces for transnational racial affiliation.8 The New...