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I suppose I'll open the first barrel on the French...
I think the case of Jack Johnson brings to light the sharp contrasts between American society, France, and Europe in general of a century ago. America was still very much a racially conscious nation while others, particularly the French, were more 'tolerant'.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxin...n-memoir_N.htm
http://content.usatoday.com/_common/...ackx-large.jpg
Jack Johnson's French musings become memoir
SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. — Jack Johnson, addicted to attention and hoping to cement his legacy, loved to chronicle his rise from a restless Texas teen to the world's first black heavyweight boxing champion.
Now, nearly a century after his most famous bout — the 1910 defeat of "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries — and decades after his death, Johnson has more tales to tell.
His largely unknown 1911 musings to a French sports magazine, including candid observations on racism likely never intended for American readers, have been translated to English in their entirety for the first time. The result, My Life & Battles, is a 127-page book by and about a pivotal figure in American culture.Johnson's 1908 championship and his 1910 defeat of Jeffries touched off race riots in America between downtrodden blacks who considered him a hero and white supremacists who deemed him a threat.
"He really was a figure of great hatred and paranoia among many white Americans, and when he won the 1910 fight, it was considered on all sides to be a really monumental event," said Mount Holyoke College professor Christopher Rivers, who translated and published the 1911 memoirs.But the 1911 magazine articles assess what he called the "color line" with more frankness, likely because his audience was the more tolerant French public and not the tensely divided American populace.From Bonnett's Anti-Racism:In 1913, he was convicted under the federal Mann Act of transporting a white woman across state lines for immoral purposes. That woman, Lucille Cameron, would later become his wife. He fled while his case was on appeal and spent seven years in exile in Canada, France, Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe.
With the republic, anyone can join the nation, whether catholic, protestant, or jew, white or black, rich or poor, by simply adhering to the project of Liberty and Equality.Hence, social equality is seen to be achieved through 'entry' into the universally valid ideals of the French Revolution, a perspective that establishes France as the progenitor, arbiter and authentic home of anti-racism.The President of the independent Mouvement Contre le Racisme l' Anti-Semitisme et Pour la Paix (MRAP) noted in 1957 that 'Anti-racism...reflects a glorious French tradition, affirmed throughout our history by Montaigne, to the Abbe Gregoire, from Schelcher to Zola, finding its expression in our immortal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen'
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Originally Posted by Nobody
Alba | Scotland
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