Jack Johnson
World Heavyweight Champion
Etta Duryea
In October 1909, while attending the Vanderbilt Cup car race on Long Island, Johnson had a chance meeting with a 28-year-old Brooklyn society woman named Etta Duryea. She was glamorous and well-educated, and played the piano and sang, but was prone to depression. She could not handle Johnson's continued infidelity, his abusive behavior and the hostile reaction of the public, and her bouts of depression gradually deepened. On Christmas day 1910, Johnson confronted Duryea about her supposed affair with their chauffer and beat her so badly that she was hospitalized. Somehow the couple reconciled, and they blamed her injuries on a fall from a streetcar. They were quietly married in Pittsburgh less than a month later. In September of 1912, Johnson found Duryea dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in their upstairs apartment.
In 1908, at the height of the Jim Crow era, Jack Johnson became the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. With Johnson's victory over former undefeated heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries in 1910, racial tension exploded and resulted into race riots that spread all across the United States. Johnson's public marriages to white women only added to the racial tension and anger felt by white Americans.
Ken Burns narrates the relationships of Jack Johnson and his three white wives in his PBS film, Unforgivable Blackness:
Lucille Cameron
In the summer of 1912, Jack Johnson met Lucille Cameron, an 18-year-old prostitute from Milwaukee who visited the Café de Champion with a friend. He soon hired her as his "stenographer," but less than a month after Etta Duryea's funeral she was seen in public on Johnson's arm. In October, Cameron's mother went to the police and charged Johnson with kidnapping her daughter. She told the press, "Jack Johnson has hypnotic powers, and he has exercised them on my little girl. I would rather see my daughter spend the rest of her life in an insane asylum than see her the plaything of a nigger." On October 18, Johnson was arrested for violating the Mann Act, but Cameron refused to cooperate and the case fell apart. Less than a month later, Johnson was arrested again on Mann Act charges. On December 4 — less than three months after Duryea's suicide — Johnson and Cameron were married, an act that outraged the public.
After his Mann Act conviction in June 1913, Johnson skipped bail. He appeared in Montreal on June 25, where Lucille was waiting for him. For the next seven years, they lived in exile in Europe, South America and Mexico, until Johnson surrendered to the authorities on July 20, 1920. When Johnson was released from the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, on July 9, 1920, Lucille was waiting. Four years later, she filed for divorce — on the uncontested charge of infidelity.
Irene Pineau
The fall after divorcing Lucille Cameron, Johnson met two middle-aged women, Irene Pineau and Helen Matthews, at the race track in Aurora, Illinois. The following February, Pineau divorced her husband, and she and Matthews began seeing Johnson together. Pineau emerged as Johnson's favorite, and the two were married in Waukegan in August 1925. She remained at Johnson's side for the rest of his life. In December of 1932, they sailed for Europe. Johnson staged a series of exhibitions in Paris, but his plans to open a boxing school in Berlin were scuttled by Hitler's rise to power in January 1933. When Johnson was killed in an automobile accident in June of 1946, Irene buried him in Chicago, in a grave next to Etta Duryea. At the funeral, a reporter asked her what she had loved about Johnson. "I loved him because of his courage," she replied. "He faced the world unafraid. There wasn't anybody or anything he feared."*
Star Trek (1968)
First Televised Interracial Kiss
Erica Chito Childs in "Shades of Grey: Interracial Couples On TV," suggests in 1968, Star Trek "aired what is widely regarded as the first black-white interracial kiss on television between William Shatner’s character, Captain Kirk, a white man and a black woman, Lt. Uhura, when the two were forced to kiss against their will by a galactic enemy."
Though the forceful portrayal of this relationship places a negative connotation on the idea of miscegenation, the public airing of the kiss and thus acknowledgement of such interracial relationships, signals the beginning of societal and cultural acceptance.
*Childs, Erica Chito. (2011) "Shades of Gre: Interracial Couples on TV," Flow. Vol 15.04.
"
"
*Burns, Ken. (2005) "Knockout: Failing to Defeat Him in the Ring, His Enemies Take to the Courts," Unforgivable Blackness. PBS.
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
Groundbreaking Film about Interracial Relationships
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a film starring Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn. It depicts the story of Joanna, a young white woman who falls in love with Dr. John Prentice, a young black physician she meets while in Hawaii.
Bosley Crowther, in a review in the New York Times states, "the apparent issue of a difference in race is raised when the father of Mr. Poitier puts it bluntly to Mr. Tracy and to his son...But it soon is absorbed in a verbal matting of nice philosophizing about the power of love, before Mr. Tracy accepts the situation and they all go in to a family dinner—with wine."*
The film portrays the idea of miscegenation in a positive light, though the reality of the film's awards reveals the remaining racist views in its time - Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn both won Best Actor in the 1968 British Academy of Film an Television Arts while Sidney Poitier, the black central character, did not even receive a nomination.*
*Crowther, Bosley. (1967) "Guess Who s Coming to Dinner (1967)
Screen: 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' Arrives:Tracy-Hepburn Picture Opens at 2 Theaters The Cast" New York Times.
Modern Family (2012)
Modern View on Interracial Relationships
Modern Family, an extremely popular television sitcom, revolves around three couples and their families. One couple involves a traditional stay at home mom, the other is homosexual, and the last is interracial with a big age gap. Childs suggests Sofia Vergara's character, Gloria, a beautiful Colombian woman who is married to Jay, an older white man, makes for many laughs, based on the “cultural” differences. Child also mentions how "Gloria’s character is always sexually clad with an exaggerated Spanish accent, and fiery temper, which is reminiscent of the racialized “Hot Latina” image that Hollywood has produced for decades, Rather than challenging racialized stereotypes, these depictions play with racial and ethnic differences, leaving us with virtually the same stereotypical images."*
*Childs, Erica Chito. (2011) "Shades of Gre: Interracial Couples on TV," Flow. Vol 15.04.