son only during the 1914-1918 war and returning thereafter. He died in 1937.
It was not only in high culture that blacks achieved a presence in France but in the popular culture as well, although with complex consequences. In 1910, the American prizefighter Jack Johnson was officially acknowledged as the first black heavyweight champion of the world (Phillips, 1975c), and in 1911 he toured European music halls. However, by 1913, Johnson, whose wife was white, was in being prosecuted on trumped-up charges for violation of the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes. To avoid trial, Johnson sailed with his wife and his manager from Montreal to Le Havre in 1913, touring Europe, until the outbreak of the war, in a series of exhibition fights. Touring in England, Johnson was publicly snubbed, ostensibly because of Mann Act charges in the U.S., but in fact, as Johnson said at a music hall, because his "real crime was beating [white prizefighter] Jim Jeffries" (Longstreet, 1972, p. 289). It was in Fran
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