Why Was Jack Johnson a Hero to Chinese-Australians in the Early 20th Century?

On May 24, U.S. President Donald Trump posthumously pardoned Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight boxing world champion in history.

In 1912, Johnson had been convicted of taking his white girlfriend, Lucille Cameron, who later became his wife, across state lines. This was held to be illegal according to a racial purity law, the White-Slave Traffic Act (better known as the Mann Act), which made it a crime to transport “women across state lines for immoral purposes.”

The inter-racial relationship between Johnson and Cameron was treated as a “crime against nature.” In Trump’s official presidential pardon for Johnson he remarked that the prosecution had been “a racially motivated injustice.”

It is less well known that when Johnson won the world heavyweight title 1908 — taking it from Canadian Tommy Burns in a Boxing Day bout in Sydney, Australia — he was watched closely by Chinese-Australians, who had themselves been victims of racial discrimination. Between 1908 and 1910, the editors of Chinese-Australians-language newspapers published several long reports on Johnson’s fights, lauding him as a “black hero.” Why did a non-Chinese boxing champion attract the attention of Chinese-language newspapers? How did they view the relationship between Chinese and “black people”? How did the newspaper reflect ideas about race among Chinese-Australians during the early 20th century?