Quarterly Review of Film and Video

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“Like an earthquake!” Theater television, boxing,

and the black public sphere

Anna McCarthy

To cite this article: Anna McCarthy (1997) “Like an earthquake!” Theater television, boxing,
and the black public sphere, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 16:3-4, 307-323, DOI:
10.1080/10509209709361468

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509209709361468

Published online: 05 Jun 2009.

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 Quar. Rev. of Film & Video, Vol. 16(3-4), pp. 307-323 © 1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V.
Reprints available directly from the publisher Published by license under
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Printed in Malaysia.

"Like an Earthquake!"
Theater Television, Boxing, and
the Black Public Sphere
Anna McCarthy

When commercial TV became a reality in the late 1940s, motion picture compa-
nies undertook a number of television-related ventures, one of which—theater
television—would become the basis for the boxing industry's lucrative expansion
via the sale of exhibition rights for prizefights. A form of large screen, closed
circuit TV designed for public auditoriums, theater TV is generally seen as a curi-
ous technological and industrial artifact of mid-century Hollywood. In this study
I will focus primarily on other aspects of the medium, specifically its local exhibi-
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tion and reception, bringing factors such as geography, community, race and
class into dialogue with industrial discourse and history. My goal is to trace the-
ater TV's role in African American political and cultural life from the 1950s
through 1971, outlining the local forces that might have shaped the medium's
reception within this context.1 To delineate the social horizons of spectatorship
for African-American boxing fans I ask how closed circuit boxing engaged and
articulated cultural politics during an era that spanned the civil rights move-
ment, Black power, and the so-called white flight, concentrating particularly, but
not exclusively, on theater TV exhibition and reception within the contested ter-
rain of Chicago's south side. I propose that Black cultural formations are central
to the history of theater television, a technology of exhibition closely associated
with the racialized spectacle of boxing. The intersection of technology and racial
politics in theater television offers an instructive example of the way technologies
and their attendant ideologies are mutated and appropriated as they travel from
an institutional sphere of knowledge and discourse into the localized, less pre-
dictable sphere of audienceship.2 In particular, the ideologies of liveness and col-
lectivity that were integral to the technology's initial promise for Hollywood
acquired a political resonance within the cultural sphere of reception. Hollywood
moguls promised an intense spectatorial engagement when they introduced the-
ater TV; this promise found one of its deeper and more politicized expressions
within the fan cultures that mobilized around the racially-charged sport of

ANNA MCCARTHY is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University. She is currently complet-
ing a book on the cultural spaces of TV and video spectatorship in the postwar United States.

307
 308 Anna McCarthy

boxing. The reception of theater television was wedded to a distinct historical

habitus formed by institutions of collective spectatorship in Black urban life. As
historians such as Mary Carbine, Dan Streible, and others have noted, participa-
tion in popular entertainments was an activity of immense cultural and political
significance throughout the twentieth century. With the advent of closed circuit
TV technology some of the communal forms of pride, memory, resistance, and
solidarity that characterized early Black amusement traditions achieved a new
kind of visibility in new and diverse public spheres. In addition to these existing
histories, I draw from oral histories and press accounts of boxing spectatorship
within this period to hypothesize about the use and meaning of theater TV sys-
tems within communal institutions of African American urban leisure.

A FOOTNOTE IN MEDIA HISTORY?

Theater TV is a marginal curiosity within mainstream histories of film and televi-

sion, significant mainly as the almost forgotten "victim" of larger industrial
struggles. The medium was introduced during the 1930s, and was featured in
several public exhibitions of TV technology during this period. However even
then, as Jeanne Allen notes, corporate interests from the radio industry quickly
drove theater TV pioneers like inventor Ulysses Sanabria of Chicago out of the
"social matrix" of television research and development.3 Other historians trace
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theater television's fate after World War II, when it was an experimental technol-
ogy in the motion picture industry. Douglas Gomery describes it then as "the ini-
tial failed innovation attempted [by Hollywood] in reaction to dwindling theater
audiences."4 According to Gomery, industrial factors such as the repeated refusal
of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allocate theater TV fre-
quencies, coupled with labor disputes, installation expenses and revenue losses,
persuaded motion picture corporations to abandon all such projects in 1952.5
Edward Buscombe sees theater TV as an example of a suppressed alternative to
the dominant interests that shaped broadcasting and film in the United States,
arguing that the contemporary TV system—based on the one-way transmission
of commercially-supported programming to domestic receivers—was neither an
inevitable condition nor a reasoned choice but rather a product of the hegemony
of the radio industry.6
Although the reasons they offer may differ, these accounts concur that theater
television was a failure. But though it is true that it did not become part of the
mainstream definition of either TV or the movies, theater TV was by no means a
failure as a visual apparatus. This is especially apparent when we consider that it
established a basic economic structure for licensing the rights to closed circuit
sports broadcasts, and is thus a precursor of the pay-per-view cable business.
From this perspective, theater television actually flourished after Hollywood aban-
doned it in 1952. Boxing promoters began to rely upon it as a revenue source in
heavyweight championships. Its economic force in championship prizefighting
was enormous; because of theater TV, boxing's theater television revenues
increased steadily in the 1960s. In 1957, for example, promoters of the Ray
 "Like an Earthquake! " 309

Robinson-Carmen Basilio bout grossed $1.4 million from 174 theater TV screenings
across the country. In 1970, the first of Muhammed Ali's famous confrontations
with Joe Frazier grossed $30 million from closed circuit screenings in 750 the-
aters, auditoriums, and amphitheaters nationwide.7
Not only was theater TV a vast source of revenue for boxing, it was also
the foundation of corporations such as Theater Network Television and
TelePrompTer, Inc. These corporations used the form both as a lucrative sports
broadcast medium and as the broad basis of new closed circuit TV market serv-
ing a variety of business and governmental bodies, from hospitals to the Defense
Department.8 Hollywood's failure, in short, was boxing's—and closed circuit
TV's—success. Indeed, the 1975 Ali-Frazier rematch, the Don King orchestrated
"thrilla in Manila," was an historic moment in the development of cable televi-
sion, as it was the first major satellite feed presented by the Home Box Office
(HBO) network. It could be argued, therefore, that the 1970 theater televised
Ali-Frazier confrontation, by demonstrating the revenue potential of closed cir-
cuit broadcasts of these two fighters, indirectly played a role in the shape of cable
television today.9

THE PROMISES OF L1VENESS

Although the above facts and figures tell us something about the economic suc-
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cess of theater televised boxing, they don't provide much of a sense of what
exactly the viewing experience encompassed. One way to start reconstructing
this experience is to examine the discourse surrounding theater TV in the pages
of the trade press during the years it was first introduced. This discursive field
provides important clues to the medium's ideological construction, revealing the
conceptual terms that were used to differentiate it from other kinds of viewing
experience and which might have made theater TV seem appealing as a distribu-
tion system for heavyweight boxing.
At the core of the discourse on theater TV were hyperbolic paeans to its
superlative powers of liveness, immediacy, and collectivity, usually linked to the
experience of sports spectatorship.10 For example, Paul Raiborn, a Paramount
vice president and chief of its theater television operations, compared the theater
experience and the arena experience with a hyperbolic appeal to the deeper, pri-
mal nature of "man."
The theater and the arena in some form have paralleled the history of man because man is a gregari-
ous creature, he has the herd instinct, he needs to gather things with his fellow men; to share things.
Nothing, not even television at home in the living room, will ever destroy this human need...
Everything is better shared. There, in a nutshell, is the answer those who fear the impact of television
on motion picture theaters.11

The "bigger than life" feel of the movies endowed theater television, in the eyes of
its creators, with a unique capacity for transmitting the "feel" of a sporting event.
Addressing members of the Society for Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE), RKO
Pictures television chief Ralph Austrian proclaimed that sports spectatorship in
 310 AnnaMcCarthy

the theater was actually superior to the experience of attending an event in the
flesh:
Watching from a theater seat would be infinitely better than from a clubhouse seat at the track. You
would hear the frenzied excitement of the crowd, the thundering of hoofbeats. You would actually be
there without leaving your home town.12

Along with this sense of unsurpassed presence, theater television promoters

stressed the verisimilitude of the viewing experience in terms of temporal imme-
diacy, touting theater television's virtually instantaneous presentation of events
as they occurred. The fact that this property was heralded as part of television
in general led motion picture industry figures to stress its special value in con-
junction with the collective, focused experience of movie theater viewing. In a
co-authored article written in 1949, an RCA engineer and a FOX technician who
had collaborated on a projection TV screening together noted that
Theater surroundings are... designed to emphasize the picture and to subjugate all distractions. For
this reason, it may be easier for the viewer to become absorbed in a theater than in some other public
place or even in his own home. Television as a medium of picture transmission has powerful psycho-
logical ally. The viewer knows that he is seeing an event that is happening now and that neither he
nor anyone else knows exactly what is going to happen next".13

With statements like this, motion picture industry- figures harnessed the collec-
tive from of theater viewing to the liveness and immediacy of television trans-
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mission, a property of the medium which would later become, as Jane Feuer has
noted, one of the defining ideologies of broadcast network television.14
This emphasis on liveness and collectivity was an integral part of theater tele-
vision's initial characterization within the competitive and beleaguered environ-
ment of the postwar motion picture industry. Yet, for reasons enumerated by
Gomery, the promise of liveness in itself was not enough to sustain Hollywood's
interest in the medium.15 It is at this point that the course of theater television's
history diverges from the industrial history of Hollywood's responses to TV, and
where film-oriented accounts of the medium end. And indeed, the diffusion of
the medium from the early 1950s onwards became increasingly less reliant upon
the movie theater as a site of exhibition, and large-screen closed circuit boxing
took on a more heterogeneous identity. Boxing promoters and closed circuit com-
panies began to install theater TV-based systems in large public venues of all
kind, although press accounts continued to refer to all such screenings as theater
television. In Chicago, for example, the Ali-Terrell fight of 1967 was screened in a
hotel, an opera house, an amphitheater and only one movie theater, yet reports
on these venues in the local press used the terms "theater television" and "closed
circuit TV" interchangeably.16
The typological diversification of sites that were considered theater television
indicates the extent to which the medium's sphere of exhibition was no longer
defined by the industrial structures of Hollywood distribution and exhibition.
Indeed, the distinction between postwar systems (which continued to be used)
and newer closed circuit projection apparatuses was probably negligible for
viewers, whose main interests would have been the fight and not the industry
that brought it to the screen.17 Someone who saw a closed circuit fight on the big
 "Like an Earthquake! " 311

screen after 1952 might not immediately recall what type of system was used, nor
place great weight on whether the screening was in a movie theater or some
other large public auditorium. In a city like Chicago, fights were offered in a vari-
ety of places; contingencies such as the venue's proximity to work, home, or
meeting places would determine whether one went to see a fight in a theater or
in the Chicago Stadium.

FADE TO BLACK

Initially used for the live broadcast of a variety of different sporting events, the-
ater TV became increasingly associated with prizefighting exhibition. Concomi-
tant with this shift was a definite racialization of the discourses surrounding
theater telecasting. Prior to 1952, when theater TV was still a Hollywood experi-
ment, the racial politics of boxing rarely found expression in discussions of
closed circuit screening. Matters of race entered the trade reports I examined
in only two instances. The first was a discussion of the technical quality of the
theater TV image. An article in Variety, analyzing the performance of the Fox-
RCA closed circuit system during the telecast of the 1948 Louis-Walcott fight
noted that "Lighting was good enough for the audience to distinguish clearly
between the body tones of the two Negro fighters[.]"18 The second instance of
racially-inflected coverage occurred in 1951, in coverage of Jake LaMotta's cham-
pionship bouts with two white opponents, screened via a network in theaters by
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motion picture corporations. Trade reports listing the theaters showing these
fights noted—for no apparent reason other than to mark audiences racially—
which ones catered to Black audiences.19
Although the first mention of race is primarily an indicator of the unreflective
journalistic practices of Variety, the second provides valuable information for
charting the progressive "radalizaton" of theater television exhibition in this
period. LaMotta's bout with Savold in June, 1951 was screened in nine theaters
nationwide; only two of these theaters (in Washington, DC and Baltimore)
catered to African American audiences.20 In Chicago, the fight was shown in two
theaters, the Tivoli and the State-Lake, which were located, respectively, in a
white ethnic neighborhood and in the city's main business district.21 After 1952,
as more theaters began to host closed circuit screenings of heavyweight bouts,
the demographics of Chicago theater TV shifted. Although fights were shown in
theaters throughout the city, including those in white and mixed neighborhoods,
the highest concentration of screenings in any one area was consistently in Black
south side neighborhoods.22 In 1965, for example, there were seven closed circuit
screenings of the Ali-Patterson fight in Chicago. One was in a mixed neighbor-
hood on the north side called "Uptown," two were in predominantly white sub-
urbs located far away from each other (Evanston on the north shore of Lake
Michigan and Oak Park in the western suburbs), and one was in the large
McCormick Place auditorium just south of the Loop.23
In contrast to these four widely dispersed theaters catering to either white or
mixed audiences, two of the three screening sites in Black neighborhoods, the
Maryland and the Capitol, were located a few blocks away from each other on the
 312 Anna McCarthy

south side. A third screening location (the Central Park theater), was located in a
Black neighborhood on the racially-transitional and tense west side. Chicago the-
ater TV venues were thus most concentrated in the Black community of the south
side, even though such sites were outnumbered by other, non-Black theaters.
On several occasions in the post-Hollywood era, theater television was a direct
instrument of African politics. In 1964, for example, the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) presented its nationwide celebra-
tion of the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education over a closed circuit net-
work that linked 47 movie theaters across the country.24 In the same period,
heavyweight champion Sonny Liston was an officer in Theater Network
Television, the largest of the theater TV companies formed after the dissolution of
Hollywood interests in the technology. Liston was the corporation's spokesper-
son in matters of racial segregation in theaters; in 1964, according to the Chicago
Tribune, he stipulated that his bout with Muhammed Ali could not be screened in
segregated theaters, a contractual condition that led to the cancellation of two
venues in New Orleans. When the venue was changed to municipal auditorium,
a new set of problems arose. The city's Philharmonic Symphony Society brought
a civil suit against the company, ostensibly because the noise levels at the new
site would interfere with a nearby concert.25 Clearly, this suit was not only about
"noise pollution" but also about the fear of "cultural pollution" via a spatialized
clash between high and low, between a form of leisure that might encourage
"race mixing" and a leisure activity associated with upper-class white society.
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Like boxing itself, the theater television industry post-1952 was an arena for
the expression of a spectrum of racial ideologies, from desegregation to sepa-
ratism. One prominent figure in the former camp was Black civil rights activist
Truman Gibson, lawyer to Joe Louis and a founding officer and president of the
powerful International Boxing Commission. The IBC brought boxing into the
television age, profiting in the 1950s from sales of regular telecast rights for
minor bouts and sales of closed circuit rights for heavyweight championships to
theater booking conglomerates and motion picture exhibitors.26 More "militant"
than the IBC was a Black Muslim organization called Main Bout, Inc., which
handled theater TV rights for all of Muhammed Ali's fights (Don King began his
promoting career in the company). Headed by Herbert Muhammed, Main Bout
was viewed with extreme suspicion by white sportswriters. For example, when
the group announced that it possessed the theater TV rights to Ali's fight with
Chicago native Ernest Terrell in 1967, an article in the Chicago Sun-Times insult-
ingly depicted Ali as a dupe of Muslim business leaders: "Clay's devotion to
Muslimism is greater than those of the Muslim's around him, it is suspected. It is
also suspected that they value him as a fund-raiser."27
Of course, such statements conveniently overlooked the fact that Ali's radical-
ism was as much a threat to Main Bout's profits as it was an asset. For example,
several US cities responded to Ali's criticism of the Vietnam war in this period by
refusing to host his fight against George Chuvalo; when it eventually took place
in Toronto, numerous American closed circuit television theater owners boycotted
the screenings.28 In instances such as these, theater television spectatorship—
and the "threat" it seemed to imply—provided a locus for political contest that
matched the intense racial politics of the sport itself. Theater TV's growing ties
 "Like an Earthquake1/' 313

with boxing meant that it entered the political and cultural landscape of African
American public life, where it inevitably became intertwined with the cultural
politics of the historical moment.

THE "GOOD LIFE" AND THE BLACK PUBLIC SPHERE

If Black cultural politics shaped the distribution and availability of theater televi-
sion screenings, then surely they also shaped the nature of the spectatorial expe-
rience itself. What was the viewing experience like for African American fans?
What were the "horizons of reception" that gave it meaning within specific com-
munity contexts? What social activities were aligned with viewing? How did the-
ater TV intersect with a larger nexus of economic and entertainment institutions
in the community? All of these questions reference the idea and the institution of
the cultural public sphere: the space—physical and discursive—where individu-
als may collectively participate in a process of defining communal agendas and
establishing political common ground.29 Rephrased, then, these questions might
inquire: to what degree did theater television serve as the basis for public partici-
pation in cultural politics? Manthia Diawara asks a similar question in his discus-
sion of the Black cultural practices represented in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Linking critical social theory with Black cultural studies, Diawara applies the
concept of the public sphere to the local and community-based collective experi-
ences detailed in the autobiolography to specify the social terrain he calls "Black
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metropolitan modernity." The "good life"—the ideal towards which the Black
public sphere strives—combines economics security and entertainment to con-
struct "an imaginative horizon of possibility for Black people."30
Theater TV was a space in the good life around which sociopolitical concerns
and community identity could be jointly articulated. The construction of the
closed circuit broadcast as a site of cultural politics took place in multiple dimen-
sions: externally, in the discursive sphere of sports journalism and the entrepre-
neurial activities of local bookers, and internally, in the practices of fans on fight
night. For the latter, the momentous occasion of a heavyweight championship
bout in the theater was a collective, live experience in which the excitement of a
night on the town fused with the act of participating in what was, and always
had been, a racially politicized event.
Before exploring the details of this experience, I want to situate it within a
historical context that stretches back to the early part of the century. The post-1952
industrial organization of theater television and its intersection with Black politi-
cal, economic, and cultural concerns suggests the fusion of two audience institu-
tions from a longer lineage of Black metropolitan modernity: boxing fandom and
moviegoing. Both were part of a vibrant public life constituted in the amusement
institutions of Chicago's south side. In the heyday of African American commerce
and leisure during the first two decades of the century, the south side movie the-
ater was, as Mary Carbine notes, "a place where racial identity could be asserted
in the face of mass culture."31 Fight film historian Dan Streible notes that during
the federal ban on the interstate transportation of fight films, a ban precipitated
by Jack Johnson's crushing victories over white opponents, early films of Johnson,
 314 Anna McCarthy

"especially when exhibited by the Pekin and other Black theaters [in Chicago]
constituted an early and powerful cinema for black audiences/'32
In 1910, prior to the national prohibition, the city of Chicago banned film
screenings of Jack Johnson's fight against white fighter James Jeffries.33 As
Streible's excellent study details, the ban left a lasting impression on Chicago's
Black boxing fans. In 1915, the film was finally shown as a special screening held
in a tent erected near the booming African American business district known as
The Stroll. The occasion was explicity linked to racial politics: The Defender,
Chicago's African American newspaper, claimed that the screening was intended
as a rebuttal to the racist imagery of Birth of a Nation?4" This tent screening also
links boxing fandom to another institution Diawara identifies with the Black
metropolitan cultural experience: religion, specifically, the evangelical tent
revivals that still spring up from time to time on the south side of Chicago. The
fact that the screening was established as a counterweight to racial hatred
acquires an additional political resonance when one considers that a few years
earlier, such hatred quite literally invaded the reception sphere of boxing when a
white lynch mob attacked a saloon where Black fans were monitoring wire ser-
vice reports of the fight between Black boxer Joe Gans and white boxer Battling
Nelson.35
As ways of consuming boxing, films and wire service reports reveal two vital
aspects of the fan experience. Old films of Jack Johnson's triumphs were a means
of communally experiencing and expressing an already established victory; the
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excitement of wire service reports lay in the indeterminacy of the outcome, the
uncertainty of victory The one was a ritualistic and collective celebration of tri-
umph, while the other was an experience in which the nervous tension of wait-
ing for details of a fight taking place in a remote and invisible location provided
of frisson of liveness and immediacy.
In 1910, an early prototype of theater television fused these two types of fan
participation together. On the night of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, The Defender
reported, a giant light board displaying details of the fight based on telegraph
reports was sent up in the Chicago Coliseum, a large amphitheater on the south
side. Liveness and immediacy were integral to the attraction of the fight, repre-
sented by "Illuminated Electrical figures nine feet high [on the Marvelous
Electrical Board."36 In the words of The Defender: "Every blow struck will be
reproduced the same time it occurs in Reno. Should either of the fighters be
knocked down, the board immediately shows the fall by an illuminated figure, as
the same instant the name of the strikee is illuminated directly above the contes-
tant and also the words 'knocked down' are flashed."37
However problematic it may appear today as a televisual myth, for African
American boxing fans in Chicago liveness provided seemingly immediate, collec-
tive access to an otherwise inaccessible, racially charged spectacle.38 If, as Miriam
Hansen notes, the visual culture of early twentieth century modernity played
with the shock of spatial and temporal rupture, then these "live" boxing images
were surely a crucial element in the experience of Black metropolitan moder-
nity.39 Like the quotidian modern fabric of skyscrapers, jazz and flappers that,
Diawara notes, would later draw Malcolm Little to the city the live and immediate
reception situation created at the Chicago Coliseum in 1910 was a safe space for
 "Like an Earthquake1/' 315

collectively experiencing a racialized battle as an affirmation of community soli-

darity and Black pride. This historical space of viewership was a crucial building
block in the Black public sphere of boxing fandom.40
The importance of liveness within this public sphere remained intact over sub-
sequent decades. After Joe Louis's overwhelming popularity finally led to the
repeal of the federal fight film ban, films of Louis's fights were, as Streible notes,
"cause for celebration in most African American communities."41 Yet these films
did not substitute for the live transmission of the fight that radio and wire ser-
vices provided. The Louis fans with whom I spoke differentiated sharply
between the champ's films, which were often short, highly edited presentations
accompanying main features in movie theaters, and live radio broadcasts of his
fights.42 The two supplemented each other, it seems; one provided "live" access
via the voice of the commentator, the other provided a collective visual pleasure
after the fact.

TWO FAN ACCOUNTS

The arrival of theater television meant that these two key aspects of fan participa-
tion in boxing culture—communal participation and the frisson of liveness—
were now structurally intertwined. As numerous industry spokespersons pointed
out at the time, theater TV was the closest thing to a ringside seat. For middle and
working class African American fans, this "ringside seat" facilitated an unparal-
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leled level of participation in the spectacle of championship heavyweight box-

ing.43 I spoke with two fans who regularly attended theater TV screenings of
these bouts in the 1950s through the 1970s. Both took pains to stress that the
viewing experience equaled that of a stadium. Jamaican-born Cecil Blair, a man
in his seventies, and his younger brother-in-law, Brady (he requested that his last
name not be used) painted a vivid picture of the air of excitement and the
dynamics of collectivity in the theater:
CB: They'd push by us, sweetheart, and we'd stand up and raise our hands. There'd be punches
thrown... AM: Was it mostly guys at the theater, or was it men and women? B: Oh women, women
[laughs] CB: Yes [laughs] B: Don't get too close to one of them! CB: That's right! 'Cause they're throwing
punches... [laughter] AM: Throwing punches... you wouldn't even get that in a stadium, right? B: You
know what, I don't think these people voluntarily throw punches. They get really caught up in it—CB:
Not even realizing what they were doing... B: Even me, and I know—[CB laughs]—and I know better!
I was just sitting there, and I got on the floor, and [laughs with CB] Not to mention giving instructions!

AM: Does it add something... to see it in a crowd? CB: Yes, when they have the crowd there, rather
than just you and your spouse sitting there watching. You get revved up in the crowd because they
are raising eternal hell, and how can you help not joining them? You understand? ... you have to be a
part of the crowd, it's really enjoyable when you go there among all the people and everybody shout-
ing, this one saying, "hit him there".. . M

For Mr. Blair and Brady, theater TV spectator ship's key feature was the playful
experience of the crowd and its vocal and bodily acts, an experience that allowed
access to, and participation in, the performative spectacle of boxing. Neither man
differentiated audience practices in terms of race; in contrast, many mainstream
journalists seemed preoccupied with racial difference in their descriptions of
 316 Anna McCarthy

African American audiences. Matters of race were never far from the surface in
articles such as the New Yorker's coverage of the first Liston-Clay bout in 1964,
which singled out Black audience members for their loudness and exuberance.45
Similarly, Sports Illustrated offered the following description of the mostly Black
crowd at a screening of the 1970 Frazier-Ellis fight in Detroit:
The lobby swirled with sports and spenders, the kind you might have expected to find in a Harlem
fight club around 1930, raffishly dressed and rippling with ghostly merriment.46

The nostalgic reference to Harlem and the emphasis on personal style resonates
closely with the atmosphere of Harlem in the 1940s as portrayed in The
Autobiography of Malcolm X. Compare the above description with this passage
from the autobiography: "Then, suddenly, we were in the Roseland's jostling
lobby And I was getting waves and smiles and greetings. They shouted, 'My
man!' and 'Hey, Red!' and I answered, 'Daddy-O/ " 47 Though both descriptions
derive from very different positions in relation to the institutions of Black metro-
politan modernity they describe, their similarity marks the historical and discur-
sive continuities of African American amusement and leisure culture.
In the first half of Malcolm X's narrative, Diawara notes, the atmospheric
description of Black cultural institutions "tells the story of the development of
the Black public sphere and the creation of audiences for Black culture in Harlem
in the 1940s."48 Although this cultural public sphere is renounced in the "conver-
sionist" discourse of the book's second half, Diawara points out that it is a crucial
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site of political identification: "Detroit Red derives his cultural and political for-
mation from the bars and streets of Harlem... when arts and entertainment were
interwoven with economic activity in the community."49 On this basis, Diawara
asserts that any discussion of politics in the Black community must take into
account the pleasures and pleasures and engagements afforded by the world of
amusement. In making this claim, Diawara signals the link between his affirma-
tion of the collectivity-building political potential of popular culture and the
dialectical and Utopian character of mass culture explored by such theorists as
Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.50 Following Diawara's lead, we can see
the live spectacle of closed circuit boxing in the theater—a space that serves as a
central institution in metropolitan cultural life—as a focal point in the nexus of
cultural and economic expression that constituted the urban "good life." As the
remainder of this article now details, the politicization of this "good life" reached
its apex with the return of Muhammed Ali after his banishment from the ring for
opposing the way in Vietnam.

"THE GREATEST" AND THE CAFE SOCIETY

To be an Ali fan in the early 1970s was to participate in a community predicated

upon a combination of politics, entertainment, and the style and panache of a
"good life." Mainstream newspapers were well aware of this dynamic; in articles
and photographs, journalists often commented on particularly stylish Ali sup-
porters. Implicit in these reports was an air of condescension. The New Yorker, for
example, singled out from the crowd at the Ali-Frazier fight at Madison Square
 "Like an Earthquake!" 317

Garden in 1971, "A Black couple in matching orange-and-yellow velveteen cos-

tume/' 51 But within the fan community, according to the Ali fans I talked to,
dressing and acting "over the top" was precisely the point both Mr. Blair and
Brady remembered seeing limousines pulling up outside of the Chicago Coliseum,
the auditorium where they viewed the closed-circuit broadcast of the 1971 bout
with Frazier, and they compared the atmosphere of the evening to that of
nightclub. In Brady's words, the social milieu of Ali fandom was a well-dressed
"cafe society"—the cutting edge of south side Chicago night life—and "everyone
who was anyone" rallied around to support Ali. At that time, Ali was a resident
of the south side (along with other boxing notables such as Ezzard Charles,
Truman Gibson, and Herbert Muhammed); his status as an adopted local hero no
doubt added an extra layer of community pride for fans like Mr. Blair and Brady
who lived in the area. Theater TV's ability to provide an entree into the cafe soci-
ety that crystallized around Ali was clear to both of them. As Mr. Blair pointed
out in response to Brady, "Anyone who was anyone went to the fight at the
Garden. Everyone who was almost anyone went to see [the fight] on the closed
circuit."52
The ascendancy of Ali fan culture marked the emergence of a renewed racism
in white attitudes toward Black boxing fans. This came to a head with the first
Ali-Frazier fight, when white sportswriters began to use words like "mob" to
describe Ali supporters.53 The New Yorker explicitly distinguished Black viewer-
ship practices from white ones, this time in a comparison of the audiences in
the Hunter College auditorium and the Harlem Armony a screening venue oper-
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ated by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In the former space, where the
projector broke in the seventh round, the article noted that "the audience left
quietly—a crowd of mostly white, mostly young middle-aged, mostly longish
haired men, whose faces did not look encouraged, or even especially disap-
pointed."54 The article's coverage of the Harlem audience differed sharply in
tone. Noting that these fans formed "their own fashion show," the article described
the Armony viewers as a simmering threat: "The people assembled were hostile.
There was no question that they were for Ali, and it might well be that a lot of
them were prepared to store up a lot of disappointment should he lose."55
Chicago was the scene of what The Defender called a "near riot" when fans
threw chairs and bottles at the screen of the Coliseum after the generator supply-
ing the projector failed.56 The newspapers refrained from discussing the incident
in racial terms, and there is no evidence that the "angry fans" were black.
However, for the technical personnel running the screenings, race was a major
issue. In an interview, a white theater television projectionist told me that he had
heard rumors that a group of black fans had broken into the booth at the
Coliseum and threatened violence to the projectionist if the show was canceled.57
This assertion, coming from an individual whose anecdotes and remarks were
tinged with a hostility towards Black audiences, should not be taken as evidence
of what actually happened in the Coliseum on the night of the Ali-Frazier fight.
Rather, it suggests that the closed-circuit operating personnel may have been pre-
disposed to see African-American boxing audiences as an unruly mob.
A very different picture of the audience dynamic for this fight emerged in
Mr. Blair's and Brady's discussions of the scene at the closed circuit screening in the
 318 Anna McCarthy

Chicago Stadium. For both men, the fact that former heavyweight champion Ezzard
Charles attended the fight at the stadium even though he was in the advanced
stages of Lou Gehrig's disease underscored the importance of the event in south
side nightlife. In Brady's words, "You got to remember, when Ali returned, you had
a sort of cult following. It was part of a cult wave or something at the time. It was a
big event/' According to Mr. Blair, the crowd dynamic was "Like an earthquake! An
earthquake! Especially when AMthrew a punch! The place was like an earthquake!"
Beady added, "For all practical purposes it was a live fight!" I asked whether they
listened to the audio commentary that accompanied the images, and Mr. Blair told
me, "You could look at it but you couldn't hear what they had to say because the
people'd be making so much noise! Especially when a blow was delivered... Can't
hear nothing. Even ourselves started yelling out too!"58
In the mainstream and the Black presses, the vociferous strength of fan support
and the visibility of Ali fans raised far-reaching political questions. The fight
became the point of articulation for a larger debate that centered on the contro-
versial aspects of Black Power. Journalists debated whether Frazier was nothing
more than a surrogate "great white hope" and whether Ali carried with him the
hopes and aspirations of the Black race.59 This image was largely perpetuated by
Ali himself, who referred to Frazier as an "Uncle Tom."60 Other journalists dis-
missed such characterizations, even as they put them into circulation. As The New
Yorker noted, condescendingly, "An unfair burden has been placed on Frazier's
shoulders. He is a professional, he is a killer, he is a Union Man, and he is no fur-
ther from the ghetto in background and experience than Muhammed Ali."61
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Defender sports columnist A.S. "Doc" Young asserted that the fight was not a
"sociopolitical extravaganza," berating Black fans whose "super-duper whitey
hang-ups" led them to decry Frazier.62 In denying any political import to the
fight, Young nonetheless acknowledged that for many fans, the event carried a
huge amount of political weight.
The Defender itself consistently intertwined coverage of the fight with African
American political issues. A general poll of reader opinions conducted a few days
before the fight placed the question of the fight's outcome on equal footing with
explicitly political questions, such as which Black leaders to name a street after,
and whether or not the city should revoke the licenses of white cabbies who
refused to pick up Black passengers.63 In this period The Defender was a daily
newspaper, and time and labor constraints meant that the paper often relied on
wire services for both its sports and national news. However, the paper's cover-
age of the fight tended to inflect such mainstream sports reporting with concerns
specific to Black identity politics at the time. On February 3, for example, the
paper featured a front page United Press International (UPI) photograph of Ali
combing his hair. However, it supplied a caption that anchored this innocuous
image within the discursive sphere of Black pride: "What's this???? Muhammed
Ali using a 'soul-less' comb to get his 'fro' together?"64 In this détournement of a
mainstream image, the paper thus aligned the material it culled from the national
press with cultural and political concerns specific to a Black readership. This
reappropriation of Ali's image, forging its links with cultural politics and Black
pride, forcefully communicates Ali's status as the figure around which a Black
public sphere crystallized.
 "Like an Earthquake!" 319

The intertwining of fandom, viewership, and politics in an African American

counterpublic is most clearly conveyed by the fact that one of the venues for
viewing the fight in Chicago was Dr. King's Workshop, a converted movie theater
that served as the offices of Operation Breadbasket, the economic arm of Martin
Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (it would later on
become Rev. Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH—People United to Save Humanity).
Here, 2,453 African American fans gathered to cheer Ali, including a number of
community leaders: aldermen, business people, and Charles G. Hurst, president
of the newly formed Malcolm X college and, according to Ebony, a cousin of the
great middleweight Sugar Ray Robinson.65 The Chicago Sun-Times summed up the
impact of Ali's defeat on this audience as a form of political defeat: 'The cheers
had turned into a stunned kind of silence. As the silent crowd moved through
the theater's ornate lobby, it was apparent that it was a defeat for them too."66
However questionable this assessment may be, it is clear that the screening
became a site where members of south side Black communities could collectively
negotiate the larger social and political questions the fight, and Ali himself, raised.
Liveness, immediacy, collectivity, public sphere. These terms can dangerously
reify the viewing dynamic of television in any form. As Jane Feuer notes, such
terms epitomize the "globalizing" ideological discourse of the networks.67 Yet at
the same time, liveness can function, like any ideological discourse in television, as
the source of multiple reappropriations and viewing positions.68 In the case of the-
ater television, it was the basis for a space of politicized reception that derived from
a longer cultural history of spectatorship. The live spectacle of boxing that theater
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television offered became the point of articulation for an institution of the good lifer
combining economic advancement for some, political visibility for many, and com-
munal participation for all. If, in Gerald Early's words, the sport of boxing encour-
aged both "racial contrast and... racial identification" and embodied both serious
political struggle and affirmative cultural practice, then theater television provided
an arena where the links between the two could be solidified.69
In light of the foregoing reception history, the question of theater television's
failure is clearly a matter of perspective. For Black cultural history, it serves as an
example of the joint articulation of politics and pleasure in an oppositional set-
ting; for historians of television, it is an illuminating moment in the dispersion of
the ideology of liveness that has characterized television since its inception.
Seized upon as a tool for product differentiation in the competitive national mar-
ket of television and motion picture audienceship in the postwar period, theater
TV's liveness metamorphosed into something else when it arrived in the local
communities of African American boxing fandom. Here, it embodied the thrill of
collectivity as a cultural and racial alliance, and set the scene for participatory
interaction in a politicized sphere of pleasure.

NOTES

1. For a discussion of the way exhibition links institutional and social history, see Douglas Gomery,
"Movie Audiences, Urban Geography, and the History of the American Film," The VelvetLight Trap
19 (1982), 23-29. Gomery's study is confined to the local geography of cinema reception. However,
 320 Anna McCarthy

as the work of Mark Williams and others included in this issue demonstrates, regionally is just as
crucial for understanding television reception (or any form of audienceship, for that matter).
2. This is not to say that industrial history is never local, even though it may often be perceived that
way. One might write the history of theater television's technological genesis in the United States
as a product of regional forces. Some of these forces that might have shaped the industrial history
of theater TV as a Hollywood innovation are suggested by Douglas Gomery's study, which high-
lights the importance of particular cities, notably Chicago, in the diffusion of the form. Chicago
played a central role in Paramount's theater TV operations. It was the site of a major theater
chain, Balaban and Katz, which hosted several highly publicized theater TV screenings
(Paramount's chief operating officer was Barney Balaban). Chicago was also the home of a
Paramount TV station, WBKB, which supplied publicity, equipment, and program material for
the premier of theater TV in Chicago. These and other regional factors informing Gomery's
account suggest that the industrial history of Hollywood's theater television experiments is
already interlaced with the history of the cities in which these tests took place. See Douglas
Gomery, "Theater Television: the Missing Link of Technological Change in the US Motion Picture
Industry," Velvet Light Trap, no. 21 (1985), 58; Douglas Gomery, "Failed Opportunities: The
Integration of the US Motion Picture and Television Industries," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9,
no. 3 (1984), 221-222.
3. Jeanne Allen, "The Social Matrix of Television: Invention in the United States," in Regarding
Television: Critical Approaches—An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, MD: AFI/University
Publications of America, 1983), 109-119.
4. Gomery, "Failed Opportunities" 223. For an account of Paramount's efforts in theater TV, see
Timothy R. White, "Hollywood's Attempts at Appropriating Television: The Case of Paramount
Pictures" in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio, (New York: Unwin Hyman, 1990),
145-164. For a discussion of RCA's theater television interests in the same period, see William Boddy,
FiftiesTelevision: The Industry and its Critics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 23-24.
5. Gomery, "Theater Television: The Missing Link," 59.
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6. Edward Buscombe, "Thinking it Differently: Television and the Film Industry," Quarterly Review
of Film Studies 9, no. 3 (1984), 196-203. See also Allen, Ibid.
7. "Loop Theater Reports Seats Sold for Fight," Chicago Sunday Tribune, 19 June, 1960, 5; "Ali vs.
Frazier: The Show Biz Approach," Business Week, 13 February, 1971, 27; Wendell Smith, "Wall
Street Predicts $30 Million Gross for TV," Chicago Sun-Times, 6 March, 1971, 80; Robert Lewis
Shayon, "A New Champ?," Saturday Review, 10 April, 1971, 31. It seems likely that the concomi-
tant inflation of the "purse" in heavyweight boxing during this period was a result of the revenue
increase brought by theater TV.
8. See "Sports for Theater TV," Business Week, 4 July, 1953, 73 and "Now Closed Circuit TV Makes a
Direct Pitch to Customers," Business Week, 17 October, 1959, 54; "TV Goes Closed Circuit," New
York Times Magazine, 7 April, 1963, 159. Theater TV's transition from the industrial sphere of
motion pictures to the emergent field of closed circuit TV is suggested in the professional biogra-
phy of Nathan Halpern, President of Theater Network Television. Halpern began his career as the
Theater TV expert for a motion picture exhibitor chain in 1949. See "Series Success," Broadcasting,
10 October, 1949, 46.
9. I am grateful to Jim Schwoch for pointing this out to me.
10. For a full discussion of the cultural origins and implications of the metaphysics of presence his-
torically associated with electronic communications technology see Jeffrey Sconce, "Television
Ghosts: A Cultural History Of Electronic Presence In Telecommunications Technology" (Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995).
11. Paul Raiborn, "How the Film Industry Can Utilize Television to Boost the Boxoffice," Variety,
5 January, 1949, 103.
12. Ralph Austrian, "The Showmanship Side of Television," SMPE Journal 49, no. 5 (1947), 400.
13. Roy Wilcox and H.J. Schlafly, "Demonstration of a Large-Screen Television at Philadelphia,"
SMPE Journal 52, May 1949, 559. Emphasis in original.
14. Jane Feuer, "The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology," in Regarding Television—An
Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, MD: AFI / University Publications of America, 1983),
12-22.
15. Gomery, Ibid.
 "Like an Earthquake! " 321

16. See Shirley Povich, "Clay's Muslim Ties Slice His Earnings, Devalue Title/7 Chicago Sun-Times,
6 February, 1967, 79; Jack R. Griffin, "Clay-Terrell Settle It Today; Experts Say Cassius in 10,"
Chicago Sun-Times, 6 February, 1967, 80; "Clay-Terrell Ducats Going Fast, Bentley Says," Chicago
Daily Defender, 31 January, 1967, 24.
17. My information of the continued use of the older systems comes from a Chicago theater TV pro-
jectionist, Bill Meisner, whom I interviewed in May, 1993. My assessment of viewer indifference to
the technical specificity of the theater TV system being used comes from Meisner and from inter-
views with closed circuit attendees, cited below.
18. "20th Tele," Variety, 30 June, 1948, 21.
19. See "First Theater TV Network Event in 6 Cities Tonight," Hollywood Reporter, 13 June, 1951, 1;
"Telecast of LaMotta Bout Scores Again," Motion Picture Daily, 28 June, 1951, 1.
20. Ibid.
21. I draw this and subsequent demographic information on Chicago neighborhoods from maps
charting the migration of African American residences in Chicago over several decades published
in Where BlacksLive: Race and Residence in Chicago in the 1970s (Chicago: The Urban League, 1978).
22. I base this information on an examination of theater advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times and
the Chicago Tribune from the Patterson-Johanneson fight of 1959 through to the Frazier-Ellis fight
of 1967.
23. Chicago Tribune, 22 November, 1965, 9, sec. 2; 2, sec. 3; 5, sec. 3.
24. "NAACP Freedom Spectacular," Ebony, July 1964, 57-61.
25. "Cancel 2 TV Casts Over Racial Row," Chicago Tribune, 25 February, 1964, 1, sec. 3.
26. Truman Gibson, interview with the author, 28 January, 1995, Chicago. Gibson shared with me the
following articles from his clipping file: "Truman Gibson of the IBC," Pittsburgh Courier Magazine,
26 May, 1951, 7; "BC Basically in TV Business, Gibson says" (n.d., source unknown); "IBC does it
Through Channels," The New York Times, 28 April, 1951, 1945.
27. Shirley Povich, Ibid. For a similar depiction of Ali, see Jack R. Griffin, "What's Terrell Thinking?"
Chicago Sun-Times, 5 February, 1967, 92.
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28. Floyd Patterson, "In Defense of Cassius Clay," in Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and
its Cultural Content from Polemic to Pulpit, Gerald Early, ed. (Hopewell: N.J.: Ecco Press, 1992),
167-173.
29. The public sphere can be conceived on many different scales, from the (arguable fictive) level of
participatory democracy within the nation state to the level of everyday interacts through which
communities and other groups come together to define their interests and priorities. For a discus-
sion of the relationship between the concept of the public sphere and modes of spectatorship see
Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1991). For general discussions of the public sphere see the work of Jurgen
Habermas, Nancy Fraser, and Bruce Robbins, among others.
30. Manthia Diawara, "Malcolm X and the Black Public Sphere: Conversionists versus Culturalists,"
Public Culture 7 (1994), 48.
31. Mary Carbine, "The Finest Outside the Loop: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago's Black
Metropolis, 1905-1928," Camera Obscura,no. 23 (1990), 9-41.
32. Daniel Gene Streible, "A History of the Prizefight Film, 1984-1915" (Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Texas at Austin, 1994), 411. Streible gives a detailed account of the racial politics and other cir-
cumstances surrounding the fight film ban. see also Jeffery Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of
Boxing in American Society (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
33. Streible, Ibid., 297.
34. Ibid, 410.
35. Ibid, 319.
36. "Jeffries-Johnson Fight, Coliseum, July 4," The Chicago Defender, 2 July, 1910, 1. I am indebted to
Tim Anderson for pointing this article out to me. These "Electrial Boards" were a fairly common
way of transmitting information abut sporting events to fans in distant cities in the early part of
the century. In New York, for example, a similar system was used to convey results of the World
Series in 1917 to fans at Madison Square Garden and the Armory. See "Thrills by Ticker Local
Fan's Fate," The New York Times, 6 October, 1917, 10; "Fans Here are not Glum Over Defeat," the
New York Times, 7 October, 1917, 20. My thanks to Joel Steinberg for these citations.
37. The Chicago Defender, Ibid.
 322 Anna McCarthy

38. It is interesting to note that these "electric board" presentations of fights were not banned along
with their film counterparts. This may be because they offered non-indexical, highly symbolic
representations of the action. The lack of images of the actual fighters removed the visual "fact"
of race from the fight, perhaps making the spectacle of a Black fighter's victory seem less threat-
ening to censors and regulatory commissions.
39. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 107).
40. Diawara, Ibid., 43.
41. Streible, Ibid., 433.
42. Cecil Blair, interview with the author, November 11, 1994, Chicago. Brady, interview with the
author, November 11, 1994, Chicago. Truman Gibson, interview with the author, January 28, 1995,
Chicago.
43. This was rivaled only by broadcast TV, which did present some heavyweight titled bouts in the
forties. The practice was discontinued in the 1950s when ancillary rights for closed circuit theater
TV broadcasts became a primary promotional revenue.
44. Cecil Blair, interview with the author, November 11, 1994, Chicago. Brady, interview with the
author, November 11, 1994, Chicago.
45. "Run, Cassius, Run," The New Yorker, 7 April, 1964, 43.
46. "TV Talk," Sports Illustrated, 9 March, 1970, 7.
47. Quoted in Diawara, Ibid., 41.
48. Ibid., 46.
49. Ibid., 47.
50. Diawara forges this link more explicitly in another context, through a wordplay that connects the
word "boheme" (the archetype of Benjamin's flaneur) to the word "homeboy" (the central figure
of Black modernity). See Manthia Diawara, Plenary Address, Society for Cinema Studies
Conference, Syracuse, NY, 1994.
51. "The Fight," The New Yorker, 20 March, 1971, 35.
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52. Cecil Blair, interview with the author, November 11, 1994, Chicago. Brady, interview with the
author, November 11, 1994, Chicago.
53. See, for example, Jack Griffin, Ibid., Tom Fitzpatrick, "Ex-Champ Views Fight in Wheel Chair"
(Chicago Sun-Times, 6 March, 1971), 6.
54. "The Fight," The New Yorker, 20 March, 1971, 35.
55. Ibid.
56. "Near Riot at Coliseum," Chicago Daily Defender, 9 March, 1971, 2; "Angry Fans Mess Up Two
Telecast Halls," Chicago Sun-Times, 9 March, 1971, 5.
57. Bill Meisner, interview with the author, May 1993. It should be noted that Meisner was heavily
preoccupied with the racial make-up of boxing audiences in the theaters where he worked.
According to his account of theater TV projection in Chicago, there were no Black projectionists in
the local projectionist union during his employment in the city.
58. Cecil Blair, interview with the author, November 11, 1994, Chicago. Brady, interview with the
author, November 11, 1994, Chicago.
59. Similar questions found expression in the public persona of Sonny Liston, the heavyweight cham-
pion superseded by Ali (as Cassius Clay) Widely considered a thug among boxing fans and jour-
nalists, Liston was, in the words of James Baldwin, "a man aching for respect and responsibility."
Describing a conversation with Liston prior to his bout with Floyd Patterson in 1963, Baldwin
presaged the polarizations surrounding the Ali-Frazier fight. "I felt terribly ambivalent, as many
Negroes do these days, since we are all trying to decide, in one way or another, which attitude, in
our terrible American dilemma, is most effective: the disciplined sweetness of Floyd, or the out-
spoken intransigence of Liston." James Baldwin, "The Fight: Patterson vs. Liston," reprinted in
Gerald Early, Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1989), 333.
60. Norman O. Unger, "Ali Chosen to Whup Frazier," The Chicago Daily Defender, 8 March, 1971, 24.
61. "The Fight," The New Yorker, 20 March, 1971, 35.
62. A. S. Doc, Young, "Good Morning, Sports," Chicago Daily Defender, 1 March, 1971, 24.
63. "Reader Poll Favors Muhammed to Win," The Chicago Daily Defender, 8 March, 1971, 3.
64. The Chicago Daily Defender, 3 February, 1971, 1.
 "Like an Earthquake!" 323

65. See "Dr. Charles G. Hurst: The Mastermind of Malcolm X College," Ebony, March 1970, 29.
66. Grayson Mitchell, "Ali's Fall Black Audience," Chicago Sun-Times, 9 March, 1971, 7.
67. Feuer, Ibid.
68. Mimi White, "Ideological Analysis and Television," in Channels of Discourse: Television and
Contemporary Criticism, ed. Robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1987), 161-202.
69. Gerald Early, Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1989), 121.
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