![]() Hope also led the betting spread, holding Jeffries’s victory at a 7–10 odds. Bombast and speculation of the highest order filled the newspapers. Reporters followed closely the fighters’ training period, which lasted months until the July 4th match. They wanted his symbolic defeat, as one reporter put it, “to show the millions of people of the white race in all quarters of the world that there is one Caucasian who is the physical superior of the greatest fighter the black race has ever produced.” They wanted to see him served his comeuppance. Known for speeding in expensive cars, frequenting gambling rooms, and worst of all, coupling with white women, he was exactly the kind of figure the irascible white faction of society couldn’t tolerate. (Library of Congress)Īt the same time, Johnson aroused fierce animosity. (In Johnson’s case, he appeared in a string of vaudeville shows in the months leading up to the fight.) And this new match was shaping up to be the fight of his career.Ī June 1910 illustration in Puck Magazine depicts the upcoming Johnson-Jeffries bout as a race relations role reversal. He loved the spotlight, and was known for his sharp dressing and wit, and in some sense anticipated the time when star athletes would become above all entertainers, ready to perform on stage and pose for the camera. It was easy for a fighter in his prime like Johnson to welcome the high-profile fight. Yet Jeffries, who had always refused to fight black opponents, was finally persuaded to come out of retirement (the $101,000 purse ($3.7 million today) helped). Though a fearsome heavyweight boxer in his day, Jim Jeffries’s prime was behind him, having quit boxing six years before to spend his days on his Burbank ranch. “But one thing remains,” wrote novelist Jack London who reported with dread on the boxer’s Australian victory, “ Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and wipe that smile from Johnson’s face.” Johnson - witty, charismatic, rich, well-dressed, and apparently unstoppable - practically dared an uneasy white public to find a counterweight. Born in Galveston, Texas, the son of two former slaves, he had shaken the sporting public when he won the heavyweight championship in Sydney, Australia two years before. Jack Johnson was the world’s premier up-and-comer. The fight itself made for an odd pairing. Times cartoon from July 7, 1910, underlines the explosive nature of racial violence resulting from Johnson’s victory. And in Omaha, a black man was smothered to death in a barber’s chair, while in Wheeling, West Virginia, a black man driving an expensive car - just as the playboyish Jack Johnson was famous for - was beset by a mob and hanged.Īn L.A. In Washington, two white men were fatally stabbed by black men, with 236 people arrested in that city alone. ![]() Louis, a black crowd marched the streets, pushing whites off the sidewalk and harassing them, before being clubbed and dispersed by police. In Manhattan’s San Juan Hill neighborhood, a mob set fire to a black tenement, while blocking the doorway to prevent the occupants’ escape. one negro was killed at Mounds, Ill., and a negro fatally wounded in Roundeye, Va.,” reported one local newspaper, explaining that “the tension that existed everywhere vented itself out chiefly in street shuffles.”Ī report from Houston read, “Charles Williams, a negro fight enthusiast, had his throat slashed from ear to ear on a streetcar by a white man, having announced too vociferously his appreciation of Jack Johnson’s victory in Reno.” “One man was shot in Arkansas, two negroes were killed at Lake Providence, La. The day after, newspapers set on the difficult task of tallying the aftermath. Louis, Omaha, New Orleans, Little Rock, and Los Angeles, erupted with the anger and vindication of a racially divided country. Cities around the nation, including Houston, New York, St. Jack Johnson, a black boxer, had defeated the white Jim Jeffries in a heavyweight fight in the middle of the Reno desert. On Independence Day, 1910, race riots ignited across America. Jack Johnson looms over a fallen Jim Jeffries in the concluding rounds of their Independence Day rumble in 1910.
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