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By: Patrick Hill | TheLoop21 (Add to your loop)
Tue, 07/27/2010 - 10:07

Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.

A hundred years ago this month a Black heavyweight from Galveston, TX named Jack Arthur Johnson waded through a largely hostile white crowd and climbed through the ropes of an open air boxing ring in Reno, NV to face thirty-five-year-old undefeated former champion Jim Jeffries.

What had been billed as the first “Fight of the Century” turned out, according to most accounts, to be a lopsided rout. To the astonishment of most of the 20,000 fans who had traveled to Reno for the occasion, the Galveston Giant, as Johnson had come to be known, proceeded in turns to lure, taunt, then relentlessly counterpunch the former champion across every corner of the ring until the referee called a stop to the hot, bloody mess in the 15th round.

This was a significant moment on a number of levels; the most obvious of which was that it marked the fight game’s grudging acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Johnson’s heavyweight title victory over Tommy Burns two years earlier in Australia.

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For Black Americans, the symbolism went much deeper. On a July 4th holiday, under the desert sun in Reno, a son of ex-slaves would have his hand raised as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world and the embodiment of all that the title signified: the king of Western masculinity, the baddest man on the planet, a living, shining, muscular refutation of the racist mythology so prevalent at the time.

In many quarters of the white American working class this was too much to take. As biographer Randy Roberts put it, "one Jack Johnson could be easily handled, but a thousand Jack Johnsons, or ten thousand, in a city like Chicago with a swelling Black population--that was a different matter entirely."

As word of Johnson’s victory spread in Chicago and other cities around the country jubilant Blacks were attacked by angry white mobs. Once calm was restored in the days after the bout two dozen lay dead. Responsibility for much of this tumult lay in the hands of journalists who had for months promoted the bout as a test of racial and civilizational superiority.

But Jack Johnson's victory—coming directly on the heels of Japan’s triumph over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, just over a decade after Ethiopia’s defeat of the Italian army at the Battle of Adowa in 1896 and during a period in which colonial expansion into Latin America and Asia had become domestic and international imperatives for the U.S. —exposed a deep crack in the façade of white racial superiority at the very moment it was seeking to consolidate itself as a domestic and global ideology.

For their part, African-Americans saw the separate but equal sporting competitions as the social counterfeit that they were.