Abstract
On Independence Day, 1910, Jack Johnson fought “white hope” Jim Jeffries for the heavyweight title. The title fight was a major event, attracting twenty thousand spectators and a press corps of six hundred. Thousands waited outside press buildings in cities across the country to hear round-by-round reports of the fight from the wire service.3 More was at stake than the heavyweight title. Johnson’s victory would inflame white sentiment, and provoked the first nationwide race riot in United States history. According to the New York Times ,riots “occurred in all parts of the country”; it added that “scores of negroes were injured seriously, and eight negroes were killed outright.” The Chicago Tribune reported:
There were battles in the streets of practically every large city in the country. Negroes formed the greater number of those who were victims of the outbreaks. They were set upon by whites and killed or wounded because of cheers for Johnson’s victory.4
This fight was the greatest event that had happened to the black race since the Emancipation Proclamation. No other day since the “Day of Jubilee” had had such a positive effect upon the black American’s self image and his ability to compete on an equal basis with the white man. When Jack Johnson met Jim Jeffries they were representing the hoped and fears of their respective races.
—William H. Wiggins, Jr. (1973)1
[Jim Jeffries] in his prime no greater fighter ever lived. May be still be man enough to lick Johnson.
— Richard Barry ( 1910) 2
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Notes
William H. Wiggins, Jr., “Jack Johnson as Bad Nigger: The Folklore of His Life,” in Contemporary Black Thought, ed. Robert Chrisman and Nathan Hare (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1973), 67.
Richard Barry, “The Prize Ring,” Pearson’s Magazine 24. 1 (July 1910), 10.
See Arthur Ruhl, “The Fight in the Desert,” Collier’s XLV (23 July 1910), 12–13
Harris Merton Lyon, “In Reno Riotous,” Hampton Magazine 25 (September 1910), 386–96
Denzil Batchelor, Jack Johnson and His Times (London: Phoenix Sports Books, 1956), 82
Al-Tony Gilmore, Bad Nigger! The National Impact of Jack Johnson (Port Washington, N. Y: Kennikat Press, 1975), 42
Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1983), 103.
Roi Ottley, Black Odyssey: The Story of the Negro in America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 206.
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 81.
Sal Fradella, Jack Johnson (Boston: Branden, 1990), 3.
For the most thorough description of the history of the Johnson-Burns fight, see Jeffrey Wells, Boxing Day: The Fight That Changed the World (Sidney, Australia: Harper Sports, 1998).
Jack Johnson, In the Ring and Out: The Autobiography of Jack Johnson (1927; New York: Citadel, 1992), 185.
Jack Johnson versus Jim Jeffries (1910), complete fight, obtained from ESPN’s “Big Fights,” tape no. BFE000001201. My thanks to Mike Cocchi, ESPN Enterprises, for his assistance in obtaining the tape. For an interesting study of boxing on film, see Dan Streible, “A History of Boxing Films, 1894–1915,” Film History 3.3 (1989), 235–257.
Finis Farr, Black Champion (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1964), 113.
Quoted in Robert H. deCoy, Jack Johnson: The Big Black Fire (Los Angeles: Hol-loway House, 1969, 1991), 114
Howard Bingham and Max Wallace, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fights: Cassias Clay vs. the United States of America (New York: M. Evans and Co., 2000), 33.
W E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Three Negro Classics, John Hope Franklin, ed. (1903; reprint, New York: Avon, 1965), 221.
See, for instance, Henry van Dyke, The Spirit of America (New York: MacMillan, 1910)
James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (1930; New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 66.
John Hoberman, Darwin’s Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997), 164.
Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Fraits and Pendencies of the American Negro (Ithaca: An-ci rus & Church, 1896)
Charles Carroll, The Negro as Beast (St. Louis: American Books and Bible House, 1900)
Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southern’s Problem (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1904)
Thomas Dixon, The Clansman (New York: Gösset Dunlap, 1905)
Robert Shufeldt, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization (Boston: R G. Badger, 1907)
Alfred P. Schultz, Race or Mongrel (Boston: L. C Page & Co., 1908)
William P. Pickett, The Negro Problem (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909).
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944, reprint, 1992), 172.
John W Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866–1876 (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1902), 133.
George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race,” Modernism/Modernity 1.1 (January 1994), 6.
See, for instance, C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955, 1974), 74.
Nancy Leys Stepah and Sander L. Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Seien-tific Racism,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Do-minick LaCapra (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1991), 72–103.
For a discussion on the ways in which the working class employs fantasy as a vi-carious means of compensating for their experience within the alienating labor process, see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, tr. Peter Labanyi et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; German edition, 1972), 32–38.
Dorothy Forrester, “Jim-a-da-Jeff,” quoted in Lester S. Levy, Give Me Yesterday: American History in Song, 1890–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 214.
W E. B. Du Bois, “The Relation of the Negro to the Whites in the South,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 18 (July 1901), 123.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Na-tionalism (London: Verso, 1983).
Susan Hegeman, borrowing the term “superorganic” from anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, defines culture as “the realm of behavior that was not biologically inherited, but learned and transmitted through contact with other persons: skills techniques, styles, belief systems, languages, [and] refinements of talent” (Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999], 82); see, A. L. Kroeber, “The Superorganic,” American Anthropologist 19.2 (April-June 1917), 163–213.
Leon F Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerns in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage, 1998), 327.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of Aesthetics (London: Blackwell, 1990), 13.
For a discussion of prizefighting and the prohibition against it, see Jeffrey T. Sam-mons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Sport (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)
Pierre Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 431.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (1905; reprint, Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1991), 10
Edmund Morris, The Rue of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 112–13.
Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 139.
Duffield Osborn, “A Defense of Pugilism,” North American Review 46 (April 1888), 430–35.
E. D. Cope, “The Effeminisation of Man,” Open Court 7.43 (26 October 1893), 3847.
Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 141
John Boyle O’Reilly, Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport (Boston: Ticknor & Co., 1888), 85
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 116.
Jack London, “Report from Reno, NV,” 29 June 1910, quoted in Jack London Reports, ed. King Hendricks and Irving Shepard (Garden City, N. Y: Doubleday, 1970), 280–81.
Frederic Copie Jaher, “White America Views Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali,” Sport in America: New Historical Perspectives, Donald Spivey, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 150.
Theodore Roosevelt, “The Recent Prize Fight,” Outlook 95.11 (16 July 1910), 550
John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 389.
Roger D. Abrahams, “Some Varieties of Heroes in America,” Journal of Folklore Institute 3.3 (December 1966), 341
Lewis R Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Fhought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 87.
Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (New York: Routledge, 1995), 29.
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1953, reprint, 1995), 190.
Gena Dagel Caponi, Signifyin(g), Sancitifyin, and Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 3.
Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York: Negro University Press, 1934, reprint, 1969).
Kimberly W Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Mod-ernism (London: Routledge, 2000), 30.
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5.
Tad Dargan, quoted in The Autobiography of Jack Johnson: In and Out of the Ring (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 13.
Quoted in J. Manson Brewer, Worse Days and Better Times: Folklore of the North Car-olina Negro (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 178.
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© 2002 David Krasner
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Krasner, D. (2002). Men in Black and White: Race and Masculinity in the Heavyweight Title Fight of 1910. In: A Beautiful Pageant. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06625-1_2
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