Jack Johnson and the Fight of the Century

During Jack Johnson's time, the heavyweight championship was unofficially a whites-only title. Despite discrimination, he fought title-holder Tommy Burns in 1908. Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion, but some questioned his legitimacy.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chalk Reboarding, and we
are of course covering Black History Month for February and today.

(00:21):
It's pretty hard to imagine professional sports in the United
States were once segregated, perhaps especially a sport like boxing,
where some of the biggest names guys like Muhammad Ali,
Joe Louis, George Foreman, the recently departed Joe Frasier are
African American. But at the turn of the twentieth century,
the idea that there could be a black heavyweight champion

(00:44):
was impossible. And surprisingly, the issue wasn't just about a
white man fighting a black man and the physical contact
that that would necessitate, which, unfortunately, in the context of segregation,
that kind of makes sense. Uh, we're sharing a water fountain,
were sharing a waiting room was considered not okay. It's
gonna figure by extension that something is physical is boxing,

(01:07):
where you're gonna swap sweat and blood and embrace in
the ring would also not be okay. But black and
white boxers did fight each other exhibition matches, weren't uncommon,
and just as the white Major League Baseball players would
barnstorm with their Negro League counterparts decades before integration, boxers
of different races would fight at pretty much all levels,

(01:29):
except at the highest level, the heavyweight championship. For several reasons,
which will discuss some more. The heavyweight title was considered
so prestigious, so honorable, it couldn't be sullied by a
black contender in some people's opinion, let alone a black champion.
So it took Texas born Jack Johnson. We're not talking

(01:51):
about the singer, of course, we're talking about the boxer
to break that color line. And to do it, he
had to be not only a powerful fighter, but really
dogged in his pursuit of the fight, trying to get
somebody to actually fight him. He hounded his potential opponents,
knowing that eventually the honor of defending that title, which

(02:12):
was so such an important thing in the boxing world,
plus of course the purse money that would come with
defending it, would eventually make it worthwhile for a white
champion to step into the ring and fight with a
black man. So first we're gonna give you a little
bit about Jack Johnson's background before we get to the fighting,
the really exciting part. John Arthur Johnson or Jack, was

(02:34):
born March thirty one, eight seventy eight, in Galaston, Texas.
His parents were former slaves who educated all six of
their kids, working as a school janitor and a laundress.
And though Jack only had five years of schooling, he
became a voracious student of history, with a particular fondness
for Napoleon. And he also played bass fiddle, loved classical music,

(02:56):
and invented stuff he invented. He had a patent on
a I think we should have put him in our
earlier podcast on Unlikely Inventor Unlikely Inventors one. So as
a kid, Johnson started fighting in battle royals, which were
these really horrible sounding underground fights where a white audience
would gather to watch a group of black boys fight

(03:19):
round robins style until one champ remained. That champion would
be able to collect, you know, a pretty modest purse
of change that had been thrown on the stage. But
from that sort of inauspicious start, Johnson worked his way up,
moved up to fights with actual purses, and started riding
the rails to barnstorm around the country and also helping

(03:40):
more experienced boxers train as a as a sparring partner.
And as we already mentioned, blacks did fight whites, it
just wasn't for that top spot. In fact, much of
Johnson's defensive expertise. He could seemingly swat away punches very easily,
and that came from practicing and training with Joe choint
Ski after the two were jailed together for boxing in

(04:02):
the first place. And just a note for you here,
just a little side note at the turning contact boxing
context for you guys. Exactly around the turn of the century,
boxing was a popular sport with all classes of people,
but it was still a sport that was considered kind
of a lista even illegal in many places. Despite the
gloves rules and timed rounds, and with new techniques picked

(04:25):
up from Joe, plus his naturally powerful punch and his
six foot one and a half inch frame, Johnson moved
on to bigger cities and he eventually made up to
one thousand dollars per fight. He was becoming a contender,
but one who would never be allowed or so A
lot of people thought to fight the heavyweight champion. But

(04:45):
why why wasn't he allowed And we're gonna talk about
that some, but at first I really want to recommend
there's a fantastic Ken Burns documentary on Jack Johnson called
Unforgivable Blackness, and for me, it really helped explain the
racial politics behind boxing at the time. It's easy to
find a lot of biographical information on Johnson, but it
helped put some of that into context for me. So

(05:09):
even though boxing was an illicit sport, I mean, people
would campaign against its violence, the heavyweight championship was really
kind of an upstanding position. It was well respected and
John L. Sullivan, who was called the Boston strong Boy,
had a lot to do with the respect for that position.
He was the first gloved heavyweight champion and really became

(05:32):
a huge celebrity, kind of a sports hero, long before
sports heroes really existed, and he made the title something
that was actually important to the general audience, almost a
byeword for the strongest man in the world. And he
even bragged that he could beat anyone in the world, except,

(05:53):
of course, it was understood African Americans, who he just
would not fight. He refused to fight black boxer, drawing
a color line after he became the heavyweight champion. Since
the heavyweight title represented more than just physical prowess or
boxing expertise, it represented physical superiority to all other men,

(06:15):
and so it had this really weighty social significance to it.
And Sullivan's precedent continued with later heavyweight champs all the
way through Jim Jeffries, the boiler Maker, who had made
his early name fighting some of the best black boxers
of the day, and Jeffreys was kind of the ultimate
boxing specimen of that era, who was hairy chested, he

(06:36):
once drank a case of whiskey in two days, and
he kept a bear as a pet. But even though
up and coming Jack Johnson was winning against all other
major black boxers of the time, clinching the unofficial Negro
heavyweight Championship, Jeffries wouldn't fight him. They instead engaged in
a kind of battle of words and intimidation. After knocking

(06:56):
out Jim Jeffrey's brother Jack in an l a fight,
Johnson told the spey tater champ that he could beat
him too, egging him on really, and then in a
San Francisco saloon, Jefferies, after Jackson had again said why
don't you fight me. Jefferies offered Jackson two dollars on
the bar to fight him completely alone in the seller

(07:18):
you know this really sketchy sounding scenario. Johnson refused that
he was only going to fight him if it was
a real fight. Finally, though, in nineteen o five, the
undefeated Jefferies decided that he was going to retire from boxing,
retire and become an alfalfa farmer. And of course, though
retiring like that, he needed to um crown a new champion,

(07:41):
a new heavyweight champion, and so he refereed about between
two white contenders and name the winner the new heavyweight champion.
Johnson obviously was really mad that this had happened this way.
He hadn't gotten his chance to fight the undisputed champion,
and so he started still just going after the title

(08:03):
anyway he could, going after the new title holders. Eventually,
that title holder was Tommy Burns, who was a Canadian
born Noah Brusso, and Burns, like his predecessors, wouldn't fight
Johnson either though, so it seemed like it was going
to be a losing battle. Yeah, but Johnson wouldn't relent.
He followed Burns around the world challenging him everywhere he went,

(08:27):
and eventually it started to get embarrassing for Burns, even
though in some twisted logic, Burns would call Johnson yellow,
even though he was the one where don't get that.
I don't either, So he said what he thought would
be an insurmountable barrier between him and Johnson. Burns said
he wouldn't break the color line for less than thirty
thousan dollars. So he thought, Okay, surely nobody's going to

(08:48):
go for that. But sure enough, somebody did agree to
pay that much. In the fall of nineteen o eight,
Australian Hugh known as Huge Deal McIntosh agreed to put
up the money and put on the fight. So Burns
accepted the thirty thousand dollars. Johnson, by the way, only
got five thousand. And their fight took place the day

(09:08):
after Christmas night in Sydney, Australia. So we're gonna give
you a brief play by play of how the fight
went down. It started amid huge cheers for Burns and
jeers for Johnson, even though, and you can see this
in the footage, he was still blowing the crowd kisses
quite kindly Johnson had Burns on the floor within seconds,

(09:29):
and even though Burns started to call Johnson racial slurs,
Johnson really had a more effective way to um anger
or embarrass his opponent. He would point at spots on
his own body, like on his side or on his stomach,
just point at it with his glove, urging Burns to
punch him there. And when Burns, after clearly a second

(09:52):
of hesitation, like what on earth is going on here,
would really punch him, Johnson wouldn't even flinch or react,
I mean really kind of stuffed to psych him out. Johnson, meanwhile,
would hug Burns, holding him up to keep him fighting
when he was starting to get tired. By the fourteenth round,
it was clear that Johnson was going to be the winner.
Police stopped the fight and the cameras. You can see

(10:14):
a freeze frame the last the last second of the
cameras rolling, and then Johnson was declared winner. They stopped
the cameras because they didn't want to see They didn't
want everybody to see Johnson defeating this white guy. But
it didn't matter if people saw it or not. At
thirty years old, Johnson was the new heavyweight champion, so
now it's time to start talking a little bit about

(10:37):
Johnson's personal life, because it's what everyone else was doing
at the time anyway, And if you've studied the Harlem Renaissance,
Red w E, DWO Boys, or even listen to our
Mark Scarvey podcast, you've heard of the New Negro. A
Michael Walsh article in The Smithsonian does a lot to
put that era of the New Negro into context. It
came after a dark post reconstruction era where Jim Crow

(10:59):
Laws caught a segregation and lynching's really increased. And by
the turn of the century, though, with the Great Migration
providing African Americans with new opportunities in industrial work up north,
things seemed to be looking up a little bit. The
idea of the New Negro developed. They were born free,
ready for opportunity, and not content to just hang back

(11:20):
and wait. So Johnson was the epitome of that New Negro.
He dressed immaculately, he lived finally, and he spoke freely.
But for many African Americans and certainly for many white Americans,
he took things a little bit too far. He drank heavily,
he raced and crashed fast cars. He had gold crowns,

(11:40):
he got into arguments with the owners of the vaudeville
theaters that he'd moonlight in. Most seriously, though, he dated
white women who he would often meet at Chicago's Fancis Bordello.
When the news that the new champion, Johnson was traveling
around with a white companion his hometown of Galveston canceled
the big parade they had planned for him. So was
the big issue, and it's important to keep that one

(12:02):
in mind as we go forward. But there was another
issue going on for Johnson, to one that was actually
pertinent to boxing. Since the old champion, Jim Jefferies, had
retired undefeated to his elf Alfa farm, some people began
questioning whether Johnson was really a legitimate champion at all.
Had really bothered folks when they're there when there were

(12:23):
the white champions in between, but was bothering them now?
So Johnson answered that he would fight Jeffreys or anyone
else who wanted to fight him, and almost immediately the
search to find that anyone who was considered or called
the great White Hope started. So seriously, anyone who was

(12:43):
white could be a challenger. They'd come from the fields,
from circuses and if they finally got to Johnson, he'd
steamrolled them. And after running out of white hopes, Johnson
took on his pal and drinking buddy, Stanley Ketchel, the
white and middleweight champion of the world, and, according to
the Burns document or, fight promoters dressed Ketchell up for
photos and high healed cowboy boots and a bulky coat

(13:05):
to make him look more comparable to Johnson. They also
had each fighter promised something, so Ketchell promised that he
wouldn't try to actually win and in the process wind
up getting really badly hurt. It was much smaller, and
Johnson promised that he wouldn't knock out Ketchell. Broken promises
all around. However, things did not go according to plan

(13:26):
what they did for a little bit. For the first
part of the fight, it seemed like everybody was happy.
It was gonna turn out to be a great movie.
The boxers could make a lot of money off of it.
Everybody would be good. But in the twelfth round, Ketchell
really started trying to win, and he knocked down Johnson
as soon as he was up. There was obviously a
huge mistake. As soon as he was up, Johnson knocked

(13:48):
out Ketchell in the process, knocking out all of his
front teeth at the route, which is I'm looking at
to Blina is cringing right now. It's maybe one of
the more disturbing physical parts of this podcast, getting your
teeth knocked out. Eventually, though, after all of these defeats

(14:08):
of the Great White Hopes, the defeat of Catchel, it
was clear that there was only one legitimate contender out
there for Johnson. That was, of course, Jim Jefferies. Even
though now he was thirty four, he was nearly three
hundred pounds and he was seriously enjoying his alfalfa farming.
He was enjoying retirement. He however, had to be the

(14:30):
Great White Hope, and eventually Jefferies agreed to come out
of retirement and fight us. Marshall Texts Ricord won the
rights to promote what promised to be the fight of
the century, and it was set for July four so
each fighter would be paid fifty thousand dollars, which is
about one point six million dollars today for film rights,

(14:52):
plus assigning bonus of ten thousand dollars, and plus the
winner would receive two thirds of a one D and
one thousand dollar purse. The governor of California ended up
banning the match, though, and after that Record moved it
to Reno, Nevada, where price fighting was legal. Basically still
kind of a wild westish area, I guess, seemed like
prize fighting was a civilized pursuit with all of its

(15:14):
rules and gloves and people not usually getting killed. The
only condition of the sudden venue switch was that the
governor of Nevada had Record swear that the fight wasn't stacked,
so Record did a lot to try to make sure
that the fight was secure. He placed deputies at the
arena's entrances who confiscated firearms from the crowd of twenty

(15:34):
thousand celebrities and attendance included a former champ, John L. Sullivan,
and novelist slash sports commentator Jack London. There were even
mock fights set up around the country with reenactors recreating
the fight. Blow for blow really was the fight of
the century at this point, but don't forget for a
minute that the whole thing was largely about race. The
Smithsonian article Dablina mentioned has a quote from the New

(15:57):
York Times on the eve of the fight that read,
if the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his
ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to
much more than physical equality with their white neighbors. Pretty
serious stuff. So despite Jeffrey's rush training, though in a

(16:18):
massive sudden weight loss he lost about a hundred pounds,
he was still favored over Johnson ten to four. But
Johnson wasn't worried. He was quoted as saying he felt
like a kid on Christmas morning on the on the
eve of the fight. This was, after all, what he
had been waiting for, you know, not just achieving the championship,
but defending it from any further claims. So now we're

(16:41):
going to give you a little rundown of this particular fight.
Jefferies refused to shake hands with Johnson right off the bat,
and his cornerman, former champ gentleman Jim Corbett, whose defensive
style Johnson had actually emulated, started a stream of racial
slurs that lasted the entire match. According to an ebb
an article by Lauren Bennett Jr. Johnson later remembered quote,

(17:04):
I sensed that most of the great audience was hostile
to me. But despite the sun and the jeering mob,
and the occasional thought that there might be a gunman
somewhere in that vast array of humanity. I was cool
and perfectly at ease. I never had any doubt of
the outcome. And if you watch the footage, it really
looks that way too. You can watch this uh this

(17:26):
match online and see the two fighters basically locked in
an embrace, with Johnson just lobbing one undercut after another
at Jeffreys. This is the part that stood out to
me the most. Jeffrey's head just bounces around every time
he gets hit by Johnson. In the second round, Johnson
told him, don't rush, Jim. I can do this all day.

(17:48):
He asked Jefferies, how do you feel, Jim, how do
you like it? Does it hurt? And by the end
of the fourteenth round, Jefferies just looked horrifying. His nose
was broken and gushing blood, eyes were swollen, even his
legs are all stained with more blood. He looks really,
really bad. In the fifteenth round, he was knocked down

(18:09):
and then knocked down again, falling over the lower ropes
that time, and at that point the crowd started to
cry for Jefferies not to be knocked out. They didn't
want to see their formerly undefeated champion get knocked out
by Johnson, so the fight was ended with Johnson declared
the winner. And again if you see the footage, it
shows Johnson's cornermen quickly forming this defensive circle around him,

(18:33):
surrounding him to protect him from the furious crowd around
the country to some people were celebrating, some were not.
African Americans came out to celebrate, but race riots began
pretty quickly and up to twenty six people died as
a result of these race riots over a boxing match.

(18:53):
But Jeffries at least concedes defeat really graciously. He later says, quote,
Jack Johnson was better than I ever was, and tells
his friends that he couldn't have even beaten him in
his prime, so kind of putting an end to any
purizing that, well, maybe if Jeffreys had been younger and
in better shape, things would have been different. So Johnson,

(19:13):
now the undisputed champ, was unbeatable, except when it came
to his private life, that is, which began to fall
apart pretty quickly. He started drinking heavily and he threatened
to commit suicide. He was also treated for nervous exhaustion
and was arrested for speeding. He established a color line
of his own, too, no longer fighting black contenders since

(19:34):
he considered them harder fights for not as much money.
He also beat his wealthy girlfriend at a Duria badly
enough for her to be sent to the hospital, and
after that they married, but her sad life living upstairs
from his black and tan Chicago club Cafe d Champion,
isolated from both black and white communities, drove her to

(19:54):
commit suicide in September nineteen twelve, and Johnson was really
inconsolable after that. But within only a month or so
he had paired up with a nineteen year old white
prostitute named Lucille Cameron Um and drove with her across
state lines. And so for all those people out there

(20:15):
who were ready for Jack Johnson to just go away
and stop causing so much trouble, finally this was a
way to eliminate him. So backing up a little bit,
in nineteen ten, Congress had passed the Man Act, which
was originally established to ban the transport of women across
state lines for immoral purposes. It was supposed to be

(20:38):
something to stop human trafficking, but the Justice Department used
it to attack Johnson. It was never meant to be
something for two consenting adults traveling together to be you know,
punished with This was just their opportunity, it was. So
Johnson was arrested October eighteenth, nineteen twelve. He was released
on bail, and in the intervening months he married Lucille,

(21:01):
the woman who he had been traveling with, and she
had already refused to testify against him. So with that
turn of events, without her testimony, the case against Johnson
was really worthless. So the Bureau of Investigation got involved
in the whole thing, trying to find any evidence that
Johnson had broken the Man Act at some earlier point.

(21:22):
Eventually they connected with a former white bordello girlfriend of
Johnson's who agreed to testify she had cross state lines
with him, even though they had done so before the
Man Act even existed, and Johnson has found guilty. He
sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison.
But while he was out on bond pending appeal, Johnson

(21:44):
just skipped down, very likely disguised as a member of
a Negro league baseball team. He then fled to Montreal,
rendezvous with Lucille, and they took off together for Europe,
where the reception was kind of icy, yeah, especially considering
he had been quite well received in Europe earlier, but
after this bad press, after this conviction, people weren't so

(22:05):
friendly to him anymore. Johnson defended threats to his title abroad,
but he soon found it impossible to earn a living
as a boxer in the middle of a war, so
he began looking for a bigger payday, and back home,
folks were still looking for a great white hope, a
new one, because Johnson was, after all, still the heavyweight champion. Finally,
on April fifth, nineteen fifteen, Johnson met with Kansas native

(22:29):
Jess Willard, a six ft six twenty seven year old
who had killed an opponent once with a punch. Since
they couldn't fight in the US due to Johnson's conviction,
they fought in nearby Havana, Cuba. So Johnson he by
this point thirty seven years old, maybe not in the
best shape anymore, and kind of taking things a little
bit too lightly. He didn't train like his trainers wanted

(22:52):
him to. By the twentieth round of this fight with
Jess Willard, which is happening in a hundred and five
degree he too. Johnson was clearly getting tired, and by
the twenty five round he asked his cornerman to see
that his wife got out safely, and I told him
I'm probably not going to make it much longer. And
then finally in the round he lost to a knockout punch.

(23:16):
Another really famous freeze frame image of Johnson lying there
on the ground with his arms thrown up over his head.
So after losing the title, finally his earning power was
just completely slashed, and Johnson went back to Europe toured
a little bit more. When the US entered the war,
he offered to volunteer for U S service in exchange

(23:37):
for a pardon that didn't happen. He traveled on to
Mexico and then finally in nine he was ready to
go home. After seven years on the run, he surrendered
at the US border and spent a year in leaven
Worth Prison. It wasn't a horrible prison situation, considering he
acted as a trustee, he trained other prisoner as He

(24:00):
even staged a few exhibition matches while he was there,
and probably my favorite detail of his prison experience. He
listed his profession as pugilist chauffeur, which, in case it
wasn't clear earlier, Johnson really liked fast cars and driving,
so that was clearly important to him just right after boxing,

(24:22):
and Johnson did keep boxing, but the Havana fight really
was the end of the major part of his career.
The new batch of heavyweights again wouldn't agree to cross
that color line, so there wasn't a black heavyweight champ
until Joe Lewis in seven, and he was deliberately set
up by his managers as a clean, living, decent man,
in other words, not a Jack Johnson. That reminded me

(24:43):
a little bit of an episode from a couple of
years ago Katie and I did on Satchel Page, where
Jackie Robinson was very much set up as an alternate
to Satchel Page, who had this flamboyant public personality, you know,
a real jokester. He would entertain the crowds. Jackie Robinson was,
you know, somebody who could keep his head down and

(25:03):
go play Major League baseball. So that reminded me a
bit of that. But Johnson just did this huge range
of activities in addition to his occasional boxing. He ran
a Harlem club called Cafe Deluxe, which eventually became the
Cotton Club. He appeared in Aida. He married his third wife.

(25:24):
He even preached all sorts of stuff going on with him.
In the spring of while returning from a tour of Texas,
Johnson lost control of a speeding sports car near Raleigh
and he crashed into a telephone pole. So he died
at age sixty eight, and his record, according to Encyclopedia Britannica,
was one fourteen bouts, winning eighty forty five of those

(25:46):
by knockouts. And there was also a type of French
artillery shell called the Jack Johnson that was named after him.
To memoirs he wrote, and of course a Broadway play
that was based on his life called The Great White Hope.
It starred James Earl Jones, and apparently Muhammad Ali was

(26:07):
a repeat viewer of this play. He'd go back and
really found a lot of comparisons to his own life
in the way he was sometimes treated. Um. Jack Johnson
was also an original inductee into the International Boxing Hall
of Fame in nine along with a few other names
we've mentioned in this podcast. Um, but I think It's

(26:29):
probably only appropriate for a man who, in addition to um,
you know, being a great fighter, was known for some
of his fantastic quotes and having the perfect response to
sometimes difficult situations. Ending the podcast with a quote of
his own, he apparently told a newspaper reporter, you know,
these newspaper reporters loved covering every aspect of Johnson's life.

(26:54):
Whatever you write about me, just please remember that I'm
a man and a good one. Well, I think that's
so at all. He was. He definitely had some unsavory
sides to his personality into his life, but he was
unapologetic for who he was, and he wanted to live
as professional boxers did at the time and everything that

(27:15):
came with that, which was kind of being a bad boy.
It seemed um and that didn't really fit with the
time he was living in. So I certainly enjoyed learning
more about Jack Johnson. I won't always think of the
Hawaiian singer now and when I hear the name, and uh,
if you want to hear any more sports history topics,

(27:36):
we realized I don't think we've covered anything since our
Kentucky Derby episode, and that was a while back. Last
please send us some suggestions. Yeah, it's fun. It's always
a good way to encapsulate grander stories in the context
of sports. And I think it's especially interesting when we're
covering black history too, because sports with these rules that

(27:58):
are clearly stayed it. For some reason, things seem so
much more unfair when there's inequalities in sports, just because
the rules are so apparent. So anyway, if you have
any kind of history topics, sports, black history, whatever, send
them our way. We are at History Podcast at Discovery
dot com. Remember our address has changed. We're also at

(28:21):
missed in History on Twitter and we are on Facebook.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about the topic we talked about today, we have an
article called how Boxing Works on our website and you
can look that up by visiting our homepage at www
dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join

(28:43):
how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone
app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes.