The fight that shook America

Jack Johnson was the first world Black heavyweight champion, but winning the title was only part of the battle. Every time Johnson stepped into a boxing ring, he struck a blow to white supremacy. In this week’s episode, the story of Jack Johnson and the legacy of Black athletes pushing for social change in America. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Live Right, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. The Gales of November in paperback wherever books are sold.

• 0:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and NPR. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago. You could probably sum up the entire history of the United States with the idea of people pushing to make a change. Where that change happens is a whole other story. Sometimes it's on the battlefield, in the courthouse, or in the city streets. Other times, it's in a stadium, on a field, or in the ring.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  It's December 26, 1908, and world's heavyweight champion Tommy Burns defends his title in Sydney, Australia, against Jack Johnson.

• 1:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Jack Johnson is determined to become the first black heavyweight champion.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Johnson has been after this heavyweight title fight for over two years.

• 1:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  As Jack Johnson enters the ring, he's already making history. Up until this fight, it was a known, although unspoken, rule.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  That no black fighter would be allowed to fight for a championship, particularly in the heavyweight division.

• 1:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  When the fight begins, the mood is tense. There's a lot more at stake than just the title.

• 1:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sports have long been a place where people challenge the status quo. From Jackie Robinson breaking segregation lines in the MLB to athletes in the 1960s and 70s, like Muhammad Ali or Tommy Smith and John Carlos, championing black power and civil rights, to Colin Kaepernick in 2016, taking a knee during the National Anthem against racism and police brutality in the US.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Jack Johnson was the father of the first wave of athlete activists.

• 2:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  The champion who started it all, whether he wanted to or not.

• 2:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today on the show, we're going to take you back to the 1908 heavyweight championship fight that changed history and tell you the story of the rise and fall of Jack Johnson. That's coming up after a quick break.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Liv Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why SELC is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, just as

• 3:32Speaker 00

  they've done for 40 years. Because clean air, clean water, and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at selc.org. This message comes from Bombas, making shoes as cozy as slippers and slippers as comfy as clouds. Smooth suede, plush sherpa, cloud-like cushioning. Visit bombas.com/NPR for 20% off your first purchase.

• 4:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  Jack Johnson was born in Texas in 1878, when the memories of the Civil War were still fresh. The son of two formerly enslaved people, he and his family saw firsthand how many of the rights Black Americans had gained were quickly overturned by Jim Crow laws. And yet, long before Jack Johnson ever stepped in the boxing ring, he got a glimpse of a bigger world and his place in it.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  What people don't understand is that Jack Johnson is from Galveston, Texas. And Galveston, at the time, and to a lesser degree still is, is a port community.

• 4:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Dave Zirin. He's an award-winning sports journalist and the host of a radio show called Edge of Sports.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  So Jack Johnson is a young man hanging out on the docks in Galveston. He met people from all over the world, from the Middle East. He's meeting people from Sub-Saharan Africa. He's meeting people from all over Europe. And, you know, and he was an almost a curio to them, this entertaining person, because oftentimes the sailors would be involved with the kids because they would ask the kids to fight each other for money.

• 5:07Speaker 05

  And if that sounds like a dogfight, that's basically what it was.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Johnson was, even as a boy, was the best at doing that.

• 5:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it was in this port town that Johnson started to gain a global perspective. It made him fearless. At a time when international travel was very difficult for most people, Jack Johnson had the world come to him. He realized there was more to the world than what he saw in Texas.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  When he was a teenager, he got a job as a janitor at a gym. And that's where he met German-born boxing trainer Hermann Bernau. He started to train, and within a few years, he began fighting in prize fights.

• 5:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  He was amazing. And in 1903, he became the colored heavyweight champion of the world.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  That wasn't enough for Johnson. He wanted to beat the best white fighters in the world and become the heavyweight champion, full stop. But there was kind of a gentleman's agreement.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  That no black fighter would be allowed to fight for a championship, particularly in the heavyweight division.

• 6:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Jack Johnson had an idea for how to get the fight he wanted.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  And Jack Johnson actually showed up at fights between white boxers for championships and so forth and taunted them, embarrassed them in terms of why they would not allow him to have a shot at the title.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  This is Dr. Harry Edwards. He's a professor at Cal Berkeley, and he wrote one of the most important books on this topic, The Revolt of the Black Athlete.

• 6:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  So the boxer Johnson taunted the most was the heavyweight champion of the world, the Canadian, Tommy Burns.

• 6:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  He would actually travel around the world to all of Burns's fights, buy a ringside seat and talk trash to Burns the entire fight. It was next level trolling. And in the early 20th century, it took a lot of, let's say, moxie for a black man to do this. You know, it was like putting a target on your own back.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  But it worked. Burns finally agreed to fight Johnson for a whopping $30,000, which was a lot of money at that time, put up by a promoter in Australia.

• 7:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  The fight was to be held in Sydney. And here's an ominous quote from a local newspaper about the match. "This battle may in future be looked back upon as the first great battle of an inevitable race war. There is more in this fight to be considered than the mere title of pugilistic champion of the world."

• 7:35Speaker 02

  It's December 26, 1908, and world's heavyweight champion Tommy Burns defends his title in Sydney, Australia, against the scourge of the heavyweight ranks, Jack Johnson. And Tommy knows--

• 7:47Speaker 05

  Nearly 20,000 people packed Sydney Stadium to watch the match. It was a serious international event.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  In round one, Tommy Burns, to the left of your screen, moves out and boxes cautiously.

• 7:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is actual footage from a documentary made about the fight in 1908. The narration was added years later.

• 8:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Right away, you notice that Johnson is much taller than Burns.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Johnson clenches with Tommy and smiles during siders. Burns looks almost like a little boy compared to the 212-pound challenger.

• 8:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  At the end of round one, things are not looking good for Burns.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Johnson rushes in and scores with a punishing left at the end of round one.

• 8:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it kind of keeps going like this.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Johnson calmly looks down at Tommy, talks to the champion, taunting him. He wants Burns, as well as everyone, to know that this is no fight. This is a picnic.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Here in round 14, Johnson rushes in, lands an uppercut, three left hooks, a tremendous barrage of punches, lefts and rights which have Burns helpless. At this very moment, in the early seconds of round 14, the police shut off the motion picture cameras and stepped into the ring, awarding the heavyweight championship of the world to Jack Johnson.

• 8:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  After 14 rounds, Burns was in terrible shape. And the police actually jumped in and stopped the fight.

• 9:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  The response to Johnson's win came quickly from the media.

• 9:16Speaker 05

  People in the US responded with outrage, including the famous writer Jack London.

• 9:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, that guy, the one who wrote Call of the Wild.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  He captured that outrage by writing that a, quote, "great white hope should come along and remove the golden smile off of Jack Johnson's face, that the white man must be rescued."

• 9:34Speaker 06

  My favorite is a headline where you have a little girl pointing up and basically saying, you know, "are you the great white hope?"

• 9:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Amira Rose Davis. She's a professor at Penn State and co-host of a feminist sports podcast called Burn It All Down.

• 9:50Speaker 06

  There's this idea that the whole community is invested in this. And you can see this also reflected in newspaper headlines, this idea that if Johnson wins, the Negroes around the country are going to riot, they're going to revolt, they're going to get the idea that they can fight back. They're going to get the idea that they're not inferior.

• 10:10Speaker 07

  His fights were nothing short of racial spectacles, in the sense that people openly mapped greater racial meaning onto each bout that he had with a white fighter.

• 10:21Speaker 05

  This is Jules Boikoff. He's a professor at Pacific University and the author of several books on sports history.

• 10:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  So Johnson, always the showman, embraced the challenge. He talked trash and backed it up.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  And so he beat one great white hope after another, culminating with his defeat of the great former champion Jim Jeffries in 1910.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  This is a quote from the New York Times' coverage of the fight. "If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors."

• 11:02Speaker 05

  The night after the fight, black people celebrated in the streets of many major US cities. And white people responded with violence. Race riots ensued, and countless people died. But the thing is, Johnson didn't want to be a racial symbol. He wasn't looking to carry the hopes of black people or be a symbol of anything. He just wanted to be a champion.

• 11:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  In fact, his philosophy was to ignore race and racism. He said in his memoir, quote, "I found no better way of avoiding racial prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist."

• 11:38Speaker 05

  But prejudice did exist, and it was making him public enemy number one.

• 11:43Speaker 07

  Here was someone who was going to live his life to the fullest, exactly how he wanted. Forget being deferential, I mean, let alone submissive. He's sort of like, racial mores be damned. He's, "I have a life to live here, and if that meant sleeping across the color line, so be it."

• 11:58Speaker 06

  Right. So he drove cars, he wore fur, and most of all, he dated white women. And this was absolutely flagrant.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  This was a man who would go into a hotel in St. Louis and ask for a room. And when the clerk told him, "We don't serve your kind," he responded, "It's not for me. It's for my lady, and she's not my kind. She's your kind." At which time, of course, they escorted him not only out of the hotel, but out of town.

• 12:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Johnson was like the prototype of the modern star athlete. Like, he had tons of money. He was brash, he was tough, smooth-talking, all that.

• 12:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, he just loved dating white women and driving nice cars. He didn't really want to make any political statement with it.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  He was an iconoclastic individual who wanted it all. Along the way, he set some standards of rebellion.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  But Jack Johnson's rebellion would not be tolerated for long.

• 13:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, the government went to extraordinary lengths to stop Jack Johnson.

• 13:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  A law called the Mann Act made it illegal to transfer women across state lines for immoral purposes. And in the early 20th century, interracial relationships were considered immoral.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  Johnson, as a prizefighter, naturally was traveling state to state for fights. And he did this with his girlfriend, who later became his wife. She was white. So eventually, a warrant was put out for his arrest.

• 13:33Speaker 07

  Unfortunately, this is something we've seen quite a bit in US history. When somebody makes a splash, the government tends to go out of their way.

• 13:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Go out of their way to stop them.

• 13:42Speaker 05

  He was eventually brought to trial.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  Convicted by an all-white jury in 1913.

• 13:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  And sentenced to one year in jail.

• 13:48Speaker 06

  But essentially jumped bail, fled the country, went to Canada, pretended to be a member of a black baseball team, and then lived in exile all over in Europe, in South America. About seven years in exile.

• 14:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  There wouldn't be another black heavyweight champion for 22 years.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  Those seven years wrecked Johnson's career. He would eventually lose his title and never regain his dominance in the sport. Oh, and he did eventually return to the US and serve his sentence.

• 14:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 2018, 72 years after Jack Johnson died, President Donald Trump gathered a number of people in the boxing community, including champion boxer Deontay Wilder and actor Sylvester Stallone, in the Oval Office to pardon Johnson for his Mann Act conviction. Today, many don't remember Jack Johnson as an athlete activist. And the truth is, Johnson didn't identify as such. But he did inspire a lot of people. And the battles he fought in and outside of the ring dealt a big blow to the idea of white supremacy that reigned at the turn of the 20th century.

• 15:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. To hear the full-length episode of Throughline about the legacy of Black athletes using their platform to protest injustice in America, check out "On the Shoulder of Giants." And join us next week when we continue to explore the people that changed the United States with the story of Eugene Debs and his efforts to unite the working class.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  So he basically argued, "America has this long revolutionary tradition, and socialism is simply the next step."

• 15:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  The man behind the origins of American socialism. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Naguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening.

• 16:30Speaker 07

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, "The Gales of November: A Chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 Shipwreck." "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, "while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic." "The Gales of November," now in paperback.