1/23/2024 0 Comments American boxer whiteJournalists, too, sought to maintain social order by preserving myths about white supremacy. Hayes became president after promising three former Confederate states – South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana – that he would withdraw federal troops, who had protected the measure of racial equality Blacks were beginning to achieve.Īs federal forces left, whites disenfranchised Black voters and passed segregation laws, which were enforced by legal and illegal means, including police brutality and lynching. Bennett in Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, via Library of Congress A backdrop of racial hostilityīorn in 1878 in Galveston, Texas, Johnson grew up as the Jim Crow era in American history was getting started. I began my book, “ From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line,” with Johnson because the consequences of the fight’s aftermath would affect race relations in sports, and America, for decades.įederal troops leave New Orleans in April 1877, as Reconstruction ends. The story has a familiar ring today, as America remains a country deeply divided by race. Whites were not willing to give up their power. ![]() Johnson’s victory, in the manliest of sports, contradicted claims of racial supremacy by whites and demonstrated that Blacks were no longer willing to acquiesce to white dominance. Ward wrote in his biography of Johnson, “ Unforgiveable Blackness.” Martin Luther King, Jr., fifty-eight years later,” Geoffrey C. “No event yielded such widespread racial violence until the assassination of Dr. Jack Johnson, the Black man, decisively beat James Jeffries, nicknamed “the Great White Hope.” Johnson’s triumph ignited bloody confrontations and violence between Blacks and whites throughout the country, leaving perhaps two dozen dead, almost all of them Black, and hundreds injured and arrested. The fight was seen as a referendum on racial superiority – and all hell was about to break loose in the racially divided United States. It was billed as “the fight of the century.” ![]() An audacious Black heavyweight champion was slated to defend his title against a white boxer in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910.
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