Lamb Chris - From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line

Chris Lamb

Jack Johnson wanted to be the heavyweight champion of the world so much that he stalked the reigning champion, Tommy Burns, to England. Johnson taunted Burns in the press. But Burns still refused to fight Johnson. Burns told reporters that he did not like blacks, in general, and Johnson in particular. All coons are yellow, Burns told reporters and left England for Australia. Johnson followed him. Burns finally agreed to fight Johnson for the then-lordly sum of thirty thousand dollars. When Johnson entered the ring on Christmas night in Sydney, 1908, the crowd met him with calls of nigger and coon. Johnson laughed, bowed, and threw kisses at those who yelled the loudest. Johnson smiled as he waited for Burns to enter the ring. Johnson knew he would not have to wait much longer to claim the title that should have been his long ago. Twenty thousand spectators were in the stands, including novelist Jack London, who reported on the fight for the New York Herald. In his story about the fight, London said, There was no fight. Johnson dominated Burns. It was not enough for Johnson to defeat Burns; he humiliated him. Poor, poor, Tommy, Johnson mocked the champion in the ring, Who taught you to hit? Your mother? You a woman?

In his biography of Johnson, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes, Randy Roberts wrote that the boxer may have become heavyweight champion, but he was still a black manand, as such, was expected to be deferential to whites, even to those who were his inferiors, in and out of the ring. In his defense of his title, Johnson humiliated his white challengers and then sneered contemptuously at their battered bodies as they lay crumpled on the canvas. He laughed at the white spectators whofrom their safety of their seatscalled him nigger and coon. It gave him joy to know how white sportswriters hated having to write that he had won another fight against another white hope. Undoubtedly he believed the title of world champion set him apart from others of his race. And in this he was right. He would never be viewed as just another black boxer, Roberts wrote. But he was wrong in his assumption that the crown carried with it some immunity against the dictates of whites and traditions of white society. Now more than ever Johnson was expected to conform. And now more than ever Johnson felt he did not have to. The collision course was set.

Nothing is more threatening to white supremacy than blacks who do not accept their place. And Jack Johnson did not accept his place. Johnson was, as Muhammad Ali once said of himself, a bad man. Johnson was, in the language of his day, a bad nigger, someone who cared nothing about what white America thought about him. He flamboyantly confronted the social mores of the day by humiliating white opponents, by driving expensive cars, by wearing expensive clothes, and by dating white women, and, in particular, white prostitutes. With his victory, he mocked the principle of white supremacy and the notion of separate but equal, which had been sanctioned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson a little more than a decade before he won the heavyweight championship.

Johnsons victory over Burns struck fear among American whitesin no small part because he had defeated a white man in the manliest of sports. But Johnsons victory had not been his alone. Black Americans saw it as their victory. A growing number of blacks refused to accept their place. They walked taller among whites and refused to accept inferior status. In Chicago, the Manassas Club, an organization of wealthy blacks with white wives, hired white waiters to serve them food and drinks at a banquet to celebrate Johnsons triumph. Johnsons victory demonstrates the physical superiority of the black over the Caucasian, one of the clubs members said. The basis of mental superiority in most men is physical superiority. If the negro can raise his mental standard to his physical eminence, some day he will be a leader among men.

Johnsons victory over Burns was unacceptable to white Americabecause Johnson refused to demonstrate the proper respect for the law and the custom of American society and because he believed he was equal to (or perhaps superior to) whites. What would happen to America and its democracy if enough other blacks began to believe that they, too, were equal? Johnson needed to be taught a lesson. He needed to be put in his place. Only then would the natural order of things be preserved. White newspapers begged former heavyweight champion James Jeffries to come out of retirement to put Johnsonand, by implication, all other blacksin their place. By agreeing to fight Johnson, Jeffries became, according to newspapers, the Hope of the White Race.

Both races understood that the stakes were high for the fight. The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, said Jeffries and Johnson would settle the mooted question of supremacy. The Omaha Daily News, a white newspaper, said that a Jeffries victory would restore superiority to the white race. If the black man wins, the New York Times editorialized before the fight on July 4, 1910, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory. After Johnson defeated Jeffries, the Los Angeles Times