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- [00:00]
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- [00:22]
Rund Abdelfattah
This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and npr. I'm Rund Abdelfattah. 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.
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Documentary Narrator
It's December 26, 1908, and world's heavyweight champion Tommy Burns defends his title in Sydney, Australia, against Jack Johnson.
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Rund Abdelfattah
Jack Johnson is determined to become the first black heavyweight champion.
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Documentary Narrator
Johnson has been after this heavyweight title fight for over two years.
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Rund Abdelfattah
As Jack Johnson enters the ring, he's already making history. Up until this fight, it was a known, although unspoken rule that no black
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Dr. Harry Edwards
fighter would be allowed to fight for a championship, particularly in the heavyweight division.
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Rund Abdelfattah
When the fight begins, the mood is tense. There's a lot more at stake than just the title. 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 U.S.
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Dr. Harry Edwards
jack Johnson was the father of the first wave of athlete, activist, the champion
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Rund Abdelfattah
who started it all, whether he wanted to or not. 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.
- [02:51]
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- [03:21]
NPR Sponsor Announcer
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Rund Abdelfattah
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.
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Dave Zirin
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.
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Rund Abdelfattah
This is Dave Zirin. He's an award winning sports journalist and the host of a radio show called Edge of Sports.
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Dave Zirin
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.
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Jules Boykoff
And if that sounds like a dogfight, that's basically what it was.
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Dave Zirin
Johnson was as, even as a boy was the best at doing that.
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Rund Abdelfattah
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.
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Jules Boykoff
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.
- [05:52]
Rund Abdelfattah
He was amazing. And in 1903, he became the colored heavyweight champion of the world.
- [05:59]
Jules Boykoff
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
- [06:08]
Dr. Harry Edwards
agreement that no black fighter would be allowed to fight for a championship, particularly in the heavyweight division.
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Rund Abdelfattah
But Jack Johnson had an idea for how to get the fight he wanted.
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Dr. Harry Edwards
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.
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Jules Boykoff
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 of the Black Athlete.
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Rund Abdelfattah
So the boxer Johnson taunted the most was the heavyweight champion of the world, the Canadian, Tommy Burns. He would actually travel around the world to all of Burns 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.
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Jules Boykoff
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.
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Rund Abdelfattah
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.
- [07:44]
Documentary Narrator
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.
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Jules Boykoff
And Tommy knows nearly 20,000 people packed Sydney Stadium to watch the match. It was a serious international event.
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Documentary Narrator
In round one, Tommy Burns, to the left of your screen, moves out and boxes cautiously.
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Rund Abdelfattah
This is actual footage from a documentary made about the fight in 1908. The narration was added years later. Right away you notice that Johnson is much taller than Burns.
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Documentary Narrator
Johnson clinches with Tommy and smiles during siders. Burns looks almost like a little boy compared to the 212 pound challenger.
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Rund Abdelfattah
At the end of round one, things are not looking good for Burns.
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Documentary Narrator
Johnson rushes in and scores with a punishing left at the end of round one.
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Rund Abdelfattah
And it kind of keeps going like this.
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Documentary Narrator
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 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.
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Rund Abdelfattah
After 14 rounds, Burns was in terrible shape, and the police actually jumped in and stopped the fight. The response to Johnson's win came quickly from the media.
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Jules Boykoff
People in the US Responded with outrage, including the famous writer Jack London.
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Rund Abdelfattah
Yeah, that guy, the one who wrote Call of the Wild.
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Jules Boykoff
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.
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Amira Rose Davis
My favorite is a headline where you have a little girl pointing up and basically saying, you know, are you the great white hope?
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Rund Abdelfattah
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.
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Amira Rose Davis
There's this idea that the whole community is invested on 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.
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Unidentified Historian/Commentator
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.
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Jules Boykoff
This is Jules Boykoff. He's a professor at Pacific University and the author of several books on sports history.
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Rund Abdelfattah
So Johnson, always the showman, embraced the challenge. He talked trash and backed it up.
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Jules Boykoff
And so he beat one great white hope after another, culminating with his defeat of the great former champion Jim Jeffries in 1910. 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. 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.
- [11:32]
Rund Abdelfattah
In fact, his philosophy was to ignore race and racism. He said in his memoir, I found no better way of avoiding racial prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist.
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Jules Boykoff
But prejudice did exist, and it was making him Public enemy number one.
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Unidentified Historian/Commentator
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 was sort of like racial, mores be damned. I have a life to live here. And if that meant sleeping across the color line, so be it, right?
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Amira Rose Davis
So he drove cars, he wore fur, and most of all, he dated white women. And this was absolutely fine.
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Dr. Harry Edwards
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.
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Rund Abdelfattah
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.
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Jules Boykoff
Yeah, he just loved dating white women and driving nice cars. He didn't really want to make any political statement with it.
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Dr. Harry Edwards
He was an iconoclastic individual who wanted it all. Along the way, he set some standards of rebellion.
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Jules Boykoff
But Jack Johnson's rebellion would not be tolerated for long.
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Unidentified Historian/Commentator
Yeah, that's right. I mean, the government went to extraordinary lengths to stop Jack Johnson.
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Rund Abdelfattah
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.
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Jules Boykoff
Johnson, as a prize fighter, 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.
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Unidentified Historian/Commentator
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,
- [13:48]
Rund Abdelfattah
go out of their way to stop them.
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Jules Boykoff
He was eventually brought to trial, convicted
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Amira Rose Davis
by an all white jury in 1913,
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Rund Abdelfattah
and sentenced to one year in jail,
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Amira Rose Davis
but essentially jumped bail, flee the country, went to Canada, pretended to be a member of a black baseball game team, and then lived in exile all over in Europe and South America. About seven years in exile, there wouldn't
- [14:14]
Rund Abdelfattah
be another black heavyweight champion for 22 years.
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Jules Boykoff
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
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Rund Abdelfattah
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 man 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. 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.
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Dr. Harry Edwards
So he basically argued, America has this long revolutionary tradition and socialism is simply the next step.
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Rund Abdelfattah
The man behind the origins of American socialism. That's next week. Don't miss it. This episode was produced by Kiana Moghadam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramti Nada Bluei and his band Drop Electricity. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Noguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Rund Abdelfattah. Thanks for listening.
- [16:39]
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