5/20/2023 0 Comments Jack johnson boxer![]() Johnson was frequently cited, and even arrested, for speeding. Outweighted, overreached, and in every way the physical inferior to his gigantic opponent, he fought a cool, well-planned, gritty fight.”īut nothing seemed to match the zeal of Johnson’s perceived transgressions outside the ring. “From the time he entered the ring until he was carried out, he was game to the core. “Ketchel won many friends by his showing to-day,” the article said. But The Times painted the bout as a significant moral victory for Ketchel. In October 1909, Johnson knocked out Stanley Ketchel in the 12th round. Often, articles went to great lengths to herald Johnson’s white opponents. The Times wrote with apparent glee when a sparring partner knocked down Johnson in an exhibition fight in 1909. This was a part of a theme of The Times diminishing Johnson’s achievements. “Although Johnson’s victory was clean-cut,” the paper wrote, “there is little credit attached to it.” That’s because, The Times wrote, Fitzsimmons had injured his right elbow in training, “making that arm practically useless.” In 1907, a year before he won the title, he beat Bob Fitzsimmons, but for The Times the victory came with an asterisk. The articles about his boxing were highly critical of him, even when he found success. The Times’s articles showed that the public could not necessarily stomach a black man achieving that accomplishment. ![]() Johnson, a native of Galveston, Tex., began his professional boxing career in 1897, but The Times did not start covering him until about a decade later as he grew to become a leading contender for a world title. ![]() So while the harsh and sometimes racist tone of the coverage came as no surprise, it was jarring still. Today, people still seem to struggle with black athletes who are outspoken. He was a well-known black athlete who, at a time when racial animosity and lynchings were widespread, was brash, taunted his opponents, dated white women and openly enjoyed the luxuries of his wealth. This sort of blind faith in the police version, typical of the day, was particularly damaging to people like Johnson. Often, official police accounts of his run-ins with the law were simply parroted without any probing or deeper analysis of what truly had happened. In preparing articles on the president’s intentions, we examined our coverage of Johnson from his era, and were struck by how The Times, like many newspapers then, seemed to wrestle with his fame and race.Īs Johnson’s chaotic life unfolded, The Times often covered it extensively, but time and distance now allow for a recognition, seemingly oblivious to the writers at the time, of the racial overtones around many of the troubles he faced. It was one reason the Obama administration cited for not granting a pardon. The campaign for it had been complicated in part by allegations that Johnson had a history of domestic violence, as historians have chronicled. President Trump announced the pardon on Thursday. Johnson resurfaced in the news last month when President Trump tweeted that he would consider pardoning Johnson, who was convicted on federal charges of transporting a woman across state lines “for immoral purposes.” Johnson, who served a year in prison, had been a lover of that woman, Belle Schreiber, who was white and had worked as a prostitute. The Times’s coverage illuminates the challenges for broad acceptance faced by Johnson, who inspired the 1967 play and 1970 movie “The Great White Hope,” an account of his life and career and the resolve of white society to dethrone him, both in the ring and outside it. It permeated how the newspaper covered every detail of his life, from his boxing to his legal troubles to his demeanor and success. He has been called a “negro pugilist and convicted white slaver,” who left a stain “on boxing and on his race” and abused “the fame and fortune that came to him.” Yet, condescendingly, he also was described as being “far above the average negro both mentally and physically.”įor The Times, Johnson, who in 1908 became the first black boxer to win the world heavyweight title, was inseparable from his race. “Johnson Weds White Girl” was the headline when he married Lucille Cameron in 1912. ![]() “The big black” and “the big negro” are just two of the phrases that The New York Times used to describe Jack Johnson.
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